Stuart Herbert

Like many before me, I’ve swapped my Dell Inspiron laptop with a nice shiny MacBook Pro. For the money, they’re the best Intel-based laptops around - and I must say that the reviews you may have read online do not do them justice.

The next step is to switch all my photography and music apps over from Windows. Music was easy enough - Logic Express will do me just fine. I wish I’d picked up a copy of the Rhythm Jam Pack at the time, but I can pop into Cardiff next week and put that right.

Photography … that’s a bit more of a challenge. I’ve started playing with the Lightroom beta, and whilst I can see the attraction, there’s a couple of tricks I rely on in Photoshop that I haven’t figured out how to reproduce in Lightroom yet. I don’t want to buy Photoshop until CS3 is out, so for now I might be better off buying a copy of Photoshop Elements, and upgrading to CS3 if I feel the need next year.

The other thing I need to do over the Christmas holidays is either upgrade or replace b2evo, the blogging engine I’ve been using this past year. Unfortunately, Safari doesn’t get on with the admin interface, and Firefox continues to be too much of a memory hog for me to want to stick with it as my main browser.

Just in case anyone is reading this and getting worried that I’ll be completely turning my back on Linux … that isn’t going to happen. Linux on the desktop has always been my preferred development platform, and that isn’t going to change. All I’m doing is switching my preferred creative platform from Windows XP to Mac OS X.

One of the albums I’ve been eagerly wiating for this year has been Witness from Show of Hands. Kristi and I had the great pleasure of seeing them live last year as part of the Roots Unearthed series here in Cardiff (they’re back in October, and we’ve bought our tickets already). They’re worth seeing live just for their performance of Widecombe Fair, where they unplug and wander through the audience.

Quite a few of the songs on album were part of the show we saw last year, so hearing them recorded in the studio for the first time is a bit like meeting an old friend. Some of the songs that we don’t remember from the show seem a bit weak (Ink Devil and Scratch in particular), but that still leaves 10 great songs on the CD.

Many folk / traditional instrument / acoustic albums are often very difficult to listen to in noisy environments, especially in the car or in the iPod on the train. Not so this album. The mix works just as well in the car as it does in the house.

My favourite song? I find it impossible to choose between Roots and Innocent’s Song.

Just before Christmas, I treated myself to an Edirol UA-25 USB Audio/Midi Interface. I’d been looking for a new recording interface since I added a Berhinger DEQ2496 Ultra-Curve Pro graphic equalizer to my guitar rig. I love what you can do with a Pod XT, but there are just some patches (and some guitars!) which really need that extra tweak to hit the spot.

Then came Christmas, and the release of the Nikon D200, and the Edirol spent the whole time sat in its box on the shelf unopened. In the meantime, the paper-shredder fairy seems to have done away with the receipt.

Problem is, now I’ve unpacked it, I’ve had no luck getting anything but noise out of the Edirol box, and I’m not referring to what passes as guitar playing in this household If I crank the output of the Pod XT up to maximum, then I can get *something* through the Edirol, but it’s so awash with noise that it’s unusable except for torturing trolls. And it’s a moot point anyway, because the second feed off to my speakers is just too loud for my next door neighbours with that setup.

The Windows drivers for the Edirol didn’t inspire confidence in me either, to be honest. Once the drivers are installed, if you decide to plug the Edirol into a different USB port, you have to uninstall the drivers and then re-install them. To be fair to Roland (the makers of the Edirol box), the other problems with the drivers not recognising the Edirol could be put down to a faulty box … but I don’t have any other USB devices that require an uninstall/re-install just because you’ve plugged the cable into a different that morning.

Anyway, enough was enough. I took advantage of a business trip to Bristol today to pick up a Tascam US-122. And, so far, I’m a very happy chicken. Plugged it in, installed the drivers, and now the noise *is* what passes for guitar playing in this household

Shame that the PC’s hooked up to really bad speakers! At least it’s pay day on Friday

I’ve been looking for a replacement for my aging Charvel for a few years now. I bought that guitar second hand back in 1991, because it had this lovely jazzy clean sound, and it’s been my main guitar ever since. (I hate playing guitars that don’t have warmth and character when played unplugged). I think that, like all Charvels of its time, it was made & sold as a rock/metal guitar, but Alas, the neck hasn’t aged well, and it no longer holds a tune across the full length of the neck (Or maybe that’s just my guitar playing? Heh

Yesterday, I found an almost perfect replacement, the Ibanez SZ320MH. Loved it so much I just had to bring it home with me Took me all of 2 minutes playing it unplugged to decide that this guitar had the right sort of natural sound

Initial impressions are that the reviews on Harmony Central are pretty spot-on. The bridge pickup is a little hot (but not as hot as the Seymour Duncan on my Jackson) but sounds really smooth and sweet if you roll the volume back a little. With the pickup selector in the middle position, the clean sound is very close to my old Charvel’s, but with noticably more resonance, thanks to the through-body stringing and the set neck. That’s right - this puppy’s neck isn’t a bolt-on

I have to admit, I found it very difficult putting it down to come into work this morning. Mmm … I wonder if that’s why they made sure I took the office keys home with me last night?

You go down the supermarket to get some toilet cleaner, and come back with the latest album by one of your favourite artists. Mmm … today is a good day! And it’ll make Kristi’s day tomorrow when she gets back from working away for the week to find the CD waiting for her as a present

Now, I wonder how I could convince Naomi to go and record a second album? I have two good reasons to be very biased on the matter, but the album she made during her year in Denmark is one of the few on my iPod where every song is rated the full 5 stars.

… then do whatever you have to do to go and see him perform. Especially if you play guitar or mandolin yourself. I’m not even remotely a fan of country music, but when he played the Muni here in Pontypridd last month, my jaw was on the floor. He was, head and shoulders, the most technically perfect performer I’ve ever had the joy to watch live - and Herb Pederson accompanying him came a very close second. It really was stunning to see someone play live at that level. I’ve seen some great gigs where the performers they were playing out of their skins for the gig of their life, but Chris Hillmand and Herb Pederson looked like they could do turn up and do that all night every night.

I’ll go as far as saying that I wouldn’t be surprised or disappointed if I never see anyone perform live at that level again. That’s how good I think he is.

Still no idea what he was doing playing the Muni in Pontypridd tho. I figure he got lost or something

Just about to head off to bed when an email came through from Line 6. After a delay of something like 18 months, they’ve finally released the Variax Workbench. If it lives up to the marketing, it allows Variax owners to create their own custom guitars via an editor running on PC or Apple Mac, and then download them to the Variax.

Unfortunately, it looks like their website has melted under the load from excited Variax owners wanting to know how much Workbench costs (Tip: don’t waste your time looking in the Line 6 online store … they haven’t added Workbench to it yet)

Still, at least it’s payday in just over a week’s time … Provided their forums aren’t full of doom and gloom, I’ll be buying a copy (and maybe a Variax Acoustic to go along with my existing original Variax).

Unless I can convince Naomi to sell me her Washburn? (Actually, I hope she never does. I’d much rather listen to her play it)

… because I’ve been having too much fun playing with the v2 firmware upgrade for Line 6’s excellent Pod XT. I also picked up the additional amp packs, giving me 72 different amp models to enjoy. I picked up the songbook to St Anger this lunchtime (never been very good at learning music by ear), which gives me a nice excuse to crank up the volume over the weekend.

The Behringer DEQ unit I bought a couple of months back has been retired for the moment, until I find which machine the Delta/66 card has ended up in. I’ll have to make do with recording off the XT’s USB port for now, until I can hook the EQ unit up to the Delta/66’s A2D.

At some point, I really should make the time to record something. The last sizable bout of recording I did was back in 97. There again, the last gig I did was in May 92, and the less said about that the better.

All I want now is to upgrade my aging Roland GR-30, get an S/S/81 set of pickups for the Fat Strat (and maybe another set for the Charvel), and I’m in hog heaven.

Rob H - if you’re reading this - you still owe me that demo (Btw, he has a genuine Gibson SG, which I’m very jealous about)

We\’ve been able to rate MP3\’s in various players for years, but one of the really useful features of Apple\’s iPod is the way it can automatically build up playlists based on the ratings you set. So which CDs on your iPod contain the most songs that you rate?

One such CD on my iPod is Mundy-Turner\’s excellent Crooked House. Kristi and I first saw them a few years back at the annual Cropredy music festival. IIRC, they had one of the opening slots (I think it was on the Saturday) - not the easiest time to be on stage - and they really got the crowd going. They\’re comparing this year\’s festival - it\’s a shame they\’re not playing this year.

Crooked House is full of excellent folk music - it\’s worth buying just for The Transportation of Sarah, but the song that strikes a chord most with me is Markham Main, about the UK Miners Strike of 1984-1985 and those caught up in the middle. Markham Main Collery is in Armthorpe, South Yorkshire, and it\’s where my late grandfather worked at the time of the strike. I\’d have been 11 years old at the time, and the only memories that I have are of watching TV reports of violent confrontations on the picket lines.

Some twenty years on from the strike, there are many communities across the North of England - and in Wales - that have never recovered from the loss of the UK coal industry. Some of these communities had been built because the mines were there … and without the mines to provide jobs, their whole reason to continue to exist has gone. Economic regeneration has been successful in some cases. South Emsall has become a hub for redistribution centres because of its close proximity to the A1, but nearby Grimethorpe remains one of the most depressing legacies of the decline of the mining industry.