Another Bench, Another Tree-Shaded Path (Abbey Wood)

Abbey Wood is at one end of the Elizabeth Line, and is next to the very little remains of Lesnes Abbey. The Wood is reached by going upstairs from the platform, crossing the road, turning right and taking a left turn into a small park. Walk along the bottom edge, down the narrow path, and you’ll see the Lesnes Abbey bit. The wood is all the green stuff behind it.

How The Far Left Creates The “Far Right”

It’s Newton’s Third Law: a batshit-crazy policy will create a batshit-crazy response. More formally, the intensity of the reaction to a new policy will be in proportion to the extent it varies from commonly-held opinion (if there is one) multiplied by its probability of being turned into law and / or institutional policy.

Instruct medical staff to ask middle-aged men if they are pregnant, and have middle-aged men walk out in mind-blown astonishment.

Push for the adoption of an expensive, noisy and inefficient technology (heat pumps, electric cars) on ideological grounds, you will get a reaction pointing out that it is expensive, noisy and inefficient and your policy is dumb.

Continue to pile on privileges to one group of people, and some of the other groups are going to bear a huge grudge against the over-privileged.

Tell people that a woman can have a beard and a p***s, and a lady writer with more money than Croesus will ridicule the idea on Twitter.

In ordinary circumstances, this would be called “healthy pushback” or “engaged public debate”. But to the Far Left, there can be no debate, since its policies are perfect. Resistance is pure evil.

The “Far Right” only exists to the extent there is a “Far Left” pushing extreme policies into legislation and institutional practice. The Far Left cannot get rid of the Far Right, so it must silence it. Freedom of speech is the freedom to express one’s exact degree of support and admiration for the policy. Anything else is hate, terrorism, Far Right extremism.

Gain and Volume

Yep, it’s tech time again. There are numerous explanations of these two features of an amplifier, and all those I have seen don’t explain it very well. Mostly because they don’t use a model of an amplifier, which I’m going to do.

Picture your guitar amp. At one end is the guitar jack, which carries a tiny, tiny current from the pickups. If that was transferred across to the speaker, we wouldn’t hear a thing. Nothing like enough power. So we need some more power from somewhere - which is why the amp is plugged into the mains, to feed a transformer that feeds the amp’s circuitry. That feed is run through some kind of “amplifying widget”, which might be a valve, a transistor, some combination of both, or some other device.

This widget takes the guitar signal in one connection, the transformer feed in another connection, and combines them in such a way that the signal from the guitar affects the current from the transformer flowing through the widget. (See electronics textbooks for details.) If the widget works properly, the output will be a signal that looks like the input from the guitar, but on a large-enough scale to drive the speaker.

In summary…

Guitar input signal -> widget
+
Current from transformer -> widget
=
More powerful copy of the guitar signal from widget to the loudspeaker

Gain controls are on the power input side of the amplifying widget. Turning the Gain up increases the amount of power into the amplifying widget, and increases makes the output signal… Gain at 0 = signal direct from guitar with no increase in power, Gain at 10 = guitar signal amplified to maximum input power

Volume controls are on the power output side of the amplifying widget. Turning the Volume up lets more of that power pass to the speaker, so it gets louder… Volume at 0 = no output power, Volume at 10 = as much out as the Gain creates. 

Now here’s the thing. The amplifying widget will change how it responds as more power is applied to it. That’s why turning up the Gain often produces distortion (unless the widget has a kilometer of “headroom”). But when we adjust the volume, it won’t change the way the widget works, because the volume is on the output side, after the widget has done its thing.

However, adjusting the volume will affect the power going to the speaker, and that will affect the way the speaker reacts. Less power and it won’t be able to transmit the fine details in the signal loud enough for us to hear. Which is why a crunchy distorted tone at high volume turns to a nasty fizz at low volumes.

So that’s that.

Recording With The Focusrite Scarlett 2i2 and Helix Effects

Regular readers will remember the problems I, and everyone else with a Katana, had with recording and playback through the thing. I gave up in the end.

I’ve been trying recording on the iPhone / iPad, using the Lexis Audio Editor, which is intuitively easier to use than the iOS Garageband. For my simple mind, anyway. Record with the mic, playback via the Apple dongle and the Katana Aux In. It kinda worked, but not inspiringly.

Then I got the Helix HX Effects. I’ve been playing with it exploring its functionality for a while. I had registered that it treated the SEND and RECEIVE ports as blocks that could be put in the signal chain. I had got as far as using a RECEIVE port / block to receive music from the phone and pass it on to the Katana.

That works because the Helix software lets us create two logical paths (A and B) between the device inputs and outputs. It’s actually easier to see-and-do on the control software than it is to explain (which is how it should be). Put all the guitar-related effects on one path, and use the other path to take the play-along music. Join the paths together at the end, so the play-along music is unaffected by the guitar effects. Works nicely.

One afternoon, I started thinking about recording again. I don’t want to use headphones, and I want to hear the sound of the guitar from the amp. That was always a problem in the past, because I was getting the guitar effects from the amp. Ever since I got the HX Effects, the amp has been set to the Clean channel and all the effects turned off. EQ’s at mid-day. It’s almost tonally transparent.

The following question now makes sense. Can I use a SEND port on the HX Effects to send a copy of the signal to an interface? The interface connects to the laptop via USB and a recording program can use the USB as an input. Also, can I take the audio out from the laptop and plug that in to the Aux In of the Katana. The HX Effects is connected to the Katana via the L/Mono output socket as usual.

I have one signal path from the guitar to HX Effects to the amp; a separate path from the HX Effects to the laptop to the recording software; and another from the recording playback to the amp. So there’s no feedback loop.

And even better… there’s no way background noise can get into the signal chain because there are no microphones!

I’m using Audacity. It’s recording software with some extras, rather than a full-featured DAW, so it will do nicely for my simple mind. I made sure it could record one track while playing back another, which is kinda key to the whole thing. I can.

All I need to be able to do is send one copy of the signal to the L/Mono output, and another copy to a SEND socket. Which is kinda the reverse of bringing in a signal from the RECEIVE port.

I tested everything I could without actually getting the interface. Everything worked the way I needed it to.

Pull the trigger. The interface of choice for the amateur is the Focusrite Scarlett 2i2, which has two inputs: either instrument jack plug or mic three-pin. (Mics need a lot more signal boost than guitars.) I need one short guitar cable (male-to-male jack plugs) to connect the HX Effects SEND to the Scarlett instrument in.

Arrives within 24 hours thanks to Amazon Prime. Took about fifteen minutes to set up, including an online firmware update. Another five minutes to set the recording volume for the guitar.

Now I have to deal with the well-known phenomenon of “recording klutz”, where hitherto fluent playing suddenly misses the beat, because someone turned the red light on. Also with the fact that my playing is, well, not quite metronomic.

Which is why we record ourselves. It’s one thing to know you’re a bit clunky while playing, but another to hear it in playback. It’s so much more embarrassing in playback.

The Geometrical Kit In The Playground Picture

This was taken around midday. In the school holidays. The park was empty. Sensible people were wandering round air-conditioned shopping malls. Or in air-conditioned cinemas.

The Path Leading Into the Distance Picture (Maryon Wilson Park)

It’s still hot. I went out to the Big Smoke yesterday and even though the temperatures were 10F lower than last week, I was still beat by about 15:00 and had to retreat to a shower at home.

The Empty Park Seat Picture (Maryon Wilson Park)

It’s been hot, and I can’t take the heat like I used to be able to. I’m not so sure that 80+F temperatures were even a thing when I was a young lad. I was in no fit state to move the day after this trip.

Empty park seats are one of those subjects that photographers are drawn to: Geoff Dyer has a chapter on it in his book on photography The Ongoing Moment. So that’s all right then.