LucSulla

Handed off. Godspeed, WPS! Met up with Hamerica, ate BBQ, learned what "BTMN" stands for. Fun lunch!

I believe you're being too modest. You clearly have the skills and ear to make any of it happen. Marty always throws a few curveballs compared to textbook pattern players, but Symphony is easy compared to most everything else I've tried. Peace Sells is a fine choice to tackle, but can the rest of your band do it too? They had no slouches on their stage. Edited to add: I can't believe I used the word 'easy.' Maybe I should have said 'straightforward' or 'conventional' or something. Edited again to remind myself that I have nothing useful to offer here. -- It is definitely more straightforward, but for some reason, all of Poland's weirdness is easy (well, easier) for me to figure out. It might be the country band, believe it or not, but a lot of his jazzy little twists and turns are kind of there. However, the stretches and precision used by Friedman are just not like what I do. I'd really like to do it though - I love how lyrical those arpeggios can sound vs. my usual scale crap I always end up doing. I can't see ever screwing around with anything on RIP - that stuff sounds hard to begin with.

The chorus licks for "Bark at the Moon," are some of my favorite ever precisely because they are harder than the damned solo, IMO. But Jake is so fluid that until you sit down to play it, you'd never know just how crazy they are. Even when you play it, you think the 16th notes are going to be the pain in the ass, but hitting those octave slides is really the trickiest part. That all had a big influence on my writing when I lean more toward this kind of stuff.

I'm having to learn "Peace Sells" and "Symphony of Destruction" for le metal band. I alway though Chris Poland was the true wizard of that band just because I played so outside, but Marty is kicking my ass. Aside from a couple of things my right hand just won't do at the moment (which is frustrating because I can pick the rhythm fine on a string but not as an arpeggio between strings), Friedman's sliding these arpeggios so gracefully up and down the neck is fucking tough. I would have never guessed "Symphony" was really all that hard to play until I tried to do it. I am a big fan of making tricky stuff sound simple though, so I have to give Marty the nod after messing around with these two songs. Now I am caught between, "Ah, fuck it, I can fake it and only MegaDave fans will know the difference," and, "I should really learn this because it will make me a better player."

Very nice!

Sometimes I play the metal. https://soundcloud.com/jason-cain-8/death-spiral

This is awesome and should be shared.

Man, I was going to make a topic on this, but it's too fucked up. Whilst trying to read up on Dave Mustaine's current insanity, I stumbled across a page of Metallica themed fan fiction. It's like watching a car accident. http://archiveofourown.org/tags/James%20Hetfield*s*Jason%20Newsted/works I was out after one of these ended with James blowing Jason while he was dressed like Batman. Is this what the more literarily inclined teenage girls are doing with their time these days? On third thought, just know it exists. Don't read any of it. My god, I'm going to have to go soak in the shower and cry now.

Not if it makes you happy. I used to have a customer that bought a case of Johnnie Walker Blue every week. He mixed it with Coke, and it was one of his favorite things in the world (well that and being drunk I'd guess). Who am I to tell him how to spend the money he worked to make?

Some days I feel like when you have played long enough, you've tried all the bullshit, and used every trick, then you are finally ready to understand the true beauty of the telecaster. It's like earning a doctorate, the day you pick up a tele on an slightly overdriven amp (or T-51, ASAT, Nash, you get the idea) and it all just finally makes beautiful sense.

Tally and a SuperPro

First, NIGHT OF THE LIVING HAMERS! What amazing instruments! I crushed tonight largely due to the amazing sounds these fiddles allow one to find. Second, Alvin Lee is fucking amazing. http://youtu.be/ZRV6fwUZwBk

Screwing around with the Tally on my Tubemeister using one of those shitty old Danelectro slap backs. https://www.facebook.com/video.php?v=10102796710576677&l=1033448771792757373

I'm having a "John 5" moment with him this week. He's one of those dudes I've known of forever, but just never really listened to. I love his stuff.

This is fucking killer. Just fucking killer. What does Sulla like? Sulla likes this.

That is where the psychology gets involved for me. I quite literally become so worried that I am missing out on something with that many choices that I never enjoy any choice I make. That is partially why I don't enjoy playing on modeling amps. I feel like I am wasting money by not really using them to their maximum potential. I'm verifiably OCD, and a plethora of options is a nightmare to me. A Mesa Mark V is *ALMOST* too much in one box. I actually ran across a bit of research the other day as I was doing some lit review for an technological adoption study I am part of. One thing researchers noticed was that the more goals a thing satisfied, the less people valued its ability to solve any one goal, so being a multitasker actually reduced some aspects of desirability. Likewise, I saw another study that looked at why people preferred smart phones to dedicated high end cameras and kind of worked out a curve where price and innovation dictate preference. All interesting stuff when it comes to these kinds of technologies.

Yeah, we had a pretty good argument about these a couple of weeks ago. I've played a good bit on an Axe FX II and the Kemper stuff, and they are quite cool. Personally, I enjoy playing through my Mesa more, but I certainly get why others have made the jump. I'm weird because the older I get, the more I think about just getting a one channel Soldano or something similar. I will say this though, it is fascinating to me how bitter these discussions can get. I'm not sure if it is some tube guys not giving the modeling stuff a fair shake and goading people that like them, or some digital guys treating anyone that just digs glass as a troglodyte, but it starts looking about as warm and fuzzy as a religious debate in 16th Century England. At the end of the day, I really just think that it is awesome that there is so much awesome gear out there for so many different preferences. The only thing I hate is when I get, "play through this, you'll like it better." And when I do, if I say, "well, that certainly has its appeal, but I still prefer my stuff," I get, "No, you're wrong. You actually prefered my stuff but are too XYZ to understand why." That shit I CANNOT stand, which was sort of what that post you quoted related to. I don't like Fender amps either. I don't think they suck, and there is a helluvalot of great music that I dig that has been made with them. I just don't personally like playing on them. And I think most people get that, but it also seems a high percentage of the ones who don't also frequent Internet forums, haha.

^Argument for modeling amps? Different subject - Maiden is awesome.

Here it be! There were actually quite a few people there. Our fiddle player just showed up and played along (he'd only played with us at one practice, and almost none of these songs). This song is in Bb, and I think that is why he sounded a bit wonky. Apparently, fiddle players hate those flat keys more than guitarists.

Even if it just limits all my mostly irrelevant thoughts that I feel some need to share with the world to one place, it has served its purpose :-p Perhaps you and I just have the worst case of mental diarrhea and subsequent need to hurl said poo at the world. A disgusting metaphor I regret only just after typing, yet I will still post it.

Few things in life are as entertaining to me as a Dumble thread on TGP.

The WPS got bloodied tonight onstage at the Lucky Lounge in downtown Austin, Texas. I hope to have a video of some sort of it to post tomorrow. Busted it out to play "Tulsa Time," after playing the Talladega for about two hours. Moving from that big ole V neck to a the little neck on the Special instantly cramped my hand, haha! However, I think it sounded pretty good. I said a little bit about the guitar before we played and got a lot of questions later about Hamer, WyldBil, and the whole project going on. The story made a lot of people smile and think maybe to world ain't so bad after all. You done a good thing here, Gene.

I used to live just down the road from the filling station Jimmy Buffett robbed. My dad got thrown out of a restaurant back in the 60s when they both were at Southern Miss because Buffett was stealing chicken legs from the buffet (funny right there). I used to sell his shitty mixto tequila at Spec's in Austin. Jimmy Buffett, career criminal. A1A is a great album though.

Don't you hate when you are just shredding sitting down, stand up, and it all goes away? I've spent the last month really focusing on the kinesiology of how I play guitar. For instance, I can play 1/16th notes at 120 bpm fine and from 160 bpm to almost 200 bpm pretty cleanly when I am warmed up. However, regardless of how warm I get, from around 130 to 150 is shaky. After really paying attention, I notice that when picking slowly, I only move my wrist. When I pick fastly, I use much more elbow and maybe even a tad of shoulder. Where my problem has been is the shift from playing with my wrist to my arm. For the past several weeks, I have been working on smoothly moving between those two motions and am starting to see results. The new problem is that to pick fast with no muting on a clean, I have to pick hard as hell. I suppose once I get the motion smooth through that 130 to 160 bpm range, I will start futzing around with dynamics more. Guitar is a never ending adventure.