Cafeteria

 

Charing Cross Road. Do not ask the price of egg and chips and a cappucino. It's not 2015 anymore.

People Who Need To Feel... Anything

There are two views of the Good Life.

The first is that a good life is full of good works: what matters are the kind, useful, constructive, healing, things we do.

The second is that a good life is full of feelings and relationships, and it does not matter what those feelings and relationships are: what matters is to feel and relate intensely.

It's binary: your temperament is one or the other.

You may, however, believe one, while living the other. Believing that life is for the feeling, but living sensibly, is very common amongst former drunks, junkies, coke-heads, divorcees, and the like, not all of whom enjoyed the ups and downs of their chaos. Chaos is not emotion. You can have emotions and still have a clean and neat kitchen. People who live for feelings often do good works, but for them it's a by-product not a goal.

The people who live for feelings don't just want rainbows and candy-floss. Emotions need to be sweet and sour. Anger, disappointment, frustration, grudges, revenge, contempt, resentment, are just as good.

Football fans are like this. They would like their team to win, but what they really don't want is a nil-nil draw after ninety minutes of faultless defensive play on both sides. They want the roller-coaster. It's the same as gambling: losses work the emotions as much as wins.

Any emotion is better than no emotion. Any relationship is better than no relationship.

This is only dysfunctional from the point of view of Stoicism, Protestantism, and other such fun-sucking approaches to life, many of which on closer examination turn out to be associated with aristocracy and established wealth. In many societies, vigorous, engaged, volatile, emotion-based action and reaction is prized and honoured by the masses, and is thus highly functional, providing the emotional roller-coaster ride that makes living, well, Life.

Therapists who emphasise having "good" emotions and "good" relationships , or at least removing the bad stuff, dumping the users, losers and abusers, are in fact closet Good Works people. Emotions and relationships can only be "good" and "bad" relative to some goal or purpose. Whereas to the emotion-centric emotions and relationships have intrinsic value for good or ill.

Understand that "sour" emotions are as satisfying, if not more so, than "sweet" emotions, and many puzzling things become clear. Especially why people stay in so-called "dysfunctional" relationships, or take stupid risks, or believe daft things: it's all about the emotions. Take away those and their lives become empty, no matter what good things they may also be doing.

When emotion-centric people get older they can often seem to flip. Suddenly they don't like drama, and aren't interested in people who cause problems. This isn't because they have suddenly acquired a goal in life: it's because the rewards they get from the emotions are not worth the energy it takes to create and maintain those high-cost emotional states. The same cost-benefit calculations that kept them in and around chaos, drama, users and losers, now make them choose to live a quieter life, because the costs don't go down, but the benefits do.

Decisions, Decisions

So here I am at the wrong end of the age range, seemingly attempting to do something I don't really have the temperament to do. Which means, I need to adjust what it is I think I'm going to be doing and expecting of myself, if I'm not going to be wasting my time. If such adjustments are possible.

At this point, I want to remind you that I totally do not mind doing spider-walks (look it up on You Tube) for minutes on end. I have something to build on.

Most people studying music academically pass the next Grade, then the BMus, or whatever, then to get a gig somewhere. Others may want to find a bunch of guys to play with, and then get a gig somewhere, while picking up what they need to know along the way. It's the gig somewhere that's the end goal. These days, that "gig" might be a TikTok channel on which they demonstrate preposterous virtuosity.

Here's what I could aim for: be able to create a loop of chords that have a sense of direction and some harmonic spice, and solo over it.

Creating a loop with a Looper pedal is nowhere near as easy as people make it look. Putting together some chords isn't just some random thing either. Neither is soloing, if it's done with any taste. The chords could come from other people's songs.

In support of this, there is...

Musical Literacy: reading music, making sense of what is in the score, identifying chords etc

Sight-reading: a) connecting the notes in the score with the notes on the instrument; b) playing those notes in a musical and fluent manner. (if the notes come from a bunch of Miles Davis solos, so much the better!)

Basic Composition: how do chords go together? what creates a sense of direction? How do solos fit over the chords (aka "playing the changes")?

Familiarity with the instrument: where are the notes? Where are the chords? (Electric: where are the tones and effects?)

And in support of that, there is...

Technique: a) getting the fingers where they need to be when they need to be there, and no more (no going down shredding rabbit holes); b) learning to use a Looper pedal, and how to set up the gear to do so.

What about genre?

Classical / Flamenco / Folk / Acoustic Blues / Jazz Solo. Fingerpicking is beyond me.

Metal. Horrible un-musical shredding.

Rock / Funk / Soul / Jazz-funk. The guitar is basically an accompanying instrument. I'd need to be in a band.

Jazz. I'll have a post about jazz, but in summary: chord-scale is no more musical than shredding; cocktail / lounge jazz is cringe; Older styles, fine.

Ambient. Possible, but as a secondary subject.

Noise (Sonic Youth etc). Pass.

Playing classical pieces for solo cello and violin: do-able, but short on self-expression!

Electric Blues / Blues-Rock. This is what I imagine myself playing to an audience if I imagine myself playing to an audience.

So, yeah. Looks like I'm going to learn to play the Blues.

And you will get progress reports.

Making Music Needs Commitment

90% of all the guitars sold in a year are bought by people who give up playing in the first year.

Learning to play music is hard work. In the case of stringed instruments, it is literally painful, since you need to grow hard fingertips on your string-stopping hand.

Learning to play a musical instrument is physical training in the way that gymnastics, ski-ing or skateboarding are. Except all the physical movement is in the hands. The pianist Leon Fleisher describes musicians as "athletes of the fine muscles". An instrumentalist needs to be able to do things with their hands that is as far away from anything an ordinary person can do as a 10-second 100m sprint.

Different types of music require different movements of those fine muscles. Classical is its own regimented thing: the aim of classical training is to make everyone sound the same. So they can play in orchestras. Outside that discipline, where individual style and sound are an asset, in Rock, Indie, Jazz, Folk, Blues, Funk, Prog, Flamenco - all the details are different. Leave Europe and try to jam with a band playing "African" genres and you'll be lost: those styles require totally different fine muscle movements and sense of rhythm.

Learning those fine movements takes time. Learning how to use the stylistic gestures of a genre takes time. Learning how to play with "feel" takes time. Working out how to do all those things your way takes time - and classical guitarists are rigorously trained to sound almost identical.

This variation of fine muscle movements, and the time it takes to learn everything, means that, at the start, a musician has to commit.

The people who make some kind of success at music choose a genre (which might be "classical music") and stick with it. Sure, a lot of players can play party pieces in other genres, but they don't live there. They live in their chosen genre. Just like the Baroque musicians did. They had to commit at the start or they couldn't learn enough in the time.

Nobody drifts into playing classical guitar. They may have done it as a child, but as they go through adolescence, they may realise they don't have what it takes (as some of the other pupils they have seen obviously do) to be successful and they don't want to be a guitar teacher for the rest of their lives, so they need to get a "useful degree", or they realise that they aren't nerds, but career and long-term hobbyist musicians are. If someone is playing classical guitar for a music degree at 21, they chose that. The same applies to kids who form bands when they are teenagers.

Musicians are called, the lifers feel that nothing else is worth doing, and the most important thing is to play. Because that's the only thing that counts: extra musica non vitam est. They may need to hold down a day job, and it doesn't have to be something precarious and part-time-y (they are musicians, after all, not actors), but it's a day job for money. Not a career.

I can't do commitment (a philosopher who commits is an activist or an ideologue, not a philosopher), and I cared about what kind of life I lived 'outside'. This is also philosopher thing: philosophers who go into business have to do as well as the rest of their character will let them.

I do have the ability to stick at something once I've decided to do it. Philosophers are allowed to have temporary enthusiasms.

My History Of Playing Music (Short Version)

Let’s go back to Junior school (7-11 in the UK). In those days everyone played the recorder in Music lessons, and Music lessons were as compulsory as maths. Our Music teacher was Mrs Poole, and she was the second most-feared teacher in the school (the most-feared was Mrs Toombs). She wasn’t scary, but she was firm. In a class of twenty, she could hear one descant recorder playing the wrong note. She knew what she wanted from the class, and we were under no illusions that anything less would do. The handful of us who showed any kind of ability at all got to play the coveted treble recorder, and the real virtuoso got to play the tenor.

Everyone in the school could sight-read simple decant recorder pieces. It wasn’t even regarded as a thing. It was the minimum ability required not to feel hopeless.

I went one better. I could play a new piece by ear, as long as someone next to me was reading. Either that or I was following their fingering from the corner of my eye. My sight reading declined as a result.

I tried playing guitar in junior school, and have memories of my mother taking me to a house heaven knows where in south-east London with a guitar teacher in it. The only thing I can remember is making a mess of sight-reading Little Brown Jug. That’s it. It didn’t last long.

Then I went to the Big School and that was the end of playing music.

I bought a guitar in, let’s say 1970 because I can’t remember the exact year. This time round, I practiced my scales and learned some cowboy chords (though we didn’t call them that then), but my left hand was not up to barre chords on that instrument, and right-hand finger-picking was… I tried, I really did, but you know when you’re trying something that your body just isn’t equipped to do? I played through the blisters, the hard skin on the fingertips, the disappearance of my finger-prints and their re-appearance again. I went from barely being able to co-ordinate my left hand with the plectrum in my right hand, to being able to rip out strings of notes almost as fast as John McLaughlin on Bitches Brew.

And there I halted. Metro Bulo Bouvo Dodo. Commute, work, drinking, sleep.

I had a steel-string acoustic guitar I played with a plectrum, and I listened mostly to electric guitarists. That doesn’t work very well. I was not playing for an audience, I was not aiming to play Bach, nor was I aiming to learn to play songs. At one time I had a Joni Mitchell songbook, and a Steely Dan one, and I could play those chords (not knowing that such books bear only a passing resemblance to reality), but it never left me feeling smug with satisfaction. Occasionally I played rambling single-string extemporisations which would engage some of my more tangled emotions.

I would play along to tracks I liked - as long as they didn’t change keys too often. Sometimes I’d have good ideas, other times I’d play some routine licks, and occasionally I’d barely be able to find the key. There was no purpose behind this, just entertainment. I was the very model of a home noodler.

Then came the Lockdowns, when you’d think I’d be playing every day. I didn’t. Weeks would go by without me even picking the guitar up.

Which is more or less where I was eighteen months ago.

For some reason I think playing or learning the guitar is going to be my Next Big Project. I will finally learn all the things I should have learned right back in the day. Minor 7 sharp third chords. The Phrygian Armenian scale. How to play “rhythm changes". Passing tones on a III-VI-IX blues shuffle. Getting enough strength in my left hand to play barre chords on the acoustic. Learning to stretch out my fingers to get those chords that spread over five frets - in the first position. Picking up a working familiarity with DAWs and hence composition. All that good stuff.

That music students spend years learning.

As if I have anything else to do with my time.

There’s a BUT isn’t there? You can hear it.

One Journey Ends, Another Begins

I've spent a couple of months thinking that I'd gone as far as I could with the Katana and the Les Paul, and needed some new gear to improve things. Who isn't tempted by a nice shiny white Jazzmaster with a red flecked pickguard? And of course, Valve Amps. And pedals. Lots of pedals.

A £3,500 Matchless combo with £1,500 of pedals on a board (more easily spent than you might think) would do the trick nicely. An £800 Tall Trees amp into a Celestion-equipped speaker cab, with the same £1,500 of pedals, would sound different-but-as-good, again, with the proviso about playing volumes. I heard a fabulous little vintage Fender amp in my last visit to Regent Sounds on Denmark Street, a snip at £4,999. They also have a nice 5W Cornell Traveller Combo for £695 (at time of writing). Lots of options, but do they sound convincing at 60-75 dB?. (Many of these amps have attenuators between the power amp and the speaker, but if it was easy, Ox Boxes would not sell for four figures.)

That's the key. if I want to hear what I'm playing through a loudspeaker, playing at bedroom volumes may compromise the amp's ability to produce the sounds I'm looking for, so that there's no significant improvement over the Katana (or any other modeller). Which means I might wind up testing the patience of guitar shops around London, while I don't find anything in their stock that sounds worth-the-money better than the Katana 50 II at 60 - 75dB.

(You Tube reviews are absolutely useless in this regard: the majority of them wind up playing distortion in the high 80's and low 90's, if not more, often displaying SPL meters proving how loud they are playing. I could stretch six rubber bands across a dustbin, mic it up, run it through a distortion pedal, and it would sound amazing at 95dB.)

If I'm content to listen over headphones (wired, too much latency with bluetooth) then I have options based on Multi-FX / Amp Sim kit, DAWs and plug-ins. This is what the professionals do when they are playing in venues with built-in PA systems or recording studios: these take output direct from the electronics, while the band will be listening through in-ears (live) or headphones (studio). Professionals only need an actual amplifier for venues without a PA.

Look at where a lot of those You Tube Guitar Gurus work: sitting on a computer chair, in front of an iMac running a DAW, surrounded by amps, cabs and other gear, with an extensive knowledge of how various computer programs - on the Mac or embedded in a piece of kit - work. Yep, in the digital world, everything becomes a computer, and everyone becomes a computer user.

No thank you. I already did that for a great many years. (What about the BOSS Tone Studio? To me it does not feel like 'using a computer'. It feels like 'twiddling a lot of dials', which is an analogue thing to do.)

So faced with the fact that spending money on gear might leave me right back where I started but a few quid shorter, I went home and had more serious attempts to get the two main tones - Marshall-ish and Fender-y - that I wanted at the volume levels I needed. (Yes, that amp is as good as everyone says it is. Somewhere in it is the tone you are looking for, though it may be the result of an odd combination of settings.) The details are in a previous post. Since then, that restless urge to upgrade or buy different gear has waned.

The final touch was setting the Neck pickup height by ear. This will cause Techs to roll their eyes, but if it's what it takes, it's what you have to do.

The Les Paul / Katana Journey is declared ended.

Now I’m starting to think about what I play, and that's really baking my noodle.

And In Other News... Society Has Collapsed

You are not crazy.

This is f*****d up.

Look at the idea of a society and somewhere near the centre is the idea of a bunch of people in the same geographical country, speaking dialects of the same language, using the same currency, paying taxes to the same Government, sharing often ineffable ‘values’, ‘attitudes’ or ‘behaviours’, and with some minimal idea of co-operating to make each others’ lives better. Add in some criminals, psychopaths, screw-ups, misfits, alienated souls, cheaters, grifters and shirkers, but not too many, and you have something we would recognise.

Societies have a background level of dysfunction and cacophony, because people have conflicting aims, different abilities, diverse work ethics, and odd ideas about how much they need to work to pull their own load. Plus there's the class / caste stuff and the whole Us and Them thing which people seem to like, as well as behaviours and attitudes from dark corners of the human soul. Add in changes in fashion, technology, prices, salaries, and the blizzard of sales pitches and uninformed BS masquerading as advice and education, and there's enough to make anyone older than about thirty-five feel like the-kids-these-days... Most of that does not count as dysfunction, unless it actually interferes with the smooth functioning of the economy, or starts producing too many people with justifiable reluctance to take part in the institutions of the society. Too many tax-paying non-participants can skew a society the wrong way.

How much dysfunction makes a breakdown?

Some of the many ways a society can screw up are:

Failing to provide jobs with a future for its young people 

Putting the way of living of ordinary parents beyond the means of their children An inadequate or overly ideological education system 

Having rules that hinder the development of a thriving economy Failing to take care of members of the Armed Forces (1) 

Failing to provide an efficient and effective Police force and justice system Allowing petty criminals to go un-punished (2) 

Failing to keep its borders secure (3) 

Having too much wealth accruing to too few people at the expense of the ordinary worker (4) 

Failing to re-train its workers to keep up with economic change, and especially hiring outsiders in favour of re-training (5) 

Allowing inflation to get too high for more than a year (6) 

Raising taxes that are wasted by inefficient management and poor policy-making (7) 

Being distracted by activists agitating for extreme policies that affect small proportions of the population (8) 

A Civil Service that forgets it works for the taxpayer, rather than for another Civil Service (9) 

Class warfare (10)

And of course, the Big Three... Attempting to invade Russia, occupy Afghanistan, or stem the spread of a virus by Lockdowns.

(So-called 'Advanced Economies' can add: failing to get food on the shelves, petrol in the pumps, water from taps, gas from the Mains, electricity from the Grid, buses at the stops, trains in the stations, phone signals from towers, data down the Internet, GPs in the surgeries, doctors and surgeons in the hospitals, money from one person to another...)

I'd say... four or more and your society has collapsed in a heap on the floor, and someone needs to call an ambulance.

Was there ever a time the UK dodged most of these screw-ups? It wasn't bad between 1954 (when rationing ended!) to 1990, even if there was double-figure inflation in the 1970’s and million-plus unemployment ever since, but after the Maastricht and Lisbon Treaties, it starts to roll downhill slowly. After about 2010 the speed picks up, and by 2016 the cracks are spreading as the media / academic / activist / Human Rights Industrial Complex declared class war, in retaliation for the Brexit vote, on the ordinary taxpayers who paid their salaries.

Four years of that, and faced with a bad case of the flu in February 2020, British society started to crack, and in March 2020 collapsed in clouds of dust. What we’re seeing now are people wandering around in the rubble, pretending that everything is OK because, well, they're still getting paid. And they have Mondays and Fridays off working from home.

This is the aftershock of the collapse. Most of the same things are still wrong. Nothing much has changed.

It is not some short-term temporary aberration. It was a long time coming, and it will be a longer time leaving.

(1) The treatment of discharged soldiers with disabilities is a scandal. As is the accommodation they have while serving. 

(2) Pretty much like a large Democrat-run city in the USA from 2019 onwards. 

(3) Looking at you, Angela Merkel. Also the UK Home Office. 

(4) This is a serious problem in the USA. Less so in the UK. 

(5) Every company and government ever. On the other hand, workers need to be prepared to accept re-training. 

(6) Weimar Germany and Zimbabwe at the top of the league, with the UK in the 1970's at the bottom. 

(7) 40% of UK taxes goes to the NHS. We can't see our GP for four weeks, and unless you are actually bleeding out in front of the staff, the operation will be a year hence, and postponed twice. 

(8) How the exact **** did Stonewall get to pronounce on the suitability of anyone for anything? 

(9) For about thirty years, the British Civil Service thought it worked for the EU. It still wishes it did.

(10) This is a thesis in itself I will sketch in another post.

The London Sinfonietta / Mixing Desk

The London Sinfonietta with the Marius Nieset quintet. One honk from a tenor sax can be heard at the back of the Queen Elizabeth Hall no problem. Ditto any of the instruments. But they have a house PA there (two sets of speakers hanging from the ceiling each side of the stage, very black so they fade into the background) and everyone plugs in. So we're not really hearing the sound of the band on the stage. We're hearing the sound of the band picked up by mics, processed and amplified. 

My hi-fi has a clearer sound and better soundstaging than the QEH's PA. Maybe than the QEH acoustically. Though we would never know.

The Les Paul / Katana Tone Journey - Continued

(Updated at publication date)

The Guitar

Flat-wound 10's and liking it. 

The base setting for the dials is "all the 7's", and the pickup selector default position is in the middle.

I experimented with pickup height, and in the end did what would make a well-bred tech shudder, set the heights by tone. The neck is practically flush with the surround, and the bridge is about where a good tech would put it. Switching from neck to bridge does not lose or gain volume - the SPL meter on my iDevice confirms it. All the problems I have had with the characteristic Epiphone Pro-Bucker tone have vanished. 

The Amp

I was determined to get that Marshall-ish sound. These are the Panel settings

and this is the all-important EQ setting

The power setting is 0.5W. This is not optional. Neither is the 12dB attenuation. I have no attenuation on the 4kHz and 2kHz bands, because that's where a lot of the distortion comes from.

Use the Neck pickup, turn the tone dial to 0 and the volume to 8/9, play above the eighth fret and you will get that creamy 1960's distortion sound. There's a reason no-one needed pedals back in the 60's. Turn the tone dial back to 7 or 8, and all that crunchy Marshall-ish goodness comes back. 

This tone does not play well with anything except the Limiter. But then, if you're using it, you won't want any other effects.

Having done that, I went for the Fender-y sound. These are the Panel settings

And these are the all-important EQ settings.

There's a trick. Just a little touch, the lightest sprinkle, of the distortion effect, to put a bit of bite into the sound and stop it sounding like a sodding jazz guitar. 

The power setting is 25W. This is not optional either. 

This sound is a base for putting the modulation and time effects over: it isn't really a tone in its own right.

Neither of these sounds are the "dials at 12:00" type, and in fact are quite extreme. If they weren't, they wouldn't be iconic. There's a lesson in there somewhere.

I have simplified the options, the idea being to approximate a pedals - amp - speaker set-up. The Chain has all the effects (except Reverb) are before the Pre-Amp.

Recording via USB

I've tried. Lost cause. Too much faffing around. If I want to record, I'll get the specialist gear.

Moleskin, Covent Garden

This starts with the weird Saturday morning train times. I can get into Waterloo way-too-early or just a little bit too late, for a 10:00 AM appointment. So I get in way-too-early and to pass the time, take photographs of the shops in the area around Covent Garden.

(I know. Who lives at number 40?)

He Shot, She Shot

On our recent walk round Hampstead Heath, Sis suggested I take a photograph of this pond. So I took...

Sis took a look via the screen and asked if she could borrow the camera. She took...

Sis is, as you will realise, a Proper Artist, while I am a mere snap-shooter.

Hampstead Heath (The Red Coat)

 I loved the way those Victorian and Edwardian painters would name a picture after some tiny detail off to one side. The modern version used to be calling everything "Untitled (Mary in her Boudoir)" or somesuch. Do painters still do that?

Symphony in Blue (The City Skyline)

 Oh yes, a mock-Whistler title. Clearly a chap who has read some art history

Five Guys

 

It could be from Boston or some other older US town, but it's Garrick Street.

Kensington Garden Fountains

 

Yep, it's catch-up time again. I've been delving from one rabbit-hole to the next for a while, with results that will be described when they happen.

Candid Snaps

 

I love snaps like this: it's the range of things going on. The concentration of the delivery driver, the expression on the passenger's face, the foliage, the glimpse of sea front, and the White Cliffs in the distance. And that intrusive level crossing barrier.

"Experts" and "Authorities" - Not

One of the more darker corners of the culture that the Lockdowns shone an unintentional light on, was the idea that Government enquiries, official investigations, and explanations provided by high-ranking officials and academics with their hands on the money-tap, form a coherent officially truthful story of the major events in our society and economy. Disagreeing with the details of this story makes one a dissident whose speech should be restricted from general circulation, and offering competing stories makes one a 'conspiracy theorist' who should be denied access to the media in any form. These "authorities" include "the distributed network of knowledge claim gatherers and testers that includes engineers and politics professors, security experts and journalists" according to Professor Neil Levy, one of those philosophers who appears now and again to suck up to an indefensible orthodoxy.

"Politics professors, security experts and journalists" are not "experts" at anything, but some engineers might be.

If there were "experts" and "authorities", who might they be?

One group of people they could not be is Government, Civil Service and other institutions of the State. It's not a Government's job to tell the voters the truth. Never has been, never will be. One job of Government is to maintain civil peace and order, and all sorts of abuses get hushed up for that reason. Another job of Government is to relate things to "broader interests and issues", which also leads to all sorts of hush-and-lousy-compromise. Governments are rubbish at knowing which issues really need to be played down and which need to be made public, but it's still their job to try to get it right.

For this reason, anyone who holds a Government position, for example Chief Medical Officer, or who is in the pay of the Government, such as every academic in every university, agrees with Government propaganda policy, not because it might be right, but because it's part of their job description to do so. That disqualifies their opinion on any subject in which the Government has an interest.

One rule of thumb is that anyone who says they are an "expert" on something, isn't. Those who know, know how little they know and how ambiguous that little is: it takes real ignorance to be certain and authoritative about anything.

Another rule of thumb is that when a journalist cites an "expert" without also citing that "expert's" name, source of income, qualifications and relevant experience - as would be required in any court - the person they are quoting is a paid shill pushing a policy.

"Experts" must be un-connected with any commercial enterprise, political cause, social movement, religion or other such organisation that has an interest in the issue. Else their support of that institution's position will be considered to be bought-and-paid-for.

"Experts" must only give evidence about the matters-of-fact on which they are "experts", which is generally a fairly narrow range.

Outside that narrow range, "experts" are as ignorant as the person sitting next to you this morning on the bus / train / coach / traffic queue / Zoom screen.

Even within an "expert's" subject, just because someone knows a lot about the facts of an issue does not mean they will be any good at devising the relevant social or legal policy. The Lockdowns showed us that most "experts" are fanatical left-leaning socialists who think more Government-spending and monitoring is the answer to everything.

Did it always used to be like this?

Yes.

But the world wasn't as complicated, inter-connected, and highly populated. There weren't welfare states, and there wasn't as much money to be made by quite so many people. There was no pharmaceutical industry, and the media was way smaller than it is now. Fewer people depended on the Government for their salaries, so the influence of Government was not as all-enveloping as it is now. Your GP routinely made house calls.

Back in the Good Ol' Days<™> it didn't matter that the experts knew even less than they do now. Governments didn't do dumb things, unless it was to invade Russia or attempt to occupy Afghanistan.

Now it matters. And Governments do dumb things year after year after year.

Chasing The Tone

Everyone goes on and on about tone (1). It's in the fingers. It's in the wood, the pickups, the pots, the fretboard, and even the nut and tuning heads.(2) It's in the pedals and the settings. It's in the amp and the speakers.

John Coltrane and Wayne Shorter both played tenor sax. Tenor saxes are made to sound the same, because it's a band instrument. The player can make a slight difference with their choice of reeds, and their breath control. So you know how you know it's Wayne Shorter or John Coltrane playing?

They play different notes. They play different phrases. They structure phrases differently. They sound different not because one uses a Selmer and the other some other make: they sound different because they play different.

Tone is in the music.

Play My Favourite Things, with fuzz, blues drive, lots of reverb, chorus, slow drive, whatever... it's still My Favourite Things and it's still a showtune. At no point does it become a metal anthem. It has a mood all its own, and turns all the tone-gear into a sound effect.

There's a video of Jimi Hendrix playing an acoustic guitar. He sounds like himself, playing an acoustic. Because he's playing Hendrix phrases and chords.

Bad news for people chasing that SRV / Hendrix / Beano Album / Dave Gilmour / whoever tone: if they want to sound like Dave Gilmour, they will have to play like Dave Gilmour.

All those pedals and amps are sound effects. The sound effects are an extension of the electric guitar - and in John Martyn's Glistening Glynbourne, the acoustic guitar as well.

Ambient is all about the sound effects, not the tone. So are a lot of post-rock instrumentals. The guitarists in rock bands don't have a tone, they provide the sonic backdrop required for the song, which changes from song to song. They might have a personal style of soloing, or creating fills, or a distinctive rhythm attack, and that's how you know who it is. Not because they of the distortion setting on their RAT pedal.

Learning what sound effects are available is part of learning to play the electric guitar. Every guitarist should know how to get a Blues tone, a fat jazz tone, a biting bridge rock 'n roll tone, and so on. Even if they never use them. That's knowing your instrument. (The Katana is outstanding in making that possible at a stupid low cost compared to buying a valve amp, interface, mic, pedals, and supporting gear.)

The search for tone is partly learning your sound effects, but it's really the search for your voice.


(1) Defined as the distinctive sound of a given guitar or guitarist, that only vanishes after excessive amounts of metal distortion or ambient effects.

(2) According to John Lill, the sound of a guitar is in the scale length, the position of the pickup(s) from the bridge, the height of the pickups, the pickup wiring, and the settings on the tone and volume pots.

Turn Up The Subwoofer For Older Classical Recordings

So for some reason, I turned up the little Rel T-Zero while playing some Dvorak the other night. It's usually on 9:00 - 10:00 for jazz, dance, rock and pop. It could take 10:00. Since classical music doesn't have loud bass, I turned it up to 3:00. (Maximum is about 4:00.)

Everything became fuller, the sound-staging was clearer, and the damn violins stopped being so shrill.

The LS-50's start to fall off after 80Hz, being 6dB down at 47Hz. 3dB is neither here nor there, but 6dB is noticeable. I've set the crossover for the T-Zero at 120 Hz. If that sounds bad, it amounts to the range between the open sixth-string E of a guitar and the 5th string B-flat. Four notes in the key of F - and not the popular ones.

Most of the lower end of the big orchestral instruments get some help from the subwoofer (all the open strings of a double-bass are below 120Hz). As I found when experimenting with the EQ on the Katana, the sub-harmonics make a difference, so all the notes from A below middle-C down will get thickened out as well. Why the violins stop being so shrill, I'm not sure, but it happens.

Older recordings, especially analogue recordings that are subsequently digitised, respond to this well. Modern recordings have more bass in the original signal, so the subwoofer doesn't need to be as loud.

Well worth experimenting, should you have a subwoofer and older recordings of orchestral music.

iPhone SE vs Fuji X-E4

Take a look at these photos.

The first is from the X-E4. The colours are rich, the details and sharpness are out of this world, one can zoom in and get all the details. But the sky is blown out. That might be me being incompetent, but I don't think so. That's what happened with film, and Fuji are all about making digital photos feel like film. So the sky blows out.

The second you will have guessed is from the iPhone SE. The detail is almost all there, the colour is almost all there, but it doesn't have the presence of the Fuji photo. It does have, however, a detailed sky with clouds and blue bits. I've noticed this before: my iPhone camera seems to be good at not getting blown out by skies, and I'm thinking that's because the iPhone is a way more powerful computer than the Fuji, and the camera software can identify and treats skies differently to the rest of the photograph.

Thing is, call me old-fashioned, but I find the iPhone picture almost unrealistic. That's not how I saw the scene, as I was concentrating on the loco, not the background. I don't want all that background in such detail - it's a distraction. I deliberately have my lens at f4 (f8 equivalent 35mm) to blur the background for that reason. The iPhone gives me detail all the way back. (There's probably an app for that, but I don't have it.)

I didn't do these consciously as an A-B comparison. So maybe if I had filled the iPhone frame with loco to the same extent that the Fuji frame, the iPhone would have blown out the sky.

Beyond that, there is something about iPhone photos, or at least those from the SE. They just don't have the weight or the depth of a real camera, and I grant that's partly because the Fuji has about four times as many pixels. I hadn't been able to see it quite so well before.

How Good Times Make Weak Leaders

Remember that saying Good times elect weak leaders; weak leaders make bad times; bad times elect strong leaders; strong leaders make good times? Let's start by discussing good and bad times.

These apply to the personal and professional lives of the upper managers, administrators and policy-makers (to include the elected legislators) of the major social, media, cultural, State, political and business institutions. Ordinary people can be suffering financial crises, unemployment, dramatic changes in the labour market, and all sorts of other stuff, or of course none of that, and it doesn't count. As long as the upper-middle class (roughly) is having a cushy time, those are "good times". In the UK, that was from the passing of the Maastricht Treaty to the end of 2015: The Second Belle Epoque. Their professional lives were easy, their dominant assumptions about society, culture and economics were unchallenged. China and Russia were behaving themselves, and EU made travel easy, and legislation even easier - all one did was tweak whatever Brussels threw out.

Your kids can't afford a place of their own, that's just the economy. A journalist's kids can't afford a place of their own, that's a serious flaw in the housing market.

If life gets too hard for the Rest of Us, we will start to object, misbehave, go on strike, and make the lives of the UMC (upper managerial class) difficult. That gives them an incentive to make sure that life isn't too hard for the common people.

We can complain about the economy all we like, but one thing we must not do is question the UMC's assumptions about the society, political institutions, and culture. That is perceived not as a threat to their survival - that would be mere economics - but their vision of themselves as Good People who deserve their privilege as a reward for their Goodness. The form that Goodness takes can vary from decade to decade, but since about 1990 it has been about having Broadly-Left social views and ideals. Before that, it was about having Broadly-Right ideals. Challenge whatever is their claim to moral superiority and you threaten them with the disintegration of their identities. In Good Times, the UMC is complaisant and herd-like, and jolly comfortable that is too.

Let's turn to what leaders are. A 'leader' in this discussion is someone who gets to set policy in a particular institution, so that following that policy protects us from sanctions imposed by that institution. A strong leader can bring people along with them, and isn't scared of imposing sanctions: a weak leader is unconvincing, and won't impose sanctions. (Yes, this applies to street gangs as well as Governments.) `Leadership' is contextual: someone can lead in one institution, and follow in another.

Leaders depend on holding an institutional position, and one gets to be a leader by occupying one of those positions. Having got there, it's up to the incumbent to do something, or collapse exhausted by the climb up the greasy pole.

Most of the rest of the people in the institution will follow a strong leader - though some will resist - or they will goof off if they spot a weak role occupant - though some will throw themselves behind policies they see advantage in.

Where do the strong leaders come from in the bad times? They were there all the time, but they weren't attracted by the jobs in politics, the upper reaches of public administration, and other high-profile institutional roles. In the good times there is too much go-along-to-get-along. Too many third-class people. Too much consensus. So the strong people go to where their qualities of character can be useful, or they find a lucrative niche somewhere and enjoy the decline.

Where do the weak leaders come from in the good times? They were there all the time as well. They didn't want the jobs when times were tough, and they wouldn't have been chosen anyway. But when times are good, suddenly good chaps who go along with other good chaps are exactly what seem to be needed. Strong-minded people are all very useful, but they can be a nuisance. In good times, we need co-operation, not conflict. Weak people love co-operating. There's nothing wrong with co-operating, as long as it's with people who share your goals. 'Co-operating' with people whose goals conflict with yours is called 'giving in'.

It's possible for one institution to have strong leaders, while another has weak ones, at the same time. Think of Sweden in 2020: a weak Government of consensus-driven politicians who fortunately were not in charge of public health policy. Anders Tegnell was, and he turned out to be nobody's go-along guy. The Swedes were the only country who did not succumb to the hysteria.

One way weak leaders damage their institutions is failing to fight back against strongly-led activist groups advancing avant-garde goals that threaten the current aims and values of the institution.

Weak leaders can be distracted by internal disputes and high-profile non-issues. This is what happened to the British Parliament between 2016-2021 (Brexit) and the US Government between 2016 and 2020 (the wonderfully named 'Trump Derangement Syndrome'). It's no co-incidence that various avant-garde activist groups made so much progress with their causes during that time, or that the UK and USA Blobs started taking on lives of their own.

How do the required strong leaders get back into the institutions when they are needed? In the UK, it's not by coup or vigorous campaigning. it's by a slower process in which the people who select and elect the candidates for key positions decide that the current lot are a bit wet, and some drier people are needed. A major donor to an activist organisation decides it no longer advances his various goals (it may have become a liability to their social standing or business interests, for instance) and withdraws their money. A Board of Governors decides the last CEO got on perhaps too well with everyone, and now they need someone who can focus on the business needs. These decisions will be made against the backdrop of what the various people sense to be a prevailing sentiment amongst the public - whatever that 'public' might be.

That mechanism relies on the general population containing a range of views on almost everything: this is why enforced consensus is a liability. A variety of views is needed, so that when the time demands this or that view, there will be people ready to explain, publicise and propose ways of implementing it. If everyone thinks, or makes a show of thinking, the same, when circumstances demand a response outside the permitted range, that society will fall victim to those circumstances. This is all basic On Liberty.

The idea that society consists of homogeneous 'Generations' is an artefact of the media and academic obsession with certain institutions, that are able to impose the appearance of a high level of conformity on the behaviour and opinions of the staff. As soon as the institutional control slips, so does the conformity.

Fresh Local Fish

The hut with the sign has fresh fish, the converted container is where they serve the cooked stuff. It's about a ten minute walk from Dungeness Station. Worth every step. There's a reason there was a crowd. 

Into The Sun - Away From The Sun

My grandfather, who was a mainstay of the Sheffield Photographic Society back in the day, used to say that one should never shoot into the sun. All sorts of bad things would happen: blown-out skies, over-dark shadows and the like. However, sometimes it works.

The Hill Garden and Pergola, Hampstead Heath

Get off the 210 bus at the Inverforth House stop. The house itself

is privately-owned, and the Garden and Pergola are at the back of it, but outside its walls. Walk down a path at the end of the House's walls and after no more than thirty yards is on your right is a gate that opens into the Hill Garden. Walk too fast and you'll go right by it. If you reach a path at the bottom of the incline, you've gone too far. The path will take you to the lower terrace of the garden, and on the left is a small building with a spiral staircase that leads to the upper terrace.   

It's well-worth the visit, though on the day Sis and I went, they were repairing something and had closed the Pergola itself because of "safety". 

We think the last photo is of is four yew trees grafted onto a common trunk and then left to grow and be shaped over, you know, fifty years or something. Gardens like this need the long view.

What is Jazz (Again): Laufey, Adam Neely, Andy Edwards

What is jazz, and why does it matter? Can we define jazz in such a way that it does matter if something is or is not jazz?

That's effectively what the National Endowment for the Arts did back in the 1970's when it decided that jazz was America's Classical Music, and started handing out grants and awards. Stanley Crouch and Wynton Marsalis locked the NEA into a definition of jazz as a) swing, b) blues, c) improvisation, d) in a pre-1965 style. Here's the list of NEA Jazz Master Fellows since it started https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NEA_Jazz_Masters. All great players, all started before 1965, which includes Ornette Coleman, Sun Ra and Cecil Taylor, who are avant-garde. Nope, there aren't many white names on the list, but then that's probably statistically representative of jazz musicians.

So maybe jazz is whatever the NEA says it is, and they have the money and publicity to prove it. In the same way the teachers at Berklee, Juilliard and all the other jazz schools get to say what jazz is, because they set the syllabus and award the credentials for a "degree in jazz". Both institutions adopt the Crouch-Marsalis definition.

Never argue with institutional doctrine: nobody is going to give up their income and status over a point of logic or a matter of fact. Change the subject: hit 'em where they ain't.

Let's do that. Because the heck with institutions. 

For Adam Neely, well-trained graduate of Berklee, jazz is a well-defined cultural practice, gate-kept by academics, the NEA, and some music industry figures. For Andy Edwards, West Midlands drumming legend and epic You Tube ranter, jazz is about creativity and technical accomplishment in the service of freedom and experiment. Which is why he fights for the word.

Sir Karl Popper told us not to fight over words. Fight for your right to party, but not over whether to call it a party.

The party is individual improvisation while playing as a member of a band, within self-imposed limits that might be about chord progressions, modal changes, tunes, or the style of a genre. That genre might be the Blues, Hard Bop, Be Bop, Cool, Modal, Time No Changes, Flamenco, or whatever else (even ghastly chord-scale).

It's about developing your own voice, and being able to find others whose voices fit with yours; it's about producing music that (some) people appreciate and want to hear, without turning into a hack. The material doesn't need to be original, but the expression needs to be sincere: a tribute band can do this, if they love the music they are playing.

Between (about) 1930 and (about) 1966, nobody partied as hard as a handful of men who gave us some of the most sublime, hip, and swing-ing-est music ever played. From Louis Armstrong through Lester Young and Charlie Parker to Miles Davis, Gerry Mulligan, John Coltrane and Charles Mingus, to name a few. It was the chosen music of the misfit, the hip, and people who wanted to stay up late drinking. It was a fabulous moment, but it passed, as all fabulous moments must do. And we have it on record.

Does it matter what "jazz" is? If you're after that sweet NEA moolah, or the recognition of a bunch of old guys and academics, or playing at venues or for records labels which are snobby about these things, then yes. Otherwise NO, it does not. If you're a professional musician, what matters is making money and enjoying what you're being paid to do. If you're an amateur, what matters is that you can have a good time playing with some people who aren't totally weird. And if you're a, uh, home musician, what matters is that you get out of playing whatever it is you want to get out of it.

Sheerness

My Nana (grandmother on father's side) lived in a tiny terraced house about a hundred yards from the seafront in Sheerness. Sis and I used to spend a week in the summer with her when we was young, while my parents did whatever parents do when they drop the kids off with the grandparents. Nana had a background that stopped one generation into North London, Mr Nana was a mystery she never talked about, but he must have left early, because my father couldn't remember him well. She had dark olive skin, and paid half her bills on her winnings at cards. Or that's what everyone told me.

The main employer on the island must be the port, through which a large proportion of imported cars arrive. Also fruit and meat. And timber. There isn't a lot of industry, the tourism is mostly day-trippers during the school holidays, and there is one large school. I think back in Nana's day, the kids went to school on the Sittingbourne bus.

Look up "backwater" in the dictionary and you'll see a picture of Sheerness.

Anyway, we went there recently (no matter your route, you will change at Sittingbourne for the shuttle service). The pleasant promenade with its open steps from the street has been replaced with a nasty lump of concrete, and the amusement arcade half-way along the walk into the town along promenade has all but disappeared. Nobody was selling candyfloss, but we might have come too late for that. There were a couple of bunches of lads playing football, and a lot of old people (which now means 60+ but in bad nick from hard lives) hanging around the streets having old people arguments. Also a couple of girls taking their younger sisters out in the pram ("That must be her sister, right" - The Eels). The seafront looked almost exactly as it did (cough, splutter) years ago, except a) the Council have let the tidebreaks rot, and b) on some of the beaches have been turned into hump-and-ditch "defences", whereas in Nana's day, all the beaches sloped into the water.

There were some geezers fishing, a few people walking and some cycling, but all were locals.

The Robert Montgomery is still out there somewhere, still allegedly capable of producing the largest conventional explosion the UK has or will ever see, but if there was any sign of it, I'd forgotten.

Across the river is Southend and its extension down to Shoeburyness. Not only across the river, but also in another economy.

Data is Expensive, Conclusions Are Cheap: How To Fix Research Fraud

It's probably just my echo chamber, but I've seen a number of YT's on scientific fraud recently. This does not shake my faith in Quantum Mechanics, because this isn't happening in real science. It's happening in psychology (evolutionary or otherwise), behavioural economics and other such pseudo-subjects with lousy replicability, and a tendency to pass off small samples of undergraduates as sufficient data. I've read my share of pop-science from these people, and while I've been amused and intrigued, I've never been convinced. The samples are too small. The conclusions are too darn cute, and fit way too well into the current academic Goodthink. Also a lot of it is just plain wrong.

What does one do about all this nonsense research?

Realise that statistical analyses, summaries, graphics, and conclusions are cheap.

It's the data that matters.

Any research project funded by the taxpayer must make its raw data publicly available, along with a detailed description of how the data was obtained.

With no controls over access. In CSV format so we don't have to write complicated scripts to read it.

And at no charge. We already paid with our taxes.

Give us the data, and we will draw our own conclusions, thank you. Research will become valuable because it produces data that people use.

Not because some publicity-savvy academic produces an eye-catching claim.

The infamous thirty-undergraduate sample will simply vanish.

Researchers who provide lots of dimensions of analysis that can be correlated with ONS data will get readers, those who use a few that maybe can't be matched against anything else will be passed by.

It works like this.

Hypothesis: children from single-parent families do better at school than children from two-parent families. 'Do better' means more and better grades at GCSE. So get a sample of single-parent households with kids who just did their GCSE's and another of dual-parent households with kids who just did their GCSEs. Same size, as there are plenty of both.

Recognise that the initial question is attractive but silly. It's the kind of question a single-purpose charity might ask, and if it liked the answer, would use in their next fund-raising round.

"Single-parent homes" are not all the same. Neither are "dual-parent homes". Families are all different. And they are an effect, not a cause. Parental behaviour, sibling examples, household economics, the location, the religion and the culture are causes.

Here's your chance to get some data-kudos.

Get a decent sample size. 10,000 or so of each.

Get the results for the kids. Grade by subject. With the exam board. No summarising or grouping. I've got a computer to do that if I want it.

And get the number of GCSEs the kids were entered for, because Head Teachers game the stats like crazy. While you're doing that, find out how else the Heads game the stats.

Get the details about those households. Age, religion, nationality, gender, political allegiance if any, car owner, rent / mortgage, highest level of education reached by parent(s), subject of degree, employed / self-employed / unemployed / retired / not able to work, occupation if working, postcode (all of it), place of work, large or small employer, private or public sector. Income and sources, expenses and spending patterns. Savings. Help from relatives. Drug use. Exercise regimes.

How long had the parents been divorced before the GCSE exams? How long had they been co-habiting or married? What are the childcare arrangements? What are the visitation rights? How often are these denied? Has the divorced partner lost touch with their children? Are the divorced parents still co-operating with each other over raising the children? Has the custodial parent moved home? How far away are the parents from each other? Was a family member in jail when the kids were taking the exams? Is the father in the dual-household away a lot? Do any of the parents work unsociable hours? Do they use daycare?

See how that data could be interesting to certain groups? Even if they weren't interested in GCSE results?

Did the parents arrange private tutoring? Help their children with their homework? Do the children have long-term health problems? Did they have health problems at the time of the exams? Were they able to revise? What is the school's record in the league tables?

You get the idea. Ask a wide range of detailed questions to cover the vast complexity of human life. Notice when a colleague demurs at something that allows the data to show the influence of (enter taboo subject here). Find somewhere else they can be useful and send them there. Do the same to yourself. The question you resist the most is the one everyone wants answered.

Test the questions. Test the interview process and the online questionnaire (if you must). Do A/B layout and question-order tests. Learn and make adjustments.

Now go out and ask the questions. Tabulate the answers. No leaving anyone out because they missed a bunch of answers. I can deal with that in my analysis. No corrections for this or that. No leaving out the answers to some questions because of "sensitivity" or "mis-interpretation".

That's where you put in the effort. If too many people give incomplete answers, go recruit some more people. Comparing those who gave complet(er) answers to those who didn't to see if there's a pattern.

Put the raw results up on Github or wherever. Along with the questionnaire, the times and dates of each interview, and a video of the whole thing if possible. I want to see their body language to judge which questions are likely to have, uh, aspirational answers. (Okay, that's asking a lot.)

I'll do my own analyses.

The researchers can publish a summary and conclusion if they want. With a keep-it-simple press release for the science journalists. The rest of us will dig into the data and draw our own conclusions.

The people who don't do data analysis can get some popcorn and follow the disputes.

Data financed by private money? Make it public or we get to treat it as self-serving.

Faced with some conclusion about medicines or human behaviour, ask if the raw data and research protocols are publicly available. If the answer is NO, or "you have to pay", dismiss the conclusion, because there is no evidence that you can judge for yourself. Without the data, we have to take their word for it or not, which means we need to judge their competence, honesty and career pressures. That makes it about the researchers, and it isn't. They may be insightful and honest, or they may be academic hacks. You can't judge that either. What you can judge is that they are hiding their data. If they are, it fails the smell test.

37 Great Portland Street

   (This is what's known in the trade as a "deadpan photo") 

 I did look at the chairs in IKEA, at Wembley, just for the pleasure of driving on the slowest parts of the North Circular. I have one of their Stradmon wing-back chairs, and since then they seem to have been through one cost-cutting round too many. Everything is one of four slightly muddy shades of grey (except the yellow and red Stradies), the material feels cheap, and the cushioning feels like it might give up too quickly. So I went back to the semi-fancy furniture shop, because looking for value is one thing, but being cheap is another, and I had one more round of sitting on all the chairs and then ordering two of the same swivel chair, one navy, one black. How much did they cost? Less than my hi-fi amplifier, more than the TV and DVD player.  

Southend Pier

(Southend Pier is the longest in the UK, because the Thames Estuary is very wide and very flat, and the pier was to disembark passengers from the London boats. There's a train from the land to the end of the Pier. It's all pretty neat and way more chill than Brighton Pier.)

The Big Day was calling the council to come collect the bed. I have to get it into the front garden, so it's a good thing the mattress is a bit flimsy (though "orthopaedic") and the base is two boxes made out of wood that takes the weight but not if you stood on it directly. The decline in the quality of our lives is hidden in such details. I had to clear the hallway to get the bits down - because I was Thinking Like A Designer and planning ahead. I moved the bases and mattress into the hallway the previous evening, and woke up at 06:00 the next day to wrangle them into the garden, covering them with some plastic against a light shower. They collect between 07:00 and 15:00, and showed up at 11:00. I spent the afternoon clearing the back bedroom and laying plastic sheeting over the fitted carpet, before laying sheets over the plastic. Because I was going to put a second coat of white over the walls and ceilings. I'm not really a pro, but I have learned some of the tricks.