Who needs em anyway? Stupid non-tempered tuning system. Gonna throw ME into a temper!

*calming breath*

Hhoh-kay. So. Lots of rehearsing today, though it’s nearly 8.30 and the guitars still haven’t shown up. They’ve promised them by 9pm. I got a call from the airport at work this afternoon to say that they’ve arrived safely, now they just need to get here from Glasgow. But that’s beside the point.

All throughout the rehearsing this afternoon, Mark (in his ever so gentle way) has been ribbing me about my tuning issues. Not because I’m out of tune. Ooooh no. Because I’m out of tune with HIM! See, Bagpipes are tuned “properly” – that is, if you were to play a concert B-flat scale (which is an A scale on bagpipes) against a piano which is in “tempered tuning”, you would find that the top concert A-flat (G natural in the bagpipe scale) on the bagpipes is significantly lower than the piano’s tuning. So low that it sounds out of tune to me, but I KNOW that Mark’s concert A-flat note is technically correct. My fingers won’t have a bar of it though. I’m having to deliberately play out of tune on certain notes, to bring them in tune with the pipes (though The Evil Doctor would tell me that it is, in fact, technically more in tune – but we shall conveniently ignore that point. I want to whinge for a while.) This whole thing is kinda like quarter tones in middle eastern scales. Only it’s a Western scale. *wails* but it sounds so WROOONG!

*pout*

OK, so I got the Doc to read over the above for technical correctness, and he had this to say:

The bagpipe scale is tuned to harmonic or “Just” intonation. Unlike tempered tuning (which is slightly out of tune everywhere) this type of tuning is perfectly in tune, giving you much richer harmonics, particularly on the major third and the flattened seventh. So stick it!

Now, faithful readers, before you get all in a tizz for the disrespect to Yours Truly in telling me to “stick it”, I hasten to assure you that that last bit was uttered with laughter on tongue, not to worry. No need to break his kneecaps quite yet.

Oh, Mark has told me that he’s been emailing all his students at PLC (that’s Presbyterian Ladies College in Melbourne, probably one of the poshest girls schools in the country) to come check out the blog, so a big shout out to all you lovely PLC ladies. Mark hopes that you’re practising hard while he’s gone, and that he expects a 3 page essay on tempered vs just tuning when he gets home.

Anyway, enough bitching about just and tempered tuning, cause something marvellous just happened while I was blogging – the guitars arrived by courier!!! Sweet Esmerelda the Mexican Electric Beauty has arrived (it’s a little cloying to hear the boys cooing over her, or maybe I’m just a bit jealous), along with Simmo’s Acoustic and Dave’s bass, heretofore known as the Axes of Evil (though I cannot take credit for that witticism, all kudos to Simmo). Right! Time to start practising!

But before I sign off for the evening, may I share a sight which is so very reminiscent of a certain blog entry from around this time last year:

As it turns out, Dave is not only a master bassist, but he appears to be a master chef! Tasty tasty food in our bellies thanks to SuperDave, now it is time to make music!

It’s official!  The Mark Saul Band ‘06 Summer tour has kicked off!  They boys arrived this afternoon into Glasgow airport, looking only slightly dishevelled, but alarmingly guitar-less.  Special thanks go to Emirates Airlines for keeping the lad’s musical luggage safe and sound in Dubai.  We could have really done with the gear here in Edinburgh though, thanks all the same.

Spirits are high despite lost guitars (three in total – two acoustic guitars and a bass), and with the lads valiantly battling jetlag, we headed off into the Old Town for some beer, food, and catch up with Everyone’s Favorite Sound Engineer, Mr Jamie Hale.

In jokes a-plenty fly between the newly arrived Aussies, which I’m sure Jamie and I will be utterly au courant with by the time the tour’s over come September.  Something about a Van Halen video, and “Baltimore” (said, almost sung, in an American rockstar voice – hard to explain.  I suspect we’ll have videos aplenty to share with the world before long.  Mwahahahahah!!!

Here’s first photos for sharing though:

Inaugural Mark Saul Band tour pic for 2006.  L-R (In case you’ve not been reading all year!) Mark, Charlotte (that’s me!) Simmo, Dave.  This is the happy smiling pic, stay tuned for the we’ve-been-on-the-road-together-for-a-month-and-we-are-sick-of-each-other’s-jokes photo.  I suspect a bit less cameraderie…    But seriously, they’re brilliant boys, it’s gonna be awesome!

Mark, RockStarSimmo and SuperDave doing their Steve Irwin/Ubiquitous Jessie impressions at the sight of Thunderbird 4 parked on Princes Street.

So now if all goes well, guitars should arrive on the next plane from Dubai and will be couriered to my flat, hopefully by tomorrow afternoon, and then it’s just 3 days till we’re flitting (flitting in a good way – like there could be any other kind…(maddy!)) to La Bella Italia for 3 sensational gigs somewhere in the vicinity of Milan.  *happy dance*

Rock on!

Cxx

After many weeks of grappling with technical issues beyond my control, my second fanvid is FINALLY ready for unveiling! And hip hip huzzah, but you can watch it without having to leave the comfort of this page! Here it is, a mopey, angsty vid to farewell the lovely Billie Piper, who has left the show after two fantastic seasons.

Warning – there are some spoilerish bits in this vid, so steer clear if you really don’t want to be spoilt! It says it in the credits, but I’m going to say it again anyway, sincerest thanks go to ErnieMay, EricaLea, ThursdayWeld and Tzegha for their creative input into this baby.

If you like it enough to want to give it a rating on YouTube, you can visit the page where it lives here.

If, however, you can’t be arsed watching, that’s OK too! I’m starting to understand that vidding (as it’s called in the geek world) is a little known or appreciated art. Many geeks themselves don’t really explore the world of vidding. I know that I didn’t really get it till ErnieMay showed me some inCREDible Farscape vids, but now I’m hooked on it. And now the folk at work have discovered that I’m into this kind of thing, so they’re all asking me to do video editing for them for presentations and the like – it’s nice when a skill leart through sheer geekiness, can develop into a useful workplace tool. I feel kinda… vindicated. Not that I ever felt victimised for making vids, but like I say, even in the geek world, vidding is a much misunderstood and unknown art.

Just 5 more sleeps to go now till the rest of the Mark Saul band arrive here, and then it’s 3 frantic days of rehearsing, before the first gigs of the Mark Saul Band Euro Tour ‘06!

We’ll be starting off with 3 gigs in sultry Milan, followed the next week by the first festival on our schedule, the Belladrum festival near Inverness, in the north of Scotland.

The gods of connectivity once again smiled down upon us last Sunday morning, and we had a fabulous V-Rehearsal, this time with the whole band in attendance at the other end of the trans-continental fibre-optic cable.  And let me tell you, if these boys don’t utterly rock your socks off, make you dance till your pants fall down, whip out riffs to make you lick your fingers and rub your nipples, explode your eyeballs with excitement, and generally play rather well, then you weren’t listening properly the first time.  Wow.  New bass player Dave - what a musical find!  At the end of one song on Sunday morning, in which the bass line sounded like another one of Mark’s playable-only-with-superpowers compositions, I had to ask whether Dave had actually been playing at all - it sounded too intricate and too perfect to be played by anything other than a computer.  “Yes,” was the answer, there had been NO sampled bass in that track – it had all been SuperDave.

Ooooh, but I’m a bit excited about putting this all together!

Gigs I’m excited about:

Beautiful Days in Exeter – this is the only gig we’ll be doing where we might actually get a night OFF at the festival, to just chill and be a festival goer – we might be arriving on the Friday, but we’re not playing till Saturday.  This festival has been sold out for months now, but plans are afoot to get The Ubiquitous Jessie (who you might remember from such blog entries as Bummin’ in Beijing, Excited about Edinburgh, and Livin’ it up in London) smuggled in the back of our bandwagon (we’re gonna have a bandwagon!).  Perhaps we can pass her off as a microphone stand.  I’m sure she’d be happy to hold a microphone on stage…

Festival Intercéltico dOccidente Murallón Folk – I’m just a bit excited about visiting Spain for the first time, at a celtic festival!!

Anntair Arts Centre, Stornoway – I just love Stornoway.  Brilliant place.

Solfest - have you seen their website?  Little dancing rainbow gifs in the headers?  What could be cooler than that?  Go ahead.  Call me a geek.  I couldn’t give a toss.  I happen to like that stuff…

So, kittens, I promise that I shall blog to the very best of my ability while on the road, and will bring regular updates each time I touch home base.  Stay tuned for more exciting installments of TOUR DIARY ‘06!!

One thing I’ve always loved about Edinburgh is the way that, although folks are locked in this maze of ancient stone and concrete, they still manage to carve out little oases of urban greenery.  On my way to work each morning, I walk past any number of places which are in what’s called the “lower basement” – their entries are one floor below street level, and often they continue down an extra floor after that.  So you have these turn of the century apartment blocks which rise four or five floors above groud level, but have more like six or seven stories altogether.

Simply a remarkable city.

Anyway, I love the way that the folk who live in many of these basement flats create little zen gardens outside their front doors, so I had to share.  These were taken on my new Motorola Razr phone, which I’m loving beyond belief.  The 18 month contract I signed to get my hands on it also represents my decision to stay here long term – yes, 18 months for me is long term!  It’s a sizable commitment to battling my ongoing itchy feet problem.  Some friends have accused me of “flitting” – well, here it is.  I’m not flitting anywhere until at LEAST December 2007.

OK, sorry, back to Edinburgh basement gardens:

 

 

You can enlarge the images by clicking on them.

 

Oooh, but we’re loving this embedded video thing right about now!

All the Brits have seen this ad, but I still love it! Every time it comes on, I think to myself, “what a nondescript looking car, but what a GREAT ad!” So I thought I’d share it with you lovely folk. I’m totally diggin’ the actor Jeremy Sheffield, but alas shall have to grow a penis if I’m to have a chance with him. Professional Ballerina (what’s the masculine for Ballerina? Is there a gender neutral version? Does it change when the Ballerina is a gay man? Someone throw me a bone here!), and also the leading man in Natalie Imbruglia’s music video, Torn, I’m all over Mr Sheffield. Giess more!

Anyway, here’s the vid if anyone’s interested:

Now that I’ve learnt how to post vids from YouTube into my blog, I shall be randomly featuring vids which tickle my fancy whereever I find them.

Here’s a sweet & upbeat little vid which was posted up this week – Rose Tyler tributes are rife right now, what with Billie Piper leaving Dr Who. I have one in the pipelines, but my editing software and my computer don’t play well together, so it’s being tardy in its release…

So this will have to tide you over till then.

I hasten to add that THIS VID IS NOT MINE! Mine is much more morose and mopey. More in the vane of “no more Rose, weepy weepy, woe betide us all, I miss Rose, The Doctor misses Rose, COME BACK BILLIE, ALL IS FORGIVEN”

*giggle*

Cxx

… in a big way! Wow! All the posters made me think, this is going to be pretty bad. I was prepared to be underwhelmed, but I wanted to see it just for the fully digital re-creation of Marlon Brando in the Crystal Palace.

I was pleasantly surprised though. They stayed VERY true to the old Superman movies, and Brandon Routh as Clark Kent/Superman was an inspired choice of casting. He’s got just enough Christopher Reeves to make him the ideal link between the Superman movies of the 80s, and what will hopefully be a long line of modern Superman movies. Not to mention the fact that I came away from it with a massive girlie crush on young Brandon.

 

Can I just point out, he comes complete with cleft chin and the little Superman Curl?  Yep, very nice casting indeed. 

It’s movies like this which make me remember that my VERY first memory of a movie was when I must have been about 5 or 6, and I was awoken from my bed late at night to the sounds of the telly from the living room. I got up to investigate, and saw my parents watching Superman I. As my 5 year old memory recalls, I knew I should have been in bed, so I slunk into the living room, intrigued by the images on the screen, hoping that I’d not be noticed by my parents and shunted off to bed again. I suspect they knew I was there, weren’t so cruel as to tear me away so abruptly. Or perhaps they didn’t want to leave at such a crucial scene, for the scene which was playing out that night was one which I’ll never, ever forget – the creation of the Ice Palace at the North Pole.

Wow. I’ve often wondered whether that was the night I discovered Sci-Fi, or whether I may have always had the predisposition towards geekiness, and this was just my first exposure to it.

Either way, it was the beginning of an obsession which would see me make friends I’d not have found otherwise, and which would give me the less than firm grip that I have on the outside world, a grip which I kinda enjoy keeping loose.

But anyway. Superman. Left me pleasantly surprised. Kinda light on plot, but heavy on character interaction, assumed a lot of knowledge of the 80s films, and was so. Very. Pretty. Special effects which were smooth and soft in the way that Episodes One, Two and Three of Star Wars were not.

Go see it if you were a fan of the 80s films. It was a little less camp, which was nice, and made me feel less embarrassed for Clark – also nice. That was the one thing that I was ill at ease with in the originals – I always felt that Clark could have been just a little cooler. Well, they’ve delivered.

4.5 out of 5 – losing the half star because it could have been a bit longer, with a bit more plot development.

This was the speech that Joss Whedon gave at a function for Equality Now, an organisation which campaigns for equality of the sexes.  It’s Joss’s pet charity, and watching this video, youll see why.  My favorite quote was:

“Equality is like Gravity.  We need it to stand on this earth as Men and Women, and the misogyny that is in EVERY culture is NOT a true part of the human condition – it is life out of balance, and that imbalance is sucking something out of the soul of every man and woman who is confronted with it.  We need equality.  Kinda now.”

And people wonder why I love this man so much.

(Click on the video above to activate the window, then click on the play button)
(Oh, and can I just say, yay! Finally worked out how to post YouTube videos into my blog!)

I’ve had a few comments now about the latency (ie delay) of VOIP communications, and how that might have an effect on the online rehearsing that Mark and I have been doing.  To answer the question – yes, there is a bit of latency.  We tested it by both counting steadily to four – the delay is around 1-2 seconds depending on the connection.  This means that Mark can play, and I can play along with him, or I can play, and Mark can play along with me.  The person who’s leading the playing has to turn off their sound, so that they don’t get the delayed sound of the person playing along at the other end.

It’s a bit of a bugger, but nothing’s perfect!  It’s not that big a deal, cause it’s really me who needs to hear Mark so I can play along to some of the more intricate countermelody bits.  Mark already knows all his stuff, and how it fits in with the fiddle (kinda makes sense, given that he wrote it all!), so it’s just me who needs to wrap my mind and fingers around the parts.

But the benefits of V-Rehearsing are not just about playing along together.  See, although Mark’s an excellent composer, and although he writes very well for fiddle despite being a piper, occasionally he’ll throw something my way which is all but impossible to play according to the laws of physics in this universe.  (Alternate universes… ROOOOSSSE! *sobs*  NOOOOO!!!  NOT ROSE!!! Last ep of Doctor Who last night.  So good.  So SAD! I MISS ROSE!!!)

Ahem.

Anyway, as I was saying, Skype means that I can let Mark know what I think of his impossible compositions ask Mark if we can change a note or two to make it a little easier for me to play.  And the best way to do that is to play it, rather than try to describe via email which line, bar and note I’m talking about.  All praise to the World Wide Web!