There are four lights!

My youngest daughter was asked to fill in for a local band for halloween eve, apparently their bass guitarist was double booked. They were looking for a bassist with some stage energy, yeah, she has that. A set of around 8 original songs, there was one cover, they'd given her a month and she dutifully committed them to memory. She asked my wife and I to go, my wife wasn't going to be able to stand around in a loud venue in Perth Northbridge, but she doesn't ask unless it's important to her so I bought a ticket for myself. (I quite often do get an invite to her various gigs and I generally go.)

The local live music scene has always been important to me. Well, that it exists - I don't get involved anything like I should. Before my daughter was gigging the only live music I would go watch were the gigs that I was playing in. I'm more of a creator than a consumer, but even still, I should be more in touch with what's going on in the local live music scene - it is important to me.

Now being a halloween eve gig it was dress ups, everyone who went there was encouraged to dress up. I have two dress up costumes in my closet...Beetlejuice as in Michael Keaton/the movie...and a Star Trek Next Generation uniform. Whilst the former would have been more fitting, since Patrick Stewart died on the day the event, I opted for the Star Trek uniform.

Parking was a drag, I ended up walking through a length of the dodgy end of Northbridge...dressed in a Star Trek Uniform...but I survived. Actually a lot of cops around there on a Friday night. The venue only had around 50 people in there, the band was a warm up to the warm up to the main show. Some pretty impressive costumes in there. I was immediately 20 if not 30 years older than everyone else in the room, but that's fine. I stood up near the front and rocked to the beat.

Some great original music in there, more my style than some other bands I've heard her play for. I wanna say late 90's vibe, kinda ballads, a few gentle/hard/gentle/hard rock juxtapositions, there were two songs I was getting Paul Kelly vibes from, but with a bit more overdriven guitar. Definitely a guitar driven sound, the main singer/guitarist on a strat definitely not afraid of fingerstyle, which was impressive for a left hander (that's a joke my left handed friends) and there was a lead guitarist on some sort of Ibanez, yay, guitar solos aren't dead. The drummer was looking after the bangs and crashes, insanely, wearing a tube man costume. That was impressive in itself. When asked later "how did you do that?" the answer was "I don't know". Lead guitarist was dressed as a Fallout Vault Dweller, main dude was a Sonic Hedgehog? I have no idea what my daughter was.

But there she was jumping and rockin' and playing pretty complicated stuff, I was chuffed to see her as such a seasoned rocker at only 18. No small feat memorising so many original songs. She said she stuffed up a lot, but it didn't show...although the sound wasn't mixed great...I looked around for the sound guy "come on man, turn up the backup singer mics! And why isn't that bass KICKIN'?!"...and there was no sound man. Must have been a sound check/set and forget job. "It's just the openers." Boo.

Good show. Spoke to the main dude songwriter, Luke, my daughter calls him The Old Man because he is 25. Oh, sooo old.

Got a selfie, see above.

Some takeaways:

• I should go to more local gigs - they are fun.
• Always take hearing protection - I'm glad I did - I use the passive ER20 Etymotic plugs which take around 20db off but keep a flat frequency response, they are okay.
• After the set, someone said something to me and I shouted out "Rest in peace Captain Picard!" Which fell flat, like nobody knew who Captain Picard was. I didn't hang around the whole night -  my daughter reported back later "Oh, when they did the prize for the best costume everyone said "the old man dressed as Captain Picard! Where is he?!""  She replied "Oh that's my dad. He had to go home. He's old." (someone else got the prize.)
• I need to install some strap lockers on her bass guitars. She jumps around so much and wears the bass low with the neck up that it comes perilously close to falling off. I looked around, I'm going to try Dunlop Straplok on them.
• You are never too old.
• Thanks for all the Star Trek Patrick Stewart 👍

Christmas Carolling

For several years now I join some Christmas Carollers, the team is invited to a few regular places - some street parties, nursing and retirement homes, and Samson Court in Duncraig. Samson Court draws a bit crowd leading up to Christmas, which is good because our team gets lots of participation, and bad because I end up lugging my guitar and music stand for a kilometre from where I parked. Conversely, we also play in a dementia ward which doesn't get much participation but I have seen some old folks who otherwise have no life in their eyes get a sparkle as familiar Christmas Carols fire off some neurons that are still hanging in there. It's quite heartwarming to see.

Christmas Carols are notoriously hard to play on a guitar! I reckon because all those years ago the hymn writers were writing far more technical music than we do now. Our team has a folder of photocopies of photocopies of often complex song sheets, in different fonts and styles between them, every year I say "I need to standardise these and make some of them simpler to play." This year, it's finally happening. Thanks to my discovery of Chord Pro and a little bit of AI to scan the photocopies/generate Chord Pro files. Then of course I play the songs through to make sure they are correct...and then make some adjustments. Lots of adjustments. AI is good but not that good, it doesn't actually understand anything.

A couple of the songs I simply dropped a lot of the passing chords. In hymns you are often dealing with a three part harmony in the vocals and the chord will follow that. Works on a pipe organ I guess, but us guitarists who just want to strum and sing, yeah, we don't need all that. A few more I wasn't a fan of the arrangement/chord choices. I checked other arrangements on the internet and stole ideas...basically I was spending around an hour on each one. I had about 25 to do...I'm over half way through, it's mid October, I think I will make it.

Remembering that I do kinda need others to check them and agree with my changes, it's not just me using these sheets. Carolling is a group effort!

Here is an example of one I'm working on right now, what I like the most is that every sheet now follows the same layout and pattern, easy to read by someone with bad eyesight at nighttime who only wants one sheet per song - two at most - and doesn't want to be fumbling madly with complicated chord changes when they'd rather be singing/playing - songs they only sing a few times a year with pretty much zero practice between each year.

Tab licensing...again...

It's happened again. A bunch of my tabs are no longer available. Let me rant for a moment or three.

When I'm arranging a cover I scribble down what I come up so I don't forget when I return over the next days/weeks. Seeing as we live in the age of computers, "scribble down" means write up beautiful scores in a score writing program. So by the time I have finished my arrangement a beautiful score exists. Twenty years ago I just offered them as a free download with the videos I posted, "Learn This!". Even though I wasn't profiting from that it was illegal.

After a while I looked into how I could get them to the people who wanted them but legally. I mean books of cover music to learn have existed forever - I still have fond memories of a Beatles music book I had in the 70's. I wonder where that is now? Hmm. But I digress.

I remember having an email discussion with someone from the Harry Fox agency, that company managed a massive amount of music permissions at the time. "How many CDs are you going to make?" they asked. "Well, none, it's all music sheet for digital download." I said. "Yes, but how many CDs are you going to make?" "..."

I abandoned that and kept giving them away. Many people at the time were just selling them anyway with no respect to the copyright holder, one guy I reached out to suggested that I should do the same, that it was quite lucrative. Whilst giving them away for free was already illegal, selling them was no something I could do in good conscience.

At some stage I was getting annoyed by people complaining about the tabs. You know these tabs take me a long time to make, and you got it for free, and you are complaining? So I put a "donate" button on my website in the style of "I you feel like supporting my efforts, buy me a coffee!" - some people did and that pacified me for a while.

But after another year and another a hundred thousand downloads I couldn't take it anymore and took them all down. A few people a month would ask for a tab, if they emailed me I would send it to them. And by that stage I had switched from the very clunky Powertab to MuseScore which really are beautiful. At that stage Patreon had come out. I decided to start as a Patreon artist, and anyone who would sign up as a supporter I would send them a zip of all the tabs I had put into Musescore. That went okay, maybe $30 a month was coming in which made me feel like my efforts were being acknowledged, but it still didn't appease my guilty conscience on copyright.

In the background...The Hal Leonard Conglomerate...had existed for a while and they had "made arrangements of covers easy to distribute"...for the low low price of $10+ for a sheet and as the arranger they would graciously give a dollar to. For starters, I didn't think my arrangement was worth $10, and for a 10% cut, streuth, that is just taking the piss. In my mind I could see the numbers - 50% would go back to the licence holder, of which 2% would go to the actual writer and 40% would go into their pockets as "administration fees". Makes me angry just thinking about it.

But up popped PaidTabs. They were big enough that they seemed legit, many big name arrangers were using them, and they looked after all the permissions for you. They took only 20%...so 80% went back to you! It didn't seem possible, and I kinda didn't believe it, but I took them at their word. Besides, YouTube already covered all the royalties when you posted a cover on their platform, so how hard could it be, how much did the copyright holder actually get anyway? So I switched out from Patreon, letting my users know what I was up to and giving them a way out. There sure were plenty of supporters in the last six months who would pay a month at $3, download all the tabs - about 50 by the end - and cancel. They got a bargain. But now at least I was finally able to offer tabs and the copyright holder was getting something!

That has worked alright until recently. I guess they got big enough to be noticed, and I guess they weren't quite doing everything as by the book as the copyright holders wanted. The email I got basically reads "Our terms require sellers to hold the rights and permissions for what they list." Ah. So you haven't ever been properly covering royalties, as I suspected, but I took you at your word. It was probably buried in the fine print. Which interestingly these days I copy and paste Eulas/T&Cs into the AI machine and ask it specific questions - does a much better job than I do!

What are they doing if they aren't covering the permissions? Just a digital marketplace? Anyway, another similar service to PaidTabs is MyMusic 5. The AI machine reports the model is pretty much the same as PaidTabs, they _kinda_ pay out royalties in some fashion..but there is nothing to stop them from getting a cease and desist like PaidTabs as well. Not worth moving there.

So I'm back to the start again. I have sheet music, I would like the people who would like a copy to have it, I would like this to all be legal, but I don't want Mega Corporations profiting off my work. Since I don't specifically want a lot of money - my day job is just fine - I'm not planning on retiring into the sheet music production business - at the same time there will be people in the arranging business making a living so I don't want to undercut them...so I'm considering Hal Leonard again. Because even though I can almost picture the song writer getting paid 25c while they are pocketing $10 and sending me $1...at least I have an avenue to get a tab into someone's hand legally.

I read their info on what to do to create a legit sheet. Wow. They tell you how the sheet should look, where all the names should be, and for each song here is a paragraph of words that must be included on the bottom of the sheet (it's different for every song, different copyrights). That made me cross - I go to some lengths to make sure my arrangements can fit on one page, so it's easy to have just a single page in your lap while you learn it. Now it needs a paragraph of legal crap at the bottom so most of my sheets will need to go to two pages...

I need to do something. Don't know what that will be. I will probably suck it up and go to The Hal Leonard Conglomerate. It will just be my pride getting in the way - about how *I* think the world should operate, not how it actually does!

(The flipside to this - if I do have sheet music that obeys all the laws, all the correct copyright notices are in place, but my arrangement has errors or is just a crap arrangement - who is gatekeeping that? My name becomes mud, high risk for little reward? The Conglomerate doesn't care, they got paid...)

Canon 20 years 2026

Yep, it happened.

As previously discussed, it was difficult, not much fun, and I didn't really like the results. It was okay but I wanted better. Maybe again in 20 years time? I played it on the electric which is problematic - Drop D meant the bottom string was flabby, and my left hand fingering meant that I was bending the bottom string badly enough that even I could hear the F#m chord was out of tune. The second commentor also noticed...

It's okay, I learnt to let go of perfectionism quite a while ago. I have ranted about it for years. Don't let it consume you! Do I think I played it better than 20 years ago? Yeah, I did. But a clean playthrough on the nylon would have been better.

But let's talk stats!

I don't do any of this to drive engagement yudda yudda, but I love statistics. And I'm always interested to see what Mega Tech is doing with the stuff we feed it. Here's a graph:

So not unexpectedly, the algorithm still owns us. 81% of all traffic to this video was YouTube recommendations.

But look, 2% of you were notified and watched! Old school! And then another 11% were fed from subscriptions feed which could possibly be the last vestage of non-algorithm feed on the entire interwebs, and some of you are still using it!

YouTube Search is mostly The Algorithm, and Other is probably direct links.

So I want to say that around 85% of all traffic is The Algorithm and 15% is non-algorithm people actually following me and clicking on the video. So creators are still firmly in the hands of YouTube. It's been this way since around 2016, I can't imagine it's going to change anytime soon.

What's happening September 2026

A co-worker challenged me last month to play "September" in September. Which I promptly forgot about, and then on the first of September the conversation went: "Well?" "What?" "Did you do it?" "What?" "Learn September?" "Ha, that's right, no. I'm too busy for that." "I'm disappointed." "ha ha." "No, really disappointed." "Okay, okay, let's have a look."

Pulled out the guitar from beside the desk, whipped up the chords, started noodling with it, after about a minute the rhythm was in my head and I was starting to groove with it. I'd forgotten how good a song it it. Jazz style chords, but with a pop rock feel? Something like that. I wanted to sing it as I found the groove but I'm a terrible singer. Nobody in the office was game to sing it for me.

I mean check it out - this is from Ultimate Guitar - grab your guitar and play these chords, they are a little tricky, but get the chorus in your head and groove! How is that G major 7 over A at the end! Try playing it as a Gsus2 with a high A over A bass! ...and queue trumpets! Yay!

Bm7   E7   C#m7          F#m7
Ba de ya - say do you remember
Bm7   E7   C#m7          F#m7
Ba de ya - dancing in September
Bm7   E7   C#m7          F#m7 Gmaj7/A
Ba de ya - never was a cloudy day

I have too much other stuff to fingerstyle and that one would be quite difficult, and besides, Naudo did it already - actually around 20 years ago, but YouTube cancelled his account (more than once) - lucky Juan has all his videos backed up and reposts them.

Meanwhile, as the world is circling around music and AI - so much so that I not longer believe anything I see or read - what do we do? Perhaps the only thing that is truly real these days is what you are seeing and hearing right in front of you. Your conversations with people in real life (given they aren't reading from a script or wired into the matrix). Or the musos you see at your local - given that they aren't playing/miming to a backing track. In fact musos, I think in the middle of every couple of songs, just kinda hold a chord progression for several extra bars, and talk to the crowd, razz them up a bit, even respond to shouts and heckles (I'm sure you all do this already) - it proves "this is real."

Speaking of not being real, I am re-recording Canon in D for the 20 year anniversary since I posted that video. Yep, I started practising last month and I have two glaring problems - I still haven't been able to memorise it, and I still can't play it much better than I did in 2006. After putting a few hours of effort into it over a few weeks, and generally getting dismayed, I kinda gave up. I decided I won't ever be able to memorise it, and I don't mind. To be honest I don't mind if I'm unable to play it well, it's not that important to me. Sorry! It was important at a time and place a couple of decades ago, that is no longer the case. When my daughters get married I won't be playing it at their weddings, I will be walking them down the aisle. Beautiful music, very hard to play, I have some good sheet to play from, I will play it every now and then and it will put a smile on my face briefly before I get frustrated that I can never play it to my expectations.

All is not lost though! I recorded around 40 minutes of me attempting to play it...I was never going to get it in one take, in fact I just assembled the video and there are ten splices. Yeah, not great. Twenty years ago I played it through in one take! This time I needed to forgive myself and move on.

And yet you know what? I can play 8 minutes of "Shine On You Crazy Diamond" totally from memory in one take. I enjoy playing that more.

* * *

One more thing, in case I haven't said it enough. I never use AI when writing these posts. Not even to get ideas, not to proof read, not even the tiniest suggestion. I don't want it interfering with my thoughts, this was always a place to brain dump about all things musical when I'm not doing musical things. AI has its place, but that is not for rambling about the things in your mind.

Custom Bass

I built a custom bass for my youngest daughter for Christmas in 2024, the delivery was actually not until 2025...it took longer than I thought! It worked out great though, it has a bright punchy tone. It is her regular bass that she currently does her performances and recording with. This was my thoughts when getting parts:

• 4 string Precision Bass (P-Bass) style - ie old school Fender with the single split pickup
• I was really happy with the Custom Neck I had made in China so I got onto them to make the neck
• I just wanted a bare body that I would paint myself. Note: Don't ever get a bare body. Get them to at least primer it if not paint it, you can lightly sand it and repaint it later. It is more effort to prepare bare wood for painting than it is worth.
• The best possible pickup that money can buy. This ended up being a SD SPB-3.
• The best possible high mass bridge, tuners and various hardware that you can get on Aliexpress.
• Custom paint and pickguard to my daughters specification. Purple and black/white checkerplate.

I recorded a video of lots and lots of the construction. I have yet to assemble it into a coherent video. I will do one day. But that day is not today and I've had this post sitting here in draft for more than a year, I want to post it! Most importantly, for the records, here is the parts list with the supplier and cost in $AUD2024:

Item	Store	Cost
Bass Guitar
P-bass maple neck/ebony fretboard/pearl inlays	Qing Ping Aliexpress	$243.23
Mahogany P-bass body no paint	Qing Ping Aliexpress	$225.16
Seymour Duncan SPB-3 1/4 Pound P-Bass 4-String	Mannys	$199.00
Guyker Tuners	AliExpress	$49.28
BB404 Bass Bridge	AliExpress	$38.05
Checkerboard pick guard	Dopro Aliexpress	$22.77
Primer Paint	Bunnings	$11.95
Purple Paint	Bunnings	$11.95
Clear Paint	Bunnings	$11.95
Guyker Strap Buttons	AliExpress	$5.62
Neck Joiner Plate	AliExpress	$5.25
Potentiometers	AliExpress	$3.98
0.047uF Capacitor	AliExpress	$2.90
Input Jack	AliExpress	$1.70
	Sub Total	$832.79
Accessories
SKB Hardcase	Mega Music	$189.00
Zoom B1 Four Bass Multi Effects Pedal	Mannys	$179.00
Guitar Strap	Aliexpress	$6.85
	Sub Total	$374.85
	Grand Total	$1,207.64

Finished enough! Paint is not great up close but looks fine from a distance! Here it is out and about!

What's happening July 2026

Just sitting in a holding pattern. I think that is fine, you don't need to be go-go-go your whole life. I still regulalry mix songs - there is plenty to be learnt there. I pick up the guitar which is hanging right behind me and play it whenever I'm here. I still play "Shine On You Crazy Diamond" a lot, I find it quite relaxing. I play it weekly in the lunchroom at work and I usually follow with "Wish You Were Here" which then segues into "Breathe". I think I need to go and play them at an open mic, I haven't done an open mic in years. I need to share my love of Pink Floyd music. And maybe give them a short list of 20-30 songs "you choose what you want me to play next". I quite like that idea - keep a heap of songs fresh in my memory and play requests. I need to play a song through once every few months to keep it fresh in my head.

Except "Canon in D". I've dusted it off, practising it to record again for the 20th year anniversary of posting it on YouTube. I've changed a few parts to both improve the arrangement and the playability. I thought if I put in enough effort I would finally be able to memorise it and play it well. I was wrong. It is the one song that I have been unable to memorise, and as I push harder into it I start disliking it. I have been through this cycle several times in the last 20 years, including the first time I learnt it. (That's why the first recording of me playing it is from sheet.) I have resolved once again that I can only play it from sheet. If I push any further, I will stop playing it. It's like some sort of nemesis. That's okay, I will play it from sheet, put up the 20th anniversary play through, and maybe in another decade Canon and I will be on better terms.

AI coding - just when you thought it was amazing something changes and it's even more amazing. We are now at a stage where you can take your favourite software, ask Claude (running in the fable model) to rebuild it from scratch but fix up all those little things that you don't like about it. And it will give you a working application straight off the bat. I don't know what this means for software - will it all be bespoke going forward? The code itself is completely unmaintainable of course, I gave up understanding what is happening in there a while back. I'm glad I grew up when you had to write code yourself, because I understand how to write code myself, but now I kinda don't have to anymore. I will become dumber, I'm sure, but the amount of work I can produce that "gets things done" has gone through the roof. As with most things AI, I'm still not sure how I feel about it. But the genie is out of the bottle. I watch it, interact with it, let's see what happens.