Sight-Reading

I’m also spending some time learning to sight-read. Using the Allemande from the first Bach Cello suite. Since it’s for the cello, it’s in the bass clef, mostly in the octave below middle C, with occasional excursion above and below. It’s best played in concert pitch on the guitar, as opposed to an octave lower, though it could be played an octave higher.

Repeat after me: Every Good Band Deserves Fans And Cash. Those are the notes on the lines of the bass clef, starting with the ledger line below the main stave and ending with middle C(ash) one ledger line above the main stave.

I tried this a long time ago, but I struggled with the bass clef. Attempting to sight-read on the piano, which takes the “Grand Clef” (treble on top, bass below, middle C, well, in the middle) seemed to have eased reading the bass clef, partly because I spent a long time reciting the notes on the staves.

Remember running your finger under the words to help you read? Remember pronouncing a word one syllable at a time? Remember looking at a combination of letters and thinking “huh”?

All that and more. I follow the notes for a while, and then the tune drops to the bottom of the stave and I’m like “ummm, A? B? G?” Or I follow four notes but don’t finish on the E but the D. Huh? Oh! That’s an A I should be starting on, not a G.

As for playing the notes so that an actual tune emerges?

Oh. The tune? Where’s that?

The tune emerges when I play the notes without hesitation, fluently.

Ah yes, fluency. Playing the right notes in the right order isn’t enough. There’s more.

I know what it takes to read fluently: one has to read ahead and think about that, while one’s fingers are playing what one read a moment ago, because it was passed it to the complier, translated into muscle actions which were stored in short-term memory and are now being played . Which is what fluent word-readers do.

It takes a while for the brain to create that compiler, the memory, and the mechanism to take the muscle actions from memory and execute them. Building all that is what it means to “read music”.

It isn’t memorising the piece. That’s different.

This is one of those tasks that one starts and carries on despite seeming to make no progress, because I suspect that when the brain does construct the read-ahead compiler, it kicks in fast and makes all the slog worthwhile.

Talk to me in a year.

HX Effects - Effects and Sounds

There are a whole load of pedals out there, and some can cost hundreds or even thousands of pounds (Klons). All of them do one of these eight things: 

Drive (Overdrive, Distortion, Fuzz); 

Compressors / Limiters / Noise Gates; 

Reverb / Echo; 

Delay; 

Modulation (Wah, Chorus etc); 

EQ; 

Looper; 

Volume / Effects level control. 

Guitar output and amp Master volume affect the tones, especially the Drive tones.

Even back in the 1960’s, when life was simple and Jim Marshall made you an amp while you waited (well, ok, not quite), studios had a number of effects: reverb, EQ, compressors, filters, as well as a bunch of special effects that the electronic music people had invented. The ultimate piece of electronic music of the 20th century, the Doctor Who theme, was made in a 1960’s sound lab on magnetic tape that was hand-edited.

The processor in the HX Effects can handle up to nine effects (or “blocks”) in one Preset, and has six switches for each pre-set. So I can build an effect out of nine others.

None are compulsory, and some play better with others. A tone based on Drives usually doesn’t work well with anything else except a simple-ish Reverb, but I understand that shoegaze bands started with a metric tonne of distortion and added more effects. So there’s that.

The one effect that hasn’t been transferred to pedals is the resonance that an acoustic guitar has. It’s a mixture of sustain (caused by the momentum of the vibrations of the wood) and reverb (of the sound waves in the hollow body). This is different from the sound of an electric being strummed with the power off, where the resonance comes from the continued vibration of the strings. Take your fingers off the strings on an acoustic and there’s still a lingering sound. Do that on an electric and the sound stops dead.

My unconscious was looking for that acoustic resonance, and I’ve been finding it something like it in combinations of delay and reverb.

Then there’s the most divisive drive pedal there is: the Tube Screamer. Apparently if you use 11’s and a Tube Screamer, you will automatically sound like Stevie Ray Vaughan, but without, you know, the talent. I have 11’s and have tried the Tube Screamer effect, and even allowing for my lack of talent, I still don’t sound like Stevie Ray Vaughan, so there must be something more to it.

Any tone I get under these circumstances is an amp in the room tone, as opposed to guitar in the mix tone. Get a neat tone in-the-room and then use it play along with a backing track: chances are it won’t blend in. At all. For a long time now, the original sound of the instruments has been merely a starting-point for the final sound. If I do get a tone - usually by randomly messing with the pots - that blends in, often it sounds thin and unconvincing in-the-room.

So here’s the pay-off.

In one session recently I was tweaking one of the ready-made presets in the Effects: it had a delay, reverb, chorus, boost and maybe some distortion. I took out the distortion, experimented with the chorus, reverb and delay, and started playing some triads. Twenty minutes later, I stopped.

That’s when I realised what I was really looking for. A sound that makes me want to play more and more. That I can get lost in. Usually that means something ambient-y with delays and reverbs, but it needn’t. So far I’ve found a couple, not counting neck-pickup-clean + a sprinkle of reverb.

HX Effects + Katana Set-Up

I bought an HX Effects at the end of March, from those nice people at GuitarGuitar Camden, where you can buy any guitar you like as long as it’s a Strat and costs £2,000+ (I am exaggerating only slightly. It is cheaper than Denmark Street where the prices start at £2,000 and ascend very quickly.) Since then I haven’t written anything about my endless Tone Journey.

Imagine being dropped in a guitar shop, given the keys to the pedal cabinet and told to play around all your like. That’s what getting an HX Effects is.

I’m playing it through the Katana, (edit: 9/6) using the Instrument In, pre-amp gain at zero, pre-amp volume nearly dimed, Mid-EQ dimed, Treble and Bass at 12:00. The power amp is set at “0.5W” (/edit) and I control the output with the Master volume.

I’m playing mostly between 65-75 dBA, and have made the following very important adjustment to the amp positioning.

I sit on a barstool about two metres away, on a chair about a meter away, depending on whether I’m using the HX Edit program.

Brief acoustics digression. When the wavelength of a note is less than the diameter of the speaker, that note and those above it will start to “beam” out of the speaker. For a 12” speaker, that frequency is around 1100 Hz, which is about the highest note on the guitar. BUT, guitar strings produce a lot of overtones - fifths and octaves - which are not a lot quieter than the fundamental tone - so that playing A440 produces second harmonics of 1,760 Hz, which will go out like a lightbeam from a big speaker (okay, there are lobes to the side, but only if you’re doing a science degree). Stand to one side or above the speaker and those higher harmonics will pass you right by: the sound will be smoother and lack bite. What I heard over at my friend’s place, where we sit with our heads at speaker level, were all those higher harmonics, which gave the impression of bite and air. This is why mic-ing speakers is more of an art than it should be: where you put the mic affects what exact mix of overtones and bass notes you get.

Chasing tone is to acoustics what cooking is to chemistry: there’s a science underneath it, but mostly it’s applied magic.

The towel under the front of the speaker means I get the overtones beamed at me, so I hear a sound with more air and snap than I would if the speaker was pointing parallel to the floor. This makes a BIG difference to my appreciation of the “tones” I’m setting up on the HX Effects.

I have one Preset with nothing in it, to send the guitar output unchanged to the amp, but despite that the sound through the HX Effects sounds a little tighter and snappier. I’m assuming that the ADC-in / DAC-out conversion, plus any other system circuitry in this “empty path” through the HX Effects, creates some compression. I’m not complaining. It has given me back the neck pickup, which sounded too snarly and nasal through the Katana.

Okay… set-up over. Actual tone-chasing next.

Geoff Marshall

There are transport nerds, and then there’s Geoff Marshall. He’s at Dovey Junction in this video. It’s about passing loops and platform lengths, and where the station entrance is. This what I watch when I’m having supper. It’s so soothing.

Angela Collier

That would be Doctor Angela to you, though she’s working in the private sector. She has a mug with a proton on one side and a hydrogen ion on the other, because that’s a joke about physicists and chemists (it’s the same thing). She’s darn good at explaining science stuff and isn’t afraid to throw math at you, because of course you math, right? This is a good explanation of temperature, but be warned, the explanation involves entropy.

Digging To China

China. Economic powerhouse? Future super-power? Communist nightmare? Land of glittering skyscrapers? There are a handful of channels about China, of which I’ve long liked this one. The place is a dysfunctional mess that almost makes the UK look well-organised… almost. This channel provides a good look at a country with about 15% of the world’s population.

The B1M

The world is full of building projects the ambition, size and cost of which dwarfs anything in the past. I think the front pages of newspapers should carry progress reports about all of them, so we can see that some useful things are being done in the world. The papers don’t, so this channel does.