What's happening May 2023

Sitting here with Covid-19 again, I can't complain it's only my second time and it has only kept me in bed for two days, now I just feel, well, sick. So a good time to sit in front of a computer and peck at the keys. In fact I fixed up and posted for my wonderful Patreon supporters my tab of Collective Soul - Shine. How that came about is when I'm playing on Fridays, I often switch to Drop D tuning, and then play a bunch of songs in that tuning. I could only remember 5 or 6 songs in Drop D off the top of my head, so I needed to add some more back in.

It's actually been a real blessing playing in the lunch room on Friday lunch at work. There aren't many people there, somewhere between none and 10 at any one time, but a lot of people walk in and out over the hour I play. 

The main point is that having anyone there puts you in performance mode. You have to play well, and when you are purposely trying to play well, the sound you can make can be so good. And the more weeks I play, the more I'm dusting off old songs and enjoying them again. I find I need to "practise" an old song that has gone rusty for 15-30 minutes at home to clean it up, and then it is good for around two months before I need to clean it up again. Or if I play it at least once a month, it stays good. Funny how the brain works!

I have a couple of songs to record, but I'm not inspired to record at the moment, it just feels like a burden. Trying to play without a single error, setting up the recording equipment, editing the video...I recognise this feeling of burdenedness from my past - when I play out regularly, I get my fix. When I'm not playing out regularly, I lean towards recording videos to get my fix. But, I do want to record two Queen songs and two Cream songs. I will get there, bear with me!

In the meantime, keep playing everyone - either to an audience or to a video camera 👍

Tempo

A couple of weeks back someone on YouTube mentioned that I was a great guitarist and made really good arrangements, but my tempo is a serious weakness. He was very kind and apologetic about it - but I was grateful because it is true and I should do something about it.

This is where I insert my standard joke "I would use a metronome but I haven't found one yet that works properly."

Background: yes I had some group lessons when I was in primary school, but by the time I was around 11 I'd stopped having all lessons and I haven't had one since. When you teach yourself, you only concentrate on what interests you and you end up with big holes in your musicianship. One of my biggest shortcomings was that playing by myself I never bothered to develop an internal clock. If I had have played with others, or against a backing track or even metronome, I could have fixed this a long time ago.

Fast forward, I now play pretty regularly at my local church, and I tell you, it was SO HARD to begin with, I couldn't track a beat whatsoever! Even now, a few years on, if I start a song solo I am sweating bullets trying to hold a steady tempo. Once the drummer kicks in I'm not too bad at following these days.

All three of my kids play instruments, and I made sure they all played in ensembles, and they continued to for years. Their tempos are all thusly impeccable.

So after the friendly YouTube commenter nudge, I pulled out my phone and browsed up a metronome, and I played several songs... on beat! An actual metronome that works! To be fair, every now and then the metronome was slowing down, so I would also slow down to let it catch up, but really, it wasn't awful. A lot better than the maximum 30 seconds I've ever put up with a metronome before.

Moreso, I have been playing at a fixed tempo slower than how I would normally play, which is hard indeed! And I have played with that metronome at least 4 times over the past two weeks!

So to my fellow DIY musos out there - if you aren't going to play with a band, at least force yourself to play with a metronome or backing track. Easy to say, hard to do, but it is worth it 👍

We Will Rock You

Naudo played "We Will Rock You" recently and I couldn't leave it alone. Since it just Em all the way through, then 2 bars of C, then A until the end, how hard could it be?

But now I'm beating myself up about it a lot.  Because it's now all about the touch.  Let's discuss.

Naudo plays the two bass notes E+B, more of a strum for most of it. I didn't want to hold onto the B the whole time, and my right hand position is more of a thumb fingerpick than a thumb strum, so I resolved to just the bass E for the Boom Boom...then I felt the CLAP! needed top three trebles filling out the Em...if I was to play just the top two strings it would be a pure (abiguous) E5 which is okay but hey, I'm playing a classical guitar - Em gives it a great Spanish feel doesn't it?

So now playing the verse words you really want to keep that big "Boom Boom CLAP rest" going, it is a pivotal part of the song. The clap just becomes the "usual flick" on the 3rd beat, but wow, Boom Boom and rest are so hard to play like clockwork.  After years of playing melodies over basslines, my fingers just want to naturally fill the space where the rest is, and quite often want to take a break from the second Boom.

What's going on in my head is a really unusual fight but if I relax into it, while concentrating hard then it flows nicely. I'm singing the words and playing the melody in my head, but letting the clockwork happen underneath. Did I mention it is really unusual? And, as mentioned the touch needs to be just right, this arrangement is about the feel not so much the notes.

Naudo improvised some great jazzy stuff  in it, but this is me, and I want the studio solo at the end.  I'm picturing Mike Meyers as Wayne playing it on the white Strat.  A good resolve fell out, than can be played on the Boom Boom CLAP rest...if you have >14 frets available. It was possible to bring it down so that the highest note is only the 14th fret, so playable on the classical, but it makes the fingering less natural, and to get the pull-offs right I had to drop a note in the essential chord and make sure it doesn't ring by lightly leaning on it during the pull-off.  Look, it works, but again, see: unusual.

Alright, this is all very cryptic, I need to record it so you can see it don't I!

As an aside, I'm still playing with text-to-image AI as you can see.  It's so cool, so brilliant, and yet so awkward and misses the mark.  The first picture up there, which is Bing Image Create (a version of DALL E, April 2023) really captures the text I put in "music we will rock you".  It channelled Brian May, got the dimly lit smoky stage feel, the rocker clothes and the triumphant rock hand held high in the air...wait - what is THAT?  Ha ha, so close, and yet just comical.  I won't show the other one that had me rolling in stitches, suffice to say, a giant three fingered fist with the middle finger raised.  Ah, the AIs, so good but that tiny last detail not quite understood changes everything.

The second picture is also funny - the prompt was "music we will rock you outdoor". And there you go, some sort of amplifier fused into a rock. What a work of art, I want one, my very own "WH Sowtur iWuck".

The text-to-image is improving so fast from just a few months back when I first posted one - I'm imagining there won't be much to laugh at soon enough...

Make a Nut

This is a my definitive "how to make a nut" article, and I will continue to edit it as I make more nuts, improve my technique and take more photos.  Let's get started!

What you need

1. A flat surface to sand flat surfaces. I have an offcut of polished granite - a piece of glass would do, but anything really flat.

2. Sandpaper, used flat for grinding on your flat surface, but also for rounding off.  Have several grades, 150 grit will remove bulk material fast, then work through 240/400/800/1200 to polish if you like that sort of thing!

3. A right angled piece of something, mine here is a lump of steel. If you run your nut/saddle along it to file the narrow end, you stand a better chance of keeping it at 90 degrees.

4. A caliper with a digital display.  The cheap ones on Aliexpress around $15 are good for +/-0.02mm which is way better than my eyes, so that will be fine.

5. Some nice sharp pencils.

6. These are actually welding jet nozzle cleaners, but can double for rounded nut slot files. They aren't as good as a real nut file, but they at 1/100th of the price. There is no cheap solution for nut slot files, yet.

7. A pencil cut in half longways...use your sandpaper and flat surface to achieve.  Used for a specific marking technique.

8. Guitar neck support.  Another cheap item on Aliexpress.

9. Guitar winder. Optional, but handy to speed the process along.

10. Nut (and saddle) blanks.  I like bleached or unbleached bone, measure all your guitars with your caliper and order bags of them from Aliexpress in dimensions the same as or slighter bigger.

11. Cheap nut slot files, this set is about $15.  Used for the initial shaping.  They make fast work of the bone but use the round files for the finishing touches.

12. A basic vise to hold the bone in while you shape it.

Process

1. Remove the old nut, you might need to have a swift blow from a hammer with a well placed chisel. Don't damage anything, but be prepared to be brutal.

2. Clean out the slot, use whatever you have, box knife, files, get it nice and flat/smooth.

3. File down the length of your blank so fits into your nut slot.

4. Cut the width of your blank so it is the same width as the neck.  It should feel nice to the touch - no "edges" that you will run your left hand over.

5. Mark the blank so you will put it in the same way every time.

6. With the blank in place, put your "half pencil" across at least the first two frets and mark the nut.  What you now have is a hard limit line - you won't file the slots below that.

7. Shape the top of the nut using your pencil line as a guide, you want to leave enough bone above the line so that when you cut your slot the string will sit around half to three quarters of the way into the slot.  So you will leave less on the high strings, and more on the low strings. Shape the top angling backwards at about the same angle the headstock angles away from the neck.

8. Decide on the edge distances for your strings slots. I like my high E around 3.5mm from the edge and my low E around 3.0mm. But use your caliper (the depth measuring "spike" on the back end) to measure a guitar you really like the feel of and go with that. Note that the distance is to the edge of the string, not the centreline of the string.

9. Do you string spacing calc.  I like this calculator. Find the specifications for your favourite strings - the width of each string is generally given in "thou" ie thousandth of an inch. Feed in the nut width, the  two distances to the edges that you like and the string specifications. It will spit out a list of numbers that represent the centrelines of your required slots.

10. With your sharp pencil and caliper, make a mark on your nut for each of the string spacing measurements.

11. Use your thinnest slot file and make an initial cut at each marking.

12. Continue to file out each slot, use the slot file that is closest in width to the string going into the slot. Head down to near the pencil line but don't go all the way to it.  Angle the slot towards the back at the headstock angle like you did when you shaped the top.

13. Use your round files to get a nice round slot shape.  Measure the string that is going into the slot, choose a round file that is the same or slightly bigger than the string.

14. Put the nut in and string up the guitar, have the strings tight but you don't need to go to full tension.

15. Put your finger at on the third fret, and with your other hand, lightly touch the string over the first fret. The depth of the slot is about right when you get a slight "plink" as you tap the string.  For nylon, which doesn't really "plink", just look for some deflection.

16. Tune up. Play the open string with the tuning perfect. Now play at the first fret - fret super close to the the fret and don't push too hard - you will always be able to "bend" the string by pushing hard increasing the pitch.  What you want is the intonation to be pretty good at the first fret.  Do a comparison at the 12th fret - how sharp or flat is that?  If the intonation is bad at the 12 fret and it not adjustable then take that into account.

17. Push the string off to one side and continue to file with the round files at the same angle as the headstock angle.  We are aiming for the string to be seated perfectly in the slot the whole length of the slot.

18. For the G and D strings, if they are breaking out of the back of the slot at a sharp angle, file a bit of relief to the outer edges.

19. Keep going until you are satisfied!  But don't push the depth...if you go too far when you pluck the string at full volume you will hear buzz as it rattles on the frets.  You only really want the action to be low at the nut so that the intonation is correct.

20. Take the nut out and give it a final polish.  Round off all the harsh edges, work through sandpaper grits and even use a bit of car/metal polish to finish it off for a mirror finish.  Put it back in and enjoy!

Here are some inspirational photos:

Step 6 - the half pencil for marking	Step 10 - Measure off and mark the string spacing
Step 18 - Give G and D some breakout relief	Step 20 - Not terrible :-)

Missing Notes

Yeah, I missed some notes.

In hindsight, it is pretty obvious, so it's a wood-for-the-trees moment. But some other notes I missed weren't quite like that, they were more about not having a good ear.

Let me explain.

In my recent cover, which I'm still pretty happy with, for the melody, "Ev-ery breath (you take)" I played "Ev-ery breath" as B-B-B.  Whereas, of course, it should be B-C-B. Maybe not so much "missed" as "got wrong".  But, they don't specifically sound wrong, in fact you could sing it B-B-B and it would sound fine, it just lacks colour.

I put that one down to wood-for-the-trees, because I was so focussed on the chords, and the left hand fingering, and the timing, and the tone/touch - the trees - that I didn't notice I had missed a key note to the song - the wood.

Those subtle 7ths, and 9ths, and the rest, which bring so much depth to music, I haven't trained my ear to recognise enough.  I'm still stuck in the beginner's land of recognising basic chords, not the added spices!

A prime example of that is I only recently noticed that in "Us and Them" from Dark Side of the Moon, starting from a Dsus2 - ie it has an octave E in it (Dadd9?) then goes to an Esus2/D - ie move the first chord up two frets but keep the D bass, and then continues the tension on a Dm major7 - ie has an F instead of an F# (minor) and a C# (major 7th).  I had played that forever as a D major with the major 7th rather than minor with major 7th! While the dissonance of the major 7th already gave the chord some spice, I should have heard the minor coming through rather than the major.

So basically, more ear training required.

While we are still talking about missed notes and Dark Side of the Moon - I have dusted off my arrangements in celebration of 50 years of DSoTM.  I came across some sheet for Breathe, and noticed the very first note in the slide guitar at the start isn't just an octave E - it is an octave B as well.  Not sure why I was only hearing the fundamental E, and it sounds fine when I play it, but adding the octave B - and then playing two note "chords" for all of the slide guitar work - sounds so good!  I look forward to sharing more with you!