Prince - aptly named, as far as I can tell

I went to see Prince last night, at the imaginatively named 'O2', previously imaginatively named 'the dome'. And it was a blinder, by the standards of gigs that I have seen. In no particular order,

• It was possible to buy beer there which wasn't filthy Carling. Even (gasp!) foreign pilsner brewed under the Reinheitsgebot


• The stage was in the round


• The seats were tiered steeply enough that I could see all of the gig despite being sat behind a very tall man


• The Purple One can play the guitar. Like, he had all the Fatty Gilmour licks down, and a bit of Jeff Beck, and a lot of other stuff they couldn't touch. I could have listened to him take guitar solos all night.

For what it's worth, he had a pretty killer rig as well. The heads were out of sight, but he was running two angled Mesa 4x12s in stereo behind him at about the distance and angle you'd put your high-end hifi in a big room. The guitars had 'fender' on the headstock, but that's no guarantee of anything these days, The tele had a neck pickup with the metal cover removed, and the strat was fitted with a bridge humbucker, a neck single coil, and nothing in between. Except an expanse of expensive-looking pearloid scratchplate.

Of course, he was going nuts on the guitar all night, and it made the sort of noise which would cause the impressionable to found a religion if they heard it in the middle of the night in the desert. In fact, now I think of it, I think anyone would have played above themselves with a rig that sounded that good.

I'm just bitter because I got back from a jam session where I had to play through a filthy Marshall DSP combo. No, it didn't sound like Prince.

Musical aesthetics - a rant

Following on the theme of using this blog as a way of dumping some stuff that has no other natural home, here's a rant I wrote in response to my good friend Big Jim's view that there is no objective 'good' in music, and we each have our own 'good' - a dangerous view, in that it suggests that musical discussion and "musical education" are redundant.

The problem (a problem which is as old as aesthetics itself) is the widespread disagreement between people about which music is good. How could someone claim to get the 'right answer' when there is so much disagreement in the world and no obvious way of arbitrating it? My answer is one germinated in both Plato and Hume: I might not be able to explain why the music *I* listen to is better than the music *you* listen to, but I can explain why I'm better placed to judge than you are. Anyway, here's what I wrote:

Faced with a world in which what the supposed 'experts' and the alleged 'masses' say is 'good' seems neither good, pleasant, effective, worthwhile, or any other positive adjective you might throw at it, we have OPTIONS, to whit:
1. decide there is no such thing as 'good'; there is only each person's own preference
2. decide that the 'experts' and/or media are right about what is the good stuff, while we are sadly mistaken.
3. decide that, largely, there is such a thing as the difference between good and bad product, and moreover we're right about it more often than not.

When I think about it like that, it seems that option 3 is clearly the right explanation of the situation. After all, I can tell a pretty good story about why the people who disagree with me approve of what they approve of - to whit, they're either paid to talk it up, or they have never experienced anything better. (If they have even HEARD anything better, they probably haven't taken the time to get inside it in the way you need to with proper music.)

Whereas, I can't imagine that any of the gurning frogs at the NME who try to tell the world that 'The Jisms' are the best band ever could point to any cognitive deficiency on our part which makes us prefer mid-period Miles. (Moreover, I wonder how anyone can take seriously a magazine's claim to have found 'the best X ever' unless they think the editor is possessed of impressive precognition or are sure that the End is Near.)

That's not a manifesto for musical absolutism, by the way. It can also force me to revise my opinions and listening behaviour - for example if someone who I know to have a superior range of experience in music starts telling me about some killer recording I haven't heard, or have only listened to without paying attention, the same logic will force me to give it a go. On that count alone, it seems like a better account of our behaviour as listeners. After all, it's pretty clear that an theory of aesthetics which justifies our habit of deference to other peoples' opinions is preferable to one which leaves it a mystery why I should ever listen to anyone else...

more linux madness

this is for my own benefit more than anything else, to save hours of googling around when I next need to solve this problem: to force Ubuntu to rescan for new hardware and update its config automatically (eg. when adding a new USB keyboard), you need to do this:

sudo dpkg-reconfigure -phigh xserver-xorg

Nice. Shiny new keyboard working now. Hulk happy.

"Wock Woll can Wescue the Wold"

I was worried that music might have lost its way recently... then I realised that I just haven't been listening to enough Japanese heavy metallers playing flying Vs with nude drummers.

Oh yes. It's all here. And here.

london licensing mayhem

So.. I find myself sat at home in front of the computer at 12am on a Saturday night after trying to go out for 'big drinks in town' with an old friend. Unfortunately, it turned out that the pub we were in shut its doors at 11, sharp, and so did every other hostelry within walking distance. So I reluctantly came home, since the only other options were clubs with entry fees, 'bangin' tunes, and no decent beer.

This doesn't feel unfamiliar at all. In fact, it was exactly what it was like to go out drinking on a Saturday night in Aylesbury in 1997. The question is, why is it that an 11pm closing time for pubs is still more-or-less universal in central London, but you can easily drink until 2 or 3 in pubs in supposedly 'residential' areas like East Dulwich ('home' for me), and even in other cities (Oxford)?

I'm not convinced that the opening hours revolution is being implemented consistently, is all.

Mind you, if I hadn't come home early, I wouldn't have got to listen to this.

My guitar has holes in it

...mostly in the places I intended to put them, but in some other embarrassing places as well.

The idea of getting a scratchplate to cover up all the damage I've done is looking increasingly appealing. For now, I've just filled up all the unintended holes with plastic wood. Maybe that'll do the job.

urgh.

R Kelly is Trapped in the Closet

It's true. R Kelly's Hiphopera is the best thing I've seen in music for a while.

'Oh God I'm trapped in the closet!'

Check it out here

Did I really have to do this?

Emails are cheap, and someone had to keep Radio 4 on its toes. I quote their response in full:

"Thank you for your e-mail regarding 'Redonda - the Island with Too Many Kings'.

I understand that you found it unacceptable for a BBC continuity announcer to
use the word 'Less' when the word 'Fewer' should have correctly been used.

I can inform you that our staff newsreaders and announcers, over whose speech we
have direct jurisdiction, undergo a period of extensive training and are only
confirmed in their appointments if the required standard has been reached.

Your comments have been fully registered on our daily audience log. This
internal document will be made available to Senior BBC Management.

Thank you once again for taking the time to contact us.

Regards

Marie Therese Gibson
BBC Information"

Nailed it!

Nice. Was on the point of switching to a different Linux distribution when I got down to some serious searching on the Ubuntu forums, and have now fixed the 'flash no sound' problem I was moaning about.

For those who care, the solution was to edit some config files to force ALSA to recognize the USB sound card as default. Code and comments are here

Brilliant. Now I can rock out with John Scofield videos all night long.

Ubuntu update

So - it's not all that bad. After a second re-install, the soundcard now works, and playing around with config options seems to have done the job for the keyboard issues. BUT: still no sound for any flash applications running in Firefox or Opera, even if I roll back the version of flash from 9 to 7.

This is a BIG problem, since I divide my time online mostly between a load of neat flash apps. Not counting youtube, that means:
Interval ear training
Randomchord.com (which I co-invented)
In the Groove , a weekly jazz show with a built-in player and a stonking jazz guitar show this week.

Without these, life is not so good, and consequently the full migration to linux has been delayed until I find a workaround.

ubuntu... spoke too soon

So, turns out the conflict between my shiny new PC and linux only went as deep as the graphical front-end used by the installer programme. It's possible to download an alternate version with a text-mode installer, which works fine. Well, worked on the third time of asking.

Of course, in linux-land 'fine' is relative. So far:
My usb audio device works intermittently, and not at all with flash in firefox
The wireless (PS/2) keyboard fails to register every other keystroke
The best linux-based multi-track studio "installs" itself without leaving any trace of its presence to enable me to boot it.

This is a shame, because apart from those niggles, it's all been nicely pluggin-an-playin' all the things I'd want it to. It's also nice to get to play around in a terminal window from time to time. Takes me back to my youth....

Linux reverses the natural order of things

Traditional wisdom has it that you have to keep buying ever quicker PC hardware to keep up with the ever-increasing demands Windows makes on system resources. What isn't so well known is that with Linux, having something a bit old and creaky around the kness might prove to be an advantage.

I've just been trying to install Ubuntu on my machine as a secondary boot option, but it keeps dying early in the installation. Various forums opine that the problem is caused by intel's shiny new processor and chipset being rather too shiny and new for the linux kernel to deal with it.

Wouldn't be so bad, except my 'spare' computer has caused two power supplies to explode rather vigorously. God knows what the neighbours will think.

Building a guitar - part one

So - I woke up a few weeks ago with the familiar feeling that drives a man, after exhausting all possible practice strategies, to improve his learning curve by buying a new guitar which will make him a more toneful, faster, neater, sexier guitar player.

Then I went out trying out some guitars.

Quite apart from the fact that most of the stock in your average guitar shop is absolute rubbish, I noticed that all of the ones made from decent bits were priced well over £1500. That doesn't seem too steep for a quality musical instrument, until you realise that (a) the aggregate cost of buying all the high-quality bits needed to make such an instrument from various online shops comes to less than £500 and (b) the work involved in assembling said bits into a guitar is pretty minimal. You'd need a screwdriver and a soldering iron. Maybe a desk to work at. And a few strong cups of tea. What would I be paying the extra grand for? Someone who could tell the difference between good and bad componentry? I'm clearly in the wrong line of work.

So far so good. I had a strategy. But then I got over-excited and bought, not a nice guitar body, but a nice bit of wood, in no way shaped like a guitar. Unless it's Bo Diddley's guitar we're talking about.

So far I have managed to cut up my rectangular bit of ash into roughly the shape I want. Now it's time to cut some holes in it. This could result in great embarrassment on my part, since a hole in the wrong place might kill the whole project.

Looking on the bright side, I still have all my fingers.

A new monster guitarist to listen to!

This guy - Rick Peckham - is an absolute beast. And he plays jazz on a telecaster. One more to add to the list! He's managed to get international distribution on his album, which means it's possible to listen to snippets of his 70s-rock-jazz fusion thing here

His website has some interesting, um, deviant pentatonic materials on it as well. Excellent.

I thought I'd lost this forever...

...when my VHS player packed in, and I realized I couldn't find the tape anyway, as it was marked only by a post it note, and stored in a box I can't find in a house I haven't lived in for five years. But the magic of youtube has saved a Tori Amos-shaped bit of my past for me:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=smJ23yBfm7A

And, as if that wasn't enough, I was THERE for this gig:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MFZ3oXCRtIM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ibgcR6viAi8
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4t1QQFGixbs
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CUseTonvkRs
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RqrMzDUyvs4
I remember nearly missing it owing to severe mud-related indolence, and the fact that, even with sensible footwear and an all-body suit made out of heavy-duty bin liners and gaffa tape, it took hours to travel the smallest distances. If you look closely enough at the folks swaying along in the front of the crowd you can see some people I used to know, including Ken the guitarist from Rebellion programmers. Hi Ken!

What is it about music you get into aged between 15 and 20? Nothing you find later on ever means as much.

I'm going to see Tori in London in July. She better live up to the standard she set in 1998... the band is the same; that's a good sign.