You Get What You Need - If You Can Work Out What That Is

I'm pretty sure that Mick Jagger was not setting out an approach to purchasing equipment when he wrote the immortal lines

You can't always get what you want
But if you try sometimes
You just might find
You get what you need

When I was thinking about buying a camera a couple of years ago, what I really wanted was a Fuji GFX 100. A medium-format monster, a snip at £7,000 for the body and £3,000 for a lens. Call me a killjoy, but with my skills and lifestyle, I just couldn't justify that. That's Holy Grail stuff. Also, the probability of me damaging or losing a £10,000 camera are much higher than that of damaging or losing a £500 camera. After watching many reviews and looking at the major camera makers' websites, I came up with this... I wanted

Fuji's simplest camera with inter-changeable lenses that is good enough so I can't blame the camera for a bad picture

That existed: it was the X-E4 that I still use now. And it's a nice bit of kit.

When it was time to trade in the Epiphone Les Paul Standard 50's, after thinking in terms of this and that and an SG, I realised that what I wanted was a

"7-lb Les Paul": two humbuckers and controls in parallel, meeting the selector switch, with a 24.5" scale length, for under £1,000

There is no such Les Paul, but there is the PRS McCarty 594 SE, which the guys at GuitarGuitar in Epsom had in stock the day I visited. It too is a nice bit of kit I now own.

Recently I thought that it might be nice, as well as time, to move up to a Real Valve Amp. Fender of course. (Really? There are other amp makers? Who knew?) What I wanted was

a Fender valve amp that can be played at bedroom volumes at the edge of break-up

which I knew to be ridiculous even as I thought about it. The 12W Princeton Reverb, the 5W VibroChamp, and never mind the 15W Blues Junior, are way too loud at natural break-up. However, I have mastered the art of getting snarly tones at around 70dB, so I don't need to rely on valve break-up. And I'm not going to be distracted by the Tonemasters and their power attenuators. Tonemasters sound almost like valve amps, but not quite. They are for pros who need to heft amps from gig to gig. Mine will be staying in one place. So the only choice is between the '65 and the '68 Princetons. The '68 has a more immediately appealing sound, but it's a little less well-defined than the '65, and I want that clean, clean sound.

So the '65 it is. GuitarGuitar do a 30-day return. What am I waiting for?

Around the same time, I wondered if I might to get a telephoto zoom for the X-E4. Like it or not, many of the good shots available in London do need to be picked out of the surrounding visual sludge by cropping or zooming. It happens that there is a very good third-party lens - the Tamron X-mount 17-70 - for the Fuji. If I were to get a telephoto zoom, and didn't want to pay Fuji prices, nor carry around the weight of solid-metal Fuji lenses, that would be the one. So I know what I need.

What am I waiting for?

I'm waiting for my inner Scrooge to stop telling me that with my appalling guitar skills, cack-handed photographic skills and warped eye for a picture, plus my unwillingness to actually go out and shoot pictures, I cannot "justify" the expense.

If I was a forty-year-old married man with a mortgage and two children needing private education, this might be a reasonable reservation.

But I'm not. I'm an older man on the last few laps. Possessing nice gear is one of the small pleasures of life, even if one doesn't use it as much or as well as a pro would. Heck, all of it can be sold on the second-hand market.

And I don't go on holidays. Now there's an expense I really can't justify.

If it ever happens, I'll let you know. And I'll try to get some culture under my belt to write about as well.

Why Cloud Drives Should Be Your Daily Drivers

(Edited 20/9/2025: In the original version, I was too focussed on device loss, and underplayed the necessity of conventional backups. The two work complement each other.)

Think of a Cloud Drive as an external hard drive attached to your computer by wi-fi + internet rather than wire. That's all it is. It behaves exactly like an eternal drive. You can treat it like an external drive: copy files to it, delete files on it, create sub-directories, even back it up. It has one huge advantage over a conventional external drive: it is not on your premises or in your possession, so it can't get taken away by anyone with or without a warrant, or soaked if the house floods, or melts in a fire, or lost if someone's kid spills their orange juice on it, or (enter description of disaster here).

We need to protect against four things: confiscation of our devices; loss of one or more devices; loss of specific data on our devices; loss of access to our Cloud account, and other Cloud-based services. We also need to handle backup of data across multiple devices, without creating a complicated and time-consuming backup routine. For some people, especially recording artists, photographers and videographers, handling large-scale data backup is part of the job, and I’m addressing the needs of people who generate smaller amounts of data.

A Cloud drive protects against losing devices, or having devices confiscated. It allows sharing between multiple devices, and usually offer a browser-based interface, allowing access from any device, as long as you remember the password. Most provide a thirty-day undelete facility to deal with stumble-thumb deletes.

Conventional hard disk backups protect against losing access to your Cloud drive account, or losing internet access. Restores or data-reading can be done to any device with a suitable data port, though if you used special software (e.g. to encrypt and compress) you will need that on the device.

Online backup services protect against loss of external hard drives and the Cloud drive.

(Professionals will usually use a Cloud drive, keeping local copies as storage allows, and use an online backup service - since they aren’t going to walk around making backups of individual employee’s laptops.)

You're already on the Cloud in so many ways. All the e-mail services keep your archives on their servers - in the Cloud. Your password manager keeps your vault in the Cloud. Apple Notes / Evernote and the others all store in the Cloud. All your social media is in the Cloud. Any product that offers multi-device access and syncing is cloud-based.

If you use music streaming, you are accessing a cloud-based music library - far bigger than anything the most obsessed audiophile could make. If you stream video, same thing.

It's the final step to put the documents, photographs, graphics and other files you create onto a drive in the Cloud. The Cloud application will create a directory on your device for its use, and anything you put in that directory will get copied up to the Cloud drive. You can tell the Cloud application you want to keep local copies, or that you are happy downloading from the Cloud drive as needed.

What gets stored in that local directory? The data I need to carry on my life, in case I lose everything in the same day (lose phone on the train, laptop stolen in the pub, dog eats the iPad... you know the kind of thing). Contact lists, schedules, programming code, drafts of novels / poems / textbooks, DAW files, reference books, my favourite photos, music tracks, videos, diary / journal, Notes app, and so on.

E-mails, contacts, appointments. On Gmail. Since 1891.

Text documents / Notes-style apps. Pffft. Doesn't matter how much I have, it likely is no more than 1 GB. Nobody can write that much in one lifetime.

PDFs and similar: Not really an issue. 3-4 GB at most for even the most avid reader. Stored in Books.

Music. No more ripping CDs into Apple Music and synching playlists to the phone. CD-quality streaming services are now affordable and allow downloading for off-line access. If I am actually going to be off-line: 5G and wireless coverage has expanded beyond anyone's wildest dreams in 2015. I keep my CDs (unless I really regret buying it), while Amazon and other downloaders keep track of what I bought from them, so the files are always there. I only really need to keep music files I downloaded or ripped, which can't be found elsewhere. That is remarkably few. (**)

(Qobuz subscribers: downloaded files are added to your Library, with a tick next to them.)

Photo / Video backup. A glance at Reddit suggests this is deeply personal: some people are hoarders and remind you that storage is cheap (which at £150 for at 5TB external SSD it is); while others are minimalists and do not want to spend time managing backups. Then there's a whole bunch of people between these extremes. I tend to the minimalist side. My intention is that Favourites and recent haven't-made-my-mind-up-yet shots will be in iCloud Photos, and everything else I don't throw out will be in directory that gets an external backup from time to time. There's a lot of prep required for this, which I'll talk about this in another post.

With my minimalist approach, I don't have a lot of data, so I get by on iCloud's 50GB plan. FLAC-ripping, RAW-shooting, Lightroom-editing, keep-everything maximalists, will be looking at least at 2TB or more. After making use of the 1TB Adobe throw in with Lightroom subscriptions. That starts to cost.

Bonus Topic: sharing across devices. One benefit of Cloud drives is that all your Windows / iOS / OS X devices can access the drives, but sharing is not compulsory. Apple devices can be customised app by app. How much you do depends on how much you trust the other people who can use your devices, and I'll let you think through how much you trust the kids not to accidentally delete photos or mail stuff to their friends. I let Files access everything it can, and share my Photos on the phone, iPad and laptop. My music apps (Sonos, Qobuz, Amazon, Apple Music) are on all my iOS devices, and I can access those services through a browser on the laptop. I don't have Books on the phone, because I can't read on it. I can get Mail and Contacts via any browser, and share the Calendar. 

Bonus bonus topic: internet privacy. I'm all for someone from Apple, Microsoft, the NSA, Five Eyes (or Five Guys, for that matter) reading my thoughts and looking at my snapshots. They might learn something. You're welcome.

(*) Having all your equipment and backup drives taken away because you made a mean tweet, or one of your darling children downloaded instructions to make an atomic bomb, or a dodgy mate sent you a dodgy image, or whatever happens to be illegal these days. They can take your devices, but they can't stop you looking at your data if you can get at it. 

(**) A while ago there was a fad for ripping all one's CDs and then throwing them away. Because shelf space or something. I ripped everything to AAC / MP3 because it was the only way to download it to the music player / phone. Hence the need to backup music libraries. To become really useful, streaming services needed a) large libraries, b) CD-quality at £10 / month, c) reliable hi-speed internet and wireless, d) high-quality DAC chipsets at commodity prices. This only really came together in 2020.

The Myths and Sunflowers of Van Gogh

I bought a paperback on Van Gogh's Sunflower paintings recently, thinking that it would be another easy art-market oriented read. I've been struggling, but maybe it's the change of the weather.

Van Gogh occupies a unique place in Art World mythology. Listen to this little snippet...

  

 

 (The words are taken from a famous essay by Rene Ricard, an influential 1980's art writer, and the movie it was taken from was directed by Julian Schnabel, who is an actual bona fide painter himself.)

Van Gogh didn't sell in his lifetime, except once. And that was not a sunflower.

Writing about Van Gogh is difficult. He has to be portrayed as a great artist who happened to have some mental health issues that lead to him committing suicide. There cannot be a connection between his painting and his mental health, because that would cast him as an "Outsider Artist", which would reduce his auction prices considerably, if not change the way we see the paintings themselves.

The art-history / market problem is that "great artists" usually do very well in their lifetimes and have robust mental and physical health. They may get forgotten immediately after their death because fashions have moved on(this tends to happen to composers), but they get re-discovered. The greats of the Renaissance were never forgotten, partly because their work was all over the Vatican and other Catholic churches and monasteries, and because a cult grew up around them, helped by the descendants of their patrons.

The usual course is that an artist does well when alive, because they are of the times, and then falls into obscurity and the darker parts of the museum repositories. When someone does write a book on them, it is clear that, technically competent though they were, the images do not speak to us now, but inform us of what then was like. The exceptions tend to be on the museum walls already.

Van Gogh is an exception to all these rules. If he had died in a duel, he might have been the Galois of painting, but he didn't. He died after extended periods in an asylum, and nobody ever explains why (though there is a scene in Schnabel's movie about him that suggests he was mildly unhinged).

Ricard blames Van Gogh's life for perpetrating the undiscovered-artist-in-a-garret myth, and then asserts that, contrary to that myth, part of the artist's job is to get the work where I will see it. Charles Saatchi in his collecting heyday used to do a Saturday morning round of small galleries and artist's studios, which seems to make Ricard sound a bit lazy, but I'm assuming that Ricard did his rounds as well. He just didn't knock on every garret door. He listened to the gossip, and getting gossiped about is part of getting one's name out.

Van Gogh's life is also to blame for the myth that genius-is-madness. This is very popular with artistic hacks and ordinarily-competent problem-solvers everywhere, but the evidence is to the contrary. Tesla was eccentric, not actually bonkers. The great painters were mostly competent businessmen who ran studios the size of a small movie production house, and negotiated contracts with Popes and Dukes (or at least the secretaries of the Popes and Dukes).

Personally, I late paintings a little overbearing. All those neurotic lines and strong colours, especially the sunflowers. I'm not a big fan of impasto, and yellow is not a Top Five colour. The Starry Night painting has become a meme. I'm sure there are people who genuinely like his work, and wonder how I can admire Sargant, Leighton or Velasquez.

In the end, the auction prices make any criticism irrelevant. His buyers are well-funded museums and very wealthy private collectors. I don't have the cash to argue with anyone paying $62m in 2014 prices for a vase of poppies and daises. That's as much as a decent footballer. But then, nobody actually buys footballers for that money: it's a complicated funding scheme by rich clubs for small ones. Everyone has long suspected that high-value art transactions are also disguised business deals, and one or two are known to have been.

I'm hoping the book, The Sunflowers Are Mine by Martin Bailey, will explain these valuations and the buyers' motivations.

The Fame of Guitarists

One day you will be standing in line for the Pearly Gates, and a junior angel will walk down the line, pick some random old guy from the line with a smile and say "my apologies, please follow me".

Huh? Wah? Who the old dude?

A man a little further ahead in the line turns and says: "that was Jeff Skunk Baxter". Like you should know who that is. When the man sees that you don't, he gives a what-do-they-teach-the-kids-in-school-these-days look, and says "he composed and played the solo on Rikki Don't Lose That Number".

Guitarists who play even one magic solo are special in the eyes of Heaven.

Classical instrumental players play other people's music. At sight. With interpretation the second time round. It's a scary skill when you consider it. The guys in Bach's Leipzig band had one run-through a Cantata (on a Thursday) and then played it straight through that Sunday morning.

Rock session musicians divide into "readers", who are hired to play what's put in front of them, and the rest, who are expected to learn the chords by ear, and compose, sometimes on the spot, their accompaniment, break or solo. Larry Carlton didn't get hired because he could read the charts, he got hired because he was a darn tootin' composer of guitar parts. That's why Steve Cropper is revered: he doesn't shred, but he composed / improvised the guitar parts on hundreds of soul and funk tracks. Including Dock of the Bay.

Think...

Tony Peluso - Goodbye To Love 

Jeff "Skunk" Baxter - Rikki Don't Lose That Number 

Denny Dias - Your Gold Teeth I and II, Bhodisatva, and others 

Amos Garett - Midnight At The Oasis 

Steve Cropper - Time Is Tight (and more) 

Paul Kossoff - All Right Now 

Dave Gilmour - Money (or choose your favourite) 

Peter White - Year of the Cat 

Steve Winwood - Medicated Goo, Dear Mr Fantasy 

Peter Green - Green Manalishi 

John McLaughlin - Right Off (on Miles's Jack Johnson 

Eddie Van Halen - Thriller 

Larry Carlton - The Royal Scam, Hill Street Blues 

Jeff Beck - 'Cause We've Ended As Lovers 

Joe Satriani - Always With Me, Always With You

and that guy, you know, played on While My Guitar Gently Weeps, Badge, Crossroads (on Wheels of Fire), Layla, Sunshine of Your Love. What's his name? He also played instrumentals - Steppin' Out, Hideaway - which were ground-breaking, though instrumentalists - from Hank B Marvin, to Carlos Santana, Joe Satriani, and Steve Vai - are different. It's a steadier, more consistent light, not a sudden flashing firework.

Oh, yes, and then there is the moment that the Devil took on the shape of Mike Bloomfield, at Newport in 1964, behind Bob Dylan

I said in another post that guitarists have the same fame as mathematicians: not for a lifetime's work, but (mathematician) for one crucial theorem that "everyone" uses, or (guitarist) for one solo that transforms a good song into a minor miracle. A song that everyone knew at the time, even if it didn't get to number one, that is still played now and catches the ear of everyone who never heard it before. And that, when you have heard it, seems impossible without the solo.