Rain

So sorry for you, mate.

I can do barre chords no problem but most of the time I use my thumb for the root note because it's more comfortable and more convenient in many cases. My classical guitar teacher used to hit my thumb with a ruler all the time because it wouldn't stay behind the neck of the guitar. She had small hands, and sometimes I almost envied her - took her her whole index to hold a barre. Me, there's a lot of finger left and a lot of my hand just hanging out there doing nothing except putting my wrist in an uncomfortable position. And you got to use what you got. I have big hands, and big thumbs, so I try to make that work for me.

When I was 16, my best friend and I made a pilgrimage of sorts and visited Jonquière, the small city from where our heroes from the band Voivod came. 14 hours by bus. The first thing that hit us when we got off the bus was the smell. The city was home to a few plants, including a very large aluminum plant. Those plants and the pollution they caused provided inspiration for much of the bands post-apocalyptic imagery. But we'd never imagined the smell. After a day or two, we were stunned - and amused to no end - to realize that our farts smelled like that plant (teenagers, you know). I guess it was like a naturalization process or something. We were becoming locals. 😁 Maybe the fact that we ate nothing but Big Macs and drank lots of Heineken and Jack Daniels didn't help. That smell is the second thing that comes to mind now when I see or hear that city name, after Voivod of course. Sidenote - my younger brother and his band opened for Voivod a few times in the last few years and he got to hang out with them. I was very proud of him. I also got to hang out with the singer in a bar in the late 2000's. I didn't tell him that his hometown smelled like McDonalds farts.

Thank you for the kind words, man! Not so far. This is one of those songs which I'd originally planned of having my now ex-wife sing. I'll either have to reach out to another friend who's always willing to help or to sing it myself (meh).

I'm still waiting too. I'm in the right place at the wrong time. Who am I kidding? I wouldn't survive half an hour even if I were to revisit my own childhood and my old golden years. I've gotten used to the comfort and the convenience of modern life a little too well. Although people still smoked in Casino the last time I went (2015 or 16?), so there's that...

Neither have I, but a friend in Canada hand builds pedals and he sent me a bunch of them, including the "Clowntaur": Love it. He also sent me a fuzz, which I never thought I'd enjoy this much, a great Tube Screamer clone, and this Rewolver which is a fantastic booster. Put that in front of the green channel on my otherwise generic Marshall DSL and the amp just comes to life. I always felt the green as an "almost" and the red one was "too much or not quite". The Rewolver just gave me me a "that's it!" golden channel. I am not much of a pedal guy, but I'm glad I have these for different types of dirt.

The words of Leonard Cohen always come to mind - You don’t really care for music do you? I found that out when I started putting my music online on MySpace in the early-mid 2000’s. Pictures always got a lot of hits, but the songs not so much. I soon realized that priorities in order were: fame, then looks, and only then music. Sometimes, months after they added you and sent a bunch of messages and commented on all your pics, you’d finally get a message about a song, like: wow, your stuff's actually good. I remember one girl who started by telling me what my new song inspired her - it was all cute, very romantic images, but the next few messages quickly shifted from romantic to lurid and downright explicit. Which I can’t complain about, can I? I did eventually meet her and she remained a supporter ever after - and to this day - sending gifts and all. But music was secondary. As with a lot of people. There needs to be something else that will incite people to actually make the effort and listen.

Something I wrote in the 90’s on an acoustic. Like everything I wrote back then, it was clearly inspired by the Beatles- I think maybe Glass Onion (the original version revolved around that Bm - G7 bit pattern). A few years ago, I started working on it again and it changed quite a bit. I shot a quick video while I was recording a basic bass line idea. I may have posted it on the old forum. Then a couple of weeks later I died. But just as I was about to choose between entering Stovokor or meeting all my musical heroes in hell, a bunch of over-zealous doctors pulled me back down. I tell you, Hippocrates and his stupid oath better watch their stupid ghost ***** next time I croak. Anyway, tonight I found myself working on that song again so I thought I’d update the audio part of the video - minus the live bass track obviously. There were little things that bugged me every time that clip popped in my feed. I must say it feels a little strange. Almost as if I was working on my own posthumous release. A one point, I even thought I was a hologram and I started worrying that I was about to go on tour. I don't have any holographic clothes to pack... Anyway, I realized that I’m like the poor man’s Ringo and Paul, working off of a poor man’s Lennon demos. I’m pillaging my own tomb, and Yoko doesn’t even seem to care.

Holy Tony Iommi, brother! Sorry I'm only getting to this - saw it earlier this week but wanted to wait til I could listen on the monitors. You F'in' nailed it - and then some. Wouldn't change a single thing. (And sorry to hear about the marital issues - been there myself. Hang in there and keep pumping out them Sabbath covers).

?

I am still getting used to the whole "chilling in your garage" thing down here. I guess our rednecks don't have lawns in front of the house so they use their garage...

Reminds me of that Star Trek Enterprise episode where someone explained where the base material used in replicators came from...

Might as well...

I've always loved the sound of those old organ "drums" and managed to incorporate samples from them in a few songs. Nostalgia, I guess.

Whatever happened to the old saying...

Must be told that I myself wanted to be a bass player. Even though I started on the guitar, after a friend of the family broke my acoustic guitar, what I really wanted was a bass. I had no idea what a bass actually sounded like, but I thought Gene Simmons and Nikki Sixx looked cool. Then I heard Randy Rhoads. I often wonder how different my life would be if I'd picked up the bass instead of the guitar. I'd live a radically different life, of that I am sure.

I've been there. What you put yourself through to earn a few bucks... For some strange reason, I've encountered a lot of people who wanted to play bass who had absolutely no musical talent. It's almost as if they couldn't hear the instrument and thought they could fake their way through a song. Maybe they felt that if Sid Vicious could do it... The most surprising was my ex - after all, she's a prodigiously talented singer, classically trained and all, so I expected that she'd pick the basics very easily, even though the motor skills might have taken some time, as for most people. I don't know how many times I tried to show her the simple chorus run for Babe I'm Gonna Leave You that she really wanted to learn. Or the Seven Nation Army line that she loved so much. But you'd put a bass in her hand, and it's like she'd become tone deaf and lost all sense of rhythm. I tried using different analogy, shapes, box, and so on, but it just wouldn't stick. She'd go through it laboriously a few times and but the 3rd or 4th, it was as if her memory had been wiped and she had to start from scratch. But then again, in some ways, I can relate. I've been messing with keyboards forever and I still struggle to play the simplest things one hand at a time. I'll have to look into that test when I have a moment. I'm curious to take it.

Same. I know I do have the Google one because I see it in my apps but I don't think I ever had to use it after the initial setup. That may have been fro my previous job, where they used the Google suite. I also have the Microsoft one because it's mandatory at work and also because someone managed to steal my hotmail credentials in 2019. I remember the first time I looked at the log of failed login attempts. I was a little shocked, although I really shouldn't have been. I still see 20-some attempts on any given day. If tapping on a number to confirm my identity on my cell phone can make things a little safer, I don't mind.

They should have remained impossible as far as I'm concerned. Those pesky things always annoyed the heck out of me. (But it's funny to see that these ridiculously affordable monitors still work 22 years later). I guess my brain's geared backwards - I can spend 60 hours a week in this red room, but a tiny bit of blue drives me nuts.

Zoltan!

Alexander agrees. Although I don't think that his version of Windows (Windows 3.23 BC) would be compatible with the latest versions of Guitar Rig.

The name brings back memories. I loved Sound Forge so much back then. I wouldn't have changed a thing about it. And let us not forget Acoustic Modeler/Mirror, which had to be one of the first impulse response plugins out there, back in the late 90's early 2000's. You could only use it offline, and I remember spending a lot of time in Sound Forge sweetening individual tracks with tape and compressor impulses, and even using it for offline reverbs with some free impulses I'd found on the web. It seemed so revolutionary. The things would display 300% CPU usage while processing files. But it was worth it. I remember Peter H. (Haller or Heller?) hanging out on the old Cakewalk NG and forums. Super nice guy, always helpful.

I had last night. On Google, every time I hit search - which I found quite perplexing. Went away when I disabled the VPN. I'm a huge Krafwerk fan, so I refuse to acknowledge that I'm not a robot.

Imagine the number of people who could potentially start doing blow just because they happen to visit this forum and read the real word for coke... EDIT: The above was a test and, see, these alternatives are ok. 😁

Aboot that, eh... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_humour Just like the metric system, practically everywhere but in the US - although to be perfectly honest most Canadians use both systems (the chart below is quite accurate). Reminds me of basic mechanic classes in high school - in the shop, every tool was referred to by its English name and measurements were all imperial. Back in the classroom, it was all French and and metric - although the teacher would still continue to use the English names unless he was reading from the manual. You just had to figure it out. My father would probably have called me a wuss if I ever used the French word for wrench in front of him.