Flamenco at the Speed of Light
12 February 2017 • by bob • Music, Guitar
I felt like some old-school jazz flamenco this evening, so I put on some classic Paco De Lucia, Al Di Meola and John McLaughlin playing Di Meola's masterpiece Mediterranean Sundance. It's been over 35 years since these three toured together, but it's amazing how great this piece has held up... and Al Di Meola's run of 256th notes starting at 2:40 would melt most fretboards.
R.I.P. Greg Lake (1947-2016)
08 December 2016 • by bob • Music
Much has been written by others about the passing of Greg Lake yesterday, so pardon my addition to the fray.
Greg Lake's death follows just nine months after his former band-mate, Keith Emerson, and these musicians were two-thirds of the colossal progressive rock band "Emerson, Lake & Palmer (ELP)." For those who aren't aware of who these guys were, ELP dominated the progressive rock scene throughout the 1970s, selling millions of records and filling stadiums with hundreds of thousands of fans during their International tours.
As an example of ELP back in their heyday, here's a video of them performing during their headlining performance at the California Jam in 1974:
PS - Since Emerson and Lake have both passed away within months of each other, someone needs to surround Carl Palmer in bubble wrap before something happens to him.
1980s Music Videos
05 December 2016 • by bob • Music, Humor
My wife was mentioning how the following pseudo-80s music video for "Pop! Goes My Heart" from the movie "Music and Lyrics" was ridiculous...
I replied that the video from the movie was make-believe; if she really wanted to see a cheesy 1980s music video, she should watch Dokken's "Breaking The Chains"...
It's like a train wreck - it's a disaster, but you can't stop watching...
When A Song Gets Stuck In My Mind...
25 August 2016 • by bob • Music, Guitar
I had a song stuck in the back of my mind all evening and it was starting to bug me, so I decided to sit down and transcribe it in Guitar Pro 6.
Once I had finished transcribing the song, I remembered that it was named "Silver Tightrope," and it was from an album which was released in 1975. I seem to recall that I thought the song had been recorded by "Yes" when I had first heard it, but the song was actually written by a short-lived band from the UK named "Armageddon."
The four bars which I transcribed are probably around 99% of the song, so it was a pretty quick diversion for the evening. Now I'll get back to the business of writing some code.
Blast from the Past
13 July 2016 • by bob • Music
So I'm driving through Tucson today and channel-surfing on the radio trying to find a station which actually plays music instead of back-to-back advertisements, when I stumbled across 96 Rock playing "The Spirit of Radio" by Rush, and I think to myself, "Wow, how many times has this exact scenario played out over the past thirty-some-odd-years?"
Seriously - hearing the same band, playing the same song, on the same radio station, and even driving down the same street in the same town. This has happened way too many times to count... but trust me, it's a good thing every time it happens.
Geddy Lee or Jacques Offenbach
25 February 2016 • by Bob • Humor, Music
After careful consideration, I have decided that Geddy Lee of Rush is actually a time traveling musical genius who was also posing as the nineteenth century composer Jacques Offenbach... That would explain why Rush named one of their last tours "Time Machine" and their plethora of science fiction lyrics over the years...
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| Geddy Lee or Jacques Offenbach? You decide. |
Gideon's Press
30 October 2015 • by bob • Music
Every once in a while you need to kick back and listen to a little prog rock from Austin, TX...
Gideon's Press - Rain Down
A Few of My Favorite Guitar Solos
15 October 2015 • by bob • Guitar, Music
This should waste an hour or so of your time - here are ten of my favorite guitar solos...
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| Eric Johnson "Cliffs of Dover" | David Gilmour "Comfortably Numb" |
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| Eddie Van Halen "Eruption" | Neil Zaza "I'm Alright" |
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| Joe Satriani "Satch Boogie" | Alex Lifeson (Rush) "La Villa Strangiato" |
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| Stevie Ray Vaughn "Voodoo Chile" | Paul Gilbert "Scarified" |
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| Steve Morse "Tumeni Notes" | Yngwie Malmsteen "Evil Eye" |
Note: Few people know about Neil Zaza, which is too bad - as his live video shows, he's seriously underrated as a guitarist. By the way, although all of these solos are good, "Tumeni Notes" is downright impossible to play. (For me, anyway.)
Honorable Mentions
I should call out some Honorable Mentions; I think that Stevie Ray Vaughn's cover of Hendrix's "Voodoo Chile" is is arguably better than Jimi's original version, but I still like the original. Also, it was a toss-up between Paul Gilbert's "Hurry Up" and "Scarified" in the original list.
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| Jimi Hendrix "Voodoo Chile" | Randy Rhoads (Ozzy) "Crazy Train" |
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| Rik Emmett (Triumph) "Fight the Good Fight" | Paul Gilbert "Hurry Up" |
Of course, I could go on and on about other guitar solos by other guitar players, and there are several guitarists who were somewhat inadvertently skipped in my list. (e.g. Gary Hoey, Vernon Reid, etc.) But that being said, the original list comprises some of my all-time favorite solos.
Code Monkey Save World
26 January 2015 • by Bob • Art, Humor, Ponderings
OK - I have to make a shameless admission: I really like Jonathan Coulton's music. Jonathan's style is sort of like modern-day-Internet-geek-cyber-folk-pop, as if that's a real genre.
Anyway, years ago he wrote a song called "Code Monkey," which became something of an Internet hit. (Hey, I'd call over one million downloads a hit.) If you're curious about the song, you can browse to http://youtu.be/MNl3fTods9c in order to see it with the lyrics.
That being said, fans of "Code Monkey" might not be aware that Jonathan teamed up with Greg Pak and a few additional artists, and together they converted "Code Monkey" and several of Jonathan's other songs (like "Skullcrusher Mountain," "Re: Your Brains," etc.) into a weird little graphic novel.
Truth be told, I'm not a graphic novel kind of guy, but I love the song - so I ordered a copy through Greg Pak's online shop.
My signed copy of the graphic novel just arrived, and it was a great read; it was fun to see the characters from so many of Jonathan's songs brought to life, even if it was just for a hundred pages or so.
For those of you who are familiar with the song, you're probably wondering to yourself, "Does Code Monkey finally tell his manager to write that @#$% login page himself and win the heart of Matilde, the girl of his dreams?"
Well, you'll just have to order the book and find that out for yourself.
(FYI - The graphic novel was a Kickstarter project in 2013 which was fully-funded in just 12 hours; it eventually reached $340,270 of it's original $39,000 goal.)
Drum Circles and Conference Calls Do Not Mix
21 July 2014 • by bob • Work, Technology, Humor
Earlier today our organization participated in a unique "Team Building" exercise: our organization hosted a Drum Circle, wherein a motivational speaker walked various members of our organization through a set of various polyrhythms with the intended goal of creating music as a "team." The idea seems plausible enough on paper, and I am fairly certain that if I was participating in-person I might have received something of value from the experience.
However, I work remotely, as do several dozen of my coworkers. Instead of hearing music and a motivational speaker, those of us who could not attend in-person heard nothing but noise. Lots and lots of noise. The entire experience was reduced to hours of mind-numbing cacophony for anyone attending the meeting via the conference call, and my only takeaway was that I had lost several hours of my life.
Shortly after the meeting had ended I put together the following animation to show my coworkers what the meeting was like for remote attendees:
| Attending a Drum Circle Remotely. |
With that in mind, please take my advice: take a look at https://binged.it/2s4KbLd for companies who offer team building exercises such as this, and avoid them as much as possible if you value your remote employees.