我的結他雜記: Alternative instrument

I bought a Hohner. Not a guitar, but a harmonica.

Hohner is actually very famous as a harmonica manufacturer. It's a good brand for harmonica.

Man, it's not easy to play though. One basic technique is bending. Like bending in guitar. (the term is actually borrowed from guitar) On a basic 10 hole harmonica, it doesn't have all notes on it (for example, no B-flat on a C major harmonica) so you have to bend. And bending is HARD! I haven't figured that out yet. :(

The reason I'm trying harmonica is that there is some pain in my ring finger. I guess I'm too old to start playing jazz guitar because jazz uses "big" chords that requires stretching my fingers very wide. I'm really afraid that I might have to stop playing guitar and bass forever. I'm looking at alternatives but nothing is comparable to guitar!

我的結他雜記: chord-melody, practice, bass amp, nylon

Tried following this lesson. The song it taught is the most popular jazz standard called "Autumn Leaves" and Download #3 on that page is the TAB. If you don't bother to follow the lesson, just play the TAB. This style is called "chord melody", i.e., the guitar plays both the chord and the melody so other instrument is not necessary. I consider this the 最高境界 of jazz guitar.

In addition to "Autumn Leaves", I have learned a few more chord melody tunes, like "Stella by Starlight" and "Norwegian Wood." Saw a kid played "Yesterday" on YouTube. He told me his arrangement came from the same book that I got my version of "Norwegian wood!" So I started playing that. It will be quite a while until I could play as fast as he does.

I have always had some free time at night. I don't spend all of it on guitar though. I'm rather lazy. Usually it's just 30-40 minutes. Half spent on theory (like playing ii-V-I in different keys and arpeggio of those chords) Half spent on songs.

Years ago we tried to figure out what blues scale and the flatted 5th were. Now I play more jazz and they don't seem to be essential to playing jazz. On the other hand, adding the 7th (and higher, e.g. 9th, 13th) to chords really make songs sound jazzy. As far as scale is concerned, major scale works very well. Even pentatonic works. And blue scale is just one of the scale that works.

I bought a cheap bass amp when I was trying to start a new rock/metal band a few years ago. I really regretted that purchase because even though it was a 120W amp, I could barely hear it when playing in a practice space roughly as big as the "big room" in President studio! I expected a 120W to sound loud enough but this one didn't. Beware of the brand Behringer. I bet a Hartke 120W sound louder. Besides, I was never able to get a band started and used it 3 times only. However, I learned that some bass amp could actually be used as guitar amp and sounds pretty good with guitar. (The most famous one is Fender Bassman) Some people used bass amp same as mine for jazz! I plugged my Spirit into it and it indeed sounds not bad. The emphasis on the bass makes the sound very warm. Good for jazz.

I listened to more and more classical guitar these days. And some classical masters also play flamenco. I'm buying a cheap classical nylon string guitar. I played my teacher's and really like the sound. Very acoustic, warm, jazzy. Also, there is more separation between strings on a classical guitar so hopefully it helps me fingering those difficult chord (right now my fingers are too close and muting the next string!) The action is usually very high though so barre chord will be more difficult. In any case, I want to try something different. Nylon string feels very different from steel too.

In the 80s and 90s, Japanese made a lot of high quality copies of American guitar (Fender, Gibson) Should be able to find some good stuff in Tokyo. On the other hand, a brand new "real" Gibson Les Paul is ~US$2500, which costs less than a trip to Japan!

我的結他雜記: Steinberger, SG, Pignose Amp, jazz scales/chords

I plugged my Steinberger Spirit into my Pignose amp. Then connect the preamp out to the computer for recording two tunes I posted on MySpace: All the things you are and Seven Come Eleven. I like the sound of this setup. I read that the amp makes the most difference in the sound for jazz. The guitar itself is not as important.
I got the TAB from books and magazines. Wasn't able to improvise. If you analyze the melody lines, there's actually a lot of major scales and mixolydian. Also there are some common licks. Finally they make some big "jumps" from high to low and back to high (高音跳去低音，低音跳去高音)
以下六線譜為例：

--------------------
-8---6---4-----3----
--------------------
---8---6---5-3------
--------------------
--------------------

仲有d常見lick:
-----------4-----
---------4-------
-------5---------
-----6-----------
-----------------
-----------------

至於chord方面，都係7th chord, 例如major 7, minor 7 同dominant 7，掃出來好jazzy
其實我在香港果支Epiphone SG比較多metal友用，好少jazz友彈SG，不過SG個pickup P-90就有經典jazz友用係其他結他。Jazz友多數彈大支厚身面拱出來果款。I'm tempted to buy an archtop jazz guitar someday. Not now of course. Maybe after the recession is over (10 years later?) Google過先知Les Paul有f-hole果支已經停左產。好少有。記得包以正好似有彈Steinberger。

Artist: Nightrage

Album: Sweet Vengeance

Just heard this band from Last.fm. What a pleasant surprise! Found out it featured an All-Star lineup with Gus G from Firewind and Tomas Lindberg from At the Gates (on this album.) I saw Firewind at Arch Enemy's concert a few months ago and Gus G's guitar playing really impressed me. This guy could shred. The most surprising thing is that he's a power metal guy but this band plays melodic death!

Show: Gigantour

Bands: High On Fire, Job for a Cowboy, Children of Bodom, In Flames, Megadeth
Venue: SJSU, SJ

No disrespect to Megadeth, the pioneer of thrash metal, but I gotta admit I would not have gone to the concert if COB is not on the bill.


In Flames is a big incentive too.

Show: Arch Enemy

Venue: Slim's, SF

Arch Enemy headlined the Tyranny and Bloodshred tour. Dark Tranquillity, Divine Heresy, and Firewind were the supporting acts.

Video: So What

Artist: Miles Davis



For those who think jazz only has a niche market, please explain why the above video has almost a million hits? Granted, it's from the all-time #1 jazz album "Kind of Blue" (not the all-time #1 track though. That would be "Take Five" by Dave Brubeck)

Artist: Fueled By Fire

MySpace Link

Thrash is back! At least according to Village Voice. That's good news to me since I have always missed the gold old days of headbanging to Metallica and Testament! Fueled By Fire is supposed to be one of the flagship band of this comeback. ("Thrash is back" is the name of their song)

Opinion: "Health" of Subscription music service

While researching my previous blog posts regarding Rhapsody and Yahoo Music, I was curious about what players are in the market and who has the biggest market share. The result? It is kind of "scary" to a fan of the subscription model like myself: According to its financial material, Napster had 830,000 paid subscribers world wide and claimed to be the No. 1 player. Consider the subscription model has been here since 2001 and the No.1 player hasn't even break the million subscriber mark. This model doesn't look too promising, does it? Maybe I'm really the minority and the naysayers are right (for the wrong reasons maybe. The arguments from the latter link were not logical at all! For example, the author thinks listeners want to listen to the hits of the moment. I quote: "Tunes are addictive for a while and then discarded. " Isn't this perfect for a subscription model where you could always listen to the latest hits without buying more and more?)

Another way of gauging the health of this market is looking at how the major players are doing: the major players one year ago are: AOL, Napster, Rhapsody, Virgin and Yahoo. Now the music services of AOL and Virgin were both acquired by Napster but we have 2 more new players: MTV's Urge and Microsoft's Zune Marketplace. I guess we will just have to wait and see.

Service: Yahoo Music Unlimited to go

If you've read my previous post, you know I have switched to Yahoo Music Unlimited to go from Real Rhapsody. Price-wise there is no comparison: the recently raised yearly rate for Rhapsody is $119.88. How much does Yahoo cost yearly? $71.88!!! And if you pay with MasterCard, you get the 2nd year free! So I do myself a favor and "upgrade" to the "to go" version, which is $143.88 (for 2 years since I took advantage of the MC deal) and it is still cheaper than Rhapsody!

So what do I have to "give up" by switching? 2 Million songs. (According to Rhapsody, their catalog has 4 mil while Yahoo claim they have 2 mil) Though what really matter the most to me is the loss in classical music. A significant portion of the comprehensive catalog of the budget classical label, Naxos, is available on Rhapsody but not on Yahoo. Don't get me wrong: You could still find a lot of classical music on Yahoo. In fact, I bet the "Top 40" major classical works are there. However, the selection is just too "limited" for serious classical music fan.

What other complaints do I have? Buggy software! Although Real is not known for writing solid software (maybe Listen.com did a real good job and the core was retained?), the Rhapsody client is far more stable and responsive than Yahoo's Music Jukebox (YMJ) during my 2 years stint with them. In contrast, YMJ crashes often and has some weird bugs (e.g. sometimes after playing the 1st song on the playlist, it appeared to move on to the next but actually repeated the 1st one) And when it behaves normally, it feels very sluggish : slow to display contents (e.g. contents on portable devices, artist/album/playlist pages) BTW, unlike Rhapsody, it does not support Windows 2000. (It used to. I wonder why it does not anymore)

The user experience for transferring songs also leaves a lot to be desired. First of all, just like Napster, it is a very slow process, probably due to the overhead of handling DRM. For example, transferring ~720Mb (~100 songs) of music to my Samsung Yepp player took almost an hour! So this is more suitable to be performed in "batch" mode (i.e. before I go to bed!) However, the software is not really well suited to run in this mode either. Let's say I dragged a list of 100 songs to a portable player, the following happens:
Phase 1: it will try to download the 100 songs from its server to my PC
Phase 2: it will try to copy the songs from my PC to the portable.
During Phase 1, if it encounters a previously downloaded song, it will pop up a message and ask if I want to re-download. It will sit there and do nothing until I respond! (What it should have done is comparing the checksum of the local and remote file to determine whether re-downloading is necessary!)
Before Phase 2 begins, if it encouters any error during Phase 1, it will pop up a message saying there were errors. Again, it will not do anything until I acknowledge!

Nevertheless, besides being less expensive, it does have its virtues:
1) higher bit rate: I believe Rhapsody serves music at 160kbps while Yahoo does 192! (I will have to perform some serious A/B testing to tell if the higher bit rate translates to higher sound quality though)
2) better recommendations: I praised Napster for this. Yahoo is also superior to Rhapsody in this regard. My rating of artists/songs/albums/genres affects Yahoo's recommendation. And I could break it down by genre so I could build playlist that have exactly the right balance of different genres. (I know this is weird but sometimes I do insist on 40% jazz, 40% classical and 20% metal!) Unfortunately, Yahoo did not take it to the next level, i.e., utilizing recommendation to enhance portable music experience. What it should have done is supporting smart playlists determined by genre or similar artists, when the songs were played last time and the total size. And it should allow "real" sychronization of such playlists to portables(i.e., keep songs on the player and in the playlist, remove the rest and finally add missing ones) The current so-called sychronization barks when there is not enough space on the player. Also, I couldn't rate music on my portable and "feed" the ratings back to YMJ. I guess it is challenging to support such feature across many players from different manufacturers, unlike Apple only needs to deal with iPods (and iPhones now)

Finally, even though it does not show on Yahoo's compatibility list, I am able to transfer and listen on my Dell Axim x30 (running Windows Mobile 2003 SE) The transfer speed is even worse than my Yepp though. (It probably has to do with Axim's SD card hardware) What a pleasant surprise!

Service: Goodbye Rhapsody. Hello Yahoo Music

I've been a subscriber of Real Rhapsody ever since I started this blog but all good things come to an end. It's time for me to cancel my subscription. There was only one reason: rate hike. I have been paying the quarterly rate of $24.95 and now Real has raised it to $34.99.

And the cancellation experience was not without pain: I had to call them (couldn't do this online) and was put on hold for 20 mins until I was able to talk to a customer service rep, who kept trying to convince me to stay with reasons like it is the first time in six years that they have increased the price of Rhapsody (which I don't really care) I had to be very firm about the cancellation to finally get it cancelled. And I will check my credit card bill very carefully for sure.

Stay tuned for my review of Yahoo Music Unlimited!

Service: Rhapsody - What have they added in the past 2 years?

I'm sure they have added a lot of new albums, i.e, those release during the past 2 years. How about old stuff? Let's compare my sampling of what is available on Rhapsody and what is not by using mostly nonmainstream artists/albums from my first review :

Punk: Now become Available	Punk: Still Unavailable
Minor Threat, Punk Goes Metal
Jazz: Now become Available	Jazz: Still Unavailable
David Murray (2 albums only)	Maria Schneider
Metal: Now become Available	Metal: Still Unavailable
Shadows Fall (1 old album only) Smashing Pumpkins	Tool, John 5, Exodus, Impaled, Metal Massacre
Classic rock: Now become Available	Classic rock: Still Unavailable
	Led Zeppelin, Beatles

Decent improvement. Agreed?

Album: Strange As Angels - A Tribute to The Cure

I always want to cover The Cure's tunes with my band but it never happened so I have to listened to others' cover versions. As a metal fan, I found Chimaira's rendition of Fascination Street indeed fascinating. This album is another interesting one and they all play in the punk/post-punk style.

Show: The Haunted/Dark Tranquillity

Venue: The Slim's, San Francisco

This was the first metal show I went to since 2001 (the last one was Pantera's Reinventing the Steel tour, with Morbid Angel and Static-X as supporting acts)

To be honest, I'm not familiar with these 2 bands at all. I learned about them from my new bandmates and we're covering their songs.

Dark Tanquillity is one of the best representatives of the "Gothenburg sound", i.e., the melodic death metal from Scandinavia. Their music striked the right balance between power and complexity, which was showcased perfectly in this show. What interested me the most was the vocalist looked and sounded very polite, which I totally didn't expect listening to his vocal. He kept asking if the crowd would mind hearing songs from their new albums. Of course I didn't mind since the new songs were pretty good. Another interesting thing was he joked about whoever have listened to those songs prior to the show gotta be pirate. However, he didn't show strong objection at all. I guess it's because Sweden is one of the more liberal place as far as P2P is concerned. Also, the band makes most money from touring. P2P is more of a problem for the record company.

Finally, a few words about the headliner, The Haunted: I didn't have too high an expectation about them since some of their songs I listened before sound kinda pop-ish or "soft" (more clean vocal, more metalcore-like than melo. death) And they indeed played a few "soft" ones at the show. However, the rest are better than I expected. The vocalist, Peter Dolving, shared some of his strong feelings against right-wing Christian and wars during the show. Check out his blog.

Album: This Is Metal's Most Covered Moments Of The '80s

Artist: Testament & Jake E. Lee
Track: Seek And Destroy (Rhapsody Link)

As I huge fan of Testament, I tend to think that I've heard of every song they played, but obviously not this one, which I discovered today! There are 3 reasons for me to like this song:
1) It's by Testament!
2) It's from the early days of Metallica, which did not suck (yet)
3) Jake E. Lee played guitar on this. He was Ozzy Osbourne's former guitarist. Typical 80's guitar hero style!


Artist: Ratt, Gilby Clarke and L.A. Guns
Track: Sweet Child O' Mine (Rhapsody Link)

This is another interesting track, with former members of Guns N' Roses covering GNR's most famous song.

Opinion: Can I find music I like on radio anymore?

Inspired by the story about WBEZ dropping jazz, I'm curious if I could still find music I like on air anymore. Turns out it is not that bad here in SF Bay Area.

On FM 90.5 KSJS, down in San Jose, there is a metal show "The Splatter Platter", from Tuesdays 10am-2pm. Check out its playlist. Very heavy stuff.

And FM 91.5 KKUP plays some blues and jazz. (Interesting story: a friend's friend played on this station during the blues marathon and that's how I knew about the station. The other day I was looking for it again but forgot the frequency and accidentally tuned into the above metal show on 90.5!)

And finally, in search of the great and probably non-existent jazz podcast that's supposed to displace jazz radio all over the country, I found Redjazz. The interesting thing is that it is broadcasted over the air on AM 1550 KYCY, the so-called "Open Source Radio."

As good as it is, there's no way it could replace the 24/7 jazz offerred by the local radio station KCSM. Here is the deal: if you could find me a daily podcast with 2 solid hours of jazz and classical music, I'll stop argue with you that jazz and classical are hogging public radio and should be taken off air.

Service: Jazz Radio on WBEZ

From this article:
"A Station Research Group multiyear study from 1999 through 2004 showed that of public radio's primary formats, jazz stations had the lowest average loyalty and lowest average time spent listening. The same study showed that the most dramatic audience growth came from all-news stations."

So, Chicago's radio station WBEZ replacing jazz programming by news seems like a very logical choice. It's sad news to jazz lover like myself though.

The same article also mentioned that iPod's popularity is another contributing factor to this decision, i.e., people'd rather listen to jazz on their own iPod than to radio. I'm not too sure about this one though. I recall there's something hugely popular before iPod and it's called Walkman.

[Update: apparently a lot of people care and discussed this topic]

Podcast: The Roadhouse

The name of this podcast is probably inspired by the song "Roadhouse Blues" and it is indeed a podcast about blues music. I recommend it because it strikes a good balance between well-known and lesser-known artists.

Here are links to its website and its podcast feed in case you want to use it with a Podcast client.

Service: XM Liquid Metal is BACK!

This is kinda old news. XM has put Liquid Metal back on air last month after about a year of hiatus (it was available online only during that period.) Hurray! I guess XM heard too many metal fans bitched about it. Power to the people! (well, power to metal fans actually)

What does it mean to me since I wasn't a subscriber of XM? I am a Directv customer and Directv switched their music provider from Music Choice to XM last year. Music Choice has fairly decent metal programming. When I heard that Music Choice's Metal channel would be replaced by XM's Squizz channel. I thought WTF 'coz Squizz is more of an alt. rock station and that's when I realized Liquid Metal was canned.

Now I'm one happy Liquid Metal listener rocking to "Are You Dead Yet?" by Children of Bodom!

Service: My experience with Napster-To-Go, part 2

If we take the To-Go portion out of equation, how does Napster do in general?

Let me start with its weaknesses:
1) Poor selection compared to Rhapsody in the genres I like (jazz, blues, classical, metal) Lots of artists have none or only few songs available. For example, Jimmy Bruno and Jimmy Raney aren't exactly household names but they are well represented on Rhapsody, not on Napster though.

2) Poor user interface: it just ain't user friendly. For example, on some artist's page, the top pane (list of album) is too big and makes the bottom pane (list of song) too small. Users like me are more interested in the bottom pane, which allows me to pick songs to download. Another examples are cryptic radio station names like "Crossroads." You would never know if you're not a blues fan already. Doesn't it discourage users to explore music they are not familiar with?

3) Poor classification/information:
For example, "Top albums" of Blues are Confessions by Usher and #1 by Destiny's Child!
And there is no consistency: following a certain navigation path you may see John Coltrane filed under Blues. Everytime I click on Top Artists under Blues I see a different list. Sometimes the album has a "download album" link next to it but I found that even if it doesn't say so, songs from the album might still be available for download when I click the album to drill down.

Nevertheless, it does have some nice features:
1) its radio feature actually generates playlists instead of streaming. Why is this a good feature? It allows listener to keep a record of what has been played so that (s)he could download all or some of them in a shot later on.

2) In addition to the "radio station" Napster created for every user, you could build custom station based on all songs in your library or your current playlist. This is more flexible than the more common way of setting up custom station based on artists/genre.

3) This is just me being nostalgic: the download window really reminds me of the good old days of the original Napster :P

The verdict? I don't think I'd switch to Napster since it charges the same as Rhapsody (and more than Yahoo) I do hope Napster will improve 'coz more competition in the digital music business could only be a good thing for consumers like myself.