scottyboy

Roger and the Rottentrolls Count Duckula Sharky and George Transylvania Pet Shop Bucky O'Hare Extreme Ghostbusters Hurricanes At various times. Can't say if they've held up or not...

Excellent, he'll fit right in next to Prince Phillip. And all the dictators and war criminals.

Surprise, fuckers! Who's laughing now? I'm revelling in a guy having malignant melanoma, definitely going to hell.

Ieng Sary did (his wife is still on the list). The other two are Khieu Samphan and Duc (already convicted) who are neither as old or as high ranking (or so I thought I remembered - Khieu is 82 and was head of state). I couldn't think of anyone else as venerable and ancient as Sihanouk/Giap/King Rama of the top of my head. Like I said, so many died the last couple of seasons, and I took out Abe, Akimoto and the Dalai Lama as useless filler. So I ended up googling "terminally ill celebrities" like everyone else, and the resulting sites have a western focus.

I like it, and the skull on the cover reminds me of Evil Murray.

I had to consult Wikipedia because Buckethead has so many albums I forget which ones are which and whether I've even heard them. Les Claypool is on at least one album, Gods and Monsters. Lead track: Not sure how much like Primus it is, it's a sort of freak-out shredfest, but it does have a fat bass breakdown around the 2m mark. Edit: oops. More wiki-ing indicates that Buckethead is the bassist on that particular track. Otherwise, Claypool is on about half the album.

Stripey?

I imagined this to be about the genre when I clicked, but yeah, when I saw all those caps this just kept jumping out at me: Sorry, I'll get out the thread now.

Had a quick listen to Needleman's Blue Blood. Agree it's a better done example of this kind of music, and this recording is way more listenable than the ramshackle demos that were up in the feedback thread before. Other than that, like Chris it's is not something I'm massively into, and it feels pretty derivative: tbh, for much of it I thought "punk Chelsea Dagger" and the guitars (and to a lesser extent the melody) in the chorus sound heavily reminiscent of those in The Offspring's Kick Him When He's Down. I guess that's unavoidable in punk though and tonnes of songs probably reuse and reference other.

Piano makes it easy to visualise stuff as the keys are all one note/interval apart. However so is guitar, each string is much like a stretch of piano keys, but there's six of them and you eventually see stuff in a matrix. For givemeasmile I'd recommend the same stuff mentioned earlier: learn the notes and intervals on the fretboard; basic modal theory and then use maybe the CAGED system (basically, move your open chord shapes up and down the neck, but knowing intervals you can now tweak them as needed) to construct new chords. Or, as mentioned earlier, just tweak your familiar chords at random and see what happens; knowing intervals and maybe modes, you should then be able to figure out what you're playing and what to do with it.

I like it, and the dizzying multilingualism is pretty refreshing.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B0B_ekSrsEk Although he was talking about, er, a particular ethnic group.

Vietnam is hot as shit, obviously, so that's the prevalent way to drink it over there; forget about about a big steaming mug of coffee. When drunk "hot" (lukewarm really, for whatever reason, probably the high proportion of milk) it's again really small volume and concentrated though.

Wasn't aware he'd been vegetative for years; would've had him on my team otherwise.

http://www.scotsman.com/news/scotland/top-stories/saudi-murder-case-nurse-lucille-mclauchlan-dies-1-3258482 Pushing "celebrity" and not sure if anyone remembers but that was a massive case at the time (or maybe just in Dundee; her death was front page news here). Probably for the lurid punishments they received (and ultimately avoided) more than anything else.

Bundy was pretty much the archetypal Bateman-esque psycho. He seems normal and intelligent but people who were around him long-term (his girlfriend, legal teams, prison guards etc.) could tell he wasn't all there. He was floored by witnesses placing him in incriminating times/places because he couldn't understand that someone would pay enough mind to other people to remember details like that. He was also a kleptomaniac and calculated liar who'd never really take responsibility for anything (his last interview, in which he made apparently heartfelt statements contradicting anything he'd said previously on the subject, and which just so happened to match the interviewer's pet views, is pretty telling). He'd also just lose the plot and behave bizarrely at times. It's also worth bearing in mind that when he actually killed people he was always completely hammered on booze. Dahmer on the other hand seemed to take/show genuine responsibility/remorse and was one of the few who was apparently not a psychopath (but had some other personality disorder). Though like Bundy he was a raging alcoholic who by the time he was caught was drinking his way through heaps of beer with a bloated corpse on one side and a drugged and still alive victim on the other. He'd then go out to do more drinking while leaving the two alone with each other. Lovely, and clearly not criminal genius.

Yeah I've done a bit of morbid reading and viewing, mostly just on Wikipedia/Youtube. TBH few of them turn out to be very interesting, most seem pretty stupid and are mainly into raping and killing women and/or kids; not your class act Hannibal the Cannibal. Pretty much all had some shitty abusive upbringing and suffer a serious mental illness or three, usually anti-social disorders (or pscho-/sociopathy). The various interviews with Ed Kemper are pretty interesting. He's very articulate (IQ of 145 apparently) and pleasant, not stereotypically shallow and dismissive. And as it happens he did the most batshit stuff imaginable, including killing both his grandparents as a child (apparently just for the banter), and lastly his mother (and raped her severed head, of course, before using it as a dartboard). Really did not like his mother it seems (they all have "complicated" relationships with their mothers): he tried and failed to stuff her vocal chords into the garbage grinder ("seemed appropriate; never could get her to shut up") and buried a severed head in his garden (in between family members he bumped off students and raped their corpses) so he could giggle to himself whenever she mentioned wanting people "to look up to her". The HBO interviews with "The Iceman" (Kuklinski) are pretty interesting, partly because they seem to be almost total fantasy. If the guy is to be believed about everything, he was a one-man army whose life included spells as both a serial thrill killer and mob hitman, who killed hundreds of people in New York and New Jersey (including all his friends, anyone who knew anything about him), and went completely undetected for decades. [He was only convicted of a handful of murders, again mostly from stuff that came out of his own mouth]. Mentioned it in another thread, but "Bikini Killer" Charles Sobhraj (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bikini_Killer) was kind of an Asian Charles Manson (who did personally kill his victims, members of his own crime "families" in fact) whose escapades across the South and South East Asian backpacker circuits (and prisons) read like a horror parody of a picaresque novel. Jeffrey Dahmer is an example of one who seemed relatively normal, in terms of his upbringing and mental health (at least once he sobered up in prison...) while having done some very deranged, nasty stuff.

Ahem: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hYDBj8ulI94 demonstration: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AAnG7WD5sBk

I think the singer sounds kind of like Barney Gumble from The Simpsons...

Is that Barney Gumble?

I also disagree that knowing theory "predetermines" one's playing: even if one does use it in such a way (say, you have a riff/hook that you don't know where to take next, so you consult your progression/modal theory to see what might fit), there's always options (whether to use a standard major chord or a natural or altered extension etc.; and that's just for chords). It's always worth noting that the "rules" (which are really a particular Western tradition of describing things) can be "broken". The most overused blues progressions and licks actually look really crazy or impossible from a (Western, classical) theory perspective. Satriani has this "pitch axis" theory (I've both read that he learned it in high school and that he dreamed it up himself :S) whereby you can do absolutely anything, as long there's just one note underpinning it. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8gSXZRgWzp8 loads of different scales over just one drone note (this particular example is really noodle-y but you can see how someone could develop something Indian or doom-y from the same concept) And here's how it might work with a nice chord progression (the guitarist has elsewhere gently ribbed Satch's theory, funnily enough): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NIDdVvz3JNQ (chords start at 1.30). As he says it's otherwise "random" and doesn't "make sense" but has one note running through all the chords.

I learned my pinch harmonics on a stagg les paul copy and a 10W amp. They're not hard but it's one of those there's-a-knack-to-it things where it seems really hard until suddenly you can nail it every time (although the exact result is always a bit unpredictable). Just find the point(s) on the string(s) where it works (most of the string, really, I find), get used to making them work in isolation and then proceed. If you're struggling, I use the edge of my dangling third finger to "pinch" (it's more like "pinging", I find) rather than the conventional edge of the thumb. Also, the more distortion and especially TREBLE, the easier it'll be. I remember the second point about chords coming up before. I imagine most of the indie-rock-shoegaze type guitarists on here create their chords by starting with a familiar major or minor barre chord shape and then shifting one or two fingers up or down. The result, if it's not horrible, is likely to be something like a major chord with an added 2nd, 6th or 7th, or the major third gets shifted up or down to create a neutral chord with a 2nd or 4th (which is ambiguous but more sophisticated than the basic 5th power chord). These are also (some) of the chords you'd find in a jazz book. The convoluted names turn up when you do more than one finger/note tweak (like A7sus4 or E6add9 say) and/or put a note other than the root as the lowest note (which results in the / with another letter after it...).

Had a look through a few of those and while the tone is amusing they still gave me a headache: they're mainly pretty advanced and esoteric and pertinent to the student of classical music. Most of it is about the Common Practice Period in which apparently "composers used harmonic minor by default", which doesn't seem too relevant to the average rock musician (Yngwie fans excepted). He also notes that "dominant 7th" chord means a slightly different thing in jazz/pop theory, which sounds problematic... The single one under "20th Century", "The Modern Modes" is pretty much the fundamentals for rock/pop/jazz. I think altered chords could be explained in a simpler, more practical way for rock/jazz as well.