Not much practicing or eventful programming on my part, but I am collaborating with a friend to make a doom metal themed christmas EP for the sake of irony, more details to follow.

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)

On the subject of music still, I went to listen to my good friend Phil play in his band (http://www.myspace.com/bengurionuk – Bengurion) they are very talented but for some reason aren’t getting many gigs. Maybe it is because Phil likes to dress up like austin powers when the rest of the group are actually co-ordinated…. Oh well. Still worth a listen

Hopefully in my next post I will upload some mp3s of me messing around with Guitar Rig 3, I love playing about with guitar effects so it might be worth me putting some online.

And finally, I visited the local guitar shop to select my second guitar so I can set a budget and save up for it, after playing 4 or 5 guitars I decided that the Fender Jazzmaster is too awesome for me yet, and the next step is a Fender Lonestar Stratocaster, here’s a brief summary of what I played:

• Fender Jazzmaster (£1000) very expensive but oh so beautiful and awesome to play.
• Yamaha Pacifica (£180) cheap, light but easy and fun to play. Not as good sounding as the others but very sturdy.
• Cheap les paul copy (£180) cheap, warm and felt quite good for the low cost. Used but had plenty of charm considerably better than the pacifica.
• Fender Lonestar Stratocaster (£480) a happy medium, smooth and great sounding. More expensive but it has a great weight to it and the humbucker pickups near the bridge are fantastic (SD pickups I believe?)

And now for the pictures!

So which one am I going to get? The Lonestar Strat (black one) best in its price range, and feels as though theres lots that can be unleashed from it once I get better.

I recently watched Transformers 2 with my good friend Ian and I have to say – it is the only film that I’ve seen that I can safely say had too much action, it was a seemingly endless film (2 and a half hours!) of unending CG wankery, if you cut the human parts out you could have probably cut it down to 2 hours, 20 minutes. There were some mightily impressive scenes but it was far too long and just a little too annoying (ghetto-bots anyone?)

I gathered a bunch of interesting links too, mostly focusing on image processing and genetic algorithms in .NET which should help with my procedural texture generator. Notable ones are:

C# Tutorial – Convert a Color Image to Grayscale | Switch on the Code

Genetic Algorithm Viewer

Freeware on pack.su

In terms of guitar progress, I feel as though I’ve taken a step back, my chords have become a little sloppy. Probably due to me trying to force the changes too much. I will re focus my efforts and structure my practice sessions better, with the following structure:

• 10 Minutes Chord Practice (Strum – Pick – Strum)
• 1 Minute changes between chord pairs (ensuring each chord plays clearly and not mushed/muted) – another 10 minutes or so.
• Scale & Picking exercise – 5 minutes.
• Rhythm exercises – 5 minutes (4/4, basic strum patterns)

A good point to remember of course is that I learned some more chords, bringing my total learned to 12! So thats: A, D, E, G, C, A Minor, D Minor, E Minor, G7, C7, B7 and Fmaj7. Lovely!

Can’t wait for tomorrow, and already booked some holidays next week to have a great 4-day weekend to do housework and preparing for the move.

Btw: Blee is lovely

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!