THE CALM AND THE STORM
TODAY, Devin Townsend releases NOT ONE, but TWO albums! Ghost and Deconstruction. I pre-ordered both of them (The Calm and the Storm – £13.99 on Amazon) and it (they) came today. I’ll start by saying I love Devin Townsend. I think he’s probably the most unique and talented musician in modern music. People complain that music today is stagnant, that nobody writes anything original. Those people have not heard of Devin Townsend. I listen to a lot of music but I don’t remember the last time I pre-ordered an album. I’ve been looking forward to this for about 18 months, since his last release (Addicted). This should give you a clue how much I like Devin.
Ghost is a very soft album. It’s not a metal album in any sense, but that’s not to say it’s bad or it’s boring. It’s mostly very slow and introduces a very big but sparse sound-scape. If you let it, it kind of flows around you. There are a lot of things going on but most of what you hear is not directly what’s happening, but instead the ambience floating around it. And that makes the whole thing very soft, very relaxed and very reassuring.
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Deconstruction is great. It’s pretty much what we’ve all been waiting for. It’s bizarre and hilarious. It’s not quite the same style as Strapping Young Lad but a lot of it’s not far off. It has a lot more variety than SYL used to have, it has more soft passages and some parts of it sounds a bit Ziltoidish. But in other places it sounds very much like the no holds barred insanity of Alien. The stand-out track on Deconstruction is easily “The Mighty Masturbator”, which is 16 minutes of complete WTF. It has everything that makes Devin great, including a trance breakdownd. Most of the songs on here have guest musicians, and there is a surprisingly high profile array of them: Michael Akerfeldt (Opeth), Ihsahn (Emperor), Floor Jansen (After Forever) and a bunch more.
Here’s an example. It’s like some kind of surreal death metal carnival until Ihsahn jumps in and then it’s pure black metal, for about 3 seconds. If Tum Burton was a death metal band…
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So in conclusion, it’s two hours and twenty three minutes of fine and original music, and it’s only £13.99 on Amazon. Pick up Ocean Machine: Biomech while you’re at it.
In related news, I have changed my desktop theme:
el dorado
This song is totally rocking.
new iron maiden album, a review
new iron maiden album, a review: pretty okay. I love the jangly guitar tones. Strats are sexy. It isn’t quite 7th Son or Somewhere in Time, but it’s pretty good. I think it’s probably better than Dance of Death or the last one, whose name currently escapes me. The sound is still quite muddy and a long way from the crystal clear punchiness of their old albums, but they seem to invoke more atmosphere on this one. There’s a lot of reverb and janglyness.
I am now listening to music on a program called Clementine. I got fed up of Amarok2.x. We are up to 2.3 now and the interface stll makes my computer seem like a pentium 2 trying to run Crysis, and every so often it will decide that I’m not allowed to listen to any more music until I kill the process and restart it. Highly annoying since it will also lose all my added-this-session playlist data if it can’t do a clean shutdown. How do you get to 2.3 and still make it feel like a 2.0 alpha? Amarok used to be great and for a while it was forgivable since ALL KDE software suddenly went terrible as it was moved to KDE4, but Amarok never seems to have come out of that dip. The devs seem to have lost the plot.
So I am using Clementine, which is a port of Amarok 1.4 to Qt4, and it is pretty good. It even has crossfade (ZOMG), which, before now, I had never actually heard, and OH YES it adds something. Apparently it runs on Windows and Mac too. http://code.google.com/p/clementine-player/
So yes I went to the doctor on Thursday and I am now waiting for test results. Hmm. Everything has settled down a bit but it is still not ideal. It may be possible, and is indeed most likely, that I have irritable bowel syndrome :-\ which if the case is sort of good news and bad news. The good news is it doesn’t change my life expectancy. The bad news is it will make life inconvenient. Or it may be that I’ve developed a food intolerance. But I am being tested for loads of stuff. If the results are is unclear I have the joys of a ‘back passage inspection’, as my doctor put it, to look forward to. WOO.
also I fixed my feed. huzzah?
but now i’m saved in the eye of the tornado
guitar news: Yesterday for the first time I hit 100% speed on Tornado of Souls. I was going to see about recording it but after several hours of searching I can’t find my woefully low quality microphone. This has taken about two weeks of intense practice (80-100 hours) so I am quite pleased but it’s not perfect so there remains room for improvement. Easily the biggest hurdle I had when learning this was some pull-offs1 across rather giant finger stretches (10th to 17th fret). This is not too hard until you’re playing 16th notes at 196bpm and suddenly it IS very hard and not only that, but it’s pretty hard on your hand muscles if you practise it repeatedly, which you will because it’s the hardest part even though it only accounts for 10 seconds of the solo.
I’m basically practising my behind off right now because I’m obsessed. As of today I have developed a shortish practice routine to get my improvement more focussed on things I care about as well as maintaining general technique, as all too often I get bored of an exercise and start noodling and this is not time which translates to a useful gain. It consists of:
3-5 minutes: chromatics
10-15 minutes: scales Each shape/mode of A natural minor/C major all over the fretboard, straight runs, seconds, thirds. Ascending/descending. At some point I will expand this to A harmonic minor as well.
15 minutes: sweeping/finger rolling
15 minutes: legato technique/stretching/finger strength (finishing with the 6 minute trill, which, honestly, makes you want to die)
20 minutes: play a few songs (stuff like Tornado of Souls, Master of Puppets, Mirror Mirror… things that are challenging or just generally useful for maintaining and building stamina/technique)
20-30 minutes: Learn something new (currently Glasgow Kiss by John Petrucci) including broken down exercises for stuff I’m struggling with.
15 minutes: improv. over backing tracks (probably more useful to focus on just one and play it 3-5 times)
This adds up to a couple of hours at most so it’s achievable, and you could break it into 2x 1 hour sessions and alternate them daily if you wanted. I’m a firm believer that you can get reasonably good by 1 hour (or less!) of practice a day as long as that hour is focussed and it’s not just spent noodling in front of the TV or jamming along sloppily to songs you half know. Scales are boring and practising them repeatedly is not entirely useful because linear runs up and down scales always sound unoriginal, but they CUNNINGLY DOUBLE as warm up time. As you can see it is cleverly broken into fairly short chunks so that I should be able to keep my attention focussed. OBVIOUSLY this is designed for ME and I feel that legato and sweep picking and improvisation are things I would like to get better at.
In other news: ’twas my birthday yesterday. I am getting old. I know this because my sister bought me a book of cryptic crosswords and my dad bought me a soldering iron. Birthdays are not what they used to be. But we finished a cryptic crossword today so all is okay. It is pretty annoying because my sister is really quite good at them and I have to stay alert or she makes me look bad.
The soldering iron is so I can fix my other guitar (Ibanez RG1570), which is currently unplugged in every sense of the word. I just play my S7320 at the moment; I am not sure if there are any rules about playing 6 string songs on a 7 string but if there are I’m totally breaking them.
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1. these are not what you’re thinking.
