Good Times

 I've been quite busy with work in the last week, but I've still been able to make some time for playing. The old idiom of practice making perfect always seems to apply, and the two pieces I've been working on from the Truefire course are getting better every session. I've continued to work hard on my technique, and things are getting smoother. Today I moved onto the next piece, called Good Times. It's in 6/8 which is a welcome change of pace.

The Squier strat still continues to delight, and now I've backed off the gain on the amp I really feel like I'm getting the best out of it that I can. Come the first week of February I'll be ordering the new tuners (I've decided on Schallers), and a new bridge/tremelo, although I'm still not decided on which one to get. I'll possibly splash the cash on a Callaham unit, it doesn't really seem much more money than some of the other choices although paying top whack for a trem that I won't actually use does rankle a bit. I've got a couple more weeks to chew it over.

Vinyl word

Since I got my amplifier serviced about a month ago I've been hitting the vinyl pretty hard. This week I've been getting the Herbie Hancock albums out, in particular 1968's Speak Like a Child and from the following year The Prisoner. I also got The Best Of John Lee Hooker out, which I inherited from my late uncle recently, and I have to say that I like this very much. There's always some Grant Green in the mix and I know I played Feelin' The Spirit this week - I got this last month, it's the recently reissued Tone Poet release - it sounds noticeably better than the DOL pressing I had before (and cost four times as much, so it should!).

Mixtape

If you're under 35 the chances are you've never had the experience of making a mixtape for someone. Indeed, cassette decks have all but disappeared from use since the late 90s as CDs and then digital services took over as being the main medium of music distribution. I was without a deck for many years, but after falling down a rabbit hole of watching Techmoan's youtube videos I got myself a deck. I've made a couple of mixtapes for people, and when I friend of mine said they'd recently discovered a deck I knew what I had to do.

I was decided that all songs on the tape would be from my vinyl collection to maintain an all-analogue signal path (well as close as possible - inevitably some modern LPs are mastered from digital sources). I'm sure there's a much larger piece for me to write about mixtapes, but briefly it was a lot of fun to flit through my vinyl song by song instead of the album experience, and a few things got played that don't normally come out.