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.

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.

20 years of YouTube

...20 years just clicked over last week - 28th May 2006 was the date of my first video upload. I didn't think I was an early adopter, YouTube had been around for a year. But in hindsight I was an early adopter. I was ten years earlier than Rick Beato who celebrated his ten years (I just watched his video). We had the same reason for using YouTube - it was an easy method to share videos with somebody. In my case it was for a fingerstyle forum (doesn't exist anymore). In 2006 digital videos were definitely a thing but not as easy as today's tide of smart phones. I had bought a Sony point and shoot camera capable of grainy video when my first daughter was born late 2003, in between hundreds of baby videos there are some of me recording myself playing guitar right back to 2004, so I was not stranger to it.

I never quite had that "viral video" moment like Rick did, however I had a lot of traffic - when I put out Canon in D it was getting thousands of views a day, the peak was 2010 when across my channel I was sitting at 7,000 daily views - enough to push Canon in D over 3 million views in those few years. Unlike Rick however, I didn't have much to offer - just an amateur fingerstyle hack (my original videos show the classic early stages of being a guitarist - it's just about moving your fingers fast into the next position and pluckin' them notes...it's missing musicality.) I never built anything around my YouTube channel, just arranged songs and played them, gave out my tabs for free (at least a hundred thousand downloads!) slowly got better while an ever-decreasing number of people watched. Not a problem, was never about being a star, was about sharing a hobby I was passionate about.

The stats - the early days show the rise - more and more people discovering YouTube. Then the fall - more and more people posting on YouTube. Those people, especially talented musical fingerstyle players, far eclipsed the increasing rate of people using it, hence the great rise and fall of my channel. In the later years it's the algorithm that decides who is going to see what - you can see a few blips along the way as events occurred, the one I remember the most was when Ennio Morricone died and a heap of people watched my Ennio video (I actually have two).

Black line = total views, Blue line = Canon in D, Green line = Here Comes The Sun.

Going forward? There is no "what happens now", I've always been doing the same thing! I get inspired to arrange a song, or something musical I'm interested in, and I record a video. Even back in 2008 I was talking about playing for audiences and how recording a video for YouTube is the next best thing, it forces you to finish a project - don't be a half-song playing guitarist. No more to say, I talked about YouTube statistics back in 2013 and not much has changed. I talked about how creators are at the whim of The Algorithm and not much has changed with that either.

So business as usual. I do have a backlog of songs to record but I'm not as single mind focused on just recording arrangements as I used to be...but that's okay. Just get out there and create - don't leave it to The AIs to do!

Jack's Utopish social media and recording a Quip

Gotta love what Jack Conte tries to do. All the creatives out there, feeding the social media beast which has turned into a piece of crap algorithm driven attention seeking advertisement focus killing machine so billionaires can make more billions...creatives don't stand a chance of being truly creative if they need to feed that machine or are creative as a hobby with the day job pays the bills. I like my day job, but I also love creativity and I have been dabbling in sharing my creativeness with the world via the internet for more than two decades now. When Jack started up Patreon several years ago I jumped onboard - it's a way for fans to support artists.

So he's just released a bunch of updates which included the concept of "Quips" - shortform videos on the platform, with the idea that they are just quick and not overproduced. Behind the scenes style. I can get onboard with that! I have been making Jawmunji Talks videos on and off for years, generally I go longer form, but I have also done a few Youtube shorts. Seeing as I'm a recovering perfectionist it's good for me to be less-producey, so I just recorded a Quip and popped it into Jack's machine. Will that machine turn ee-vil? Maybe, but I want to say no. People will game it for sure, but will it intentionally be made ee-vil like the social medias? I want to say no. Will it get traction? Maybe! It will if we feed it! Can Patreon be the vehicle where fans can actually support creatives? I kinda think it already is! I love the "1000 Fans" notion - that you "only" need 1000 fans to pay you $100 a year and that is a decent income. I think of my youngest daughter in her various bands, I know she has followers, and she sells merch at gigs, and it gets devoured. I helped her make 30 high quality CDs for Hyperfest - all sold (note to self - write a blog about that). The lino print cheap t-shirts she makes move easily at a greater profit...heh, I think the CDs are much better value for money, but there you go!

The point being that she is already supported by local fans who show up and buy merch at all her gigs. So that, applied world wide on the internet seems like an obvious step. But the current social media, the streamers, all the internet machinery for it - designed to make the maximum amount of money for shareholders and if the creatives got nothing from it then that would consider that great.

Stepping off my soapbox, I decided to post a Quip. I love to talk about creative stuff that excites me. I love to engage with people who also love to talk about the creative stuff that excites me. I don't need to make a living from being creative, but I wouldn't stop people who want to support me as well! I do have a bunch of mates already on Patreon - in the early days I used to offer stuff so I amassed a number of supporters - but I stopped offering stuff (it was in a very very grey legal area) - and encouraged supporters who were expecting stuff to cancel their subscriptions - but offered cheap tiers for anyone who wanted to keep supporting me. Some did! Thank you supporters - it is great to engage with fans but when someone supports financially it changes things...people making a sacrifice because they believe in something. They don't have to sacrifice but they want to.

Let's switch to tech talking.

I would dearly love to have a dedicated room with cool gear set up to make it super easy for me record a video whenever I am in the creative mood. I do not have that. So just now I spent more time setting up the gear than recording the video. Shame. So here are some notes to Future JAW to help him out:

• OBS Studio: still amazing. Keep using it for this sort of thing.
• Web cameras: I'm running a classic Logitech C922 Pro and a C920. Both are dated - I'm going to buy a more modern replacement for the C920. Important - don't saturate your USB bus with webcam feeds, try to make sure each one is plugged into a different USB bus...currently I have one on the laptop and one on the dock.
• Microphone: my ever-useful Zoom H1D. Turn it on a set it into audio interface mode. Plug it into USB, it's low bandwidth so it will be fine. In OBS Studio go into Settings->Audio and point a Mic/Auxiliary Audio to it.
  Remember! Windows->Sound Settings for Input and Output definitively show what is connected. All apps refer to the devices there including OBS!
• PeSonus Studio 1824 interface, via Reaper DAW: this is the complicated bit. Guitar instrument cable -> PreSonus interface -> USB to laptop -> Reaper DAW -> OBS + headphones. I use the 1824 in ASIO mode, which is the best way to interface with an interface, and Reaper can apply fx and send them back to the interface, so I plug my headphones into the front of it and get near-zero latency. HOWEVER that isn't shared on the Windows laptop I use UNLESS you turn on Loopback=virtual in the PreSonus Universal Control application. Once you do that, you will see in Sound Settings an input for PreSonus Virtual - which you can then add to OBS as another Mic/Auxiliary Audio.
• OBS Studio again: brings it all together. I've tried different picture-in-picture/split/shifting/etc methods for the webcams, I went for portrait this time, one webcam on top another on the bottom. In Settings->Video I went Base of 1080x1920 (ie portrait HD). Then it is a case of adding the two webcams, cropping and moving them to fit. The Zoom HD1 microphone I initially added a gate filter, but the electric guitar acoustically was getting through the gate when I dug in. If I increased the gate I had to shout to trigger it. So I added a mute/unmute hotkey and remembered to deal with it. Not great.

When in doubt, just talk through your problems with a chatbot - that's what I did. General life tip with chatbots: you have to have some basic knowledge of what you are trying to achieve, you have to half know the answer or they will lead you down a never ending garden trail to nowhere. You have to have  a year's worth of built up a knowledge of knowing how to get what you need from a chatbot, accumulated from trial and error...hence I wrote the notes above to help Future JAW when he forgets things.

What I need to do to be a little better for next time (and there is always a next time, I have been doing "behind the scenes" videos for 20 years) - at least one better webcam, and a microphone stand that puts a microphone close to my mouth so I don't have to worry about mute/unmute, so I can just use gating.

Oh and I played Pink Floyd Learning to Fly. I was aiming for a more "Pulse" live feel, so more bassnotes, wasn't quite getting it, still undecided whether I should be hitting it that hard. The G string rings a bit too much, wasn't happy with my playthrough. BUT THAT'S ALRIGHT...if you want perfection use AI slop.

Shine on you crazy tab

I saw Yoni play Shine On You Crazy Diamond many years ago, thought it was such a good interpretation, Ioved the idea of trying it, decided it was too much of an undertaking. Around May last year I had started noodling with it and even recorded a youtube short playing part I. Well I have been plugging away at it in the background. Yep, it is a massive undertaking. Heavily influenced by Yoni, there are a few bits he had taken out and I added in, a few bits he played I didn't. I also gave up at the start of part V whereas he took it a little bit further. I play my arpeggios different, more classical like maybe? I pay it different enough to warrant my own tab for it, otherwise in a years time I will have completely forgotten how to play it.

This very morning, on a sunny Labour day in Australia, I finished the tab...well it will need several more play throughs and tweaks - sooo many articulations. 6 pages. I kinda regret starting but it's so iconic and so nice to play. I play it through around twice a week to really push it into muscle memory, and at over 8 minutes, with a lot of complicated chords it's challenging. It's been more than six months, and it has kinda pushed out any other arrangements I have been working on, it would be at least three if not four of my normal arrangements worth. I practise parts on my electric, but my full playthroughs are usually on a classical. I think it sounds better on the classical, even though I run out of frets on a classical. On one calm day when I'm feeling chill and relaxed I'll try recording it. Then I can release the tab to you all. And get back to the backlog of all the other arrangements and recordings I have queued up :-)

What's happening Nov 2025

So much to do. I need to write this down so I don't forget about anything.

Record "Breathe (in the Air)" with Nay. Finish the arrangement - currently it is guitar, bass, two singers. It will be a "live" play through but I suspect we will also record the parts separately and mix it against the "live" video. To a click track, of course! This is cheaty, but for us both to sing - she's a good singing, I am not - and play complicated charts - of course I have made it complicated - is not easy. It will be fine, it will be more a music video to a studio recording. The arrangement is sounding great. We will be playing acoustic because:

Muck around with the new acoustic bass. I recorded a video about if of course, which is a story into itself. I had noticed that people seem to like short portrait videos, that people like discussions on specific types of guitars, and they reckon a good thumbnail goes a long way. Well for the first time ever I made a thumbnail...and it was specifically a video about a Tanglewood TRU7ABCEBW, and while it was portrait it was too long to be a short. Worst performing video I have done in a long time! But that is neither here nor there, I make videos because I have something I want to talk about/share. The bass itself is cool, but it's an acoustic bass, which means the only thing it is good for is aesthetics (think MTV unplugged...)

Backlog of mixing recordings from my local church - it's great, every Sunday there is 4 songs, around 20 channels each time with a huge variety of musos, gives me a chance to hone my mixing skills. I normally do one every week or two, I'm building up a collection and often share them with the team for inspiration...planning on getting my ten favourite mixes of 2025 to the music director for release on Spotify.

Record/video/edit/mix a "garage session" of the band "Solstice" my daughter plays bass in. I have ideas in my head to record them live, but also to have an almost "This Is Spinal Tap" documentary feel to it. Well, less irony, but a casual chat between songs (not necessarily me). Will probably get an audience, to give it an intimate feel, so the viewer can feel more like they are part of a small group listening/watching the music. Need to organise with Nay and Lyds when they finish exams.

Record "Shine on You Crazy Diamond" and get the arrangement finished and uploaded. It's super challenging both to play and notate out. Would be the longest song I have ever taken on. But it sounds so good. I need to get it out there so I can continue to develop it. Like Breathe (in the Air) I'm sure I will constantly be changing it as I find new treasures in it.

Record "Breathe (in the Air)" and update the arrangement and upload...again. I've changed it so much since I last recorded it, and even more since I have been exploring it as a duet. It's such a great song. I've been sitting on all my Dark Side of the Moon arrangements, to release one day as a book...but I've gotta give up on that, it might never happen. So get stuff done and recorded and scores uploaded.

Other Arrangements - I've got a few waiting to be finished, recorded, or both. Who can fit all this in?!

Continue to develop a tone for my new Cole Clarke acoustic. I'm just running it through a Zoom G1 four, which is convenient because it fits in the guitar case. It is super programmable, I reckon there is not much it can't do. It's "only" 24bit 44.1kHz 128x oversampling and a 32 bit processor so the audio purists would baulk but there is a lot to love about it. I've fiddled with it a lot, there is more to fiddle with.

Android Audio App for when I need a coding hit, sit with the Chatbots and code up an Android Audio App. Primarily I want it to be able to load an MP3 and play it AND PITCH SHIFT IT. Yes, you can download them, but they are all full of adverts or they want a subscription. With the Chatbots watching over me, I reckon I could knock this up with only a minor bit of frustration. Why? Because the songs I play at my local church are rarely in the same key as the recording and it is nice to play along with them. And I like to code. It would also be nice for it to be able to do a rough pitch detect, tempo adjust - and these are all things that exist in free libraries, so it all seems doable. But this is possibly a pipe dream.

So as you can see by my messy desk, there is always something musical going on but it's a mess...if only there were more hours in a day!

What's happening Sep 2025

I have spent a number of weeks compiling an album. Nah, not an album from me, it is a live album, a production of originals showcased at my local church. There are 19 songs/poems, and many have introductions so the file count is actually 31. That's quite a lot of work. The styles were eclectic! From ballads to singer songwriter pianist to grunge to rock band. Each one I painstakingly reworked from the multi-channel recording from a trusty old M32 deck with SD card module added.

I had to think about stuff I don't normally have to think about - how will the songs all cohere together so they all sound like they belonged to the same event. I think some of that naturally happens because it is me mixing each one, and unknowingly I will already have a style that will carry through. But I considered how some of the quieter ones should sound quieter compared to the loud ones, but at the same time be just fine standalone. Some sort of album cohesion.

It's all but finished, which is great, because I've run out of steam for it... would be at least 50 hours invested to date.

To make my life harder while mixing all that, because of course you'd make life harder, I bought a set of Steven Slate VSX headphones. The ones which emulate a room, so you can say "this is what it would sound like sitting in a recording studio close to the monitor speakers. Or far away from the speakers. Or in a car. Or with earbuds." My youngest daughter kept stealing my Sennheiser HD280s...so I gave up and bought a set of VSX as my headphone replacements. They aren't as easy as they sound, it takes getting used to. Initially it just sounded like different EQ and different reverb. Which I guess it kinda is in a simplified sort of a way. Which is why it made my mixing more difficult, because I was now listening for other things.

I'm still getting used to them, I find I leave then in flat frequency response mode most of the time and only switch to a room as I'm finishing off a mix to see how it translates. It's interesting, well worth the effort. The sales pitch says "best mixes you've every made in your life" but I don't think it is that easy, it's not a silver bullet, I can see that they make a useful difference though. I just need to think differently, listen differently. Listen. Know what to listen for.

Meanwhile I play "Shine On You Crazy Diamond" twice or thrice a week. It would be around 7 minutes long at the moment - hmm, I should time it - okay, done, 8 minutes. It covers parts i-iv and end at the start of v, there are a few elements not included, but it's quite nice and definitely passes the pub test. There are a few more things I'd like to put in there, but history has shown the harder I make a piece the more likely it is to later fall out of my head and I stop playing it regularly. The song is already complicated, so I think if I'm going to do anything more to it - keep it simple! Well, "simple" is a relative term.

I've played it several times on my Friday work lunchtime hangout, there's one lady who stops past for a chat quite often, she doesn't recognise many of my songs because all she listens to is heavy metal and rap! The other week I played a few Metallica riffs, which she knew, I said I've work out something for her. "Enter Sandman" is a great Metallica song, I think we all know the intro, but I was sure I could do more than that. And you know what - I did - and not only is it relatively easy, but it sounds great! It is based on a listen through from Josephine Alexandra's cover, greatly simplified but still super cool. I even played it for my youngest daughter and she had a crack at it. I think that might be the highest compliment I can get - she hears it and wants to try it for herself :-)

Vibin' Reaper with The 'Bots

I still mix multi track recordings from my local church, I find it relaxing and therapeutic. The more I do it, the more I appreciate everything that is going on - music production, sound engineering, what to play, what not to play.

Early on, when I'd just started having a crack at Reaper DAW, waaay back in late '23, I realised that there are a number of processes that I was doing every single mix, so I created some scripting to get them done quickly. It served me well for nearly two years, but I still found myself doing other same things every mix, and while I put together some additional scripts, I still wanted to improve my workflow - the mixes I want to process are stacking up on my disk waiting for me. I want to spend more time on the creative process rather than the mechanical grind.

These days we have the LLMs - the ChatBots - and they code like absolute guru maniacs, I use them at work. When I started coding was a ChatBot wasn't a thing. Now it is.

So the first script I wanted created was the ability to look at a mix I had coming in, all the people involved, and apply my usual effects to each. In Reaper you can save an fx chain and then load it back up again on a different track. Pretty standard fare. Since there are around 20 people in the music team, each recording was a combination of fx...and I wasn't leveraging hard enough. I could come up with a baseline fx for each vocalist, guitarist, pianist, automatically load them, and tweak them from there rater than from scratch or manually copied from a previous mix. Especially the drumkit! Yikes, so many mics (never enough mics!)

I fired up ChatGPT5, and we got somewhere fast. It's one of those things, it has scraped enough of Stack Exchange and reddit to know about Reaper, and it understands Lua, the scripting language, so it has a good crack. But it's not instant. Oh no no no, you have to iterate and iterate and iterate some more. You get 80% of the work done in 20% of the time. A pretty standard rule in engineering I have found.

I ran out of Chatbot freebies, and firstly because I was being cheap, but secondly because I wanted to try other LLMs - I switched to Grok 4. Which Chatbot would do better?

I sent the code so far to Grok, and it changed some stuff, and improved it a bit more. Unfortunately, there was a lack of understanding by me, ChatGPT, and Grok, about a certain bit of functionality. None of us could fix it. Humans are still better than Chatbots - I can vouch. I forced it to rethink an approach to a section of functionality that no matter how many times it tried to fix it, just didn't work. I remembered having a similar issue when it was just me by myself. With Grok's help, we sorted it out. And then Grok ran out of freebies.

Again, being cheap but also wanting to see how the other side lives, I switched to Gemini 2.5 Flash. Not as good, but I didn't need much more, I was basically done. What I got it to do was remove fluff and tidy up the code, which it did admirably. "Clean up this code, simplify it, and I will test it and make sure it still works." "Okay, good one, still works, now simplify it even more, don't be afraid, we'll keep testing it." I was actually surprised how small the resulting code became.

I then passed it my old made-by-human script; I wanted a few enhancements. I gave me a "Very cute, nice try, I can see it works but it is full of bugs and poor coding techniques." Sure, it said it a bit nicer than that, kinda "good effort! here's a gold star!" and then ripped it to pieces.

But Humans for the win again! Even though it added in my enhancements and the code looked far nicer, it introduced an error, another "This Reaper API call is supposed to work like this, it doesn't, maybe this time. Maybe this time. Maybe this time." And I ran out of credits.

So, I gave Claude Sonnet 4 a crack. Quite different to the others, well, still a Chatbot, but it had a less-chatty more-codey style of operation. It wasn't fooled by the Reaper API - I did help it "Really, you need to think differently about this call, I'm pretty sure it's not going to work like you think, let's do some test scripts to understand the core functionality together AND THEN we'll put it into the main product". Claude surprised me, it felt like a coding buddy, and we came up with a great final solution. And when I said "TIGHTEN IT UP MORE!" it said:

  Looking at the cleaned-up code, there are a few potential improvements
  I could suggest, but I'd want to be careful not to over-engineer it since it's 
  working well now. But honestly, the code is in a really good state now. It's 
  clean, functional, and does exactly what you need. The improvements 
  [I suggested] would add complexity without much practical benefit. My 
  philosophy is: if it's working reliably and you're not planning major 
  changes, leave it alone! Sometimes the best improvement is knowing when to 
  stop improving.

That was good advice. I stopped, and my vibe coding for the day was done, and it will save me 10-15 minutes every mix.

What's happening May 2025

Who doesn't like "Shine On You Crazy Diamond"? We've all played those four notes with glee at some stage.  I'm pretty sure I have looked at fingerstyle for it many times, but never really knew what to do.  Several years ago Yoni did a brilliant interpretation - most videos of him playing he sings it, but there is one video where he plays parts I-IV all instrumental and it is inspirational. A few weeks back I fiddled with it again, and committed to playing it Capo 3 and hanging onto a Em chord - so Gm.  I didn't follow his video, I followed Songsterr, but I used his quiet arpeggio style.  It's so good, so nice to play, but so much work.  So I'm more just noodling, and playing it to my mate Steve at work on Friday mornings - it is one of his favourite songs as well.

I'll record a short for youtube of me playing part I on the new guitar.  My first short was fun to do and seemed to be well received.  Shorts don't have to be a full production, so it actually gives me license to just play bits of songs and have fun with it!  The new guitar is purely for production at the moment, I still work out new stuff on an electric guitar because it is light on the fingers and quiet. I still rehearse on nylon. But wow the new guitar sounds nice and it will suit Shine On You Crazy Diamond part I beautifully.  And I can record it both acoustically and plugged in and then mix up an amazing version in Reaper, and then mime along to it in a video :-)

Meanwhile I have been helping out the band "Solstice" record and mix their first EP. Apparently there are several bands called Solstice in the world, this is the one from Perth, Western Australia, that my daughter is in. As far as a recording studio goes I'm quite the amateur, no formal training just what feels right, what I've seen on YouTube and what I like in music. So I have ideas that are getting tweaked as I go.

The most recent session was the singer/songwriter/guitarist also filling in as drummer whom we shall call S1, and the singer/bassist, ie my daughter whom we shall call S2. My "recording studio" lives in a box...so I set it up in my family room, takes about half an hour, which includes setting up a digital drum kit. The heart of the studio is my laptop running reaper connected to a PreSonus Studio 18|24. I can track 8 instrument/mic inputs and the midi trigger from the drum kit. Heading out I drive a PA and a 4-way headphone splitter, which is a Behringer HA400 knock off. I don't often need the PA, we all just listen through the headphone splitter - which I have nice long cables for. This disadvantage is that we all listen to the same mix - but we can individually adjust levels with physical knobs on the HA400. It seems to work. I have discovered it is possible to send individual mixes out of the PreSonus, but it would require a bit of messy routing in Repear, a preamp on the line outs on the Personus, which are all mono so I'd have to pair them for stereo headphones.

So the headphone out -> 4 way headphone splitter with individual volume knobs is actually really good and really cheap to implement.

I thought that if I sent a click track we could build the foundations of the song with drums and bass, then add in guitar and vocals on top. I was wrong. The best way for the young ladies (16 and 17 year olds!) was for S1 to play guitar and sing a scratch vocal at the same time over a click track. We'd then record the bass on that, and the vocals on that, and then finally the drums. That seemed to work best!

I do have all the gear to record everyone at once - I have two SM58 Behringer clones and enough inputs for all the instruments. The drummer, S3, is definitely more of a live band scene, she can't lock into a click track and while it is possible to do everything without a click track, it is hard to do. So S1 was doing the drumming.

S1 brought her condenser microphone - it has a nice tone, but as expected, it hears _everything_. We ended up using it on the mix but I could hear the click track from S1's headphones :-) While mixing I found that the scratch vocals through the SM58 clonw were easily EQ'd to sound as good as the condenser mic, possibly the only issue with the dynamic was if S1 or S2 got too close at volume you'd hear boominess come through, which the condenser didn't get. I think practise would sort that out.

We got reasonable recordings of four original songs, S1 quite likes to mix so she took on the first one, I took on the second one, other two are waiting. I have discovered, after mixing maybe 50 songs now, that all my mixes end up sounding a bit like 70's rock.  Which clearly is the sound that I like - my mix buddy laughs at it quite regularly. (Yes, I have a mix buddy, we send each other our mixes and critique them, it is really great for both of us, even though he is a far more experienced sound guy than I am!) I pick on his thumping modern day drum sounds, he picks on my weak 70's drum sounds...

Speaking of drums I've actually switched to Steven Slate drums, free version, to track drums. Whilst I love Old School Drum Tracking I have found that SSD5.5 matches hit velocity to samples of different hits which is just so good!  So if you hit a drum at full midi velocity 127 you will get the hardest drum sample.  But if you hit at midi velocity 10 you will get the softest drum sample.  Not a volume scaled version of the hardest drum sample, but an actual recording of a drummer hitting a drum the softest he can.  VST drums are amazing!  My electronic drum kit will always be hooked up to a VST drum kit going forward.

Just to give The Algorithm something to do, here is a link to Solstice on Spotify

Worth a post in itself!

What's happening Jan 2025

I managed to record only one song over the Christmas break, but I made two versions, one with a drum track https://youtu.be/2NHKErdw0HQ, the other without https://youtu.be/QpbUkUUNzBE. I was reasonably happy with my play through - 3 takes, using the last take with a few fixes from the first take. When I listen to it I can hear where I'd gone off beat and then re-tracked back on, but it isn't too bad - practice with metronomes and drum tracks does actually work!

I wondered what the internet would think - I posted the drum track first and then without second, thinking that without is my normal syle and that would be my most recent video. The Algorithm however picked up the drum track version and boosted it and it got a lot more views. I noticed that the feedback from viewers seems to be "yeah, nah" (translation: I understand what you did there, I appreciate it, but, I prefer the other one.) Since I had made 5 drum tracks over Christmas, when I got back to work I played them for some people and it further reinforced it - nobody preferred the drum track. My drummer mate said "drums were okay" but "drum tracks are cheesy", another said "if you are going to play acoustic, leave the drum track behind.

So, slightly peturbed, I am still playing along with them to improve my tempo, but not as enthusiastic as I was.

In other news, all the parts for the bass guitar build came in, and construction began! It is currently at a stage where it is assembled, unpainted, with strings at tension, but no pickup. I'm a bit perplexed, the shape of the neck seems slightly wrong. right at the end of the fretboard it seems to slightly pop out, meaning I need to set the action higher than I want to prevent buzzing. I've done quite a few adjustments, I'm letting it settle, I definitely need to file down the nut, but I still can't quite work out what is going on with the end of the fretboard. The manufacturers did a great job on the last neck I had made, so I can't see them as having got it wrong?

We will see! I will finish it, I've put too much time and money into it to not to, but I will be disappointed if I can't get it how I want it!

Meanwhile, I put some new strings on the Esteve. They we very mellow and dull sounding on my last recording...

I will keep practising, next song to record in a couple of weeks is "Feels Like We Only Go Backwards" and after that "Fly Like an Eagle".  I'm really looking forward to the latter, I'm very happy with my arrangement of that.

JAW

What's happening December 2024

I'm mucking around with a number of musical stuff at the moment!

On the fingerstyle arrangement front, I am polishing, practising, and getting a few ready for recording over Christmas. It's been a while since I recorded an arrangement, I'm looking forward to getting some done. After around a year of mixing and learning about the DAW Reaper I have a slightly different perspective on recording, I might even start to sound a bit professional in the future - Watch this space!

In other news I have recorded a song from my teenage daughter's "girl band"...they are the quintessential power trio, Lyds is the singer/songwriter/guitarist front person, my Naomi is singer/bassist and Jess is the drummer. I'm thinking "Cream" with Clapton/Bruce/Baker, but they were well before even my time, so maybe "Nirvana" is slightly more contemporary, but I don't think Krist ever sang? Anyway.

I got them to record one of their originals to a click track. Mostly because all I *had* was a two channel mixer. Recorded stereo drums, then guitar and bass, then two vocals. It took several hours, it was like herding cats...they are 15&16 year old teenage girls. I later put together a mix, it took most of my effort just doing audio quantisation on the drums and the bass. Because the song is punchy, it needed to be super-tight and it wasn't. The vocals and the distorted electric guitar were okay - the guitar was not punchy so slightly out timing is not noticeable. The girls have been singing together for a while so they matched in nicely. And besides when vocals are leading or training a beat, well, that's "expression" :-)

Two things came out of that session. First is that recording with only two channels is not enough. In a fortuitous set of circumstance, while chatting about it to one of my mates at work who has been creating music for years, he said "Oh I have an old PreSonus with 8 channels, I'm upgrading to a Focus-Right, do you want to buy it off me?" So I have a PreSonus Studio 18|24 USB sitting in front of me that I need to get familiar with.

The other thing to come out of that session is I recorded electric drums as a stereo channel straight from my drum machine. I felt helpless mixing it. I'm now quite used to mixing an analogue kit with 7 mics on it, and I love the flexibility. In the stereo mix the snare sound was not at all what I wanted. I ended up putting a sample on top of it for all the hits of the snare, that was tedious. I know that my drum machine can act as a midi trigger, I even bought a midi cable for it a while ago, just haven't used it. The PreSonus has a midi interface, so I need to get familiar with that, I need to go back to glorious multi tracked drums.

So as if all that is not enough, I have been playing a bit more often to a metronome. I still dislike them, but as far as being a useful all round musician, you need to be able to play super tight to a click. But recently, I had switched to a drum beat instead of a metronome. It is less like being constantly hit in the brain with a stick. I've found it almost pleasant. The problem is, not every drumbeat suits every song. So I thought "why don't I use a drum machine app where I can save each beat, and the tempo, and recall it when needed?" Not to mention not having to remember a tempo I like to play each song as. While looking for something that could do this, I found that most apps that will do what I want are cut down-DAWs, rich in features, of stuff I don't want to learn. So then I figured, I'm already learning a DAW, reaper, why not just knock up a MIDI drum track for a song, export it as MP3, and then play along to each one? It ties in with my need to use my drum kit as a midi trigger anyway, so two birds with one stone there.

The fingerstyle guitar snob purist in me squawked "You can't do that, you can't have any sound other than what your fingers and guitar is doing!" I've never done backing tracks or looping, and to be honest it's forced me to be a better guitarist - forced me to think outside the box to fill out a song, forced me to develop techniques for a rich guitar only sound. Maybe playing along to a drum track is a gateway drug, but my path of being "just a solo instrumental fingerstyle guitar player" has blurred over the years, I think there would be benefits in playing along to a drum track - firstly being a tighter rhythmist, and secondly a bit of enhancement to the music I play to audiences.

What's happening October 2024

I've continued to do a lot of mixing. It's easy to load an SD card into the deck at my local church and record all 32 tracks, and then you have 4 songs to experiment with. I have a mate from work who has been doing that sort of thing for years, and trained, so it's great to pass mixes to him for a critique. It is a universe into itself the world of mixing, I've got at least my toe in it now. The more I do, the more I practise, the better and faster I am getting at it. I'm not aiming for perfection, I'm aiming to be competant at it - so when it actually counts I might be able to mix a song with some skills.

From a fingerstyle guitar point of view, you may think "What's the point JAW?" I have noticed it is making me think more about production. What does a song need? How can I fit the bassline in? Percussive strums to make a strong beat? The melody IS SO IMPORTANT! There is no doubt that mixing a multi-instrumentalist song will improve your overall musicianship - and it helps improve your ear. So would many other musical pursuits - like learning more theory! What is the best bang for buck? I don't know. But I do know that I'm enjoying the world of mixing and I'm more likely to do something that is fun than something that may be more beneficial, but I don't currently have any interest in.

Meanwhile I need to do a stocktake on fingerstyle arrangements that I really should record. Before I forget I can play them :-)

• Don't Dream it's Over - Crowded House
• It Feels Like We Only Go Backwards - Tame Impala
• Come on Eileen - Dexys Midnight Runners
• White Room - Cream
• I Want to Break Free - Queen
• Horse With No Name - America
• Rain - Dragon

There's few others that I have put effort into but I'm not sure if I will continue to pursue them...

• Got What You Need - Eskimo Joe
• Live it Up - Mental as Anything
• Pumped Up Kicks - Foster the People
• Toccata - Bach (Sky Version)
• 19-2000 - Gorillaz
• It's All Over Now Baby Blue - Bob Dylan/Graham Bonnet
• Fly Like an Eagle - Steve Miller Band

Mmm. Fly like an Eagle.

Mmm.

<Some Time Later>

I'd forgotten how groovy that song is! I noodled further with my previous efforts from a few years back, started developing a cool bassline. I needed to refer to the chords (ultimate guitar) and a quick check of melody (musescore). I had a rough for the verse and the chorus pretty quick just from memory. I then re-listened to the song again :-) So much cool electronics in it. But I can't really emulate that. The bassline rocks, but the studio recording relies on the synth and the electronics to carry the, um, chord extensions progression? You can hear the chorus and verses moving through some chord extensions, but it's not in the bass. The bass is just hanging onto an A, popping up from a G on a beat, but it's hanging on the chord of Am. I couldn't come up with a chord progression and hang onto the A without it sounding a bit boring. But I can make the bassline emulate the chord extensions.  Maybe the first verse could be just on the A?  So much I could do!

And so groovy! I hooked up my practise electric guitar, dialed in a tiny bit of distortion and recorded a quick rough so I'd remember what I was playing with, have a listen!

Fly Like an Eagle rough thoughts:

What's happening July 2024

I continued to progress "Don't Dream it's Over" and very nearly recorded a Jawmunji Talks video. I still might, it's worth a discussion.

However this month my local church had an open night, and the kids and I wrote two tunes for it. So a bit of time spent working on that. We had actually written the tunes some time ago, which came down to me putting together chord progressions and writing lyrics...yes, I do them both at the same time...as in, I don't write lyrics and then set it to music - I don't write music and then create lyrics - they are informing each other as I go. I have a vague idea of melody, but once I have a chord progression and words, I give it to my youngest daughter and she immediately comes up with a melody far better than I could do. It must be a singer thing. And she'll normally tweak the words to fit better with her word flow. Finally, once we have that together, we play it a few time for my son, give him the chord structure, and he will improvise something over it on the sax.

I decided to play the double bass for this one, plucked, bluegrass style. I love the sound of the double bass - particularly when bowed, but I'm bad at bowing it so plucked it needed to be. My youngest played keys and sung on the first song, sung and played electric guitar on the second song.

We needed to have done a bit more practise, but the gig went off without a hitch. All three of us had more anxiety than we were expecting, which was weird, we have all played to audiences many times. I think it was because we normally play covers, there must be something about originals that heightens the anxiety. An increase vulnerability perhaps.

Anyway, good fun. My youngest daughter is a born performer, having her front our little trio with a low slung telecaster belting out some lyrics is in her element. My son can wail out soulful expressions on the sax, we were using a new sax pedal which introduced some nice tones. I love the big fat sound I can get from the double bass, we had it mic'd up so it was kickin'. It is still hard to play, and I am still sporting two blisters on my right first two fingers. I did carefully knife them open, splashed with a methylated spirits to keep the bugs away. A long time ago I decided that pricking open blood/fluid blisters is much faster recovery than letting them do their own thing.

All done, back to working on my fingerstyle arrangements!

What's happening June 2024

I finished my arrangement of "It feels like we only go Backwards", I have played it through many times, several people have heard it, vaguely recognised it but couldn't tell me what it was. I count that as a win! It is a good arrangement in that it has a few challenging parts. The bass has a prominent "one and ... three and", so funk style, and I'm not used to playing a bassline like that. It took me a while to get that under my fingers - although I didn't take it too far - in the places where the melody is complex I drop the "ands".

However it is good to push out of your comfort zone with your arrangements - it helps you develop skills that you can then use elsewhere. It's pretty easy for me to play everything in my default style, which is the drum equivalent of kick-hat-snare-hat, which translates to bass note-mid note-mid chord fragment flick-mid note...adding in any melody notes on top as required. If you can get all the variations of bass rhythms locked into your brain to naturally occur then you have a pathway to great sounding arrangements. I have said it before but I'll say it again - Travis picking a song sounds great...for the first song...but not for every song! (I recognise my  hypocrisy here - I play too many songs with a chord flick on beats 2 and 4...Kel Valleau did it for years and then suddenly stopped...maybe I take a leaf out of his book?)

I've also said before that I wish I had played more bass as a kid. With apologies to my classical brothers and sisters, but the bass rhythms you find in classical music don't have the groove of the bass rhythms in rock and pop. It's only been in the last decade or so that I have come to discover the wonders of bass groove and how it glues a song together.

It's all about musical growth.

Speaking of which I turned my attention to a song I have had on my back list for arrangement for a long time, "Don't Dream it's Over" by Crowded House, which is claimed by both Australia and New Zealand as their own. It too has musically challenging parts that don't fit with my default. There are prominent chords and melody accents on "1-ah", as in "1-ee-and-ah", being the 4th sixteenth note in a bar.  This really clashes with my desire to hit the snare on beat 2, one sixteenth beat later. I've found a compromise where I can hit the prominent chord and still feel the off beat 2 and 4 groove.

There's also some great melodic choices - after digging into it I found all sorts of interesting treasures - for instance the chorus "hey now hey now" the chorus are G-A, but the melody is E-B-F#-B, so you end up with unusual chord fingering of the quite haunting chords of G6-A6sus2.

It's all about musical growth.

(I highly recommend oolimo for analysing the chords you are thinking about.)

What's happening May 2024

Earlier this month I recorded a Jawmunji Talks video. I enjoy doing them, I have a lot to talk about. Unfortunately I don't have a good setup for recording them, and I'm not great at them either. Interestingly about the same time I recorded it Rick Beato put out a video talking about his obsession with the perfect look for his talking videos. I could relate to evertything he was saying. My computer is under a staircase, it's pretty tight but I make it work. It doesn't however give me much room to create an ambience. It would be nice to have a big room with the background filled with all my musical stuff, with warm lighting, and a set of cameras and microphones set up permanently so I can just go in and record whenever I felt like talking about something. One day one of my kids might move out and I will repurpose their bedroom into a music studio...

I need to work on my talking videos, I need to articulate more, and possibly plan what I'm going to say if not script it. I like the idea of being able to just talk without scripting, but when I watched that video back I realised that I missed saying some things I wanted to say, and said some things that were unnecessary. This media we are on right now - text - so easy, I can just go back and edit anything! And I do! And sometimes, when I'm a consumer, I prefer text, but sometimes I prefer video, so it's nice to have both.

It was good to dust off OBS Studio, I hadn't used it in a while. It's such a great program for staging AV productions. I had plugged in two logitech C920s, a Zoom H1N as audio input, a knock-off Behringer USB interface, and two display captures. It handled them all live, the USB interface was slightly more laggy than the Zoom H1N, so I had to mute the Zoom when I was playing the guitar (I was using the electric). I be honest I should just play the nylon string guitar through the mic...in fact a dynamic mic for voice and a condensor for the guitar. Mmm, maybe dynamic for the guitar, but I do love a condensor for the guitar, it captures everything, if not a little too much everything. I should look into being able to capture all audio feeds and all video feeds at the same time to do post production on - so all video angles and all audio streams, but I doubt my little laptop could handle that.

Anyway, something to chip away at in the background.

Meanwhile, I've had an obsessive dive into a Tame Impala song I first mentioned I should cover back in 2013. "It Feels Like We Only Go Backwards" has been in my to-do list for a while, it's a nice psychedelic rock song, and Tame Impala is from my home town of Perth Western Australia, I need to have more Perth band songs in my setlist. It won Single of the Year for our local music awards in 2013, it has a nice high melody with a very groovy bassline.

I'm at a stage when the basslines in my arrangements are starting to get a bit more complex, which I am really enjoying. My thumb is starting to know where to go, both in rhythm and note selection, rather than just sitting on the root note for the whole bar.

It does make for playing it quite complicated though. But that is a good thing, it's how you progress!

The song is in F, but I'm just tired of needing a top string A over a bottom string F in arrangements, which it would have a few. So inititally I dropped it back to E, which ends up with the main chord progression of E-B-F#m. The latter two aren't trivial chords for arrangements.

I bashed out the melody and the bassline into Musescore with very little playing the guitar. I wanted "the actual" melody and bassline to be there at the start, after that I can grab the guitar and work out what I'm prepared to tackle and what I won't. There were some great sounds but some unusual fretting, and I've worked out that if I don't keep it simple then the songs won't stay with me, so I dumbed it down ever so slightly.

I came back to it the next day and considered instead of dropping from F to E, going from F to G. This created a much easier chord progression of G-D-C, but I needed to drop the melody down an octave to fit, otherwise it's a high B over a low G, which is slightly easier than a high A over a low F, but then I may as well stick to E.

The lower melody over the higher bass is also easier to put together on your left hand, but you've now compressed the song together in the middle frquency range. It gaves a warmer feel (it's how the Artic Monkeys play their cover of it) but to me it turns it into a lullaby. So I'm wrestling with "do I make it easier to play but more frequency compressed, or harder to play and a wider range? Not to mention that G-D-C is such an overused cowboy chord sound.

I know what Naudo would do :-)

What's happening April 2024

A while ago I decided I needed an electric guitar. I bought an interesting one that had a UST pickup in it. I remembered pretty quickly afterplaying it for a while that electric guitar necks are too narrow - generally a nut width of about 43mm. I next had a company in China build me a custom neck - 48mm wide - but I accidentally specified Stat style heel rather than the Tele style heel that guitar actually needed so it wouldn't fit on the guitar. Not dismayed, I picked up a cheap Stat copy from my local pawn shop and fitted the neck. It was okay, but I hadn't made a good nut for it, so the intonation was bad.

Nonetheless I started using it as my practice/arrangement guitar, mostly because it is quiet and yet the neck feels like a classical neck, and the string tension is not that far off a nylon string. I've been playing it more than my actual classical... a lot more.

I thought to myself "why don't I fix up the nut so it intonates better, and do some of my normal recordings with it?" Because to set up a recording with microphones with the classical requires a bit of effort and the house to be quiet. My house is rarely quiet.

Getting the nut better is becoming an easier process for me, I have made a few saddles and nuts now. I have a feel for what you need to do, and am getting a bit quicker at it. This one was easy, the strings all just needed to be closer to the fretboard.

I remembered why I stopped adjusting it last time - you have to be able to file a very narrow groove - the width of a string - into bone. I had tried the welder nozzle cleaner files and they are okay, but not with the really fine files, it's not really possible.

I remembered a trick I had seen on the internet - modify a set of feeler gauges. The idea being that feeler gauges come in all the exact widths you'd need, and they are kinda tall so they don't flop around like a 0.4mm round file. So I grabbed my feeler gauge, measured up each string with a caliper, got the corresponding feeler gauge out, and roughed up a section with a heavy duty file. I didn't need to make it super rough, or even a very long section. I did clean up the burs on the sides by running the edges flat over some sandpaper, and rounded it ever so slightly so it wouldn't cut a completely square slot.

The end result is great. You don't need to file much, it is only slightly abrasive which is fine for a thin bone slot and you aren't going deep anyway.

I quickly had the nut slots the perfect width per string deep enough that you only had to press the string down a tiny bit before it was touching the fret. How far? Well, I figure if you fret at the first fret, and then look at how close the string is to the second fret, you want about that same distance. Leave a bit extra - nuts wear down during tuning, so have a bit of meat there so it lasts longer than the first string change.

Once I re-tuned and then fretted at the first fret the intonation was not perfect but a lot better. I still fret like an acoustic player - mashing those strings down so of course I am going to go a bit sharp anyhow - I need to develop a lighter touch for electric guitars. But I was happy enough.

The next stumbling block recording on an electric, is how to play with headphones on through whatever effects pedal you want to hear, possibly listening to a click at the same time, all while recording just the guitar.

This should not be a stumbling block of course, people have been recording through interfaces for years. I had bought a nice little Behringer mixing desk with USB output for a cheaper price than an interface, and that has come in super handy as both a mixer and for recording. Because whatever you mix can be sent straight to a computer as a 44.1kHz 16 bit USB stereo signal.

The problem now is latency. If you are sending your mix to a giant amp that you are listening to, and recording in the background, then latency is not a problem, it can be seconds, who cares! But if you pluck a string and are listening in headphones from the computer then there should be no delay (no latency). I reckon I can hear latency starting at around 10-15ms.

Out of the box the average computer hardware running Microsoft Windows will not achieve 10-15ms. The standard Microsoft audio driver is "DirectSound", and it is not made for real-time audio. You will be quite sad if you try to use it for real-time audio.

However if you switch to ASIO as your audio driver, you should be able to get your 10-15ms. Unless you have a specific ASIO driver for your USB interface, download and install "ASIO4ALL". From Reaper/Audacity/etc go to your audio setup, choose ASIO, and click on the ASIO Configuration. Things to try: test out Hardware Buffer, I found setting this with anything around 12ms-20ms worked great. Try setting the block size to 64. Keep the sample frequency at 44.1kHz/16 bit.

If you hear latency, then decrease the values. If you hear noise - like the occasional pop and click, then increase the values. I was able to find a noise free setting that had a latency that I could tolerate.

With that all done, I found with ASIO I couldn't play a click track or anything else at the same time! That is because ASIO will only run exclusively, it won't share with other audio. I found if I went back to DirectSound and recorded a click track, and then back into ASIO mode I could play the click track and overdub, so it's okay.

Otherwise, try out WASAPI. This is the Microsoft equivalent to ASIO. It's pretty good, it will run in shared mode so it is almost the same as using the default DirectSound in that respect. It has similar settings to ASIO, play around with the buffer size, and set the thread priority to Time Critical.

I found I couldn't quite get as good latency out of WASAPI as I could from ASIO. This is all on an 8 year old Dell laptop running Windows 10, so hopefully you have more joy!

So once I was ready with a guitar that would play in tune, with a recorder that could record noise and delay free while I was listening, I hit the next road block.

Well, two road blocks.

I couldn't get the tone I wanted, and my fingerpicking doesn't translate well to coil pickups. Huh?

Tone - I am using my Zoom G Four multi-effects pedal, so I can dial in any patches I want. I found an acoustic simulator with a tiny bit of reverb, running through the neck pickup only at about 50% tone was barely okay - I could live with that - but it just isn't the sound of a classical guitar.

Fingerpicking with a consistent dynamic and tone is hard on electric! I only had to pick ever so slightly different between notes, almost imperceivable, and that different dynamic leaps out. Only have to flick the strings percussively a tiny bit different to the previous and it is the difference between a kick drum and a closed high hat!

I dialed in some compression and this squeezed those inconsistent dynamics together and made them less obvious... but you know what? It squeezed the dynamics together! I _want_ the actual dynamics that I want when I'm playing!

So my years of nylon string has meant I don't have the ultra-fine control of my dynamics I need for an electric guitar.

I haven't given up, but for now, I think I will stick to practice on the electric but recording on the nylon. (Oh, and all this practice on the electric is making me rusty on nylon...)

Fingerstyle Influences

We are all influenced by music, but further to that, we are influenced by artists, and even further to that we are influenced by artists who play in a style that we'd like to emulate. There are ways to get into fingerstyle and my path started with simply learning classical guitar from the Aaron Shearer Red Book and learning how to strum various chords along with music I liked, but there were three artists that really inspired me - Tommy Emmanuel, Michael Chapdelaine and Naudo Rodrigues.

Tommy was a great starting point, through him in the late '90s I discovered thumb independence which is the backbone of fingerstyle. I've seen Tommy in concert, he's such a good showman too. I did some  of his covers back in the day. With the advent of Youtube in 2005 it got a lot easier to discover other fingerstyle artists which is where I found Michael Chapdelaine. He had a slightly different approach to fingerstyle, that seemed to be born out of classical guitar, which resonated with me more than Tommy, because that is where I too was coming from. I covered his covers of "California Dreamin'" and "Come Together".

But then it was Naudo Rodrigues who I connected with on a guitar level the most, I transcribed/re-covered many of his covers, and still do from time to time. After Naudo's influence I was at a stage where I was doing my own arrangements, my fingerstyle was basically set in motion and rather than needing to play exactly what these artists were playing, I was doing my own stuff.

Artists who influence are pivotal to anyone's musical journey, which is why I was saddened to hear from my internet mate L3fty that Michael died late last year. A friend of his wrote some moving words about him, I wasn't surprised to hear he was a troubled soul. The perfectionism you could hear in Michael's playing was both fantastic and yet deflating. It was the contrast between Michael and Naudo that was freeing for me - Michael wasn't only note perfect, he was dynamics and inflection note perfect. You can hear errors in Naudos playing and that makes his style more relatable to me. I don't want to know how to play 3 songs perfectly, I want to know how to play 100 songs adequately.

And yet, it is the striving for perfection that pushes us to new found guitar heights, but it is a balance. So thanks Michael!

...it reminded me that I once has some correspondence with him.  I dug around and found it deep in my archives. I had covered his "Come Together" and had written up a tab and then did a video where I talked about how to play it and added a link to my tab. He asked me to take it down because he was planning on making his own tab and tutorial. I did, and then let him know, and he got back to me:

28 Nov 2007

hi Jason:
thanks very much for honoring my request.
i would love to see your performance of the tune on so i don't mind if you publish it on the youtube. it was just the teaching part that was a problem.
you are a good man and a very good guitarist.
thanks again for digging my stuff.
hope we get to play together one day.
tu amigo.

michael

What's happening Feburary 2024

Musically busy times!

• Over the Christmas break, I attempted to record the whole song "Wish You Were Here". Which I did! Except the singing! I featured myself on my new 12 string Gretsch and myself on my Maton 6 string acoustic, myself on the double bass, and because I'm a weak drummer I sequenced the drums...myself. It all sounds great! But after several attempts at trying to sing the song, even with pitch correction, I just wasn't satisfied.
  
  Luckily my youngest daughter, who can sing, felt sorry for me and has started giving me some lessons. She worked out my range is from C2 to C4 which is a shame because the song starts on C4. Yes, I did trying singing it an octave down, I didn't like it.
  
  But after a good warm up, and working up from notes in my range, I could hit the D4 and E4 the song requires, with almost no hint of straining, so I am going to tackle it again. I've already made a how-I-made-this video, everything is ready to go, I just need the singing! I have planned a harmony, which would be nice if was a high harmony, so I can either sing it an octave down instead or enlist my daughter to do it. I wanted it to be a video of "I made this by myself", maybe to inspire others who were thinking about doing something similar, but also it would be nice to have my daughter sing on there with me. Or she sings the whole thing!


• Since I was revisiting "Wish You Were Here" I found some fantastic resolves with beautiful colours for my fingerstyle version, so I have been updating that arrangement. Some stuff I can't believe I had never noticed before. I've always meant my arrangements to be works in progress, as my skills develop, as my ear develops, so to add additional complexity and texture to an arrangement is how to keep the passion alive.


• Speaking of tabs, I have finalised notifying all my Patreon Supporters that I would not longer be putting tabs on Patreon, instead everything is moving to PaidTabs. This fixes 3 issues I had with providing tabs on Patreon:
  1. It's not really legal, there is no royalty payment to copyright holders. While I could dress it up as "supporting me but hey here are some tabs for free"...yeah nah.
  2. The more tabs I put there the less value each one was. In the early days you could subscribe for $3, take the 10 tabs there, unsubscribe, okay! But the final tab I gave out to my supporters took the total to 35. So less than 10c per tab. Of course it is better to sell them individually. I don't want to be "one of those people" who is ruining it for struggling musicians trying to carve out a living while I'm living a great life with my day job and music is my hobby.
  3. I was starting to feel a burden to create tabs for my Patreon supporters. That I needed to hurry up and realease another tab "it's been 3 months already!" I like working on other musical projects in between arranging new songs for fingerstyle guitar. I don't want to create an expectation that I'm going to create an arrangement every 2 months on the dot. That's how you burn out.
  
  
• ...so I'm updating my tabs again and releasing them on PaidTabs. I've got more then 10 on there now, people are buying them so that's nice. It takes me at least an hour to update a tab depending on what state it is in - I want them to be execptional - so I just need to keep working through my catalogue...only around 70 to go...


• At work the marketing team attempted to put an in house rock band together for a campaign promotion. They reached out to a bunch of people including me, I guess with a few thousand people in an organisation there would be quite a number of musos...and there was...and most of them were unavailable for the launch date. I mentioned that "If you are going to have a rock band you need a lead singer" and that if you can't pull anything together then I can play some rockier fingerstyle on the day, that's easy for me.
  
  They were unable to secure any of the singers.
  
  One of the guys who works in my team is a drummer, so I dragged him over the other weekend and got him to play along with some of my fingerstyle. I have played with drummers many times in the past and it's always good...except for my ability to keep tempo. But with a few years of playing in my local church band I reckon I have improved. We managed to bash out around 10 songs in just over an hour that we thought we could do, it's only an hour's gig. He was happy enough to play on my little electric drum kit, so I'll be able to pack up my PA, mixing desk, drumkit and guitar and a bunch of cables and ship it to work.
  
  It shall be fun :-)

PaidTabs

While still discussing what to do with my large collection of music cover arrangements I have produced over the past nearly 2 decades, my longest supporting mate on Patreon remarked 'Paid Tabs, seems to be where people are selling their arrangements' (thanks Mark). Dumbfoundedly, I went there, and sure enough, it is a website where you can sell arrangements of covers - and they look after the copyright holders. Their fee is only 20%, which is much better than Hal Leonard's 90%...makes me raise an eyebrow, how one can be so expensive and one so cheap, but I don't understand the inner workings of royalties, who am I to argue! Besides, I saw scores there from Paul Davids, Davie504, Igor Presnyakov - and I'm not going to argue with those legends!

So, finally, I have a place to legitimately park all my arrangements and sell them and copyright holders are looked after. This is what I had planned all along, and while waiting for this day to arrive I have used Patreon as a method to kinda/kinda not sell my arrangements, as of today there were 33 available to anyone who became a paid sub. That's pretty good value, I set the PaidTabs at $5.00 each which is the lowest you can go, so as good a value as you can get. I'm going to stop letting them go out the door through Patreon (I did discuss selling arrangements with Patreon and gave them a few months to think about whether they would offer a similar service...not going to happen in the near future.)

For all my existing Patreon friends, rather than just shut down the tab memberships, I have stood up two new memberships, which I have called "Basic Set" and "Fancy Set". Being $1 a month and $2 a month, where $1 a month is enough to buy a basic set of strings each year, at $2 I can get a fancy set of D'Addario coated strings! I've had plenty of Patreons who sign up, take everything and leave after a month, that was fine, I get it, but I've also got Patreons who simply want to support me. And I love that, it does inspire me!

So if you are a Patreon of mine and want to keep supporting me even if you aren't getting tabs anymore, head over to my Patreon page and change your tier to Basic Set or Fancy Set, as sometime in the next week or two I will be closing down the tab memberships.

Sorry if this disappoints you, I had mentioned this would happen sometime, I hope you had a good run while it lasted. Thanks for being here! If you do move across to the new tier, thanks for staying with me! I will keep posting stuff that interests me and maybe you, I just won't be posting tabs anymore.

In the meantime I have around 90 arrangements I need to get up to scratch and post to PaidTabs...I figure that will take me at least a year at the rate I move!

What's happening September 2023

Playing for an hour in the lunchroom on a Friday every week is a useful pursuit - it ticks several musical boxes:

• There are people listening - okay mostly having lunch and not looking at you - but you naturally want to play your best;
• Nobody likes a half song playing guitarist so you play a song from start to finish, even if it is just an improvised few verses and choruses and omitting the solo;
• It's just you and a guitar, no sheets music, no gear. Everything has to be memorised and all the sound tone comes from your own two hands;
• You don't want to just play the same 10 songs every week, so you are constantly developing new arrangements and dusting off old material;
• You are reinforcing and normalising society with music. Yeah, this is more abstract, but us humans have a deep emotional connection with music which needs to be nurtured. There is a big difference between streaming music phone-to-headphones and someone sitting there, right there, playing music. I'd like to see more live music in society, and more people recognising live music as normal.

So while playing a few weeks back one of the admin staff came in and had a chat. The company was having a family day, and they were thinking of hiring a band, but then they thought "why not just ask our resident guitarist?" Heh. They called me their "resident guitarist". How could I say no to "resident guitarist"?

So for two Sunday afternoons I set up my "playing out" kit - the Esteve, my Behringer Eurolive B112D Public Address speaker sitting on top of a stand to get it up to ear level, my Zoom effects pedal for some reverb sound shaping and a couple of instrument and power leads. It all fits on a fold up trolley so I can do one trip from my car to the venue.

Both Sundays I played 2.5 hours, no repeats, both sessions I got the the end and there were still a few songs I wanted to play! I was quite pleased that my repertoire is still quite extensive - sure, a few songs had rough patches were my brain blanked out and I had to percussively strum a few open chords and hook back in to a verse or chorus - but it wasn't awful.

At an event like that with lots of people walking by you get a chance to say "thanks" and smile and nod while you are playing, and a few people will stop and chat. It's nice.

I wasn't quite getting the tone I was after, there is a a bit too much resonance/boom/chatter on the low E string. That might suit some songs that sit on a bass guitar driven sound, in fact it was cool for that, but for a general pop song it was out of balance. I couldn't fix it on the spot, that's something I will need to look at.

Meanwhile, I have continued to dust of some old favourites. Particularly the difficult songs, like "Something", "Whiter Shade of Pale" and "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road". Wow there is a lot of chords in them, and the different inversions up the neck. I can think in terms of open chords/cowboy chords, but I haven't mastered the neck for everything. If I could send something back to Past JAW it would be "spend a bit more time mastering the chord locations on the neck". There are plenty of chords inversions up the neck I do know, that come natural now, but not everything I need. So quite often when I'm playing a song where the melody has taken my up the neck, I'm completely winging it from muscle memory - I don't actually know what I'm doing... It's okay, means there is still plenty to learn!

Keep playing, keep practising. As I said recently to a coworker who has a guitar but is struggling to stay motivated: "Play 5 to 10 minutes every day rather than an hour a week - so keep the guitar on a $20 stand in the middle of your living room so you can't ignore it. Sure learn from youtube or a book the stuff you need to know, but also learn fun stuff that that attracted you to the guitar in the first place. Check in with a guitarist from time to time to make sure you aren't doing anything silly. And learn to sing...it might sound confronting and out of your comfort zone, but once you can change smoothly between 3 chords you have about a million songs at your fingertips, but only you will recognise them unless you are singing them."