Never before in the long and storied history of JustAnotherBad dot com has an entire month gone by without even a burp out of my creative muse.  Not until May of 2009, that is, when insurmountable forces of unbelievable...oh screw it, I've been busy, okay?

Doing what? you may ask yourself, if you're one of the three souls left who still bothers to wander through here.  Well, lots.

I bought a new guitar (which insisted on being played alot), began a window-repainting project (which I probably won't finish before my 40th birthday in a couple weeks), and got married.

The guitar is an ESP LTD MH-400, which looks a lot more elegant than its name suggests.  I've always wanted a hardtail, carved-top guitar, and I finally found one that trips my trigger.  It has the pickups I like, a beautifully figured maple top, small inlays, and a set-in neck.  It doesn't quite have the sweet resonance of my Mason Bernard, but it's probably only a year old.  The Mason is nearing 20 years old, and any seasoned guitar player will tell you that age (of your guitar) makes a big difference.  But the new ESP is mighty sweet, and will improve over time as I play it more and more.  So that's been consuming a bit of time...

Then there's the window I'm repainting.  It happens to be in the bathroom - in the shower, actually - which is one of the stupider places to put a normal wood-frame window in a house.  Whoever painted it last used latex paint, which is, of course, water-based and thus adds insult to injury.  If I had the time, inclination, and/or money, I'd replace it with a glass block window, but I figured I could get away with a quick refinishing for now.  I used a chemical paint stripper on it (I suppose I could have used a heat gun, but as a matter of fact, I only remembered that I had one at the exact moment I typed this sentence).  With the old paint gone, it's been sanded, caulked, and primed, and this weekend, I will give it the first of a couple coats of good oil-based paint.  That should last until I get the time, inclination and money to do it right - with a glass block window.  In the meantime, it's a bit of work...

Where does that leave us? Oh yeah. I got married. Again.

It was a small ceremony - five minutes at the most, with a guest list that included only immediate family and one very close friend.  Being the second time around for both of us, we intended to keep it simple and intimate. I think we took the jeweler by surprise a few weeks back.  We were picking out our wedding bands.  When are you getting married? the salesperson asked.  May 30, we responded, which was only a month away at the time.  Oh! she exclaimed. We heard a lot of that.  Because it was so small, planning was far less than your usual wedding, but it still consumed a bit of time. 

So that's why I've been a huge slacker. I've gotten somewhat of a life again, and I suppose with summer here, I'll remain pretty busy, so don't expect a lot of updates.  Try Reddit if you need a more frequent fix of crazy.  But I'm not quite finished with this blogging business yet.

Yeah, that's why I play guitar.  Yeah.

I used to play guitar in a rock band.  I still do, but I used to too (with apologies to Mitch Hedberg).  I should qualify that statement by stating that we get onstage every 5 - 7 years now, unlike the early 90's when it was a quite a bit more often than that.  We also miss a few more notes and breaks than we used to - probably by an order of magnitude.

A few months ago, word spread that our singer was about to turn 40, which was a great surprise to us because we weren't aware that we'd even had a singer.  Seriously, hitting 40 is an epic milestone in life, particularly if you've spent most of that life partying like a rock star.  As such, it seemed appropriate that we gather for the occasion and attempt once again to wreak musical mayhem.  I can assure you that such mayhem was certainly wrought.

Since it had been close to six months since I'd even touched one of my guitars, it seemed like a good idea to pick it up and knock a little rust off the old digits.  Several days later, there was enough rust knocked off to render a WD-40 salesman apoplectic.  My wrists hurt, my fingertips were raw, and it was very clear that I was in for a bit more work if I didn't want to completely embarrass myself.  Mild embarrassment, of course, is perfectly acceptable - particularly when guzzling bucketloads of beer at a 40th birthday party.

Still, I methodically worked my way through the setlist and a number of physical drills.  The endless scales and picking exercises that I could do for 8 hours a day in my teens had returned to get everything in proper working order again.  I don't have the patience or enthusiasm for them anymore, particularly once everything was getting back in sync.  But in the end, I got comfortable enough that I could execute the songs competently, and at least enjoy myself faking my way through the rest of it.

Even my fingertips eventually came around, with the help of Eric Clapton's purported rubbing alcohol trick.  Surprisingly, you soak your fingertips in it, rather than guzzling it.  And between my old favorite axe and my new favorite toy, the equipment was cause for far more joy than worry.

We finally played this last weekend, and it went every bit as good, if not a little better, than I expected.  When you only play once every half-decade, you have to expect some hiccups (and by "hiccups", I mean "making 4 attempts at starting a song until you get it right").  We all enjoyed ourselves, and that's ultimately what makes it worthwhile.  For my part, I don't know if I'll start playing a little more regularly or not.  If not, I hope rubbing alcohol doesn't get too expensive.

The musician in me has re-emerged lately - spurred, no doubt, by the sudden appearance in my life of two Pods.  No, I'm not starring in a remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers - these are Pods of a musical nature.  And while they're both musical, electronic, and have very similar names, they influence music in vastly different ways.

The first is my new iPod Touch.  This little gem was a birthday gift from my Lady Friend, who, unlike me, is quite adept at picking up on subtle hints ("gee, I'd like an iPod Touch"), yet can still keep me in the dark about it.  It's the 16 gigabyte version (from the greek "giga", meaning "a shitload of" and "byte", meaning "music"), and holds 4,000 average length songs, or two-and-a-half Grateful Dead concert bootlegs.

I've now spent the last 6 weeks ripping my CD collection and purchasing music, both from the iTunes store and from Amazon.com.  iTunes pros: huge selection, nice interface, and nearly flawless song information.  iTunes con:  DRM, or digital rights management.  Listen up, you RIAA bastards - I've now purchased Shout at the Devil four times.  Twice on vinyl, once on CD, and once online.  If I want to make a damn backup copy, or throw a copy on another computer in my house, I'm damn well going to - stick your copyright protection up your ass.

Amazon.com is nice, too.  Pros:  prices on some tracks are only 89 cents, the selection is pretty damn good, and most importantly: no DRM.  Cons:  the ID3 data is frequently inaccurate.  It may be niggly to some people, but to me it's really annoying.  I'm so anal, I put the original composition dates on all my Mozart tracks.  How many people can say they have playlists for the 70's and 80's - and they're talking about the 18th century?

But I digress.  Amassing the music library, and all the hours spent listening to all that music on the new iPod have re-ignited my passion for music - particularly the early to mid-80's rock and metal that inspired me to take up guitar.  And that leads us to my other new Pod...

The Line 6 POD xt - a small, red, lima-bean shaped device that recreates some of the most famous rock guitar sounds over the last four decades.  I plug my guitar into it, spin the knobs and Presto! the Eruption sound.  Or, at least, what Eruption would have sounded like if they'd put my rusty ass on Eddie's gear in the studio instead of him.  Another spin of the knob, and now I'm transformed into a reasonable approximation of U2's The Edge, wondering what godforsaken town has streets with no names.

In a nutshell, the POD has complex circuitry and software that is built to "model" not just the sound but the subtle characteristics of nearly three dozen different amplifiers.  On top of that, add the ability to mimic dozens of classic stompbox effects used by everyone from Jimi Hendrix to Kirk Hammett, and you've got a fantastic tool to keep your favorite guitar player hidden in his basement for as long as you'd like.  Or perhaps much longer, if you actually like the guy.  I, for one, think it's the Greatest Thing Since Sliced Bread.

And if you don't believe me, where do you think I've been lately?  Okay, well maybe there.  Yeah, and there, too.

Oops!

Thanks to Paul from Long Shrift for letting me know that my comments weren't, like, actually allowing people to comment.  That's been fixed, so y'all can gun on my Guitar Hero hatred (I'm talking to you, Boffo).

Woah...Rock-n-Roll

Just did a little editing over at Wikipedia on their Mason Bernard page.  Mason Bernard is a brand of electric guitar made in the early nineties.  I bought one used from a guy in 1991 or 1992.  Turns out they're pretty damn rare.  They also kick ass and I love mine.  If you wanna know what it looks like, just take a look at the crappy picture in that article.  That one's mine.  It's got EMG active pickups - an 85 model in the bridge and an SA model in the neck.  Practically invisible, down and to right of the volume knob, is The Booster Switch.  It's a tiny rocker switch that, when flipped to the on position, gives me an extra 20dB of gain.  In english, that's like pouring gasoline on the hot coals in your Weber grill.

I am a seasoned guitar player, and I think that the twenty-plus years of plucking and fretting under my belt undoubtably contribute to my disdain for the phenomenon known as Guitar Hero. 

Make no mistake - I am a fan of electronic gaming.  I have a great deal of experience with flight simulators, racing games, first-person shooters, and the like.  And I have enjoyed them all greatly. 

But I scoff and harrumph at these wannabe-rock stars, what with their feeble, phallic, plastic, oversized joysticks, and the way they feverishly slap and beat at them, staring wide-eyed at the television, watching a multicolored stream of digital M&M's flow down the screen.

They actually have the nerve to post videos of their triumphs to YouTube, as though they have achieved something great.

My Lady Friend thinks it represents an interesting clash between my love of computers - the ultimate enabling technology - and my long-standing love of the art of music.  In a nutshell, computers enable these mouth-breathing yashcos to feel some sense of what a musician feels to play a piece of music.  In reality, it's nothing like playing a song.

Unlike a flight simulator, where the bulk of the actions involved may actually give you some sense of how to pilot an airplane, the motions and actions in Guitar Hero prepare you not the slightest fraction for how to actually play a piece of music.  Likewise, with a racing game, you can get some sense of how to successfully pilot an automobile around a track at a different speed - yet all Guitar Hero will do is teach you how to flail - meaninglessly - at a guitar.

Furthermore - it diminishes the art of playing guitar, by turning it into an objectively-measured sport.  While some may look at it that way - most musicians and music lovers will tell you there are no measurable ways of determining guitar greatness.  The greatness is measured within - from the heart.

At the end of one such GH video on YouTube was a scorecard showing "Notes Hit".  It stated that he was over 90% correct, having hit over 1000 notes.  I would point out that he was 0% correct - having hit no notes whatsoever.  Plastic buttons, yes - but not a single note.