There was a time when, according to the Rock Press, the Best Albums Ever were Revolver and Pet Sounds, in either order of your choosing.
Not even the journalists who said that believed it. It’s just what they have to say so they keep their Rock Journalist Cred Card. For one thing, the best Beatles album is either Rubber Soul or The White Album. For another thing, Pet Sounds is not the best Beachboys album: that would be some Greatest Hits compilation, because the Beachboys were a pop-singles band. And their best song is Heroes and Villains, closely followed by Good Vibrations. In case you were wondering.
In the 1960’s all the pop bands were trying to do the same thing: entertain the public, sell records and get into the Top Ten, but even then there were tribes - Surfers, Mods, Rockers, Hippies - for whom music was part of a lifestyle. By the 1970’s The Sex Pistols were not trying to do the same thing as Yes, who were not trying to do the same thing as Blue Oyster Cult, who were not trying to be America. From the 1970’s onwards the audience for `music’ was so large and cosmopolitan that bands could make a living writing for niche markets. The idea of a `best album’ had become silly.
Given the sheer output of some artists, it barely makes sense to ask what is their `best’ album? One’s `favourite’, sure, but best? Which of Miles’ output is the `best’? Or Neil Young? Joni Mitchell? Madonna? Eric Clapton? Frank Zappa? John Digweed? As opposed to, which one will blow your head off with its experiments? Some artists do have a `best’ that also sold a container-load, and go on to produce a steady output that is bought by a core of die-hard fans, see for example Suzanne Vega. Some artists have a `period’, usually of not more than five years or so. If they don’t break up, they carry on afterwards, but the magic has passed. Jefferson Airplane, The Who, The Beat, Prince, Spandau Ballet, and others.
Some bands just can’t make an album that has no clunkers. They are basically singles artists, and their Greatest Hits album is usually almost too much too take.
Here’s my list of Twelve Albums That You Must Listen To:
After Bathing At Baxters - Jefferson Airplane (1967)
Everyone Knows This is Nowhere - Neil Young and Crazy Horse (1969)
Blue - Joni Mitchell (1971)
Bod Dylan’s Greatest Hits Vol 2 - Bob Dylan (1971)
Bremen / Lausanne - Keith Jarrett (1973)
Get Up With It - Miles Davis (1974)
Press Colour - Lizzie Mercier Descloux (1979)
Timeless - Goldie (1995)
Endtroducing - DJ Shadow (1996)
Bedrock, Complied and Mixed by - John Digweed (1999)
Broken Social Scene - Broken Social Scene (2005)
These are all older, because by the 1990’s all the genres had become settled and refined. There’s no Metal and no Rap, because neither speak to me, and both genres were settled more or less the first time they were played. There’s no Stadium Rock, Folk or post-Coltrane jazz because it isn’t experimental, it’s settled.
The Good Stuff is always at the start, when the rules aren’t set, the limits aren’t known, the A&R people don’t understand what they are dealing with, and there isn’t a huge technical hurdle for newcomers to jump. Every new technology has to be learned by everyone from scratch, and that takes away the advantage of older musicians, if only for a couple of years. Every new movement in pop music starts with a new technology or the rejection of something from the past: punk explicitly rejected the techno-flash of early 70’s bands; 80’s music has the sound it does because of all those early synthesisers and drum machines; Britpop was a deliberate rejection of the slick production of the 80’s; nuMetal was a fusion of Metal and rap that dropped the need for shredding; Grunge was Punk v2. Rejecting the techniques and the slickness means that the bands have to focus on songs, and pop music has always been about songs.
It may be no kind of co-incidence that the two most creative bands - The Beatles and Miles Davis - both worked with classically-trained musicians - George Martin and Teo Macero - who had gone into music production when it was a suit-and-tie salaried job for classically-trained people who didn’t quite fit in to the orchestral performance world. Both Martin and Macero not only knew all the usual classical composition technique, they also knew about the avant-garde composers. They knew about electronic music, sound effects, musique concret, and the like, and they knew about what the avant-garde jazz musicians were doing. These were possibly the most musically well-informed guys who ever graced a recording studio. Miles was no slouch either, and Paul McCartney spent the months before recording Revolver listening his way round London’s `Underground Music’ scene. (Revolution No 9 was the Beatles saying Yeah, we are so freaking good we can even do musique concret.) They had to look back on the history of other genres of music, because rock / pop had no history of its own. By the mid-1970’s there was enough history for the whole enterprise to have its own history, and it became more consistent and stable.
Friday, 9 October 2026
Friday, 2 October 2026
The Guitars of Woodstock…. Were Not Strats
There’s a neat little video about this.
The notes have the following list:
John Fogerty - 1969 Rickenbacker 325
Jerry Garcia - 1967 Gibson SG Standard
Jorma Kaukonen - 1964 Gibson ES‑345
Alvin Lee - 1959 Gibson ES‑335 “Big Red”
Johnny Winter - 1968 Fender XII
Buzzy Feiten - 1960s Gibson ES‑335
Leslie West - Gibson Les Paul Junior
Pete Townshend - 1968 69 Gibson SG Special
Carlos Santana - 1960s Gibson SG Special
and finally….
Jimi Hendrix - 1968 Fender Stratocaster
Gibson 7, Fender 2, Rickenbacker 1. Gibsons evenly split between SG’s and ES’s. The sound of Woodstock was the sound of the humbucker. Legendary session guitarist Tim Pierce said that the standard advice on the West Coast when he was getting started was get an ES335 and a Fender Princeton.
How? Why? After all, Hank B Marvin was a big deal in the UK, and this guy called Buddy Holly was apparently a thing in the States, and they played Strats in the 1960’s (and that was good enough for Dave Gilmour). Well, it was the days before pedals, when any effects had to be obtained by some kind of abuse of studio equipment. Anyone who wanted a `sound’ had to get it from the guitar and the amp, and maybe refine it with some EQ in the studio board.
It was two things. One is an effect often seen in the early history of a technology, the other was gain pedals.
The largest amount of whacky, creative weirdness in any technology is always just after its invention, while it is all still being made in garages and small factories, and no-one has invested serious money on production lines and staff training. Take a look at some of the early desktop and laptop computers in the 1970’s and 1980’s. Or mobile phones in the 1990’s and 2000’s, before the iPhone. Or MP3 players before the iPod. Once IBM waded in with a desktop design, everyone else followed suit, because, you know, IBM. Once Apple waded in with its massive production and superior marketing, all MP3 players looked the same, as did smart phones a bit later. Someone `gets it right’ and does so at the right time with the right business muscle behind it. Leo Fender might have got it right with the Tele and the Strat, but the business heft wasn’t there. Sit through this to spot when someone got behind Fender / Squire.
There were all sorts of guitar weirdness in the 1960’s, often tied with a genre. Surfers used offsets, bluesmen used humbuckers, jazz players used archtops with humbuckers or P90’s, country musicians used Gretch and anything else that would twang. Rock musicians wanted a big fat sound, and back then, that meant humbuckers. Later on, metal shredders would adopt Ibanez.
Once the gain pedals appeared in the mid-1970’s, a Strat+pedal could drive the amps as hard as a humbucker, and the more gain and effects in the signal chain, the less difference the guitar makes to the sound. The Strat can be easily modified, and is more comfortable to play. The more the guitar becomes a tone generator for the effects in the signal chain, the less it matters what the actual instrument is, so you may as well play something comfortable and easy to repair.
Or something along those lines.
The notes have the following list:
John Fogerty - 1969 Rickenbacker 325
Jerry Garcia - 1967 Gibson SG Standard
Jorma Kaukonen - 1964 Gibson ES‑345
Alvin Lee - 1959 Gibson ES‑335 “Big Red”
Johnny Winter - 1968 Fender XII
Buzzy Feiten - 1960s Gibson ES‑335
Leslie West - Gibson Les Paul Junior
Pete Townshend - 1968 69 Gibson SG Special
Carlos Santana - 1960s Gibson SG Special
and finally….
Jimi Hendrix - 1968 Fender Stratocaster
Gibson 7, Fender 2, Rickenbacker 1. Gibsons evenly split between SG’s and ES’s. The sound of Woodstock was the sound of the humbucker. Legendary session guitarist Tim Pierce said that the standard advice on the West Coast when he was getting started was get an ES335 and a Fender Princeton.
How? Why? After all, Hank B Marvin was a big deal in the UK, and this guy called Buddy Holly was apparently a thing in the States, and they played Strats in the 1960’s (and that was good enough for Dave Gilmour). Well, it was the days before pedals, when any effects had to be obtained by some kind of abuse of studio equipment. Anyone who wanted a `sound’ had to get it from the guitar and the amp, and maybe refine it with some EQ in the studio board.
It was two things. One is an effect often seen in the early history of a technology, the other was gain pedals.
The largest amount of whacky, creative weirdness in any technology is always just after its invention, while it is all still being made in garages and small factories, and no-one has invested serious money on production lines and staff training. Take a look at some of the early desktop and laptop computers in the 1970’s and 1980’s. Or mobile phones in the 1990’s and 2000’s, before the iPhone. Or MP3 players before the iPod. Once IBM waded in with a desktop design, everyone else followed suit, because, you know, IBM. Once Apple waded in with its massive production and superior marketing, all MP3 players looked the same, as did smart phones a bit later. Someone `gets it right’ and does so at the right time with the right business muscle behind it. Leo Fender might have got it right with the Tele and the Strat, but the business heft wasn’t there. Sit through this to spot when someone got behind Fender / Squire.
There were all sorts of guitar weirdness in the 1960’s, often tied with a genre. Surfers used offsets, bluesmen used humbuckers, jazz players used archtops with humbuckers or P90’s, country musicians used Gretch and anything else that would twang. Rock musicians wanted a big fat sound, and back then, that meant humbuckers. Later on, metal shredders would adopt Ibanez.
Once the gain pedals appeared in the mid-1970’s, a Strat+pedal could drive the amps as hard as a humbucker, and the more gain and effects in the signal chain, the less difference the guitar makes to the sound. The Strat can be easily modified, and is more comfortable to play. The more the guitar becomes a tone generator for the effects in the signal chain, the less it matters what the actual instrument is, so you may as well play something comfortable and easy to repair.
Or something along those lines.
Friday, 25 September 2026
Tony - Not A Film About Anthony Bourdain
I saw Matt Johnson’s Tony recently. It is supposed to be about the young Anthony Bourdain, and specifically, his first year working in a restaurant kitchen in 1970’s Provincetown, on Cape Cod, Massachusetts. The older chef who kicks his butt and mentors him is played by Antonio Banderas, so you know he has to be a Good Guy At Heart. That’s what you cast Banderas for. The chef who actually kicked Bourdain’s butt was an omni-competent, all-knowing, slave-driving, underpaying, and probably over-exaggerated in the telling, monster called Bigfoot. Who appeared in Bourdain’s life after he had gone through the Culinary Institute of America (yep, the CIA) and done another year in P-town.
Dominic Sessa was cast as Bourdain. What you need to know about Bourdain is that he was 6’4”, skinny and had a malice-free mischievousness in his face. Being 6’4” for a man is like having a nice smile and 36D’s for a woman: the world is going to cut you a lot of slack. Sessa is not 6’4” - he’s about the same height as Banderas - and so we do not feel the sheer presence Bourdain would have exerted.
Next problem. Bourdain was a Boomer, and Matt Johnson has Sessa play him like a Gen Z, because that’s going to be the audience and Sessa was born slap in the middle of Gen Z. And this was when I realised why films made about twenty or so years ago feel very different to the current crop. They don’t have Gen Z’s, and precious few Millennials (the oldest of whom would have been 25 in 2006). They have real people who grew up before the Internet, and have only ever used the word `problematic’ with irony quotes. Films today, even nice little art movies, are made for Gen Z and later Millennials, who are a bunch of prissy nebbishes, who will never, let’s face it, be able to afford a two-star dinner. It’s as if the writers pulled the punches so as not to shock the fragile souls of their young audience.
Bourdain was a self-confessed Chaos Monkey and professional Asshole of a Manager. Read his best-selling Kitchen Confidential (I re-read it after the movie) and it is clear that: a) he loved food from an early age, partly because it could be used to shock (aka `gross out’) regular people, b) he was consciously dedicated and put the work in to become a professional line chef, in the same way that young men and women put in the work to compete in the Leeds Piano Competition at age 20 (the youngest allowable in 2027); c) he was prepared to live the life. None of that comes through in the film, possibly because it is utterly antithetical to the attitudes of Gen Z, and we would not want to alienate the audience, would we?
There isn’t one moment when Sessa’s Bourdain was seen to actively enjoy the food. We have no idea at all why at the end of the movie he is seen interviewing for the CIA (insert CIA joke here).
Leo Woodall’s ‘Sal’ is far closer to the spirit of the original than Sessa. I’d call his performance relaxed and seemingly spontaneous, but that might not do justice to the amount of work he put into creating that character.
There have been other Chef Movies. Jon Favreau’s 2014 Chef, John Wells’ 2015 Burnt, Campbell Scott and Stanley Tucci’s 1996 Big Night, and Bob Giraldi’s definitive 2000 Dinner Rush. Bradley Cooper starred as `Jack Bourdain’ in a 2005-6 TV series that ended too quickly. I may try to find that.
Dominic Sessa was cast as Bourdain. What you need to know about Bourdain is that he was 6’4”, skinny and had a malice-free mischievousness in his face. Being 6’4” for a man is like having a nice smile and 36D’s for a woman: the world is going to cut you a lot of slack. Sessa is not 6’4” - he’s about the same height as Banderas - and so we do not feel the sheer presence Bourdain would have exerted.
Next problem. Bourdain was a Boomer, and Matt Johnson has Sessa play him like a Gen Z, because that’s going to be the audience and Sessa was born slap in the middle of Gen Z. And this was when I realised why films made about twenty or so years ago feel very different to the current crop. They don’t have Gen Z’s, and precious few Millennials (the oldest of whom would have been 25 in 2006). They have real people who grew up before the Internet, and have only ever used the word `problematic’ with irony quotes. Films today, even nice little art movies, are made for Gen Z and later Millennials, who are a bunch of prissy nebbishes, who will never, let’s face it, be able to afford a two-star dinner. It’s as if the writers pulled the punches so as not to shock the fragile souls of their young audience.
Bourdain was a self-confessed Chaos Monkey and professional Asshole of a Manager. Read his best-selling Kitchen Confidential (I re-read it after the movie) and it is clear that: a) he loved food from an early age, partly because it could be used to shock (aka `gross out’) regular people, b) he was consciously dedicated and put the work in to become a professional line chef, in the same way that young men and women put in the work to compete in the Leeds Piano Competition at age 20 (the youngest allowable in 2027); c) he was prepared to live the life. None of that comes through in the film, possibly because it is utterly antithetical to the attitudes of Gen Z, and we would not want to alienate the audience, would we?
There isn’t one moment when Sessa’s Bourdain was seen to actively enjoy the food. We have no idea at all why at the end of the movie he is seen interviewing for the CIA (insert CIA joke here).
Leo Woodall’s ‘Sal’ is far closer to the spirit of the original than Sessa. I’d call his performance relaxed and seemingly spontaneous, but that might not do justice to the amount of work he put into creating that character.
There have been other Chef Movies. Jon Favreau’s 2014 Chef, John Wells’ 2015 Burnt, Campbell Scott and Stanley Tucci’s 1996 Big Night, and Bob Giraldi’s definitive 2000 Dinner Rush. Bradley Cooper starred as `Jack Bourdain’ in a 2005-6 TV series that ended too quickly. I may try to find that.
Friday, 18 September 2026
Brocherds, Flu, and Vertex Algebras
I’m still recovering from the flu. About 90% there, but this blog is written using the final 10%. Plus I have foresworn commenting on wast we used to call Current Affairs, or you would have got something about the Lindsay Clancy trial and the continuing farce of Age Verification. Not to mention the unanswered question of our time: WTF was the American Military doing when it told its Commander-in-Chief that a war against the Iranians and their best mates the Houthis could be won this side of a cold hell? The Middle East never did make sense, and it makes even less sense now. I might have weighed in about the protests against illegal immigration as well. But I have said I won’t do any of that, so I won’t.
So in the meantime, I’m half-way down this rabbit-hole. If you want to know what actual mathematics sounds like, try this. Don’t try to understand the maths, at least the first time through, but aim for the biographical remarks Borcherds drops from time to time. When I heard Borcherds saying that the entire subject arose from someone’s study of a super-obscure lattice, I had to reach for Rule 14 of the methodology of mathematics: no progressive research programme ever came of Lattice Theory.
The utter incomprehensibility of this talk - again on the first time through - is an example of why philosophers of mathematics are, with a handful of exceptions, confined to marginal comments and subjects. It takes some serious effort to understand this stuff, and even more to understand why it might have the slightest value to anyone.
See you next week.
So in the meantime, I’m half-way down this rabbit-hole. If you want to know what actual mathematics sounds like, try this. Don’t try to understand the maths, at least the first time through, but aim for the biographical remarks Borcherds drops from time to time. When I heard Borcherds saying that the entire subject arose from someone’s study of a super-obscure lattice, I had to reach for Rule 14 of the methodology of mathematics: no progressive research programme ever came of Lattice Theory.
The utter incomprehensibility of this talk - again on the first time through - is an example of why philosophers of mathematics are, with a handful of exceptions, confined to marginal comments and subjects. It takes some serious effort to understand this stuff, and even more to understand why it might have the slightest value to anyone.
See you next week.
Friday, 11 September 2026
The Group of Constant-Value Matrices
Now this one is really cool.
I would have bet your life on the fact that in any group of matrices, the identity is always a matrix with a 1 along the diagonal and 0 everywhere else. Nothing else is contemplated in an undergraduate maths course, and we were never confused by counter-examples. But here is one.
(This is a catch-up post.)
I would have bet your life on the fact that in any group of matrices, the identity is always a matrix with a 1 along the diagonal and 0 everywhere else. Nothing else is contemplated in an undergraduate maths course, and we were never confused by counter-examples. But here is one.
(This is a catch-up post.)
Friday, 4 September 2026
Friday, 7 August 2026
Mac Neo vs Mac Air vs Mac Pro - It's The Storage
My trusty Intel Air is the early 2015 version, so it is at least eleven years old and with 4GB of RAM is not suitable for upgrading from OS X Catalina. Software upgrades are a thing of the past as almost everything requires at least OS X 12 or later. What I have still works, but when the Apple website won't run on the Safari version Catalina supports, it's time to upgrade.
What do I need it for? Running the latest browser versions; light editing of small numbers of photographs; writing in Notes and TeXShop; opening and light editing of spreadsheets from National Statistics; running utilities like HX Edit and Focusrite Control; and Apple Music, Sonos and Qobuz. Those utilities run just fine on my old Air. I am never going to do AI, gaming, video editing, RAW processing, music production or anything that needs serious machinery, and if I do, there will be a solid business reason behind it that will probably justify buying a suitable laptop.
The nice man in the Covent Garden Apple Store said that a) if I did need a Macbook Pro (starting at £1,999), I would already know I did; b) if I promised to stay in my low-compute mode, the Neo (£799 for 512GB) would be just fine, c) but the moment I stepped into higher-Compute mode, I would curse myself for not getting the Air (starting at £1,299).
He's right about the Pro. 14" screen, 16GB RAM, 1TB storage, three Thunderbolt 4 ports, MagSafe, headphone jack, HDMI port and SDXC card slot, latest Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, for £1,999. The Pro has fans for cooling and other such touches. That matters, because modern chips are designed to slow down when they get hot, and if your laptop is how you make money, you don't want it doing that. You're not paying for the specifications, you're paying for productivity. That's not me. Unless I just want to treat myself.
The base-model M5 Air is a full-featured laptop. Sky-blue for preference. 512GB storage, 13" screen, 16GB RAM, two Thunderbolt 4 ports, MagSafe, headphone jack and the latest Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, for £1,299. It's way more than I need, but that's not a reason for not getting one.
The Neo is. It is a considerable upgrade over my Intel Air, which is what I am looking for. A nice Indigo Neo with 8GB RAM, 512GB storage, A18 Pro chip, 1 USB-C 3.2 and 1 USB-C 2 port, a 3.5mm headphone jack, and 512GB storage. It lacks some of the refinements of the Air, but none that I will ever use or miss.
The use-issue is not performance, but storage. How much, and how reliable is it?
Let's do "how much" first. My usage is roughly: Photos Library: 17GB; CD rips and downloads: 33GB; iCloud: 1.1GB on drive; Other: 1 GB. Apps, Mac OS, OS 'Other' and my ~/Library come to about 35GB. An OS update can need 3-4GB plus working space while it is running. Apps bloat over time; and some apps give themselves as much cache as they can get, often without asking, because it reduces their streaming costs. AI will want lots of RAM and memory-swap if you don't give it enough, so allow 8GB for that; while the EU and UK Government will be installing client-side snooping and heaven knows what-all else in the near future. Say 15GB free at all times just for the system to work properly, and another 5GB for app cacheing. That comes to 107GB, 55GB of which is for operations.
I will not be ripping or downloading any more CDs, and text takes minimal amounts of storage. The future space-hog is Photos. I shoot JPEG when I get out at all. That 14GB Library is about 1,000 pictures taken and kept over the course of 17 years (! I said I don't get out much). My shooting ratio is about 12:1, so in a regular year I will take about 750 pictures occupying 15GB at current average size. Over a 5-year period, that's 75GB and easily held on a 512GB drive. Even if I went out twice as much, it would not cause a problem.
So the 512GB Neo it is.
I get away with this because I do not take lots of pictures of my family, cats, sailing boat, holidays and the like, and I don't take hundreds of RAW files, let alone 4K video, nor do I want to run lots of AI tweaks, and I have given up any ideas of producing music tracks. If wanted to do any of that, I would get the M5 Air, and look at external SSD drives vs internal storage upgrades.
To no-one's surprise I have been thinking about this for a while. The answer kept coming out as the M5 Air, whereas my intuition said the Neo was fine. It wasn't until I realised that I was looking to upgrade an 11-year old laptop, not a more recent one, that the arguments changed. When I looked at how much storage the photos would take that I realised what my intuition had grasped that maybe I didn't want to recognise: photography is not even a once-a-week hobby for me. Especially when it gets too damn hot.
What do I need it for? Running the latest browser versions; light editing of small numbers of photographs; writing in Notes and TeXShop; opening and light editing of spreadsheets from National Statistics; running utilities like HX Edit and Focusrite Control; and Apple Music, Sonos and Qobuz. Those utilities run just fine on my old Air. I am never going to do AI, gaming, video editing, RAW processing, music production or anything that needs serious machinery, and if I do, there will be a solid business reason behind it that will probably justify buying a suitable laptop.
The nice man in the Covent Garden Apple Store said that a) if I did need a Macbook Pro (starting at £1,999), I would already know I did; b) if I promised to stay in my low-compute mode, the Neo (£799 for 512GB) would be just fine, c) but the moment I stepped into higher-Compute mode, I would curse myself for not getting the Air (starting at £1,299).
He's right about the Pro. 14" screen, 16GB RAM, 1TB storage, three Thunderbolt 4 ports, MagSafe, headphone jack, HDMI port and SDXC card slot, latest Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, for £1,999. The Pro has fans for cooling and other such touches. That matters, because modern chips are designed to slow down when they get hot, and if your laptop is how you make money, you don't want it doing that. You're not paying for the specifications, you're paying for productivity. That's not me. Unless I just want to treat myself.
The base-model M5 Air is a full-featured laptop. Sky-blue for preference. 512GB storage, 13" screen, 16GB RAM, two Thunderbolt 4 ports, MagSafe, headphone jack and the latest Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, for £1,299. It's way more than I need, but that's not a reason for not getting one.
The Neo is. It is a considerable upgrade over my Intel Air, which is what I am looking for. A nice Indigo Neo with 8GB RAM, 512GB storage, A18 Pro chip, 1 USB-C 3.2 and 1 USB-C 2 port, a 3.5mm headphone jack, and 512GB storage. It lacks some of the refinements of the Air, but none that I will ever use or miss.
The use-issue is not performance, but storage. How much, and how reliable is it?
Let's do "how much" first. My usage is roughly: Photos Library: 17GB; CD rips and downloads: 33GB; iCloud: 1.1GB on drive; Other: 1 GB. Apps, Mac OS, OS 'Other' and my ~/Library come to about 35GB. An OS update can need 3-4GB plus working space while it is running. Apps bloat over time; and some apps give themselves as much cache as they can get, often without asking, because it reduces their streaming costs. AI will want lots of RAM and memory-swap if you don't give it enough, so allow 8GB for that; while the EU and UK Government will be installing client-side snooping and heaven knows what-all else in the near future. Say 15GB free at all times just for the system to work properly, and another 5GB for app cacheing. That comes to 107GB, 55GB of which is for operations.
I will not be ripping or downloading any more CDs, and text takes minimal amounts of storage. The future space-hog is Photos. I shoot JPEG when I get out at all. That 14GB Library is about 1,000 pictures taken and kept over the course of 17 years (! I said I don't get out much). My shooting ratio is about 12:1, so in a regular year I will take about 750 pictures occupying 15GB at current average size. Over a 5-year period, that's 75GB and easily held on a 512GB drive. Even if I went out twice as much, it would not cause a problem.
So the 512GB Neo it is.
I get away with this because I do not take lots of pictures of my family, cats, sailing boat, holidays and the like, and I don't take hundreds of RAW files, let alone 4K video, nor do I want to run lots of AI tweaks, and I have given up any ideas of producing music tracks. If wanted to do any of that, I would get the M5 Air, and look at external SSD drives vs internal storage upgrades.
To no-one's surprise I have been thinking about this for a while. The answer kept coming out as the M5 Air, whereas my intuition said the Neo was fine. It wasn't until I realised that I was looking to upgrade an 11-year old laptop, not a more recent one, that the arguments changed. When I looked at how much storage the photos would take that I realised what my intuition had grasped that maybe I didn't want to recognise: photography is not even a once-a-week hobby for me. Especially when it gets too damn hot.
Friday, 24 July 2026
Even New PRS Guitars Need Attention From A Tech
Contrary to Paul Reed Smith's claim in numerous interviews, you cannot walk into any guitar shop, pick up any PRS SE and play it on stage that night. It will need a going-over by a tech. Maybe the American guitars are that good, but the SE's are not. The same is true of Fender, Gibson, Epiphone, Squier, or any other guitar costing less than £1,000. You may be lucky, but it would be easier to take it straight to a good guitar tech to look over and sort out the obvious issues.
Over the last not quite four years (seems much longer) I have bought five guitars - traded one - one cheap electronic amp (the Boss Katana) and one not-so-cheap valve amp (the Fender Princeton Reverb 65 Reissue). Here's the schedule of repairs.
The Boss Katana (from GuitarGuitar, Epsom) didn't need any work. It's a PCB and electronic (aside from the final power amp stage), and so can be made to high standards out of the box, and quality control can be digital, and hence cheap.
The Fender Princeton '65 (from GuitarGuitar, Epsom) needed the pre-amp valves replacing- after only eight months. They got it back to me in a week, and I think it sounds better than it did when I bought it.
The first guitar was the Epiphone Les Paul (from GuitarGuitar, Epsom). It needed something doing to the electrics, probably the jack socket, and the tech lowered the action and polished the frets while he was at it.
The second is the PRS McCarty 594 SE (from GuitarGuitar, Epsom). That needed a dry solder joint on one of the tone pots fixing, and later on a decent jack socket, a little neck relief and some work on the nut to correct the playability and intonation of the G string.
The third is the Squier Paranormal Telecaster (from Regent Sounds, Denmark St). That needed a decent jack socket and a better selector switch. Upgrading the pick-ups was my little indulgence.
The fourth is the Fender Vintera Mustang (from Sell Us Your Guitar via Reverb). That came with the tremolo system so badly set-up, the bridge was at an angle to the body and the adjustment screws were cross-threaded. My tech sorted all that out, polished the frets, relieved the neck and oiled a dry fretboard.
The last is the PRS Silver Sky SE(*) (from Wildwire Guitars via Reverb). As delivered the tremolo was locked down and there was some string buzz towards the upper frets. My tech unlocked and adjusted the trem, watered and fed the fretboard, polished the frets, adjusted the nut, and replaced the penny-pinching jacket socket with a proper Switchgear one.
This reminds me of what cars used to be in the 1960's and 70's - there would always be something that needed fixing and usually something that rattled. Automakers spent millions upon millions on robot automation assembly to get rid of those problems. Ordinary cars today are built to standards that were engineers' pipe dreams in the 1960's. Today's guitars are built to the same standards as yesterday's cars. The bodies are cut by CNC routers, and the pickups are wound by CNC winders, all the other parts are made in the same way they would have been back in 1960, and all are assembled by hand. A lot of guitars get sold each year, but not enough to justify the kind of investment that would be needed to make a robot assembler and installer for the wiring loom. If that was even possible.
A basic set-up from a tech costs around £50 - £100 depending on what needed doing. It's worth the money.
Everything you have heard about the Silver Sky SE is true. It sounds like you dreamed a Strat should sound like, plays like a dream (now) and Wildwire had one that weighed just over 7lbs. The Mustang could easily become my default guitar: the Mustang neck pickup should be right up there with the Telecaster neck pickup as something legendary. And it weighs 7lbs. Whereas the Paranormal weighs 8.5lbs, but sounds and plays like it should. The 594SE also weighs 7lbs, plays really well and has a lovely round, thick jazzy neck sound, and a snarly bridge tone - at least that's how I have it dialled in.
Props to Andy at Richmond Guitar Workshop for sorting all these things out. Support your local tech.
Over the last not quite four years (seems much longer) I have bought five guitars - traded one - one cheap electronic amp (the Boss Katana) and one not-so-cheap valve amp (the Fender Princeton Reverb 65 Reissue). Here's the schedule of repairs.
The Boss Katana (from GuitarGuitar, Epsom) didn't need any work. It's a PCB and electronic (aside from the final power amp stage), and so can be made to high standards out of the box, and quality control can be digital, and hence cheap.
The Fender Princeton '65 (from GuitarGuitar, Epsom) needed the pre-amp valves replacing- after only eight months. They got it back to me in a week, and I think it sounds better than it did when I bought it.
The first guitar was the Epiphone Les Paul (from GuitarGuitar, Epsom). It needed something doing to the electrics, probably the jack socket, and the tech lowered the action and polished the frets while he was at it.
The second is the PRS McCarty 594 SE (from GuitarGuitar, Epsom). That needed a dry solder joint on one of the tone pots fixing, and later on a decent jack socket, a little neck relief and some work on the nut to correct the playability and intonation of the G string.
The third is the Squier Paranormal Telecaster (from Regent Sounds, Denmark St). That needed a decent jack socket and a better selector switch. Upgrading the pick-ups was my little indulgence.
The fourth is the Fender Vintera Mustang (from Sell Us Your Guitar via Reverb). That came with the tremolo system so badly set-up, the bridge was at an angle to the body and the adjustment screws were cross-threaded. My tech sorted all that out, polished the frets, relieved the neck and oiled a dry fretboard.
The last is the PRS Silver Sky SE(*) (from Wildwire Guitars via Reverb). As delivered the tremolo was locked down and there was some string buzz towards the upper frets. My tech unlocked and adjusted the trem, watered and fed the fretboard, polished the frets, adjusted the nut, and replaced the penny-pinching jacket socket with a proper Switchgear one.
This reminds me of what cars used to be in the 1960's and 70's - there would always be something that needed fixing and usually something that rattled. Automakers spent millions upon millions on robot automation assembly to get rid of those problems. Ordinary cars today are built to standards that were engineers' pipe dreams in the 1960's. Today's guitars are built to the same standards as yesterday's cars. The bodies are cut by CNC routers, and the pickups are wound by CNC winders, all the other parts are made in the same way they would have been back in 1960, and all are assembled by hand. A lot of guitars get sold each year, but not enough to justify the kind of investment that would be needed to make a robot assembler and installer for the wiring loom. If that was even possible.
A basic set-up from a tech costs around £50 - £100 depending on what needed doing. It's worth the money.
Everything you have heard about the Silver Sky SE is true. It sounds like you dreamed a Strat should sound like, plays like a dream (now) and Wildwire had one that weighed just over 7lbs. The Mustang could easily become my default guitar: the Mustang neck pickup should be right up there with the Telecaster neck pickup as something legendary. And it weighs 7lbs. Whereas the Paranormal weighs 8.5lbs, but sounds and plays like it should. The 594SE also weighs 7lbs, plays really well and has a lovely round, thick jazzy neck sound, and a snarly bridge tone - at least that's how I have it dialled in.
Props to Andy at Richmond Guitar Workshop for sorting all these things out. Support your local tech.
(*) Yes, I know I said recently that Strats were not cool and I couldn't see myself playing one. But you see, Silver Skys are not Strats. It's the headstock. Makes all the difference. Also it has three single-coil pickups and a five-way switch, whereas Strats have a five-way switch and three single-coil pickups, which is entirely different. And Guitar Tube says that Silver Skys are not Strats, so it must be true.
Friday, 17 July 2026
RAF Museum, Colidale - Part One
I will have a longer post about taking photographs at the RAF Museum, Colindale, illustrated by shots that didn't work out so well. When the weather allows my brain to run at more than 70% capacity: I have a mid-1950's brain that did not come with enough cooling for these tropical temperatures. Anyway, here are some that I think work okay.
Top down: Messerschmidt 109; Gloucester Meteor; Jet Provost; Provost, Meteor, AN Other; Fokker D VII.
Friday, 10 July 2026
Centrepoint Close-Up
It's Centrepoint of course, and therefore at the junction of Tottenham Court Road and Oxford Street, and throughly iconic. But in this picture, you have to know the building to know that. Otherwise it's some random 1960's concrete office block with some random glass geometric gadget in front of it. It's a neat picture, but I'm not trying to exploit the iconicity? iconicness? of Centre Point. In fact, I'm hiding it. A lot of my photos do that: I don't take pictures of iconic things, partly because "everyone does" and partly because the Iconic Thing distracts from the composition and the picture. If that makes sense.
Friday, 3 July 2026
Saffron Hill
Oh darn tootin' amma blame the weather. It's to do with Europe being off the English coast or something like that, I blame the bureaucrats in Brussels. Or the CCP. Or The Russians. Or the Democratic Party. Or maybe all of them, since they all meet secretly in Mae's Cafe, Brighton, every other month on the third Saturday for a full English and to hatch a new round of conspiracies. They speak in Really Bad International English, which Mae speaks fluently, and she passes on what she can make out of their chatter to me and the editor of the Financial Times, who ignores it and then wonders why he has the feeling he's already heard about whatever it is when it happens. She used to tell the editor of The Economist, but they wrote about what the leaders should be doing. Because The Economist can run the world so much better than anyone else except the BBC. Mae never tells the BBC because she knows the BBC is the propaganda branch of the Security Services when it isn't being the media wing of Right-Thinking-People, or perhaps Left-Thinking-People, or maybe People-With-Their-Heads-Up-Their....
Moving along...
This is looking down Saffron Hill, near Farringdon, and it took me a while to see that it's actually a good picture.
Moving along...
This is looking down Saffron Hill, near Farringdon, and it took me a while to see that it's actually a good picture.
Friday, 26 June 2026
The Ironmonger Est 1835
I do like a photograph of a shop sign. Other people may like snapping celebrities, or pigeons, or cats, or passers-by scratching their ears, or other such cutsie things, but I like a shop sign. So here is one.
Friday, 19 June 2026
Central London from Parliament Hill
This year's photography condition is that I have to use the 90mm (135mm equivalent) prime lens that I splurged for second-hand in spring. It takes shots like this, and there is almost no zooming-by-cropping. I like shots of Distant Things (as opposed to things-in-the-distance) and that lens does it about the way I see the scene. So score one with this...
Friday, 12 June 2026
Cancelling My Subscription to The Daily Telegraph
The Daily Telegraph has put its online subscription price up by about £10 / month. Which means I have to do a whole lot of overthinking about whether I want to carry on with it. I subscribed to it back in 2020 because it was the only paper that had a remotely sensible attitude to the Lunacy of the Lockdowns. I needed to know what idiotic measures the Government were going to impose for the next twenty minutes, and what else was going on.
It gives me something to look at over breakfast, if I'm not watching a movie or a box-set episode. If WW3 breaks out (oh wait, it has, read this https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-9914/ . £21.8bn nearly all 'gifted'? We're at war, we're just not sending our unemployed young men to be killed) I'm sure the Telegraph will let me know.
Increasingly, I am less and less interested in what it is telling me. Westminster in-fighting. Which incompetent and clueless person will be the next PM. The Trans toilet thing. A few days ago it did a piece of undercover reporting about people smugglers that I hope our Intelligence Services already knew but didn't want the targets to know they knew. But who knows, maybe our Intelligence Services are too busy with "right-wing extremists" (and how I wish that was a mis-direction, but I bet it isn't). Otherwise I'm reminded of the Bob Dylan lyric: And something is happening here / But you don't know what it is / Do you, Mister Jones?
So there are two questions. First, how will I know that WW3 now involves the UK being bombed? I've just put a link to Reuters Europe (translations into English available) in my web browser. That should cover the news. I've also added the ONS front page https://www.ons.gov.uk/ to assuage my endless thirst for statistics.
Second, how will I know what is going on with the culture and trends in the UK and world? Now, see, this is the controversial part. I don't actually care. If I want to see what's new in books, I will browse round Foyles. Qubuz keeps me up with music, and the Curzon website with movies. I could care less about the commercial cinema. I still haven't entirely given up You Tube yet, even though the AI slop keeps on seeping in as fast as I can click Don't Recommend Channel.
Finally, what am I going to read at breakfast?
For the last week, it's been my art books. Much better for the soul.
And I cancelled my subscription.
It gives me something to look at over breakfast, if I'm not watching a movie or a box-set episode. If WW3 breaks out (oh wait, it has, read this https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-9914/ . £21.8bn nearly all 'gifted'? We're at war, we're just not sending our unemployed young men to be killed) I'm sure the Telegraph will let me know.
Increasingly, I am less and less interested in what it is telling me. Westminster in-fighting. Which incompetent and clueless person will be the next PM. The Trans toilet thing. A few days ago it did a piece of undercover reporting about people smugglers that I hope our Intelligence Services already knew but didn't want the targets to know they knew. But who knows, maybe our Intelligence Services are too busy with "right-wing extremists" (and how I wish that was a mis-direction, but I bet it isn't). Otherwise I'm reminded of the Bob Dylan lyric: And something is happening here / But you don't know what it is / Do you, Mister Jones?
So there are two questions. First, how will I know that WW3 now involves the UK being bombed? I've just put a link to Reuters Europe (translations into English available) in my web browser. That should cover the news. I've also added the ONS front page https://www.ons.gov.uk/ to assuage my endless thirst for statistics.
Second, how will I know what is going on with the culture and trends in the UK and world? Now, see, this is the controversial part. I don't actually care. If I want to see what's new in books, I will browse round Foyles. Qubuz keeps me up with music, and the Curzon website with movies. I could care less about the commercial cinema. I still haven't entirely given up You Tube yet, even though the AI slop keeps on seeping in as fast as I can click Don't Recommend Channel.
Finally, what am I going to read at breakfast?
For the last week, it's been my art books. Much better for the soul.
And I cancelled my subscription.
(Edit 24/7/26) There's no way to actually cancel the subscription from The Telegraph's end. I turned off the payment in PayPal. That got me an e-mail asking me to update my payment details. I called customer services and explained what I was doing and they confirmed that cancelling the payment was the way to do it. I got another reminder, which I ignored. Then I got a slightly snotty mail saying that because I had not updated my payment details, they were cancelling my subscription. Like I was delinquent. Way to make the customer think about going back.
Friday, 5 June 2026
Joni Mitchell's Blue
Blue is a Perfect Album. There isn't one note that could be changed, one word that could be improved, one inflection of her voice that might be different, or one note of the accompaniment that might be pepped-up. Every. Single. Song.
I was a sixteen year old OND Engineering student at the time. I was going to the local college of further education, when most of the boys I'd known at school had stayed on to the Sixth Form. Around the same time I had discovered Weather Report's first album in the a stall in the nearby market, and was grooving to Miles At The Fillmore and the subsequent albums.
Describing the mood of the 1970's is more or less impossible now. The media talked about a generation gap in attitudes between my generation and our parents: it felt real, but I have no idea what it consisted of. They could remember the war, and rationing, and really thought that nuclear war might break out as a result of the Seven Day's War. A lot of them had been in the Services. Rationing was over when we were born, and conscription was dropped before we were of age. Jobs were easy to get for school-leavers, and the best employers went round universities on what they called the Milk Round to interview and recruit graduates.
Life was simpler, but rougher, even in the cosseted streets of the south-west London suburbs. Mixed schools were pretty much for the low(er)-achievers: good grades needed single-sex schools. The girls in the posh schools were, I found out years later, actually quite wild. We had nothing like them in our boy's school. Boys pushed and shoved and formed cliques. I was one of those boys whose friends at school were all the other boys who didn't have any friends. I wasn't in the rowing team (my school had an ace rowing team, and the best rowers wound up in the Boat Race teams. Until the Americans came along and ruined it all), and I wasn't in the football team, and I couldn't make the chess club either... There were fewer divorces, but consequently more un-happy marriages and more drinking. GPs handed out Valium or speed like candy to anyone complaining that they were miserable or moody or whatever else. The well brought-up boys and girls of the suburban bourgeois started smoking and drinking when they were sixteen.
There were fewer cars, you could park almost anywhere in London any time you wanted, the trees were smaller and scraggly, shops closed at 1PM on a Wednesday and on Sunday the country was closed. It was pretty much closed by about six in the evening, except around the West End, and theatres and cinemas. Heck, the radio and TV stopped broadcasting about nine in the evening.
Joni Mitchell sung us songs from a different world. Her lyrics talked about Greek Islands and seedy bars in American towns, and made heartbreaking romance out of the mundane: but when he's gone / Me and them lonesome blues collide / the bed's too big, the frying pan's too wide. It could be bathos, but he voice soars when she sings about the frying-pan and you can hear how much it hurts her to see the half-empty pan. Also, your unconscious notices that she has a fried breakfast, so you know she's one of us.
The darker days songs of For The Roses, and the grown-up disappointments of Court and Spark were yet to come. By the time she got to the mystery that is Hissing of Summer Lawns she was portraying the mood of the 1970's.
But on Blue she is still happy, still in love, travelling the world even if she wants to be back in California, which in 1970 was a paradise on earth - except for the bits in Dogtown and Z-Boys which weren't.
Friday, 29 May 2026
Keeping The Internet Safe For Children, The Easy, Free Speech, Privacy Preserving, Way
MPs don't not want to protect the children from dodgy content. They don't give a damn about children's welfare: if they did, they would make sure there were jobs for the kids to go to when they left school. Something that stopped happening in the 1980's.
The Treasury and the Cabinet want the money. Hence the focus on You Tube, TikTok and other companies with billions in the bank and business operations in the UK. If a website has no business presence in the UK, its owners can legally ignore Ofcom.
MPs, and civil servants, don't want the dodgy content, or at least, they don't want it so darn easily available. Far-left extremism literature is okay when it is only available in three specialist bookshops in the UK, but geez, when it's available by going the The Guardian's website... that's too easy. So they should like the first part of my solution.
The Children's White List. This is a list of sites where the Government deem children are allowed to go. What's on the White List? Not a lot. Wikipedia; the BBC; any .gov.uk website; You Tube for kids; online libraries; Child Helplines, that sort of thing. Like the Children's section in bookshops and libraries. Let's have an app that allows them access to their school's website and resources (left to the developers as an exercise), and university websites. Maybe it could be held on the device, maybe by ISPs. It's not permanent and can and should be updated frequently. Start small and add.
Age Verification by device. The OS by default is set to filter all internet traffic through the White List. In the OS Settings, there is an option to Age Verify. Take that, and a little app will ask for random digits from the user's NI number (in the UK), which will be sent to a Government database, which will answer YES or NO depending on how old it thinks the user is. The database will keep a record of the device IMEI, date and time of the request (to handle repeated requests that may be someone trying to guess). Nothing else. If the device gets a YES it will activate the option to remove the White List filter, which the user can select. There will also be an option to Impose White List, which will de-activate the option to remove the White List and revert to the filter. To remove the filter, use the Age Verify option again. Re-setting the device re-imposes the White List, but re-booting after an upgrade doesn't. You get the idea.
How do your kids now access You Tube? It's not on the White List, so they need a device that belongs to someone who is Age Verified. That would be the parents. The kids can't open a parental device. The parents aren't going to give away their NI numbers. Nor are they going to hand over their device to their kids.
The OS makers could sort this out in about, oh, five days or less. The Government could set up a basic White List and change it as time goes on. Free speech is for adults, not kids, and the White List does not affect kids.
So, done, modulo details.
(A prize for identifying that quote.)
The Treasury and the Cabinet want the money. Hence the focus on You Tube, TikTok and other companies with billions in the bank and business operations in the UK. If a website has no business presence in the UK, its owners can legally ignore Ofcom.
MPs, and civil servants, don't want the dodgy content, or at least, they don't want it so darn easily available. Far-left extremism literature is okay when it is only available in three specialist bookshops in the UK, but geez, when it's available by going the The Guardian's website... that's too easy. So they should like the first part of my solution.
The Children's White List. This is a list of sites where the Government deem children are allowed to go. What's on the White List? Not a lot. Wikipedia; the BBC; any .gov.uk website; You Tube for kids; online libraries; Child Helplines, that sort of thing. Like the Children's section in bookshops and libraries. Let's have an app that allows them access to their school's website and resources (left to the developers as an exercise), and university websites. Maybe it could be held on the device, maybe by ISPs. It's not permanent and can and should be updated frequently. Start small and add.
Age Verification by device. The OS by default is set to filter all internet traffic through the White List. In the OS Settings, there is an option to Age Verify. Take that, and a little app will ask for random digits from the user's NI number (in the UK), which will be sent to a Government database, which will answer YES or NO depending on how old it thinks the user is. The database will keep a record of the device IMEI, date and time of the request (to handle repeated requests that may be someone trying to guess). Nothing else. If the device gets a YES it will activate the option to remove the White List filter, which the user can select. There will also be an option to Impose White List, which will de-activate the option to remove the White List and revert to the filter. To remove the filter, use the Age Verify option again. Re-setting the device re-imposes the White List, but re-booting after an upgrade doesn't. You get the idea.
How do your kids now access You Tube? It's not on the White List, so they need a device that belongs to someone who is Age Verified. That would be the parents. The kids can't open a parental device. The parents aren't going to give away their NI numbers. Nor are they going to hand over their device to their kids.
The OS makers could sort this out in about, oh, five days or less. The Government could set up a basic White List and change it as time goes on. Free speech is for adults, not kids, and the White List does not affect kids.
So, done, modulo details.
(A prize for identifying that quote.)
Friday, 22 May 2026
No Fusion - A Couple of Sample Shots
(Taken with NoFusion 56mm HEIF+ iPhone SE2)
I have whinged before about the iPhone's uncanny-valley computational photography. The over-sharp details, the over-defined skies. So I went looking for a camera app that avoids it, and isn't the subscription-based Leica one. After looking at some videos, NoFusion seemed to be a decent option, even with an annual subscription, so I downloaded it. You have to select the HEIF+ option to dodge the iPhone computational photography, and it adds a heartbeat to the save time, but it looks better. I know a perfectly blue sky with bright red cranes doesn't show it well, but the top photo does, and come on... who doesn't love a blue sky with bright red cranes?
Friday, 15 May 2026
Why Two Strats (Teles, Les Paul's) Sound So Different (It's NOT the Tonewood)
Why can two guitars from the same model range, allegedly with the same pickups, tuners and switches, sound just different enough so that you prefer one over the other? Shouldn't they be the same? Because modern manufacturing techniques?
I watched a couple of videos on how guitar pots are constructed, and very enlightening it was.
There's a sweeper arm attached to the knob, which runs over a ring of resistive material. At both ends are bits of bare metal that the sweeper can reach. One of those ends is at 1 and the other is at 10. At those positions, there is no resistance. As soon as the sweeper gets wholly on to the resistive ring, there's resistance. (Half-on and half-off, the electricity sees the zero resistance half-off bit and goes down that path, so the sweeper is not on the ring until it's all on the ring.) This why there is the well-known leap in tone or volume change on reaching 0 or 10. Personally, I think that's bad design, but there it is masquerading as a feature.
It seems guitar manufacturers think that 10% variation on the resistance of the pots and the capacitance of the cap is acceptable. This means one guitar might have a 550k ohm pot and another a 450k ohm pot, which is more than 20% different, which you will be able to hear. A 0.022 microfarad capacitor (a popular choice for tone controls) would vary from 0.0198 to 0.0242 microfarads, and that makes a difference of e.g. 3,000 ohms (!) in the reactance to A440, which is 16%, and that will also be noticeable.
That's why one Fender or Gibson sounds better than another, because the components vary so widely. (Paul Reed Smith says we can go into any guitar store anywhere in the world, pick out the same make and model of his guitars, and it will sound the same. Which if it is true means his manufacturers are doing some wicked quality control. If so, how did they miss the dry solder joint in my 594?)
But here's the thing.
The difference between any two guitars played through the same amp with the same settings is most noticeable when playing clean, and with either wide-open or mid-point dial settings. Reverb and delay blur the details, as does modulation (chorus, flanger, tremolo, phaser, univibe), and once the distortion goes beyond edge-of-breakup, no-one can tell the difference between a £100 Harley Benton S-style and a £6,000 Les Paul. Add enough effects and no-one can tell if you are playing a Custom Shop Jazzmaster or a Squire 335. A few dozen kilo-ohms difference between the pot values will vanish in the noise.
So that, I think, is why guitar-makers feel they can get away with what hi-fi manufacturers would blanche at. Anyway, this is about tradition, and traditional construction was even more erratic. Manufacturing has come a very long way since 1980 and even 1990, but guitar electrics did not seem to join the ride.
If Fender is prepared to use skanky (because that's what taking kit from the 10% bin is) guitar pots, why wouldn't they do the same for their amp pots? Makes a mockery of all those settings for this and that tone (you know, "to get that so-and-so sound, use 5 on the treble, 6 on the mid-range and 3 on the bass") because the writer's 5 may well be my 6 or 4. It really amounts to no more than "keep twiddling, it's around there somewhere".
There's a sweeper arm attached to the knob, which runs over a ring of resistive material. At both ends are bits of bare metal that the sweeper can reach. One of those ends is at 1 and the other is at 10. At those positions, there is no resistance. As soon as the sweeper gets wholly on to the resistive ring, there's resistance. (Half-on and half-off, the electricity sees the zero resistance half-off bit and goes down that path, so the sweeper is not on the ring until it's all on the ring.) This why there is the well-known leap in tone or volume change on reaching 0 or 10. Personally, I think that's bad design, but there it is masquerading as a feature.
It seems guitar manufacturers think that 10% variation on the resistance of the pots and the capacitance of the cap is acceptable. This means one guitar might have a 550k ohm pot and another a 450k ohm pot, which is more than 20% different, which you will be able to hear. A 0.022 microfarad capacitor (a popular choice for tone controls) would vary from 0.0198 to 0.0242 microfarads, and that makes a difference of e.g. 3,000 ohms (!) in the reactance to A440, which is 16%, and that will also be noticeable.
That's why one Fender or Gibson sounds better than another, because the components vary so widely. (Paul Reed Smith says we can go into any guitar store anywhere in the world, pick out the same make and model of his guitars, and it will sound the same. Which if it is true means his manufacturers are doing some wicked quality control. If so, how did they miss the dry solder joint in my 594?)
But here's the thing.
The difference between any two guitars played through the same amp with the same settings is most noticeable when playing clean, and with either wide-open or mid-point dial settings. Reverb and delay blur the details, as does modulation (chorus, flanger, tremolo, phaser, univibe), and once the distortion goes beyond edge-of-breakup, no-one can tell the difference between a £100 Harley Benton S-style and a £6,000 Les Paul. Add enough effects and no-one can tell if you are playing a Custom Shop Jazzmaster or a Squire 335. A few dozen kilo-ohms difference between the pot values will vanish in the noise.
So that, I think, is why guitar-makers feel they can get away with what hi-fi manufacturers would blanche at. Anyway, this is about tradition, and traditional construction was even more erratic. Manufacturing has come a very long way since 1980 and even 1990, but guitar electrics did not seem to join the ride.
If Fender is prepared to use skanky (because that's what taking kit from the 10% bin is) guitar pots, why wouldn't they do the same for their amp pots? Makes a mockery of all those settings for this and that tone (you know, "to get that so-and-so sound, use 5 on the treble, 6 on the mid-range and 3 on the bass") because the writer's 5 may well be my 6 or 4. It really amounts to no more than "keep twiddling, it's around there somewhere".
Friday, 8 May 2026
90mm Prime Photos
So I have been out and about with the 90mm prime, and liking the results. This one is an official London Street Photography shot, for which I get 50 points,
and this one demonstrates why taking photos in London when Spring has sprung is so difficult. Everywhere you turn there's a big splotch of green blocking the details. It doesn't go away until autumn.
And it is great for getting close-ups of dogs who just love going for a walk in the Thames.
Friday, 1 May 2026
How To Overthink A New Guitar
The Les Paul and Flying V are religious icons. If you want to drop a Flying V at my place, I will not turn it away. The SG looks like Batman's ears. The 3XX-series look like workmanlike hollow-bodies for session players. The Jazzmaster, Jaguar, Mustang, Explorer, and others, look quirky and interesting. We will pass over those Ibanez with long curly horns, Strandbergs, Mayones, headless guitars, and other weird modern stuff. Also 7-strings. Gretsch's and the like are too big and hefty for my old shoulders. Anything with a Bigsby is just... why?
There are two basic electric guitar sounds: humbuckers (Gibson) and single-coils (Fender). There are variations of single-coils - Strat, Tele, Jazzmaster, P90 - and each has a slightly different clean tone, but sound very similar when going into distortion, as this shows...
Humbuckers are the same: a common characteristic sound with differences around the edges which fade when going into distortion. Watch this...
Can split humbuckers can get close enough to a single-coil sound? Well, watch this...
Three things from this. The Strat was always identifiable, but only just; in the final section, all of them could have been Les Pauls, because that's what distortion does; otherwise split-coil is more or less the same as single-coil (because that's what coil splits do, only take output from one of the humbucker coils).
Turns out the PRS McCarty's have coil taps, not splits. Here's the difference...
My PRS McCarty 594 SE ticks the double-humbucker and coil tap boxes. The Paranormal Tele kinda ticks the offset look and Tele / Jazzmaster pickups. In theory that leaves P90's, about which someone said...
Okay, so given the range of tones I have recently understood I can get by making the 594 and Princeton do tone acrobatics, I'm not sure this is going to fill any gaps. P90 guitars are expensive unless it's a Yamaha Revstar, weighing around 9lb, or a Sire L7V New Gen which is a Les Paul shape and maybe heavy as well.
I would like a Jaguar or a Mustang (who wouldn't)? But. The affordable ones do not have the original toggle switches and circuitry. Guitars with the original circuitry cost over £2,000 even in the second-hand market. Without the extra switching, it is not quite the real deal. I'm not a collector.
So to fill what I'm missing in the sounds I have, I need a Strat. So, now, uh, this is where it gets awkward.
The Fender Stratocaster is the most played electric guitar in music history. Yet 1) the whammy bar is in the wrong place; 2) the tremolo goes out of tune too easily; and 3) the controls are in the wrong place; 4) Fender's quality control is erratic, on a wall of the same model Strat, no two will sound the same; 5) it does not look cool. Yes, you read that right. It's too long in the waist. Those horns are disconcertingly thick close up. Some of the headstocks can be over-large. It’s a bloke’s guitar, and I’m not a bloke.
By contrast the Telecaster is discreetly, unutterably, cool. Zippo lighter cool. Ray-Ban cool. Lou Reed played one for years. The Boss plays one. Julian Lage plays one. The Tele came in a vision from God to Leo Fender. It is the guitar that shows up and plays. Hell, Mike Bloomfield played one at that notorious Dylan Newport gig. Ralph Macchio uses one in the duel with Steve Vai in Crossroads. What more do you want?
Well, those position 2 and 4 Strat tones for one thing.
The Player II series offers chambered Strats and Teles, putting them within my weight requirement, so a visit to Epsom or Guildford is in the offing.
There's birthdays, and un-birthdays, and Christmas and un-Christmas. Plenty of occasions.
There are two basic electric guitar sounds: humbuckers (Gibson) and single-coils (Fender). There are variations of single-coils - Strat, Tele, Jazzmaster, P90 - and each has a slightly different clean tone, but sound very similar when going into distortion, as this shows...
Humbuckers are the same: a common characteristic sound with differences around the edges which fade when going into distortion. Watch this...
Can split humbuckers can get close enough to a single-coil sound? Well, watch this...
Three things from this. The Strat was always identifiable, but only just; in the final section, all of them could have been Les Pauls, because that's what distortion does; otherwise split-coil is more or less the same as single-coil (because that's what coil splits do, only take output from one of the humbucker coils).
Turns out the PRS McCarty's have coil taps, not splits. Here's the difference...
My PRS McCarty 594 SE ticks the double-humbucker and coil tap boxes. The Paranormal Tele kinda ticks the offset look and Tele / Jazzmaster pickups. In theory that leaves P90's, about which someone said...
When compared to Fender-style single-coils, P90s are noticeably fatter and warmer. They don't have quite the same sparkling top end or quack, but they compensate with a more substantial midrange and beefier low end
Okay, so given the range of tones I have recently understood I can get by making the 594 and Princeton do tone acrobatics, I'm not sure this is going to fill any gaps. P90 guitars are expensive unless it's a Yamaha Revstar, weighing around 9lb, or a Sire L7V New Gen which is a Les Paul shape and maybe heavy as well.
I would like a Jaguar or a Mustang (who wouldn't)? But. The affordable ones do not have the original toggle switches and circuitry. Guitars with the original circuitry cost over £2,000 even in the second-hand market. Without the extra switching, it is not quite the real deal. I'm not a collector.
So to fill what I'm missing in the sounds I have, I need a Strat. So, now, uh, this is where it gets awkward.
The Fender Stratocaster is the most played electric guitar in music history. Yet 1) the whammy bar is in the wrong place; 2) the tremolo goes out of tune too easily; and 3) the controls are in the wrong place; 4) Fender's quality control is erratic, on a wall of the same model Strat, no two will sound the same; 5) it does not look cool. Yes, you read that right. It's too long in the waist. Those horns are disconcertingly thick close up. Some of the headstocks can be over-large. It’s a bloke’s guitar, and I’m not a bloke.
By contrast the Telecaster is discreetly, unutterably, cool. Zippo lighter cool. Ray-Ban cool. Lou Reed played one for years. The Boss plays one. Julian Lage plays one. The Tele came in a vision from God to Leo Fender. It is the guitar that shows up and plays. Hell, Mike Bloomfield played one at that notorious Dylan Newport gig. Ralph Macchio uses one in the duel with Steve Vai in Crossroads. What more do you want?
Well, those position 2 and 4 Strat tones for one thing.
The Player II series offers chambered Strats and Teles, putting them within my weight requirement, so a visit to Epsom or Guildford is in the offing.
There's birthdays, and un-birthdays, and Christmas and un-Christmas. Plenty of occasions.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)