Ian Benedict

Guitar practice is going pretty well. I’ve been working on my improvisational skills to be able to come up with my own solos, rather than just playing the same one over and over. It’s working out all right so far, but constantly working on scales is very dull. I picked up a slide as well, have been noodling around with it and haven’t really started practicing much with it. Also guitar-related I guess, but in another 19 days, I will be seeing Jeff Beck and Eric Clapton at the ACC from row 23 right at the stage.

I finally fixed my Macbook. It turned out to be a corrupt hard drive and not BIOS-related (phew!). Just about done installing the millions of apps I need to operate on a daily basis. It’s only yet another reason why I need to start shifting more of my data to the cloud (which I’ve been doing a lot thanks to Google). Also, I need to get into the habit of writing smaller, more frequent blog posts rather than giant word heavy ones once every few months. I guess I’ll make that a New Year’s resolution.

Upgrading this site to Wordpress 2.9 was an incredible pain. But I finally set it up with Google Analytics, since the regular stats plugin seems to have been borked.

This has to be the prettiest guitar I’ve ever seen. The art is done based off of Jimi Hendrix’s Monterey Stratocaster. I would definitely get a paint job like this when I get my stratocaster.

Picture was found here.

I’ve gotten back into playing the guitar and I figured I would talk about the pieces that make up my setup.

Epiphone Les Paul Special II:
This is a fairly basic starter guitar with a tone and volume knob, as well as a switch for the pickups. It has two humbucker pickups which don’t sound too bad. Overall, it’s a good economical choice to practice guitar.

Line 6 Spider III (15W):
A small Line 6 amplifier which features some good distortion effects. It’s a fairly good practice amp, but not for anything more than that.

Boss DS-1:
A cool distortion pedal that offers a variety of distortion effects. I don’t use this as much now that I have the following pedal.

ZOOM G7.1ut:
A multi-effects pedal I got last year. It offers a wide variety of effects and sounds that it can produce, making it great for getting the most out of your guitar. My favourite part has to be the USB interface because it can plug directly into your computer for recording and editing the effects patches.

Here’s a pic I took a while back of my rig with the only difference being some better cables.

I haven’t really had much of a chance to write anything now with school and work in full force.

I did have my Kendo grading a couple of weeks ago. I was granted the rank of 4th kyu (Yay!). This rank is basically one of the beginner ranks in Kendo, so it’s nothing to be too proud of. I’m just happy I can finally wear the armour now. Wearing it for the first time, I was really disoriented because the headpiece was on really tight and it also cuts off peripheral vision. Additionally, the gloves provide almost no protection for the wrists, so I last left practice with my right wrist in a shade of purple.

The guitar playing is going well. I’ve been playing around a lot with my ZOOM console and have been getting tones very close to some of my favourite bands. My bassist friend and I have finally starting jamming again this year, and with a drummer coming soon, we’ll be able to get some good play time going in the summer.

But yeah, other than that, I haven’t been doing much besides school and work. The mental fatigue has been setting in for a while now, so I tend to leave my Sundays free to sleep in the entire day. At least I’ll catch a little break this upcoming weekend when I head up to a cottage with some friends.

Alright, so exams are finally over (YAY!), however I start my full-time job next week (….) so there’s not that much room for relaxation. As well, I start summer classes the week after next, so I’ll probably be even more swamped with work in the summer than the past semester. As for plans for this week, I have a bunch of things that have been on my to do/play/watch list for a long while now.

I picked up this neat little ZOOM G7.1ut multi-effects console to spice up my guitar playing a bit. It also has a built-in USB interface to make connectivity with the PC a breeze. I’ve played around a bit with some of the settings and parameters during exam week, but nothing too much into detail. I figure that once I can play fairly well, I’ll at least have an outlet to record my playing and post it online.

Other than that, not really much has been going on. Kendo’s going well, with my grading coming up this Saturday. I did happen to catch Harold & Kumar 2 last week. It was pretty good, but I’m not sold on whether it was better than the first one. On that note, I’ll leave you with the hilarious poem Kumar recited to the girl he likes (I guess this would be a spoiler, so read at your own risk):

I’m sure that I will always be
A lonely number like root three

The three is all that’s good and right,
Why must my three keep out of sight
Beneath the vicious square root sign,
I wish instead I were a nine

For nine could thwart this evil trick,
with just some quick arithmetic

I know I’ll never see the sun, as 1.7321
Such is my reality, a sad irrationality

When hark! What is this I see,
Another square root of a three

As quietly co-waltzing by,
Together now we multiply
To form a number we prefer,
Rejoicing as an integer

We break free from our mortal bonds
With the wave of magic wands

Our square root signs become unglued
Your love for me has been renewed

- David Feinberg

The school semester is slowly drawing to a close. Sadly though, the snow isn’t.

I’m really happy with my guitar playing. All those days of chord progressions and scales are finally starting to pay off. I’ve been practicing this one particular song which happens to be from Megaman 2 (Yeah yeah I know, it’s a good lick though), and can pretty much play it thoroughly. In addition to the recommendation I made last time for beginner guitarists, I’d also recommend checking out the Metal Method series of instructional dvds. They’re made for the absolute beginner to around intermediate/advanced players. Here’s a video of the song I’ve been practicing (But it’s not me that’s playing, obviously).

In this next section, I’d like to take a bit to talk about a couple of web applications.

First up is Mozilla Firefox, a web browser. Yes I do realize this isn’t something new, however there was a beta released recently for the upcoming Firefox 3. I just installed this yesterday on my home Vista laptop, and so I wanted to talk about it a bit. The biggest feature here has to be the huge cut in memory usage. There have been reports that it uses around 60% less memory as you keep the browser open. This is a huge deal for me because I sometimes leave my browser on overnight and it can just be downright unusable in the morning. That and the fact that I haven’t had the need to use the task manager to kill its process yet is what sold me.

Finally, the other application I wanted to talk about is the not so well-known IM client known as Digsby. What makes it better than the standard MSN or Trillian clients? Well, not only does it support a plethora of IM protocols, it also can track your different email accounts as well as social networking applications! That’s right, this client offers a more connected experience to your social networking platforms like Facebook, for those of you who aren’t already addicted enough as it is. I’ve only just set this client up yesterday on my Vista laptop and it tracks my MSN, GMail, and Facebook accounts. So for example, if someone posts on my wall or sends me a message via Facebook, I’d get a little notification on the bottom right corner of my screen much in the same way as MSN. This client offers just about the closest experience I can get to Adium on OSX (Which I am in love with) while offering features that even Adium doesn’t have. It is currently in beta and only available on Windows so far, however Mac OSX and Linux versions are in the works.

Well, midterms are finally over and I have a bit of free time at last.

Kendo has been going well so far. I’ve been a bit disappointed with my lack of stamina during the last couple of practices, but I intend to rectify it quickly with a lot of cardiovascular exercise. As well, the skin has started peeling from under my feet, so I guess my initiation into Kendo is slowly beginning. Other than that, practices have been pretty fun so far. I’ve been contemplating whether to look into getting my Gi and Hakama around now or wait till the end of the semester.

Guitar practice is slowly coming along as well. I’ve decided to stop randomly playing riffs from different songs and work on mastering the basic techniques. Some of the techniques I’m working on include things like vibrato, legato, palm muting, etc. For the record, if you’re looking into learning to play the guitar, I highly recommend John Petrucci’s Rock Discipline DVD. It’s very good at putting you on the right track to becoming an expert guitar player.

In other news, it seems that Nine Inch Nails has released a new album called Ghosts I-IV. Now, I haven’t really heard much from them in the past but I’m fairly interested in this release. More specifically, I’m interested in how they’re releasing the album. They’ve decided that they’re going to release the first of the 4 CD set, which contains 9 tracks, for free for people to download and enjoy. If you are interested in buying the album, you can pay $5 and download all 4 discs containing 36 tracks in total. Both downloads come complete with album artwork and some extras like wallpapers and avatars. NIN isn’t the first to try this method of content delivery, with Radiohead being the innovators here with their album In Rainbows where they let you pay whatever you felt the album was worth, even if it meant you paid nothing. Personally, I think $5 is a steal for a full album and that NIN is definitely on the right track to finding the right balance for the cost of music.