Blues guitar

Laptop, front steps, sunshine, trying to stop the shaved bits on the sides of my head being so glowingly white. Also a modicum of academic work, the last floater of the huge berg of it that was the whole of last week. There was a post sitting in my head all last week that I didn't have time to post but it was about impatience.

We did a gig the week before and the headlining and allegedly signed and media-darling band played to almost no-one, and looked dismally flat against the storming supports, British Beef. Like Sum 41, in that they were playing ludicrously energetic and bouncy pop-punk and doing it very well. Excellent, excellent drummer that was the physical opposite of Oz, tiny and skinny, but drummed remarkably like him, including the volume level. And a singer/guitarist that really reminded me of Paul. And this enthusiastic bassist doing loads of backing vocals that really reminded me that I should be doing that. Hmm.

So the remaining academic work, there's this last little blip in on Tuesday and then we've got just over a week to finish building and do the write-up for the robot. It's a giant pair of pincers, basically, with a worm drive to pull them together, and we're partway through welding up the pincers and have the motors and speed controllers all sorted, but it doesn't yet have any sort of chassis or body, and we're not quite sure how we're going to make something strong enough to take all the forces, and still be inside the 12kg weight limit. But anyway, once that's done and handed in then the academic switches off again til October so it is clearly time for great Plans to be carried out.

This summer's principal great Plan is to learn to play guitar. I'm sure it can't be that hard for someone who knows the stuff I know already. I just passed Impact Music on the way into town, which is a curious shop run by a bloke who no longer really wants a shop; he mainly uses it as a base for a mail order business and now only opens between 1 and 3pm on a handful of days a week. It was only midday when I went past on the way out, but I had a squint through the shutters and such stock as he has in seems to be wildly reduced because he doesn't really want it to be there any more, and given that all I want is a cheap basic guitar, this seems like an ideal plan. I don't have to buy the complete budget sets everyone seems to want to sell, already having straps, tuner, leads, stands, practice amp, and yet if something goes wrong the shop's only just round the corner. Filled with resolve I even got meself a book in town. Came back, passed Impact Music about half two... shut, no sign of having been open today at all. No idea when I'm next likely to catch him in. But that brand new Marlin for seventy quid, that was looking at me hopefully through the bars, that was.

You Beauteeeeey!!!

I can almost, after a fashion, damn near, play The Cardinal. I mean not in detail but I've got the idea, it's become clear because I now see I was tying to mess with something similar with Ed and Liz the other day. That is, the difference it makes to a song if you swing the bass drum. There are songs when I do this anyway, it's a very Punch Judy thing to do on account of the sort of thing Jodie writes, but putting busy and swung bass drum in, this is, it seems, part of the essential thing I must be dancing to in Jecano. So, basically, mad amounts of swung bass drum, add as many doubles and ghosts on the snare as you like so that it seems sort of like you're doing a complicated roll between the bass and snare, and then add machine-gun fills every so often. And some messing with hats in the middle bit. And his cymbals are always going to be tastier than mine and anyway I can't use those up here in the loft. But, right, that's a lot of there.