My Wushu Blog

Tools required:

• The internet
• A quality *nix OS (FreeBSD in this case)
• youtube-dl, available in FreeBSD under ports/www/youtube_dl/
• ffmpeg, available in FreeBSD under ports/multimedia/ffmpeg/

First thing is first, find a really cool youtube clip. If you dont know of one already, use a Buckethead Song (Volume warning, this clip was mixed “hot”, so turn your speakers down):

Watch the drummer (Bryan Mantia) go crazy in the background, pretty intense.

Now, use ‘youtube-dl’, which is pretty simple, the main argument it accepts is a URL of the youtube clip in question, and it saves it as a Flash Video file.

[server] 3:41pm: ~>youtube-dl 'http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=61k041I4aEo'
[youtube] Setting language
[youtube] 61k041I4aEo: Downloading video info webpage
[youtube] 61k041I4aEo: Extracting video information
[download] Destination: 61k041I4aEo.flv
[download] 100.0% of 8.04M at   57.33k/s ETA 00:00

Next, use ffmpeg to save the audio stream as a mp3 file:

[server] 3:45pm: ~>ffmpeg -i 61k041I4aEo.flv -ab 128000 -ar 44100 interworld_and_the_new_innocence.mp3
FFmpeg version 0.5.1, Copyright (c) 2000-2009 Fabrice Bellard, et al.
  libavutil     49.15. 0 / 49.15. 0
  libavcodec    52.20. 1 / 52.20. 1
  libavformat   52.31. 0 / 52.31. 0
  libavdevice   52. 1. 0 / 52. 1. 0
  libavfilter    0. 4. 0 /  0. 4. 0
  libswscale     0. 7. 1 /  0. 7. 1
  libpostproc   51. 2. 0 / 51. 2. 0
  built on May  8 2010 15:43:57, gcc: 4.2.1 20070719  [FreeBSD]

Seems stream 0 codec frame rate differs from container frame rate: 1000.00 (1000/1) -> 29.92 (359/12)
Input #0, flv, from '61k041I4aEo.flv':
  Duration: 00:03:38.24, start: 0.000000, bitrate: 306 kb/s
    Stream #0.0: Video: flv, yuv420p, 320x218, 242 kb/s, 29.92 tbr, 1k tbn, 1k tbc
    Stream #0.1: Audio: mp3, 22050 Hz, mono, s16, 64 kb/s
Output #0, mp3, to 'interworld_and_the_new_innocence.mp3':
    Stream #0.0: Audio: libmp3lame, 44100 Hz, mono, s16, 128 kb/s
Stream mapping:
  Stream #0.1 -> #0.0
Press [q] to stop encoding
size=    3411kB time=218.31 bitrate= 128.0kbits/s
video:0kB audio:3411kB global headers:0kB muxing overhead 0.000916%

Verify the file with file(1), or listen to the newly saved mp3 file over and over and over and over and over and over again.

[server] 3:45pm: ~>file interworld_and_the_new_innocence.mp3
interworld_and_the_new_innocence.mp3: Audio file with ID3 version 2.4.0, contains: MPEG ADTS, layer III, v1, 128 kbps, 44.1 kHz, Monaural

Last month when I helped my Friend Glenn,who now works at An Olde Town Tattoo Parlour in Monterey, move he was cool enough to lighten his load by giving me a very cool cream and black Gibson SG. The original heavy metal guitar made popular by Toni Iommi and Angus Young.

The guitar’s neck was broken at the body, and thankfully someone who knew what they were doing successfully glued it back on. Glenn put some heavy .11 gauge strings on it to keep a good amount of tension to help maintain structural integrity. I normally play with .10′s, so its really fun playing with the heavy strings and then switching back to my strat. I’ve decided to keep the heavy strings, and even down tune to D and C# just for fun. Keeping that in mind, I went ahead and picked up two Dimarzio X2N humbuckers, and since most of the brass parts on the SG went through some heavy usage, I also picked up a new tail-piece, bridge, and a new all black faceplate.

Replacing pickups is pretty easy, it required a little (de)soldering but that is the hardest part. What probably took me the most time was figuring out HOW I was supposed to re-wire the new 4 wire X2N pickups in a setup that only had 1 wire…

It seems modern humbuckers are REALLY fancy, and if you have a 5-way selector you can activate them in different combinations. Whereas the SG pickups had only 1 loop for the humbucker, the DiMarzio’s had a north loop and a south loop, and you could either wire them in series or parallel. There is no right way, its a matter of preference I guess, but since I’ve never hear either one, I chose a guide I found on Semour Duncan’s site.

I should point this out, even though I bought DiMarzio Pickups, I actually found more useful documentation on Seymour Duncan’s site. Not only did they have a really nice support section (http://www.seymourduncan.com/support/wiring-diagrams/), they also have color-code diagrams for each pickup vendor. So a big kudo’s for SD, maybe I’ll get those next time.

Okay, onto the work, let’s take a look at what we are working with:

Here are the new parts:

The real work begins:

Let me just say, getting the pickups screwed on to the face plate was HARD. There are two tension springs that keep the pickup stationary, and getting those compressed so the screw could reach the faceplate took a lot of effort. I almost lost two of the four twice since they would shoot off while I was struggling to screw the pickup on.

I had a problem with the two screws that are used to adjust the bridge, the were slightly bigger than the old screws. I actually had to re-drill the holes for them, and this makes me a little uncomfortable. If it ever needs to be replaced, there is now a good chance the holes will have to be filled and re-drilled. Oh well.

This was a great way to spend a Saturday afternoon, working on a guitar while listening to a Buckethead/Praxis playlist on Pandora. I spent most of the evening playing the guitar, those new pickups are very hot! They are going to require special attention so they don’t overload the amp. The sound is killer though, nice and low, a stark contrast to the Stratocaster’s sound.

Reference Material:
2h_2v_2t_3w
color_codes

One of my Christmas gifts was a magazine subscription to Guitar Player. The biggest enjoyment I get out of a magazine like this, is I get to read about bands and musicians I normally wouldn’t hear about. I live in a musical vacuum, which is odd since I seem to like it so much. I don’t listen to the radio, watch MTV, and for some reason I don’t like computer software telling me what I might like (like iTunes, Pandora, Google, etc…). Over the past decade I’ve probably ‘discovered’ 3 or 4 groups or albums that I actually like. However, in the past two months I’ve found that many artists or groups I’m really digging because now I get to read about them more.

One artist I came across is Buckethead. The first image that comes to your mind when you read that name is exactly what you should think of. He is a man who wears a bucket on his head, and he, Brian Patrick Carrol, has been doing this for 20 years. That sort of fascinates me, because the only picture of buckethead with out the mask on was taken before he created the character. When he is interviewed, he will either talk through a hand puppet ( a gruesome head ), or he will write down what he wants to say.

But you know, considering how your typical rock start tends to look (especially 20 years ago):

Or, what other soloist guitar “Virtuoso’s” look and act like:

I’m just sayin’, I don’t mind this as much as the above examples:

Besides the look to make him stand out, he is WICKEDLY talented! I’ve seen a LOT of footage by now on youtube, and I’ve purchased a few of his solo albums, and this guys plays on another level. Some of it is pure shred, and its almost obnoxious, but it just doesn’t feel like he’s jerking his guitar off in your ear like Yngwie or Steve Vai. I offer the follow clips to explain what I mean, and why I’m really getting into this guys music. Yeah, I’ve found something else to fixate on His guitar is a serious piece of wood too, it’s a chambered over-sized Les Paul with 24 frets (awesome, most guitars have 21 or 22) and two kill switches which he uses a lot.

He can bust out a pretty traditional rock song, and it makes sense why he was Slash’s replacement for Guns and Roses (I think he’s much better than Slash, but I was never a big fan of GNR, and Axl is another rock star dick).

Then, he can have something thats really mellow and full of soul

Those arn’t technical breakthroughs, so here is a “Lesson” by Buckethead. It is not so much a lesson, because you can’t learn this. I would say he’s a robot, but I think even a robot would screw this up. Check out the 4 note tapping, then the really cool riff afterwards.

It’s not all rock n roll though, he also plays some amazing chicken pickin’…

…and break out the Nunchaku’s followed up by a Robot Dance… Because he just couldn’t come off any more scarier.

I read in an old interview that he wears the mask because he wants his performance to be about the music, and not him. That, and it lets him feel like to can do more and take more risks on stage (like dance). I can understand that, and appreciate the emphasis on it being about the music. He is also a horror movie fan, and that shows. Most of his music would make a killer soundtrack, he should do one of the Silent Hill games. I’m adding him to my short list of concerts I want to make an effort to see.

Not an instrument,  but albums.

I enjoy listening to music a lot, it makes my commute better, it makes jogging a lot of fun, and sometimes I don’t mind running errands because it gives me a good reason to listen to a new album.

So, here are a few albums that I’ve recently picked up and really enjoyed.

Fist off, check out that cover, that looks like a movie poster of something I’d watch. If I saw that in a video store (or on twitchfilm.net), I’d be too excited to click on it, I’d be paralyzed in the anticipation of a subtitled movie. There was a short story of a similar title which inspired this album. Or, so Wikipedia says.

I could lament over the fact that its just a Roger Waters album, and without David Gilmour playing guitar, it is only a shadow of what it could have been… I’d be lying if I said that though. This is a pretty awesome album, and while there is no Sir David Gilmour, there is Jeff freakin’ Beck. That guy creates some really unique sounds out of his guitar, where I cannot even tell what he is doing. I’m not a guitar virtuoso by any means, I know about enough techniques that while I can’t do it smoothly, I at least know the fundamentals of what a musician is doing. Not with this album. I can’t tell if he’s using a slide, his magical fingers, a whammy bar… its all mixed together.

Besides the music, which I do like, it is a Roger Waters album, and that means it is very satirical and the entire album is really one LOOONG song. The biggest downside to that is you cannot really appreciate one song at a time, you have to listen to the entire album. In the era of digital music with random track selection, or buying songs at a time, it can really kill a high concept album like this. Like the other Pink Floyd albums, such as The Wall, Dark Side of The Moon, Animals, etc… the entire album flowed together. They were also produced in the days of records (which now a days means a piece of information in a database ), where you pretty much had to listen to the entire album (I was always really bad at finding a track without hitting another song). It almost seems like albums like this wouldn’t be very successful in todays market, where you have to have a few radio-friendly hits and your album has to be modular enough to accommodate one-off iTunes downloads.

So, albums like this make me appreciate my commute to work. It gives me a large chunk of time to give the entire album its due respect, because after all, driving is for paying close attention to music and podcasts, not the road…

I heard a song off of it called ‘No Rest for The Wicked’, and it’s pretty rockin’, so I got the entire album.

It’s not bad at all, it has a few tracks that I really like, and others are a little too fast paced for my liking, but all around it has a nice classic rock/blues feel to it. I have one of the songs on my jogging play list, and it has the perfect tempo to run too. Its just right where if I follow it with my gate, I run a bit faster than normal.

This group makes their music with a hacked Nintendo Classic. It seems like they use real instruments, then let the 8-bit MIDI sound processor re-encode it. So, it sounds like the music to a 80′s video game. Being that is when I started playing games, it really hits the nostalgia spot. I like the bleeps and boops of old games, so naturally this album is good.

This album cover reminds me of something my Grandma would listen too. Or, when I used to go to the Salvation Army to look for records (Look, I didn’t have any disposable income as a teenager, and I was big on 70′s music. I could only afford used records, and even then I couldn’t even afford that), and every album had a cover like this… Maybe thats the joke of it, its pretty deceptive. That, and I think the dude likes animals a lot.

Over a year ago, I watched a very good movie called “Dead Mans Shoes“, which featured a Bill Callahan track (its under his previous band name, Smog) called “Vessel in Vain”. I’m not a country or folk fan. I might find a Johnny Cash song appealing, ormaybe one Bob Dillon song, but that is more of an artifact than me liking the two genres. Even though I don’t really like the majority of that type of music, there is something about Smog/Bill Callahan’s music that hooks me.

So, I’ve gone though every Smog/Bill album, and each album varies enough from indie to country that I tend to like one or two songs, and the rest are kind of ‘meh’. This one was no exception, there are about three songs I REALLY like, and the rest just don’t do anything for me.

I got this album specifically to try and learn some classic B.B. King songs. I’ve been working on “The Thrill is Gone”, and its pretty amazing how he can work just a few positions on the strings, yet create a whole sound scape. He also has a different playing style than I’m used to, so I had to build up my index finger’s strength just to try and hit the same quarter and full bends that he does.

Blues is still iffy for me. It seems if I like it, I REALLY like it, but not all of it catches my attention. Like this album, some of it is really REALLY good, and the rest feels like its just filler music. Maybe because to me, some of it starts to sounds too much alike, and I can’t remember it.

This cover is on the right on the precipice of giving me nightmares, freaky right? That and the weird almost anagram like mix of the Band name, and the Title name (which is almost backwards) breaks my brain like a divide by zero error. I can’t remember if the band is King Crimson or Crimson King now…

I’ve never heard of King Crimson, and the only reason why I got it was because it was categorized with Pink Floyd (as “Progressive Rock”) on the hilarious show “The Venture Brothers”. With that in mind, I decided to give it a shot.

It’s not bad considering the era (Ha, does that make you feel old Dad?? I referenced your generations music like a historian would ), it talks about flower power, moon children, it has flutes in the mix, and the entire album is 4 tracks, each track is 12 minutes long. I don’t like flutes in my rock, so there are bits and pieces that I like about it. It seems it would have been a good soundtrack to a movie, as it doesn’t have the typical structure as most music.

!!!
I came home with Owen last night, it was dark in the house. I was going to Owen’s room to get him ready for bed, and I went to the corner of the room to turn the light on. What I forgot, and didn’t see, was my guitar that I left of the floor. I normally lean it up against my computer, or the wall, but sometimes I’ll leave it on the floor to encourage Owen to play with it. I guess that wasn’t such a good habit to get into.

Repairing a neck like that would cost about as much as I bought that guitar for, so I’ll pull down Michele’s old acoustic guitar.

Let’s get this out of the way:

My favorite band is Pink Floyd, and Sir David Gilmour’s guitar work still gives me goose-bumps.

There will be little criticism of this concert, in fact, there will be only high praise. With once exception, there was a TERRIBLE audio delay on the concert disc. That really annoyed me, mostly since I pay very close attention to how he plays the guitar. The show itself was good, it wasn’t the typical Pink Floyd production (no large circular projections screen, crazy laser lights and flying pigs), it was very basic. It also had a really cool guest line-up, including David Bowie during Comfortably Numb. Funny, David Bowie talked about his parents taking him to a PF show when he was about 10… David Gilmour is freakin’ old! My only concern is that I’ll never get to see him in concert (I did at least catch Roger Waters in 99), other than that, his age has no other relevance.

This concert was to promote his solo album, On an Island, which was released on 2006. It’s a decent album, some songs are cheesy, and it always feels like each song is an excuse to belt out a super long guitar solo. Even when he plays the sax, he still treats it like a guitar. This is a contrast from the old Pink Floyd dynamic, where Roger Waters was completely focused on the message, while David seemed to be all about the tone of the music. This is why, in their stride, they worked very well together. Anyway, the first half of the concert was his latest solo album, the second half was a lot of classic PF songs, Echo’s being one of my favorites (I once copied a VHS version of their Pompeii concert, and learned how to play it by watching it over and over again).

The real gem of this Blu Ray concert is the second disc, with all the behind the scenes footage of the entire tour. It was incredible, and I have a new level of respect for the entire team that performed. Here was my favorite part:

That is a tuner attached to the flute of a wine glass. Why is that cool?

They were at dinner, drinking wine, and they decided to play around with the wine glasses. Cool right? Then it cuts over to a sound check, and David is there with a handful of wine glasses, tuning them, and showing someone else how to play the beginning of “Shine on You Crazy Diamond Part I”, with the wine glasses tuned accordingly.

Thats the kind of awesomeness I always liked about the band. It gets better, because then in Venice, David stumbles across a street performer who uses wine glasses (and he’s really good, he’s playing Fur Elise with them). He then asks the guy if he would like to play a show with him the following night.. and the guy actually hesitates until Gilmour says “I’ll pay you of course…”

I really enjoyed this box set, from the concert to the bonus footage, and it has further fueled my enjoyment of playing the guitar. It also prompted me to search YouTube, and I came across this recording of “Theres No Way Out of Here”, from his first solo album in 1978:

I like it, even the cheesy chorus is cool with me. I bought that album and have really liked a few songs on it. Him and Roger need to get back together though because it still doesn’t beat “Dark Side of The Moon”, “Wish You Were Here”, “Animals”, etc… Those are some really fascinating albums and I could post a full length post for each album.