2008 - the year in review

The newspapers all do it, the TV channels all do it, the magazines ('books' if you live in Manchester, UK) all do it, so why the hell not?

Actually, this strike me as a very good idea given the nature of the 50th Anniversary Edition and the fact that it is now 4 years down the line. I can post my New Year resolutions at one end and post the pathetic excuses at the other!

Whisky

Thanks. Just top it up. Woah! You trying to get me drunk! Eh - no water, thanks... or ice.

Tobacco

Actually, I've given up. Twice this year, in fact. I'll be doing it again in a few hours too. In the meantime, I'll have another rolly-up, thankyou.

Guitar

Fergus (for that is the name of my 50th Anniversary Edition guitar - as in 'Fergus sings the blues') is now my favourite guitar - and so it bloody well should be! It's taken an age to get it functioning as I'd always planned, but we're getting there, and I plan to make a separate post about the whole business of building a 'project' guitar.

Songwriting

Ah. Well there you have me. In principle, I could write a song in a hour or less. But a good song? That's where I fail.

I usually write songs by playing an acoustic guitar and singing, and I've tried to schedule some space in my daily timetable to do exactly that. But with an Accident and Emergency doctor on shifts living to one side of this terraced house and a year old baby parented by careworkers on shifts on the other, I'm routinely paralysed by the fear of making a noise. That and the fact that the schedule usually gives me around 15 minutes means that finished songs are in short supply. OK - it's an excuse and it's a bad one, watcha gonna do about it!

Recording and Production

One word. Caedmon. In case you haven't been following, Caedmon was the band I was part of in the seventies. We had a reunion this year, wrote and and recorded half a dozen tracks, and I was charged with the task of turning those takes into viable recordings via Logic. As a result, I've finally mastered beat mapping in Logic.

Web site

It has finally dawned on me that, while the intention of the web site was to document the progress of the 50th Anniversary Edition, and give me a platform to promote a final product, it has taken on a life of its own. People routinely drop by to check out comparisons of basswood and alder as tonewoods for guitar bodies, or to find out more about Marshall amps or Epiphone Valve Junior customising. So the web site has had a (long overdue) facelift, and I've even added some ads just to see what happens.

Sleep

I'm sorry, I must be getting old - what did you say again?