Free Guitar Riff Lessons

Check out Marcos Farhat's website: www.farhat.name. I usually don't put the name of the link in the link, but I just love that web-page name.

Anyhow, Mr., er, Señor Farhat is an Argentinian guitarist who has a few dozen classic rock intros, riffs, and solos in multiple camera angles. Twenty-five years ago, I would have been all over this (that's how old most of the songs are, hah!).

For now, the site is not riddled with popups (but it is available in multiple languages, which is cool). He is trying to make the site supported by advertising, donations, and the sale of his videos (which if you are dying to learn Metallica and Iron Maiden licks in higher resolution - it looks like a must).

Anyhow, if I ever go to Argentina, I would want to meet Marcos. From his C.V., it looks like he is about my age - and has impressive experience in music.

I wish I had the ability and the time to create a website to teach like that. My angle would be on teaching guitarists how to read music (a massive VOID in the music world). Sadly, the education of most guitarists is from chords to tabs. I'm not helping out yet, either...

--gh

Pot Transplant...

No, the title is not talking about getting the tomatoes out.

For such a cool guitar, the Gibson Les Paul really has some issues. Earlier this year I wrote about having the fingerboard planed correctly (it was an issue all along, and not due to time or warping). Well, on Friday I performed surgery on my 1979 Custom and replaced the volume and tone pots, as well as the tone caps. Here is what things looked like before (note the anemic looking caps).


I replaced everything with the wiring kit from RS GuitarWorks. I just measured the pots and they were:
Volume: 327k ohms & 217 k ohms
Tone: 87k ohms & 91k ohms

Those tone pots were probably fine, but those Vol pots were replaced with 500k pots, a BIG improvement. Also, check out this stock photo of the kit - I sure hope those $15 caps were worth it! (Hovland musicaps, lol.)



The thing is, the sound is vastly improved. I never liked using the tone pots on this thing (anything less than 10 sounded muddy). The volume control was dark as well when that was rolled back. A lot of people that make this modification also change out the pickups, replace the bridge and maybe even the tailpiece. When someone asks "was it improved" they say "yes, but I cannot tell how much the improvement is from the new components, or the pickups, or..."

I only made the changes in the wiring this time. I can honestly say that this improvement is only matched by getting new pickups. The difference is that striking. The sound is clear at all levels, and the tone knobs are now fun to use for the first time (in 27 years!).

So, if you have a guitar with questionable componentry - may I suggest this upgrade.

Here's a cool picture with all the wiring removed. You can see the date (Jan 9, 1978) as well as the color scheme ("NATURAL"). It's not really rare or anything, but I have always liked the fact that this guitar has no fancy paint job on it. Just a clear finish (no flame or quilt-top either, just boring maple). Neck is maple too, and not mahogoney. (The guitar's serial number says that it was completed on January 11, 1979[!] in Nashville TN - so you can see that things moved quickly in that plant then.)



Oh, and if guitar talk bores you, here's a picture I took on the way to work. Yes, that is a purple toilet with flowers in it. The sign says RELAY FOR LIFE on it, but I thought they do that in September around here...



--gh

Tubes and such...

Just screwin' around with Illustrator...

Make a Comic

I used the Witty Comics site to make my own comic strip. (I copied the image from the screen rather than signing in and whatever else the site wants me to do.)



I kind of had this idea rolling around in my mind as a SNL skit or something because I watched two crime shows in a row that had the chief telling the technicians and medical staff to translate their jargon into English.

Not too funny, probably.

--gh

P.S. Do you bevelie taht olny the fisrt and lsat letrets in a wrod are neaescrsy to udatnsenrd meixd up txet? I rebmemer sneieg taht eimal a few yreas ago and it azaemd me taht I cuold raed taht meessd up wnitirg. Oh, I betetr sotp now bucease Sfraond and Son is on. Taht sohw relus. (Altered text courtesy of Scrambled Text Generator.)

Why I don't care for Andrea Bocelli

I try not to be too opinionated, but I can't sit still and take this anymore. I don't care for Andrea Bocelli. Who is Andrea Bocelli, you ask? Well you are obviously not a woman, and you aren't dating.

This is him:



From now on, I will try to recreate an image from the Internet, rather than outright stealing it. It also lets me take more freedom with how I see things. This, by the way, is how I see Mr. Bocelli:



Already someone is crying fowl, I am sure of it. "You can't say anything bad about Andrea Bocelli, he sings so beautifully and he is blind!" I have to admit that in that statement lies part of my problem. When I first started hearing about him a few years ago, I kept hearing the familiar tagline "and did you know that he's blind?" I don't understand why that matters anyway. It would be a real statement if it went something like this: "Andrea Bocelli paints such beautiful pictures, can you believe he is blind?" See? That would really *be* something.

But his visual skills have no bearing on my assessment of him. It's just something that bugs me about his followers. My problem with Bocelli is that he really is not that outstanding of a vocalist. I could walk over to the fine arts building on campus, swing a dead cat, and hit a few vocal music majors that could match (and exceed) his capability.

What's worse is that he seems to get the same popular respect that Plácido Domingo or José Carreras gets. He is no where near these guys. Want to know how to figure this out? One word: microphone. A true vocalist doesn't need one of these in every venue. I know that microphones are a staple of recording, and are nearly ubiquitous in performance entertainment. However, I have never seen this guy singing without a microphone two inches from his face.

Simply put, he does not have a big enough voice. Axl Rose can outsing this guy (or at least he could between 1987 and 1992).

I cannot sing better, though - so I will hand him that. Next time I hear something about him, it better be "Andrea Bocelli is such a wonderful singer, he sings much better than Greg." Yeah, that sounds more appropriate.

--gh

My weakness

I have a major weakness to confess. Is it just me, or is Women's Billiards about the freakin' hottest thing on television. What is it about these athletes?

ESPN had a semi-final on this evening between Allison Fisher and Jeanette Lee at the Mohegan Sun casino in Connecticut. You only have to do a Google Image search for Ms. Fisher or the Black Widow to know what I am talking about.


I was a little worried about just posting copyrighted photos, so I took two of them and worked them into one piece here.

I think it must be their arms. I have always been an arm-man. I am feeling filthy...

--gh

LASIK@Home... uh.... UHHHHH......

Is this a joke? Surely a web page called LASIK@Home is meant to provide some kind of social commentary. I mean, it does have a funny picture and all:

However, usually the joke pages are obviously written to provide humor. I see nothing funny on Lasik at Home that makes me think it is a spoof or anything.

I think I will try it out on the dog first.

--gh

Squared Circle

I was trying to find the relationship between the circumference and area of a circle for a maps exercise utilizing Miller's C. This is the ratio of a shape to a circle who's circumference equals the perimeter of said shape. I never could find out how to calculate the area of a circle given it's circumference, and had to work it out on my own:

It took me 28 seconds to derrive this simple relationship (equation) based on Pi-R^2. But I spent about 20 minutes idly searching for it. The first search I found , however, led me to proof that Jesus did indeed create everything, which works out good enough. I think I need to read the links from that page, they look interesting...

--gh

Further proof that I are sucked

I saw a great one-time only blog entry idea on Livejournal. What you do is enter your birthday (no year) in Wikipedia and share three events, three other births, and three deaths that happened on your birthday. Not a bad idea for filling the web with more links to useless information.

Except nothing really happens on my birthday. I have to limit my event-birth-death to just one each:

Event: 1887 - Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show opens in London.
Birth: 1949 - Billy Joel, American musician
Death: 1903 - Paul Gauguin, French painter (b. 1848)

Not really much to comment on. Sorry. Under deaths, Schiller was the only other name I even recognized. I don't read poetry in German, so I thought it would be pretentious to even include that. I did notice that an Afghani singer, one year younger than me, died last year on my birthday. Wait, I just looked him up and the wiki entry says he died a day earlier. (Errors on Wiki? No way!)

--gh

To being, or not to being.

--gh