The Chapman Zone Dave’s Blog

…till I have to go back to work.

I spent Christmas Eve and Christmas day ill with a cold, and I felt too rough to go round to my brothers for Christmas dinner, so I went to bed and slept much of the day. Rob was kind enough to send back a plate for me which I ate today - very nice!

The food that was on the plate was pretty good as well…(sorry!)

I’m feeling a bit better today, and I’m out of bed, so I can get on with my time off. I have half a million things I want to get done (including relaxing a bit). These include (in no order of priority):

Tidying out my room
Playing my guitar (a lot)
Sorting out next terms Scout programme
Tidying the Scout HQ
Spending lots of money (I counted up my change bottle from the past year. I ain’t saying how much I’ve got, but it’s a lot!)
Getting back on the drums
Upgrading my Strat pickups
Cleaning out and washing my car
Cleaning my bike and fixing a few broken parts (namely the mirror and front mudguard)
Making the 2005 Scout Summer Camp movie (amongst other video projects)
Adding to this website
Taking some shots of the Pancakes (we haven’t done any for ages)
Getting Land of the Dead and The Muppet Show: Season 1 and watch them both.

OK, that’s not quite half a million, but it’s more than enough to keep me busy. Plus my mate Brian’s coming down from Wales on the 28th, and I hope to see him a few times while he’s down.

Once again, Cornell came to my rescue when I tried to install Gallery2 onto my web page and had a total and abject failure (and stress session - I hate not knowing how to do stuff).

Anyway, he came through (as usual) and I can now put photographs onto my site.

…..so I did.

My efforts at John and Sarah’s wedding are the first things to go up, and so far, the only things. I just spent the last four hours resizing the photos to make them suitable for the web.

If you want a look, go to the ‘Links’ section on my sidebar, and find the ‘Gallery’. Alternatively, just click here.

Many more photos to come, no doubt.

I went to see it this afternoon. I arranged a trip for my Scout Troop, to end the term with a fun activity.

Now, the Chronicles of Narnia are a cherished part of my youth, and I must have read the books dozens of times, so whilst I was very keen to go and see it, I was a little nervous at the same time, for fear it might be a pile of complete…..ummm…….. elephants pants?

I needn’t have worried. I loved it. It was about as faithful a recreation of the book as is possible. In fact I can’t remember anything remotely significant that was left out (bearing in mind that its been around five or six years since I last read it). Actually, there was a fair bit more stuck in, with a few scenes given extra tension or excitement. The battle scenes at the end were also embellished somewhat from the brief description that the book offered.

The four children also acted their parts very well, which was something else that I was concerned about before going (I remember how bad the TV adaptations were). Aslan was breathtaking in his realism, as were most of the effects. I guess Weta have at least matched ILM in the Visual Effects superiority stakes….

I’ve been a bit down about my guitar playing recently, since I recorded myself. My mate Tom came round the other night with his guitar and we played for a bit. I wasn’t really able to contribute much, as I couldn’t get my brain to let go and get into it (I was still p*ssed off about the recording of myself, and was a bit negative about my ability). Also, my guitar sounded absolute cr*p compared to Tom’s, which I also blamed upon my playing, since my guitar is a lot more expensive than his, so should sound great.

So I’ve not progressed much over the last week or so…

But! I went for a guitar lesson this afternoon. It was supposed to be this morning at 10:30, but I slept in and totally forgot about it. Fortunately, Gary, the owner of Four-Four (the shop where I go for lessons) let me take a later cancellation instead (seriously nice guys there). So I went in for an hour at 14:30.

Chris (the tutor) gave me a bit of ‘Money’ by Pink Floyd to play (which I am going to continue working on - it seemed pretty straightforward). Then he said that dreaded word - ’scales’….

Apparently I was playing the ‘G’ Shaped minor Pentatonic scale. Which for the uninitiated is what you hear playing when somebody does a Blues solo. He put on a backing track, and told me to randomly play any of the notes in the scale, in time to the music.

It was awesome! OK, I wasn;t playing with anything like the skill he was, but every note fit the music, no matter what order I played them in. It has given me a new impetus to pick up my electric and play it, as it had been neglected of late. As soon as I got home I put on another backing track and played along for a good hour at least. I shall be mucking around with this for a good while now. It has added a whole new dimension to my playing.

Cheers Chris!

I also was relieved by the fact that my guitar sounded a bit rubbish for a reason that was not to do with my playing. The bridge on the guitar is a little slack, which means that I am getting a lot of fret buzz. I thought it was my technique.

It just goes to show that playing is a thing of moods, and learnign the instrument is being able to push yourself through the dark days when you think you’ll never be able to play properly.

I got my (sorry, that should be ‘I got Emma’s’) Peavey bass amplifier back from Kyle and Aarons tonight. I asked Kyle to come round tomorrow to record some drum tracks on the PC, and I need to run my drum kit through the Amp before it gets into the PC. I hooked it up to make sure it worked, and that I remembered how to use Cakewalk (I didn’t want to waste hours tomorrow trying to get it to work). After I’d satisifed myself that it worked OK, I had the idea to plug my guitar in to it to see how it recorded.

I wish I hadn’t now. It recorded fine, and with a little work post-production I’m sure it would sound very nice. It was my playing!

God I sounded crap!

They say that recording yourself is a good way to make an objective opinion of your own playing, as it’s difficult to properly ‘hear’ yourself play when you’re concentrating on the actual playing.

Well, I listened to myself…..and I was a bit dismayed. There were string buzzes aplenty, with some accidental muting, and my picking went from lud to soft seemingly at random…

I’ve decided not to let it get me down though. I’m drawing consolation from the fact that a: I hadn’t done any real warm up beforehand, b: It was a song that I’d only started playing a few days ago, and c: It was a fingerpicking song, and I’ve only done flatpicked songs up till now. Oh yeah, and d: my timing was pretty good (now that I’m getting used to playing along with a metronome.

Oh well, keep plugging away at it, Dave…

My mate Cornell came round last night to set me up with a gallery on this site, so I can put up some of my photos.

Of course, total prat that I am, I lost the password to my cpanel (which I think is my interface with the website server or something like that).

However, while we were waiting for Flump to send me my password, he showed me how to tweak the site, by going into the pagefile (I think) and changing stuff to suit.

I understood what he was saying and all that, but I think I had a case of information overload, because I looked at my website files tonight, I didn’t have the first clue what I was looking at.

I finally worked out how to change the photos at the header of the site, so I stuck a few of my own in. I intend to make a few more changes, as soon as I have the time to sit down and have a proper look at the code…