...Really, Even If You Can Make The Katana Sound Like One (Almost)...

And it turns out we're not done with Katanas yet...

Roland / BOSS have a thing called Tube Logic. I'd forgotten about it. It's some clever stuff that makes power transistors (or more to the point, an Op-Amp) sound more like power valves. More. Like. Not "exactly like". This is rock 'n roll. Nobody can hear your nuances over the drums.

In a last desperate attempt, to do something about the ineffably "blurry" clean tone I was getting from the humbuckers on the 594 with the power selector at 25W, the Master volume at 09:00 and the pickups at 6 / 7... I turned the volume to 12:00 and dialled the guitar volume back to 2 to bring the volume back to polite levels. It sounded almost identical to the first setting, but, I don't know, 10 lbs lighter?

Then out of curiosity, I turned the power selector to 0.25W (which takes all of 6dB off the 1W loudness of the speaker), and dialled the guitar volume back to 8. Oh Holy Moly! When played through an HX Effects channel with a Tube Screamer, or another distortion pedal, the clouds parted, and the sun shone through. Okay, we're not talking Mediterranean, but it was good enough.

You'll notice this is entirely counter to how Real Amps work. To get a clean tone on a Real Amp, keep the volume / gain below a certain level, and crank it up to get distortion. Cranking up the guitar, while turning down the amp, to get distortion, or cranking up the amp, while turning down the guitar, to get clean, is just being silly.

But that's Tube Logic for you. (Plug in via the Power Amp In socket, to by-pass the K's DSP, which you don't need because you've got a multi-effects pedal.)

It works for me. (For now.)

I do need to dedicate three blocks (two EQ and one compression) of the nine in an HX Effects circuit to what amounts to managing the Katana so it sounds vaguely like a proper amp, but I can live with that for the moment.

There's one combination I'd like to test: a Big Trees

 through a 1x12 cab. Not cheap, but then neither is a decent home hi-fi. And I think it looks cool.

...No, You Really Do Need A Valve Amp...

Hope you enjoyed the little psycho-drama. It had no resemblance to the inner workings of my mind. At. All.

I'm an engineer at heart. I don't collect, and I don't have that "pride of ownership" thing. Things are tools: cars, guitars, screwdrivers, espresso machines, lawnmowers, hi-fi's, whatever. I buy one because it does the job, and I can afford it. I prefer it to be well-made, with good materials, be comfortable to handle, and work with as little friction and bother as possible.

Guitar amps are made to compete with the singer, the bassist, maybe a horn section, a keyboard, the guys at the bar ordering drinks, the pool game over in the corner, the trucks leaving and arriving outside, and (shudder) a drummer, that monster capable of rendering any other instrument inaudible with a flick of the wrist. Nuance and subtlety of tone pretty much vanish when the band strikes up. Guitar amps are just fine for that purpose.

Ah, you say, but they are used in studios as well, where there isn't so much competition. Take a look at a video set in a 32-track (or more) recording studio. Not only does the mixing desk have more controls for things you didn't even know could be adjusted, there are racks of industrial-grade electronics to distort, warp, and modulate sound in ways that are not available on a Helix or a DAW. What comes out of the guitarist's amp into the mic and back to the mixing desk is mere raw material. What's on the record bears zero resemblance to what the band heard in the studio. In the 1960's the amp might have mattered, but not so much since the mid-1970's.

Guitar valve amps are not for home playing. They only come on song around 70dB, and the sweet edge-of-breakup only hits at 85dB or so. Unless it's a, yes, the K-word, which has some trickery in its Tube Logic.

Okay. Let's look at the gear.

Based on Guitar tube reviews, there's a bunch of valve and modelling combos priced below £600 from Marshall, Supro, Vox, Fender, and other familiar names. The clean tone sounds somewhere between suspiciously pristine and just okay, while the cranked tone is thin and fizzy, or boxy and fizzy. The so-called boost buttons do not add harmonic distortion, but just noise. Many of them have quality compromises even more than usual, often in the quality of the speaker, tubes or other components. See Psionic Audio's review of the AC10C1 for an example.

Let's go over the £600 line, and stay there.

Guitar-amp manufacturers have a house take on the clean, edge-of-breakup, and distorted sounds: the usual characterisations relate to the clean sound. Roland is super-clean; Fender is "scooped"; Vox is "chimey"; Marshall is "mid-range"; and so on. Each range has three variations on weight: 20-25 lbs, 40-50 lbs, and 60+lbs. Only the first of those will be going upstairs, so if you want an AC15 or a 4x12 Marshall stack, either you need to know a couple of strong lads prepared to get them up the stairs, or the studio needs to be in the garden or on the ground floor, and you will need a trolley.

So the questions for a bedroom player are: a) do I like the clean tone , b) can I get the thing up the stairs without getting a hernia, c) does it sound good at low volumes, d) will it treat my favourite pedals nice , e) what's the cool factor?, f) can I afford it?, g) will it make that much difference?

a) excludes Fender, because their clean tone is full of itself, and c) excludes Roland because even the JC-20 is WAY TOO LOUD at about 2 on the dial. b) excludes any combo over about 12kg or so, and hence restricts me to the smaller 5-15 watt combos, or a 1x12 and a head. f) depends a lot on the answer to g). To be fair to most modern gear, c) and d) are generally YES for the clean tone, and NO for edge-of-breakup or distortion.

e) Cool factor. That's a tricky one. None of the usual combos or head+cabinets are that cool. Even Marshall stacks are iconic rather than cool.

You Really Need To Get A Valve Amp...

My guitar-playing friend says that at some stage I really must get a valve amp, and I know he's thinking Fender. It's on my "things to vastly over-think" list.

Okay, so, which one should I get? Cue watching endless Guitar Tube videos comparing this and that.



(And that's just one of a zillion)

Wrong question. Better question: what benefit am I looking for or expecting? Is it realistic?

I mean, I've damn near tamed the Katana with the HX Effects. It does a really good impersonation of a valve amp clean tone. What more do I want?

I want edge-of-breakup! I want to sound like Tony "Bruno" Rey or John Roggio on their Saraya albums.



(Pouts. Folds arms defiantly.)

(Soothing but condescending tone) That's only for the Big Boys who can record and play at 100+ dBC. Now have a wash and change into your pajamas. Don't do that. It is not the end of the world. No. Life is not empty and meaningless. Don't be silly. Have you done your homework?

(Stamps foot.)

If I can't have that, I don't want one!

(Runs away to cry in secret.)

From Pendulums to p-Adic Numbers - A Philosophy of Mathematics

For quite some time I have been working on an essay on the philosophy of mathematics. It's gone through many changes since I first started jotting notes on the commute and in various cafes around London, and bears no resemblance to anything I thought I would write when I started. It isn't complete and probably never will be, since there are always more insights and examples to add. It does have most of the philosophical points I want to make, and talks about most of the maths I feel even half-way competent to discuss. So I'm going to make it available for whoever needs some light entertainment. It will get updated from time to time.

The link is here (link)

It's an attempt to answer these questions:

How is it mathematical techniques and tools are so suited to describe physical processes? 

How do mathematical concepts work?


What kinds of knowledge does mathematics provide?


How do we know that a theory does not harbour fatal inconsistencies? 

How do mathematicians get and develop their ideas?


How do we judge the value of a technique, theorem or subject? 

What constitutes progress in maths?

It proceeds through discussions of these issues in the context of differential equations, functional analysis, infinity, functions, numerical analysis and recursive functions, and the various types of numbers, from the counting numbers to the p-adics. There's a discussion of axiomatics and model theory and a brief look at category theory; the way mathematical ideas are structured and what mathematical knowledge is (epistemology); how we might appraise different mathematical theories (methodology); and what constitutes progress and then a discussion of how to get ideas and solve problems (heuristics).

What there isn't is detailed presentations and rebuttals of existing philosophies of mathematics, what I've called the “where Smith mistakes Jones’ summary of Brown’s critique of Frege’s

misunderstanding of Kant” school of scholarly discussion. 

Rigging

 

You know which boat this is, and where it's located. Worth clicking through to get a better view of all those cables and ropes, none of which are called "cables" or "ropes" by Real Sailors, but then. I'm not a Real Sailor.

Charlton House

 Most of it is open to the public, but sadly there's no historic furniture, art or decoration there. It's a ten-minute walk up the hill from Charlton station, and worth an amble around the park, a cup of coffee and slice of Victoria cake in the cafe. 

Negative Space, London Bridge Station

All the Kool Photographers talk about using "negative space", but I always thought it meant they exposed those part of the picture incorrectly. But this one seems to work.

 

Bleak Mid-Winter Suburbia

It's not enough to get out for a daily walk. The walk needs to be pleasant, or at least neutral, to look at. Hedges on country lanes, with an occasional glimpse across a valley, or perhaps a path across a flat moor, or maybe even along a canal. Not round the outside of an industrial estate. But we make do and carry on.

 

One Wall of the Walled Garden, Golders Hill Park

 

Golders Hill Park is a couple of stops up the hill from the station. It's well worth the visit.

Room Resonances

Room resonances are a real thing, but... a) the wavelength has to match the room dimension almost exactly.

While it looks as though there are "as many notes as we want", in Western music there are only 88 notes. But not really. There are actually 12 fundamental notes - starting with A₀ at 27.5 Hz and ending at A♭₁ at 51.91 Hz. Double those frequencies to get the next octave; double again to get the next; and so on until reaching C₈ at 4186 Hz.

So a room that supports a standing wave (resonance) at, say, C₂ 65.41 Hz, will support standing waves at all the other C's as well. The sound will be quieter with each jump up or down of an octave. However, people only worry about bass resonances. That's because notes below a limit that varies with the room, are non-directional, appearing, as it were, at once everywhere in the room. (Above that limit, the notes become directional, which is how you ears tell you that the drums are right in the middle of your speakers.) Think of the bass notes as being produced in the middle of the room and going in all directions. If one of the dimensions of the room fits the note, and if there isn't soft furniture in the way, up pops a resonance.

If you're really unlucky you might get three different resonances: floor-to-ceiling, side-to-side, front-to-back. Highly unlikely, but possible. Chances are you will get one. There won't be others, unless your room changes dimension somewhere (sloping walls or ceiling?). Most people will get one. And that's it.

My listening room is 2.5m high, so a slightly out of tune C♯₃ / D♭₃ of 138.6 Hz will cause a stomach-churning resonance. Here's the thing: the 3-octave is used for effect, not for carrying the tune. That's usually done an octave higher where resonances don't happen. Bass players famously "play the root note" (unless they are Jaco Pastorius or Jack Bruce), and C♯₃ / D♭₃ (or C♯₂ / D♭₂) are not the most frequent root notes. Also, the instrument would need to be slightly out of tune to make my room react. That's why it happens so infrequently.

That doesn't mean I don't get quieter and louder patches if I move the subwoofer around. Very much so: interference isn't resonance. Its current position was chosen because it produced the most uniform level throughout the room. It's very un-nerving moving from one chair to another and suddenly hearing more bass.

Anyway, here's a list of the notes most likely to cause resonances, along with the wavelength. Measure the room (wall-to-wall, ceiling to floor. You can ignore diagonals because corners create bass boost, but do not create standing waves) and if any of those three numbers are within 0.02m (20mm) or so (depends on how reflective the material is), you will likely get resonances

D♭₃      2.47m 

C₃          2.62m / 130Hz 

B₂          2.78m 

B♭₂      2.94m 

A₂          3.12m / 110Hz 

A♭₂      3.30m 

G₂          3.5m 

F♯₂       3.71m 

F₂           3.93m 

E₂           4.16m 

E♭₂       4.41m 

D₂          4.67m 

D♭₂      4.94m 

C₂          5.24m 

B₁          5.56m 

B♭₁      5.88m 

A₁           6.24m 55Hz 

A♭₁       6.6m 

G₁          7.0m 

F♯₁        7.42m 

F₁           7.86m 

E₁           8.32m 

E♭₁       8.82m 

D₁          9.34 

D♭₁      9.9m 

C₁         10.48m 

B₀         11.12m 

B♭₀     11.76m 

A₀         12.48m 27.5Hz

How do you stop a resonance? Only big, obtrusive, and expensive bass traps made of materials sourced in an Ardennes forest and hand-assembled by elves in a workshop outside Dusseldorf will do the trick... it says here on the PR handout.

Resonances result from room dimensions. So change the dimensions of the room. No builders needed. Nice full shelves full of absorbent things: paperbacks are always good, just don't line them up precisely. LP's or big art hardbacks may not be a good idea if the resonances are at higher frequencies. This will work for side-to-side or back-to-front resonances, but floor-to-ceiling you are pretty much stuck with. Unless you put nice thick carpet in everywhere, which will damp it a little.

Hi-Fi Lessons (2): Useful Numbers

You will wind up learning a bunch of numbers by heart:

The sensitivity of your speakers in dB / m at 1 watt 

The diameter of your speakers' woofer and tweeter 

Twice the power = 3dB volume increase 

10 times the power = 10dB increase = "twice as loud"

30dB = what you think is silence - but actually isn't 

40dB = when no-one is talking on a new train 

50dB = it's not quite loud enough 

60-70dB = about the loudness of a normal voice. Or my acoustic guitar. 

80dB = the volume audio reviewers say they listen at - until their partners yell "TURN THAT DOWN" 95dB = the volume of the taped announcements on London Underground trains

343 m/s = speed of sound (roughly) at sea level 

Frequency = 343 / wavelength in metres; wavelength in metres = 343 / frequency;

27.5 Hz = frequency of lowest note on the piano, and known to music (outside stunt instruments) 

41 Hz = lowest note on double bass 

261 Hz = middle C - literally the middle of the piano keyboard, and the note between the treble and bass clefs in the Grand Clef 

440 Hz = note the oboe plays for everyone else to tune to, otherwise known as "A440" 

4,186 Hz = frequency of highest note on the piano, and known to music (outside stunt instruments)

Hi-Fi Lessons (1)

My hi-fi journey began when I realised that some music seemed to be coming from a corner on the upper right hand wall rather than from between the speakers. if you try to solve the same problem, here are some of the things you will do or realise...

You will measure every distance in your room when you start working on speaker positioning and room acoustics.

The stereo soundstage is real. It is, however, fragile. You really do have to be in the right place, and not move around a lot.

For a given room, there's only one right place for the speakers to be, and you have to keep moving them around until you find it.

You will re-arrange the furniture in your room (I'm assuming you live alone or have a Room Of Your Own) so you can set up the Magic Triangle with your speakers and listening position.

You will download a dB meter app.

Having the speakers in phase is real. In phase, the sound comes from between the speakers. Out of phase, there's nothing in the middle, and the sound comes from between each speaker and the nearest wall.

You have a dominant ear.

Sub-woofers improve the sound of classical recordings.

Room reflections are a real thing, which is why the Magic Triangle is a thing.

Of course the people marketing expensive room treatment panels and insulation are going to say that "soft furniture and carpets are not good enough".

Acoustics as an engineering practice does not apply to "small rooms", which, unless you live in a mansion, yours will be.

As for that stuff about wires... comes from telecommunications, which uses frequencies several orders of magnitude higher than hi-fi, when stuff like insulation capacitance matters. At hi-fi frequencies the effects are undetectable.

If you think that worrying about noise from computers via the USB is silly, plug a laptop into your Boss Katana via the USB control, and turn the channel from "Clean" to "Crunch" or even "Brown". Convinced? I was. The same goes for the Scarlett 2i2 interface.

Timeless Albums

What makes a "Timeless" album? When you play it, you enjoy it, it speaks to you, and there's no nostalgia involved. It seems it could have been made today. The rules are: one album per artist, except Bob Dylan, Miles Davis and John Coltrane, because respect for the Greats. John Mayall is there twice because The Beano Album is there for Eric Clapton. Picking a timeless Beatles album is arbitrary, as is picking one by Joni Mitchell, The Rolling Stones, John Martin, Van Morrison, and probably others.

I wavered over Cream / Traffic / Eric Clapton. The Bind Faith album is an All-Time Favourite, but it is of its time, as are the Cream albums. The Beano Album is the Blues, so it's Timeless. There are many fine albums from the 80's, but many of them sound like 80's albums, and while that puts them on the All-Time Favs list, it disqualifies them from the Timeless list. Except the Loose Ends and Level 42 albums, which get by somehow. I had The Crusaders' Chain Reaction on the list for a while, until I accepted that, ATF it may be, it has that 70's sound to it. Saraya's self-titled first album was there, until, let's face it, for all it's an ATF, it's as big-hair 90's as a band can get. Thriller is a Classic, but it is of the time. Some Classics are Timeless, and some are not.

I get that a Gen Z hearing ABC's The Lexicon of Love might be blown away by it, and hear it as a contemporary album, in the same way that we now hear the Beatles as the best indie band in the world, but this is about how I hear it.

Kinda by definition of what the list is, the majority are going to be from decades very past. I have Park Hye Jin, Charli XCX, Keep Shelly In Athens, and DJ Seinfeld from the last two decades, just to convince you that I am listening to new stuff. Just be thankful I haven't put Jason Aldean's Highway Desparado on the list.

Anyway, here's the list...

Abandoned Luncheonette - Hall & Oates 70's 

After Bathing At Baxters - Jefferson Airplane 60's 

Astral Weeks - Van Morrison 60's 

Band of Gypsies - Jimi Hendrix 70's 

Bare Wires - John Mayall 60's 

Bedrock - John Digweed 90's 

Before I Die - Park Hye Jin 10's 

Bless The Weather - John Martyn 70's 

Blood On The Tracks - Bob Dylan 70's 

Greatest Hits Vol 2 - Bob Dylan 60's 

Blues Breakers (Beano Album) - John Mayall 60's 

Broken Social Scene - Broken Social Scene 90's 

Blue - Joni Mitchell 70's 

Can't Buy A Thrill - Steely Dan 70's 

Crash - Charlie XCX 20's

Dark Side of the Moon - Pink Floyd 70's 

Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere - Neil Young 70's

Genie - The B. B. & Q. Band 80's 

Getz Giberto - Stan Getz 60's 

Goats Head Soup - The Rolling Stones 70's 

Hot Rats - Frank Zappa 70's 

In A Silent Way - Miles Davis 60's 

In Love With Dusk - Keep Shelly In Athens 10's 

Kind of Blue - Miles Davis 50's 

King of the Delta Blues - Robert Johnson 40's 

Level 42 - Level 42 80's 

Live at the Village Vanguard - John Coltrane 60's 

Mirrors (Remixed) - DJ Sienfeld 20's 

Rubber Soul - The Beatles 60's 

Solid Air - John Martyn 70's 

Second Toughest In the Infants - Underworld 90's 

So Where Are You? - Loose Ends 80's 

St Dominics Preview - Van Morrison 70's 

Texas Flood - Stevie Ray Vaughn 80's 

Timeless - Goldie 90's 

Zodiac Variations - John Dankworth 60's

JD Vance to Europe: You Have Been Served

My old heart fluttered when I read JD Vance's speech to the Munich Security Conference. You can find a transcript here.

tl:dr

As far as Vance is concerned, there are three major threats facing the West:

1) Mass immigration 

2) The creeping loss of freedom in the UK and Europe, where an unaccountable administrative class with a contempt for ordinary people, has acquired legislative power and is using it to enforce what look like Soviet-era restrictions on freedoms 

3) Oh, yes, that whole Russia-Ukraine thing. And maybe China as well. And spending proper money on defence.

The USA will ally with and defend countries that share its values, and right now it's not looking much like the UK and EU are respecting those values. So should UK and EU-area politicians carry on enforcing Soviet-era censorship and treating the electorate as fodder for their projects, the USA will walk away from defending it.

Which seems like a perfectly sensible position to me.

Learning Electric Guitar: Let's Talk About Ability

Playing classical music, the difference between me (or better, someone who can actually play with their right-hand fingers) and the latest crop of graduates from the music schools, who go on to record a CD of guitar music by composers who were once named only in the lesser-read pages of Groves, is one of degree: they can read music better, interpret better, play the notes with more confidence and accuracy, their technique is smoother. (The same might be said of the latest crop of Berklee graduates as well.) I know what to do to get to where they are, even if I don't have the energy to do it.

That attitude, when carried into rock or even jazz, is mis-directing. It means a focus on technique, and specifically fingerboard virtuosity. Berklee has convinced everyone that jazz is about music theory and the fingerboard technique to apply that theory.

But rock, folk, soul, funk, dance, ambient, post-rock, country, and many other generes, are not about technique. They are about music first. The technique enables the music, but does not direct it. There are some consummate professionals in country and jazz, but they aren't there because they can shred.

They are there because they can do what's needed, and contribute when it's needed.

The difference between me and Tim Pierce, Steve Lukather, Larry Carlton, Chris Spedding, and Steve Cropper... and that's a silly way to even start a sentence. It's not that they play better than I do. I could learn all the scales and chords and music theory and it still would not begin to close the gap. They have better ears and can hear what the chords are and what they need to play over those changes. They can compose breaks, riffs, solos, and in some cases, songs that got to the top of the charts. They understand and can play within the conventions of genres from blues and funk to rock and country. They can hear a solo or a song a couple of times and play it back. They can hear the effects another guitarist is using, and work out how to get those effects. It's the whole package; they are simply much better musicians and much more complete craftsmen.

While I was playing my trusty old acoustic, I never thought about all that. Taking up electric made me aware of it. I don't mind not having the chops, but finding out there was so much else I didn't even know about, and have subsequently turned out not to be so good at, has been... if I'm honest... disheartening.

Learning Electric Guitar: So Now Let's Make Some Music

The classical guys are trained to play the notes other people wrote. That's how classical music works now - though in the past, the composers were also often virtuoso performers (nobody ever shredded better than J S Bach) and the instrumentalists fill in chords and bass lines from the barest notation, while the singers were given a tune and expected to improvise around it. Mmmmm. Sounds familiar.

Contemporary classical is not how rock and jazz work.

If you learn and play the Rikki solo, you're either in a tribute band (when the closer to The Skunk the better) or you're not, in which case, you're just imitating The Skunk, and it's lame.

   

Putting something that recognisable, and that good, in the middle of an otherwise competent but not inspiring song would distract from the song. Nobody would remember anything else. Oh, yeah, that's the song where they use the Rikki solo. The song needs its own solo, as generic as it may be, and people will say "nice guitar". That's what the guitarist is hired to provide.

This is partly about the law. In rock and jazz, the Rikki solo and its like are protected by copyright - that can be worth the cost of enforcing. In classical, either the copyright has run out, or the fees are cheap, or it's not worth the cost of enforcement. Which is why all those string quartets can play Bartok and Beethoven quartets without bankrupting themselves, and why it is worth the musician's time learning to interpret them, and learning to read music in the first place. (Something similar applies to jazz, when it is treated as a classical form.) Rock musicians often don't read because they are not in the business of reproducing other people's music faithfully and interestingly.

Professional guitar-playing is about being able to learn a piece of music quickly; adapting your tone to the needs of the band / song / studio; and composing or improvising solos, breaks and backing phrases as needed. (Also showing up on time and ready to go, behaving well and getting along with everyone - but that's pretty much standard operating procedure in any job.) The fundamental skill in rock guitar, even more than jazz, is the ability to make music. Even a four-note phrase between the lines of the verse. (Especially that, now I think of it.)

The technique and music theory is an enabler for that. You can know a zillion scales and chord extensions, but if you don't have the taste to apply them when needed, you may as well stick to the basics. The distance between learning the technical stuff, and actually playing, is huge. It's about one's ability to hear what is going on, and play something that fits in with it.

Noodling ("improvising or playing casually on a musical instrument") is primarily therapeutic. How many people sit through a slow movie with an acoustic in their lap, playing scales, riffing chords and phrases, to fill out the time between plot points? Electric guitars open up the possibility of noodling with tone as well. One can noodle one's way into learning the Turkish Diminished Locrain scale, or into getting the cowboy chords at the tenth fret. It keeps the hands in and the fingertips hard. One can spend an hour comparing Santana's tone on the CD with what's coming out of the DAW or the digital pedalboard. One can noodle with aplomb, and one can noodle so badly that one disappoints oneself. (Sighs. Puts down guitar. "Time to do the washing-up".)

Learning Electric Guitar: Welcome to Tone.

Classical players do not have to deal with tone. Almost all acoustic guitars of the same size with the same strings sound almost the same. Pluck or pick near the bridge, and all of them sound snappier and twangier. Pick near the bottom of the fretboard, and all of them sound rounder and smoother. (This also applies to electric guitars, because it's physics.) It takes about ten minutes to appreciate the range of tones available from an acoustic, and another ten to convince yourself that, yes, resting your hand on the soundboard does take a little off the treble frequencies.

Start by trying each type of string, from flat-wound to pro-steels, to get an idea of what each one sounds like. I would stick to one string maker to keep the variables down. And try 9, 10, and 11 gauge. (Yes, it makes a difference. 9's feel thin against the fingers and a way easier to bend.) Play DR Blues 9's or 10's and you may never buy another brand again. 

 
I understand that kids these days do not buy amplifiers. They buy an interface (say a Focusrite Scarlett 2i2), plug it into their Macbook, make all the modifications in Garageband or some other DAW, and listen over a £69 pair of headphones via the interface loopback. This is one way to do it, and I understand that this is now taught in primary schools, or is just intuitively obvious to anyone under fifteen. The weakness in this method is headphone quality. If you do go this route, get decent headphones, say, Sennheiser HD560S or better. You ears will thank you.

Amps. Valve vs solid state vs modellers, Fenders vs Marshalls vs Vox vs Roland JC's vs Boss Katanas vs the list is endless. 

(Fender Blues Junior)

You Tube demos and reviews are a reasonable starting-point. YT audio is heavily-processed and that's before your laptop or phone soundcard gets at it. If an amp sounds bad on YT, it most likely will sound bad in your room. You should try them out in a store, but only if the resident shredder is being quiet.

The amps in You Tube demos are always cranked. Those lovely crunchy rock tones can only be obtained at 85 dB and more - just look at the dB meters in the background of Andertons videos - and with a valve amp. Half the time, there are pedals as well, but those might not get mentioned. Below that, you will only ever get a clean tone, with maybe a pinch of distortion from an effects pedal. It will sound different, but it won't sound... glorious. If you're playing jazz or blues, it's fine. But if you want that big stadium-rock / metal sound... you will need to record into a DAW, apply the effects there, and listen over headphones. Learning to use a DAW well does not happen in an afternoon. Or sound-proof your room.

Well-meaning people will suggest a Katana. 

It is excellent value for money, it has a pre-amp volume, a Master volume and an attenuator / power control, so it provides lots of bites at the volume control cherry. It has decent effects - many based on BOSS's own pedals, so they should know - built in, and control software that lays everything out really well. The only thing you need to know is how to EQ it so it provides a reasonable approximation to a "real" amp. 

The majority of recorded guitar sounds you have heard have been played through Fender amps, with Marshalls and Vox's a distant second and third. Fender amps are bright, light, clean, and like a sunny day on the beach. Marshalls are darker, heftier, distort more readily, and are like a funfair at night. Fenders are an easier place to start. To get close to that sound with a Katana (I don't know about the other modelling amps) takes implausibly extreme EQ settings. (See this post for details.) However, the base level valve amps (a Fender Blues Junior or a Fender Vibro Champ) are at least twice as much as a Katana or other modelling amp. 

Guitar amps are loud. For the same wattage, nearly twice as loud as a pair of hi-fi speakers. 1 watt through a 12-inch Celestion speaker 

will produce between 95-100dB, which is well into Health and Safety territory. 1 watt. You don't need 2, let alone 100. Watts are used as a proxy for build and component quality: within the same manufacturer and range, mo' watts generally means mo' quality. A Fender Blues Junior provides 15 watts, and the Vibro Champ provides 5 watts. That means the Blues Junior is about 5dB (i.e. not a lot) louder at full power than the Vibro Champ. All the volume is in the first watt. 

Having chosen your amp (on the basis of reviews, what your mates said, budget, volume, weight, and looks, as well as how it sounded in the store) you need to get a sound you like from it. This will not be done in an hour. You need to hear how the the sound varies with how high or low you have the guitar turned up, what effect the tone knobs have, and what effect the amp EQ controls have. Hearing the all-important difference between gain and volume, and finding out when to use gain (as little as possible).

Later on you can buy a digital multi-effects pedal, such as the Helix HX Effects, 

to start experimenting with effects. Compression, distortion, drive and fuzz; chorus, flanger, tremolo, phaser, and weird stuff like ring modulators. Reverb and delay. Those rabbit-holes go deep. Or if you never want a pension, you can buy separate pedals.

Now watch a video that explains how the guitar sound you hear on your favourite track is not actually what you think it is. What goes on in the mixing desk, and the mastering process, can make more difference than anything you're doing with your pedals. What it takes to sound good in your bedroom rehearsal space on your own, is not what it takes to sound good when playing live, and when in the studio.

It's all good nerdy fun. But it's a much bigger workload than guitarists had back in the 1960's. No-one tried to sound like anyone else, and there were almost no pedals. Now it's not enough to learn someone else's notes, you also have to get a good approximation of their tone. Effects were made in the studio by huge bits of equipment that cost as much as a house did back then. Now every guitar player needs to be their own sound engineer - until they get into the studio, if they ever do.

Learning Electric Guitar: The Guitar

If you must play electric guitar, make your first one a single-coil. Fender, Squier. A Telecaster 

for preference, though you should try a Stratocaster, because a Tele neck is like a half-a-baseball-bat. If you have a bit more money, try a PRS Silver Sky SE,

which is PRS's only single-coil guitar. The overwhelming majority of guitar sounds you have heard are single coils through Fender amps. Single coils keep their tone through a much wider range of volume change than humbuckers do. Leave the Gibsons, Epiphones, any other PRS, and the others, because getting a good tone from humbuckers is a long journey with many false ends.

Learning scales and modes, and all the fancy picking techniques, takes time and practice, but it isn't hard. Learning the chords, if you do it by rote, is harder because you need to learn to move all four fingers at the same time, like some ballet dancer on all fours.

Making sense of chords is a task. It does not help that guitar chord books show you "chords called A-something". Which is not what anyone needs. Which is a book that shows us "chords in the key of A" (A major, B minor, C♯ minor, D major, E major, F♯ minor, G♯ diminished - for a start) which are scattered all over those books. (An A minor chord is not in the key of A. It is in the keys of C, F, and G major, and also A, D and E minor.)

Everybody talks about the major and pentatonic scale "shapes", but nobody talks about the chord shape-sequences that make up the chords in a scale. You may get a mention of Nashville numbers and cowboy chords (all the chords you can play in the first position with minimum use of barre chords). Oh yes, and barre chords. That will take way more time that anyone lets on, unless you're a natural.

This may all come easily to you. Maybe you got the same brain wiring Davy Graham did - some of the Tik-Tok players undoubtedly have. Maybe you have perfect pitch, or darn good relative pitch, and you have picked up without knowing it what sounds are where on the fretboard, so you can play back a phrase after hearing it once. A lot of people can do that, but even more cannot. Maybe you can just play stuff out of thin air - that's what it takes to improvise. A lot of people can, and far more cannot. Maybe you take to reading tab, or to reading proper notation. Like reading words aloud, some people are better at it than others, almost from the start. Maybe you can form muscle memories quickly, but maybe you're like most of us, and you need to play-it-or-lose-it.

And the guitar is only half the instrument, unless you are going to play jazz, when you only need half the guitar (because jazz only uses the neck pick-up).

Minimum Age for Social Media

I read in our fine print media, that according to many people, the minimum age for social media use should be 16.

I beg to differ.

The minimum age for using social media should be 45.

Up to then, people should be...

doing homework, passing A-levels, going to university to make friends, read books (and online lecture notes) and get a degree, finding a job afterwards (good luck with that), finding somewhere to live that isn't at your parents (good luck with that as well), finding someone with whom to share your life (because that's the way I've always heard it should be, and really good luck with that), getting new jobs because promotions don't come with pay rises anymore (more good luck), having and raising children, and all that stuff. Which defeats most people even if they aren't wasting their time scrolling through the carefully-edited posts of their Facebook friends.

Social media is for professionals to advertise their services. It always only ever was about advertising.

Better living through less exposure to advertising.

And after 45 you won't give a toss who is selling what.

The Great Tone Journey (Cont)

It's been a long time since I've written about my Hunt For Tone. I know, you've been missing it.

I'm after tones that make me want to play more notes because the sound is pleasing. I'm not after the Beano tone (really). I have no desire to sound like Dave Gilmour (honestly Guv). I have accepted that in my bedroom, I must temper my ambitions. Also the one benefit of being an amateur is that one can sound like oneself. It's the pros who need to be able to sound like other people.

None of this applies to using a DAW and its effects and plug-ins. I'm still using old-school things like amplifiers and digital pedals. And guitars. With strings.

None of the Guitar Tubers who talk about tone come right out and say that at bedroom volumes (less than around 75dB at one metre from the speaker) it is simply not possible to get full-bodied crunchy, drive-y, distortion-y tones. Those come from valve amps, the valves need to be driven, and that requires serious amounts of dB's.

Pedals will not do the trick. I have tried every effect in my trusty Helix HX Effects, and while they get close if the humidity and air temperature is just right, none quite get the full-bodied sound we are looking for.

My Paranormal Telecaster has been the single most significant learning experience in the whole search. Single coils don't lose tone as the volume goes down, and don't gain it appreciably as the volume goes up. There's a change, but it's not from WOW to OH-UH. That's what happens with the humbuckers on my McCarty 594 SE. At 8 and above, the sound is all there. At 7 or below it goes flubby, rubbery - the strings feel like rubber bands under my fingers, which is totally a psychological effect, but we're talking about psychology here. Unless I use a fuzz pedal, when it's all just fine at 5 - and that's with the fuzz level control turned down a lot.

So I've learned to separate the effects of twiddling the humbucker volumes from twiddling the effect controls. I set the effect up with the Tele (single coils), and then check it on the McCarty (humbuckers). As long as the humbuckers are 8 or more, it usually works.

The EQ is the final part of the chain, and that is there to correct for the Katana, not the guitars. On a 10-band EQ pedal, this is +15dB on 62 and 125Hz, +21dB on 2k and 4k Hz, and -20dB on 8kHz and 16kHz. This requires two EQ blocks in the HX Effects, and the second one makes the difference.

The signal chain is now: guitar -> HX Effects -> Katana Power Amp In, and HX Effects -> Scarlett 2i2 -> DAW.

The basic clean chain is: LA Compressor -> '63 Spring reverb -> EQ1 + EQ2. 

Distortion pedals work better in <i>parallel</i> with the main signal chain. I put a Y-split after the compressor, place the Y-join before the Reverb and EQ pedals, put the distortion in the B-channel, set it up so it sounds good, then take some dB out at the Y-join. The Helix Y-connectors provide that functionality. I've got three drive pedals, each in its own panel. 

The settings work for both guitars, though the ODs sound different when hit by humbuckers or by single-coils. Which is the way it should be.

(edited 20/2/2025)

The Good Life Treadmill

Since people had time to sit around and think about stuff, they have wondered how they should live, and what a "good life" is. Not a fun life, or an exciting life, or a boring life, or a safe life, all of which are very easy to define in any given society at any given time, but the far more elusive "good life". Whatever that is. Kudos in funeral orations or obituaries? Nobel Prizes? A life lived without once appearing before the magistrates on some sordid or serious charge? What feels worthy, or righteous, or proper, or grown-up, or spiritual, or, well, anything that lets us claim virtue-status over the mere hedonists?

The psychologists have come up with just such a description. Not for what you or I would call a good life if we lived it, but what liberal, middle-class, postgraduate-degree-holding, urban-living, people familiar with the pop-culture would think they should say if asked what makes people feel as if they are living a good life.

Invariably it looks something like this (taken with minor edits from an actual source):

1. Healthy living and functioning

2. Having hobbies and recreational pursuits we enjoy 

3. Doing work that allows us to feel, from time to time, as if we are highly competent at the job 

4. Relatedness - intimate, romantic, and familial relationships 

5. Connection to wider social groups 

6. Feeling good in the here and now 

7. Inner peace - freedom from emotional turmoil and stress 

8. Feeling well informed about things that are important to us 

9. A sense of autonomy, power and self-directedness 

10. Finding meaning and purpose in life 

11. Creativity allowing self-expression

Seriously. This is what they came up with. Word for word. My heart sinks every time I look at it. It's so darn... icky-sweet-nice. Like those articles about Ten Things Dying Patients Say - Number Seven Will Surprise You. I seriously doubt anyone ever said they regretted working too hard. Everyone I've ever seen working long hours has been doing so to avoid going back to the Divorce Flat, or a housemates-marriage. But I digress...

There are no qualifications, no conditions. It's mind-snappingly obvious (I will feel better if I'm not exposed to emotional turmoil and stress, and if I feel good in the here and now? Gee, who knew?), and also highly non-specific (what the hey is "healthy living and functioning" in a world where there is research to condemn or praise any darn diet or exercise regime under the sun?). Which is intentional. It is supposed to get us arguing about what it means, rather than whether it should be there at all.

It misses the point entirely. A good life does not consist of doing a whole bunch of things so that you can do a whole bunch of other things so you can do the whole bunch of things again. That's a treadmill, and Marty Augustine, the gangster in Chandler's The Long Goodbye, knew it: I gotta make a lot of money. I gotta make a lot of money, so I can juice the guys I gotta juice, so I can make a lot of money, so I can juice the guys I gotta juice.

When we do something so we can do something else later, that's called "work". And too often 'later' never comes. Everything is work, from the moment we wake up to the moment we go to sleep, and even sleep is about productivity and health, so that makes it work as well. The psychologist's 11-point good life is work: we are not advised to have friends because hanging with the bros is a neat way to waste the time, but because it gives us a feeling of connection that forestalls loneliness. We even need to "feel good in the here and now" because then we might not take drugs, get drunk, eat too much, or spend time in dark corners of the Internet. Everything we do is always about something else.

When everything we do is about something else we're going to do, or not going to do, or something that might happen, or that might not happen, that's not actual living. It's not even training. It's prep-work - but without ever getting to the actual decorating, let alone having a pleasant room to live in.

Which is a problem, because the things we enjoy doing are the things we do for the sake of the process, not the result. So if everything we do is about something else, we're not enjoying anything we do. Because it's something we are doing for some other reason other than doing it. (See Gilbert Ryle's The Concept of Mind, the chapter on Emotion, for details.)

I'd suggest that a good life is one in which a sizeable chunk of what we do is about itself. It prepares us for nothing, and prevents us from nothing. It is not something we do so we can do something else. It might be something we do so we can get something done: ironing, taking photographs, writing blog posts, hanging with the bros, watching a movie, putting the world to rights, fixing the roof, washing the car, reading a history book, lifting weights... as long as we are doing it because it is what we want to do, and we don't want to be doing anything else in that time, and it's not being done because then we can do something else, or then we will have a tick against some To-Do List.

(Edited - a lot - 15/3/2025)

Who's The Customer?

Sounds like an obvious question with an obvious answer.

The customer is whoever buys it and uses it.

That works in Tesco.

No, wait. You got that shopping list from your partner. You're the errand boy, and you're paying, but it's your partner who will be using that stuff and expressing disappointment if you forgot the radishes and got the wrong brand of pasta. (You didn't know there was a wrong brand of pasta?) You are Tesco's customer, and your partner is your customer.

How about the NHS? You don't pay for NHS treatment, so you can't be the customer. Patients are just raw material for the process. Who pays? The Government does. Whose complaints get attention? Um. The staff, especially the consultants and surgeons. Maybe the managers listen to the politicians, but mostly not. The NHS does not have a customer. Which is why it is a self-contained, unaccountable, uncontrollable organisation. They are all going to get paid no matter how long the queues.

By contrast, Harley Street has customers. They're called "clients" because Harley Street is posh.

Who are the customers for universities? Foreign students actually pay with their (parents') own money. UK students "borrow" money from the Government to pay, but the debt is not distrainable and does not count against the credit score. UK students also borrow money from the bank, and get some from their parents. Sounds to me like they are just the means by which that money gets to the Bursar. Like NHS patients, undergraduates are raw material for the process. The Government is paying for the universities to provide an illusion of employability and education. The parents are paying in the hope that it's not all an illusion. The one group we have overlooked are the academics: they are expected to bring in research grants. Those are handed out by the Government. So that makes the State the customer, and it dictates what gets researched. (Yes, all that junk soft science is actually commissioned by people who know it is junk. You wouldn't want the money spent on real research would you?)

Who are the customers for airports? Not passengers. Airlines.

Who are the customers for airlines? Some of the customers are the actual passengers. But then Ryanair gets a chunk of money from provinces for flying into their regional airport. So that's Government again.

I leave it as an exercise for the reader to work out who is the customer for Social Services? And who is just raw material for the process.

It's a wonderfully clarifying question.

The Sophons Arrived in 1995

In Cixin Liu's The Three-Body Problem trilogy, sophons are neutron-sized supercomputers with a propulsion system that can whizz around the solar system in no time and mess up any experiments we do that might advance our understanding of fundamental physics.

(Yes, I know, but it makes for an interesting read.)

That has to be the best explanation of why, all of a sudden in the mid-1990's, everything stopped developing: physics, music, politics, fashion, art, literature, mathematics, movies, name it. There have been engineering advances in computing, but no fundamental breakthroughs, and look at what that got us. TikTok, dating apps, Facebook, the Lockdowns, working from home, mass-scale social flaking, and Netflix. Yep, real progress.

I think the Sophons are distracting us with that stuff.

The essence of Sophon intervention is that it should look as if it's a neat idea and will make our lives better, easier or more fun; absorbs a huge amount of effort and smart people in its implementation; but after a while turns out not to be such a good idea after all.

I hereby suggest that the adjective 'Sophonic' be used to describe anything that meets these criteria, and those who devise and push be described as 'Sophons'.

Not all distractions are Sophonic, we do quite enough on our own to distract ourselves. Celebrity and royal gossip is just plain ordinary stuff, as is corporate PR. Political BS has always been with us. Bogus research in psychology, social "sciences", behavioural "sciences", not to mention anything prefaced by "Evolutionary", are just plain old-fashioned academic BS.

The Green agenda and Climate Change were taken over and exploited by the Sophons. I demur from suggesting what research in maths is Sophonic, but String Theory and Supersymmetry are both clearly Sophonic. Facebook, Instgram, Pinterest, TikTok, You Tube, and the rest... all Sophonic media.

Go Paula, Go Paula

 

I spent quite a bit of one trip in and out of town recently with a silly grin on my face because this track is a DOOZY!

Death's End - The Dark Forest Attack on the Solar System

Towards the end of Cixin Liu's Death's End, someone in a planet far, far, away sees that the Trisolarian system was destroyed, and works out that our Solar system probably did it. This person is about as low in the organisation as anyone can get without actually being a cleaner. He goes to his boss to ask for the relevant weapon, and having been authorised, flips it carelessly in the direction of our Sun. It's a small two-dimensional thing, and is observed with curiosity as it makes its way towards us. Then it is activated, and... squish squash squwash... the space around it loses the third dimension. Everything is crushed down to two dimensions and destroyed in the process. The effect expands outwards at light speed, and nothing can stop it. We now understand the episode where our heroes encountered a four-dimensional world that seemed to be shrinking to three-dimensions. Our solar system, and in fact ultimately the whole universe, is going to be rendered two-dimensional. Which, as one of the characters says, is only not a problem for the aggressor, if they are actually two-dimensional in the first place.

This kept coming back to me. Such Dark Forest attacks, we have earlier had suggested, would only happen when the cost and risks of doing so were minimal and did not give away the attackers location away. Which is exactly what happens. The casual destruction by a lowly employee. The fact that destroying a solar system and then a galaxy is not something anyone needs to debate or get clearance for. The sheer off-handedness of it all.

Before you worry, the physics of the device - along with most of the physics in the series - is utter nonsense, but we go along with it because the story it enables is so interesting.

After a week of this sticking in my mind (I really am not that preceptive) I got what Cixin was up to. It's an analogy with the legal bureaucracy. Where public employees can reach out and destroy careers, marriages, and lives with a charge here, an investigation there, a court case, and the sentence, tossed as it were at the offender with a flip of the wrist. They only penalise what comes to their attention, investigate as little as possible, spend as little effort as possible running the process, and hand out the penalty with no thought for its effects or consequences.

I suspect it may be possible to read a lot of the book like that. In fact, there's a passage in it where he tells us that's what he's doing. But I'll leave that for you. And I could be reading far too much into it.

The Fermi Paradox - A Boring Answer

The Fermi Paradox is the difference between the supposed number of planets supporting intelligent life that there should be in the vastness of the Milky Way, never mind the Universe, and the fact that we haven't picked up any radio-signals from any of them, let alone slapped a parking ticket on a visiting space-craft. Whenever anyone gets bored, they form a theory on why we have the Fermi Paradox.

The doozy is the Dark Forest Hypothesis, exploited by Cixin Liu in his Three-Body Problem trilogy, appearing so I gather on a Netflix near you. This is the idea that the universe is actually stuffed full of advanced civilisations, and they are all keeping quiet so that they aren't attacked by another one, rather like an animal moving through a forest at night, which keeps as quiet as possible to avoid giving its presence away to the predators all around it.

At the other extreme is the Uniqueness of Us hypothesis, which is that there's only us in the Universe, because making a planet that can support intelligent life and Kier Starmer is 0.000000000000000000000000000000001% possible. And that may be too high.

Then there's the We Got Here First hypothesis, which holds that we are the first civilisation advanced enough to support Angela Rayner, and all the others have just about reached Plato, or are currently building Stonehenge, or maybe are still single-cell organisms. Just think, in another million years, they too will be have their very own Rachel Reeves.

And of course, there's the Smartypants theory, which is that we have been visited by aliens, and they found us so stupid and crude, they flew off and give us a 1-star review on TripAdvisor. Or they found us too aggressive. Or they thought they would come back when Wes Streeting was not in charge of anything.

However, the boring answer is this....

Radio, television and radar broadcasts use electromagnetic waves, and electromagnetism is, as we know, magic + Maxwell's Equations. How these waves travel depends on the medium and the wavelength. Very short waves (1-10 mm) are absorbed by the atmosphere in a few kilometres. Very long waves (1-100 km) bounce between the earth and the ionosphere and can flow over hills and down valleys. Radio, television, mobile phones and radar use waves between 10cm and 100m, and these mostly travel in straight lines. The transmitters are designed to direct the waves to where the audience is, not spray it all over the place where the audience isn't, like outer space. Some of it leaks, but not a lot.

Here's the calculation. Whatever the aliens were using to listen, our signals would need to be audible above the white noise of the Universe, the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) radiation, that covers the radio, TV, radar and mobile phone frequencies. At those frequencies, the CMB has a power of on the order of magnitude of 10^(-7) Watts / sq metre. For a station broadcasting at 5,000 kW / sq m (which would be a lot) and an inverse-square fall-off, since 1 light-year is about 9.5 x 10^15 metres, that's a fall-off of 53dB, so our station's signal would have a strength of about 5.5x10^(-10) Watts/sq m, which is about 4dB below the CMB. To get 5dB above the CMB, we would need to have 1,024 transmitters of that strength going flat-out. All of them so badly designed that they sprayed energy in all directions equally.

At 10 light-year's distance, signal loses around another 20dB, and there aren't enough transmitters on earth to get the total above the CMB.

The nearest candidate planets are 4.22 light-years away, and the next is 11 light-years. And those aren't good candidates.

Nobody ain't hearing nothing.

2025. Let's Be Careful Out There

It's going to be a good year if you're a train driver or a civil servant, or some hack pushing AI, or anyone selling arms and ammunition to anyone else, or in the business of selling emergency supplies of energy, or building those money pits HS2 and the Hinkley Nuclear station, or if you're a lawyer on the endless Covid enquiry whose conclusions we all thought we knew but will have been changing with the times, or if you are providing hotel accommodation for illegal immigrants, or if you're a human rights lawyer being paid by millionaire activists to prevent the expulsion of foreign criminals, or if .... oh heck, you get the picture.

Here's a financial goal for 2025. Try not to end the year with more debt that you started it.

And A Prosperous 2025 To You