Chord sketches

Only a week and a bit to go till me & the lovely Blee move house can’t wait!

In terms of programming content, I’ve been struggling with .NET’s AutoResetEvents and Semaphores (do a search, I dare ya!) I finally got the program to work though. Unfortunately it’s classified so I can’t upload it but it was a simple program that sent web service requests in batches all at once (to check for concurrency issues with the server) which created a bit of development irony as I was trying to fix threading issues in a tool designed to find threading issues. Oh well, I’m glad it work and hope to never touch the code again!

On a more creative note I’ve started to begin sketching the feel & general music-ness of my first piece of music – Last Week of Flat (LWOF for short) I got the name from my current situation (last week of living in a flat…..) and it’s just going to develop over time really. No goal to make it the best track ever, more to ease me in to the world of music production and songwriting itself (without the lyrics cos I can’t sing)

So to start off that project I figured I’ll set down the general feel of the song which is embodied in the rough rhythm patterns below, the first riff is in D7, second in E7, third in G7 and the final one is in A7. I’ve ordered them based on how much I like them, A7 is quite sloppy because it was nearly midnight and I don’t have much of a creative side…yet…

Anyway here it is, enter at your own risk:

Edit: Oof where are my manners? Here’s the guitar rig setup too to recreate the sound using real or virtual pedals (chaining order is top to bottom, the split mix can be ignored really)

And so it begins…

The blog begins! Well, more of a stream-of-conciousness mess to prevent my head exploding from the various thoughts and learnings that accumulate through the day. As I want to start as I mean to go on, I will fill my first post with content too!

Me so far

Quite simply I’m a programmer (web developer right now) with a passion for programming interesting things, music and having a nice drink with friends. Yesterday (friday) filled all three criteria; After a long hard day developing a way to encrypt sensitive details using some clever AES & salt encoding based on an algorithm I read at the start of the week (http://www.obviex.com/samples/EncryptionWithSalt.aspx – heavily commented, but useful) I finished the day, drove home and practiced some guitar (right now I’m a beginner, with 9 chords under my belt and one scale)

After that, I went with a good friend to the local pub – the Tudor based in Wigan town centre, we had a mature discussion about life (ha!), enjoyed a couple of drinks and watched a couple of bands. They were surprisingly good, especially the two piece with a bassist who I could only describe as intense, his bass was plugged into some kind of crazy freak amp with the overdrive set to 11, backed up by an equally amazing drummer who snapped his sticks halfway through their set. Unfortunately I can’t remember their name and should have bought their 50p CD that was on offer (musicians need a source of beer money!)

The band before them was also good, but nothing about them stood out. Talented but kinda blended into the tiny stage they stood on, plus Darren (the friend) was more interested in the passing women as we somehow ended up standing right next to the entrance to the women’s toilets.

All in all a good day, cheap night out which was ended with some salt & pepper chips from the fantastic Peter’s chip shop

Night all!