Interesting car decal

I should really get one of these..



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Magadheera - One of the best action scenes ever?

This is just about the most action packed scene I've seen in a long time. Check it out, from the 2009 film Magadheera. Thanks to Donnie Ross for that link.I'm not sure if a big group dance number starts up right after the clip ends, ( "I will kill you, BUT FIRST WE DANCE!") but I suspect so..Hollywood could learn a thing or two from these guys!

Guitar Riff of the day for a year 001-007-Week 1

 First week's riff of the day snippets.I really like how 2 and 6 turned out.

  GROTDFAY 001 2010-08-18 by Zartimus

  GROTDFAY 002 2010-08-19 by Zartimus 

  GROTDFAY 003 2010-08-20 by Zartimus

  GROTDFAY 004 2010-08-21 by Zartimus


  GROTDFAY 005 2010-08-22 by Zartimus

  GROTDFAY 006 2010-08-23 by Zartimus

  GROTDFAY 007 2010-08-24 by Zartimus

Scot Pilgrim VS the World.

This is my favorite movie of the summer so far. It has everything. Guitars, groupies, Battle of the bands, video games, kung fu, romance, teen angst (it's just missing zombies). The editing style in the action scenes uses comic book panels and Anime style cuts which I love. They use a lot of captions, titles and onscreen labels which are way comical (think Fight Club, Zombieland,, Watchmen). I espeially loved the the one that explains the partitioning of his aprtment and what he shares and does not share with his gay room-mate ( Scott's gay room-mate, Mcauly Culkin's brother if I'm not mistaken, steals lots of scenes in the film).
The numerous video game references scattered throughout the film are also hilarious, from the totally recognizable Windows OS and Nintendo sound effects to the Sims style "Pee meter" hud displays when Scott goes to the can. His collection of stupid t-shirts is as impressive as my own. They make fun of a lot of stuff that bugs me personally, like pretentious Vegans (so hey, that must bug other people too!).

All of the battle of the bands scenes harkened back to my high school years. Being a guitar player, I was actually in a few of those, and never won! It's no wonder I liked this film. It's filmed in Toronto where the comic book on which it is based is from and it's great to see familiar locations in a cool film such as this. I'm constantly amazed at how the lead actor Michael Cera manages to play the same character in different films, ( Superbad,  Youth in Revolt , etc ). It's not for everyone though! Give it a shot!

Guitar Riff of the day for a year Blog

After catching a story about a local musician who's embarked on a project to write a song a day for a year I thought I'd try the same thing! A Riff a day for a year!! I tend to do this anyway (I probably have 800 snippits kicking around on old tapes and Compaq flash and SD cards), but the regularity of it will be a challenge.

If I get any really good ones I'll make them into proper songs!


**UPDATE*** I moved the guitar Riff a day for a year posts to their own blog since daily posts of the same type are going to clutter up this one. They can be found here. I'll post a weekly recap.

I'm using Soundcloud to host them but I'll run out of free space eventually. It's a great site to host music though, with a nice built-in player.

As i was creating the guitar riff site I mucked around with the new Blogger template builders and reverted to their tools. Time for a template change. I'll customize it up again when I have time. I really like the GUI though, great color picker.

Eric Johnson Chiming G delay hold trick on the Line6 Pod X3 Pro

I was mesmerized when I first saw Eric Johnson do this on Austin City limits back in 1990. It was so simple yet immensely effective. At the time I was (and still am) running a rack, being from the 80's and all, and was unable to rig a sound anything like this. He was using foot pedals and I was a foot pedal snob. Back then i thought, if I can't do it with a rack then I'm not gonna do it! Over the years I've added rack-mountable Loopers like the Line6 Echo pro, different Delays, units with pseudo sample/loop effects like the Freeze function in the Yamaha SPX 90 (and today the SPX 2000). I've bought and sold some foot pedal loopers like the Boss RC-20, RC-50 (and now the Line6 JM-4). The old green wonderful Line6 Echo Pro (gee I wish I had that one back,) The Boss DD-7 foot pedal does a nice job but they all have issues. They ain't a rack-mount unit, they don't have dual stereo in's, they don't save the loops for later recall, they don't take an SD card, they don't have a software GUI you can deep edit with via USB on your PC, they aren't MIDI-able.

They just don't make a rack-mount looper with all the stuff I need above. I just have to wait for someone to make one (well there's the Looperative LP1 unit  but there's NO WAY I'm paying $1700 US for a friggin  looper). I my hope is that Line6 will make one for me with all the crap I need, they come a bit closer every time they release a new one. here's a great site for info on real-time looping devices, http://www.loopers-delight.com.

Turns out when I was playing with my Pod X3 pro while on vacation, I flipped around a few settings and found you could toggle between dual tones and still have the delay of the old one sounding in the background. Once they were separated from each other, and the foot controller assigned to toggle a few items, the trick worked. He's a video showing the effect I'm trying to reproduce and how it was done on the Line6 X3 series.

Time for a new blue telecaster guitar build!

Hmm. It's that time of the decade again.. I have a hankerin' to build a new guitar. I'm a strat guy, but who doesn't like Telecasters. they're like the Stratocaster's in-bred Hillbilly cousin. My favorite guitar these days is my Lake Placid blue strat with the rosewood fretboard and white pickguard. What better compliment than to make the same damned thing in a tele. I just have to decide on a maple or rosewood fingerboard. I'm going to go obscenely thin on the neck, something in the Ibanez Wizard style which is .750"on the 1st fret and .820" at the 12. Thinnest neck style on the market. You can FLY on that neck and the tone sacrifice is negligible.

So I looked around on the net, found some pictures and photoshopped them the way I want it to look. Mmmmmm looking good. I'll really do research on the pickups this time around  because that's the real hit and miss part of any guitar. You never know how the damned things are going to sound until you slam them in there. I have almost always bought on verbal recommendation from people I hope know what they are talking about. Seymour Duncan has a good page (I've had great luck with their stuff) where they try to give you an idea of what the different models will sound like, but again, different neck, different guitar, different wire and schematics, pots, whatever.. ALL DIFFERENT! So good luck getting that similar sound. Every beast sounds a bit different.

First off I have to sell a guitar to make room for this one. The first guitar I ever made was a tele , a monstrous natural flame maple with an SRV neck and Nashville 5.2 pickups I started right around Sept 11th 2001 (I remember because it got held up in shipping at the border because of the towers getting hit). Very nice but overkill for me. I don't play it very much and it's wasting away in it's case. I'm not sure why I'm even thinking of parting with it, maybe it's just the itch to slap a new one together again. One thing I've learned is the telecasters I liked as a kid where the beat up ones Prince or Bruce Springsteen used to play. The ones that look like they've been thrown in the back of a pickup truck. My nice natural flame maple one is far too pretty...
 Anyone want to buy a used custom telecaster? Muhahahahahahaha!

The Walking Dead - Excellent Zombie fare

Nothing like a good Zombie comic! I have a colleague who is leaving my office to start another assignment within the department but of course they don't have an office ready for her. She's been squatting in her old digs reading documentation the last few days and it looks really boring. So, on my way to a meeting in another building, I dropped off my copy of "The Walking dead - Volume 4" and said, "Check this out! It's the best zombie graphic novel you'll ever  read! (actually I said "Tiens, c'est la meilleure bande dessinée de zombie que tu jamais lu!" because she's French). She sported me a weird look and I left before she could protest. An hour later on the way back to my office I stopped by to collect it and she indicated that she had already "dropped it off" because we don't share the same taste in reading materials (she really didn't like it, I think she may have carried it back with metal tongs). 

"What's not to like?" I asked. "Did you see the part about the girl in the raincoat with the Samurai sword who walks through the zombie-infested areas hunched over pretending to be a zombie, completing the ruse by leading two zombies around on leashes like pets (whose arms she has cut off so they don't give her any trouble)?"

She shook her head. I continued.

"They're her boyfriend and his best friend who got turned into zombies early in the story . Oops, ex-boyfriend I guess.."

Blank stare...

"Hey in October they're airing it as a TV miniseries, you can catch it then!"

Oh well. Not everyone loves Zombies. Muhahahahaha!!

I'm just finishing up issue 4 where a group of survivors in have discovered a max security prison that turns out to be a great place to hole up from the Zombie hoards. The series is awesome, if you want to pick it up, use the best comic supplier in the universe - Dark Age Comics http://www.facebook.com/?ref=logo#!/group.php?gid=61008535645&ref=ts

Here's a TRAILER for the upcoming TV miniseries!