Gibson Les Paul Deluxe Cherry Sunburst LH (1977)

Rover P4 (1964)

I've had many dreams through out my life just like anyone else, some dissolve into a fading swirling mist on awakening, and some stay with you, clear and vivid images like those on a cellulose film! Although I had this particular dream several months ago it is like watching a dvd over and over until it becomes ingrained into ones memory, it's very science fiction, maybe because I'm a sci-fi addict at heart? Who knows….

MY DREAM:

I am walking down a street, a street like any other…it is day time and all is quiet, there is no one around, the streets are deserted. I do not recognize this street, it is strange to me but I am walking along it nonetheless. I can feel a certain quality in the air…it feels like static electricity and from behind me comes an ever strengthening breeze which makes me stop, turn around and face it, the breeze hits my face and I squint in its wake…I look down the empty street, the breeze is blowing up all sorts of rubbish from litter bins and producing a confetti like affect as it hurls towards me, bits of paper slap against my body and face, I cover my eyes against it and turn back around and start to run for reasons unknown.

I am an ardent fan of the currently running American tv series 'Lost', I am fascinated by it to tell you the truth. There are several subliminal elements that all border on reality, and the more you become involved… the more confused you get. The program includes many well documented theories that certain eminent scientists through out the decades have postulated, these theories are cunningly integrated in the plot lines. One such popular theory is called 'Six Degrees of Separation' which the program leans heavily upon.

Six degrees of separation is the theory that anyone on the planet can be connected to any other person on the planet through a chain of acquaintances that has no more than five intermediaries. The theory was first proposed in 1929 by the Hungarian writer Frigyes Karinthy in a short story called "Chains."

In the 1950's, Ithiel de Sola Pool (MIT) and Manfred Kochen (IBM) set out to prove the theory mathematically. Although they were able to phrase the question (given a set N of people, what is the probability that each member of N is connected to another member via k_1, k_2, k_3…k_n links?), after twenty years they were still unable to solve the problem to their own satisfaction. In 1967, American sociologist Stanley Milgram devised a new way to test the theory, which he called "the small-world problem." He randomly selected people in the mid-West to send packages to a stranger located in Massachusetts. The senders knew the recipient's name, occupation, and general location. They were instructed to send the package to a person they knew on a first-name basis who they thought was most likely, out of all their friends, to know the target personally. That person would do the same, and so on, until the package was personally delivered to its target recipient.

Although the participants expected the chain to include at least a hundred intermediaries, it only took (on average) between five and seven intermediaries to get each package delivered. Milgram's findings were published in Psychology Today and inspired the phrase "six degrees of separation." Playwright John Guare popularized the phrase when he chose it as the title for his 1990 play of the same name. Although Milgram's findings were discounted after it was discovered that he based his conclusion on a very small number of packages, six degrees of separation became an accepted notion in pop culture after Brett C. Tjaden published a computer game on the University of Virginia's Web site based on the small-world problem. Tjaden used the Internet Movie Database (IMDB) to document connections between different actors. Time Magazine called his site, The Oracle of Bacon at Virginia, one of the "Ten Best Web Sites of 1996."

In 2001, Duncan Watts, a professor at Columbia University, continued his own earlier research into the phenomenon and recreated Milgram's experiment on the Internet. Watts used an e-mail message as the "package" that needed to be delivered, and surprisingly, after reviewing the data collected by 48,000 senders and 19 targets (in 157 countries), Watts found that the average number of intermediaries was indeed, six. Watts' research, and the advent of the computer age, has opened up new areas of inquiry related to six degrees of separation in diverse areas of network theory such as as power grid analysis, disease transmission, graph theory, corporate communication, and computer circuitry.

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So you see that not only does the program incorporate modern ideology but also uses it in practical ways and so demonstrates how the theory works. You may well of come across it in your life without really knowing it? 

The Italian Tomato Garden: 

An old Italian man lived alone in the country. He wanted to dig his tomato garden, but it was very hard work as the ground was hard. His only son, Vincent, who used to help him, was in prison. The old man wrote a letter to his son and described his predicament:

"Dear Vincent, I am feeling pretty badly because it looks like I won't be able to plant my tomato garden this year. I'm just getting too old to be digging up a garden plot. I know if you were here my troubles would be over. I know you would be happy to dig the plot for me.

Love, Dad".

A few days later he received a letter from his son:

"Dear Dad, Don't dig up that garden. That's where I buried the bodies.

Love, Vinnie".

At 4 a.m. the next morning, FBI agents and local police arrived and dug up the entire area without finding any bodies. They apologized to the old man and left.

That same day the old man received another letter from his son:

"Dear Dad, Go ahead and plant the tomatoes now.
That's the best I could do under the circumstances.

Love you, Vinnie"……….

Recently my phone line went down along with my internet connection as well, I don't have wireless at present so I endured 4 whole days without the web! This of course is not too tragic because I knew that eventually my phone company would restore my landline connection and everything would be back to normal. I have friends that I communicate with on a regular basis within the domain of the internet and during this time all communications were temporarily severed!

The situation got me thinking though about how we all take for granted this seemingly modern technological age where everything is at our finger tips for us to use at will, until it goes wrong that is, things break down and we all know it, but we never really get to grips with the concepts or implications of shall we say more extreme failures within our society communication infrastructure.

Communications are always important to the world as a whole, lets face it before the onset of modern transportation such as trains, planes and automobiles….letters, parcels or anything sent out of that nature would take quite a considerable time to reach their destinations, weeks in fact, especially if they were going abroad by boat (one of the first couriers other than pigeons) even mainland deliveries took time to reach their targets, these of course would be delivered by the use of horses, or indeed a man on 'shanks pony' such were the times.

I don't send any paper mail these days unless I have to, my preference is the web based email system which is instant and effortless to use and it doesn't require the expense of a stamp. Obviously, packages and parcels or things of a bigger nature which one needs to send cannot be sent down the 'fat pipe' but can be ordered and dispatched via the internet should you want to. So, the lines of communication have been somewhat speeded up over the past two or three decades to such a degree that the world has now become a smaller place, but what is driving all this? and what would happen if this driving force was abruptly removed or exhausted?

We now enter the darker aspect of my train of thought, everything that powers our society at large is electricity, the energy choice of the world! We all live our lives around it infact, we wake up to it, we use it during the course of the day and we even take it to bed with us so to speak, there isn't many aspects of our lives that does not include the assistance of electricity, so imagine a scenario where electricity that was once abundant and taken for granted is now gone! Not that I'm saying it will, but the possibilty or threat exists, in a world where we rob natural resources from the planet.. something will give, like oil for example, nothing lasts forever and the ecology of our planet is deteriorating so the eventuality of a global disaster is not too far fetched, anyone seen "The Day After Tomorrow"?

So, back to the electricity scenario…….

The energy that powers your laptops is gone, the energy that powers your computer towers is gone, ah, you might think, I can use batteries instead, wrong, they also need power to be manufactured or re-charged on a large scale, anyways…..the energy that drives your tv's, radios, hi-fi's, sound studio's (grrrrrr), lights, fires, cookers, food blenders, mixers, kettles, coffee makers, micro-waves, fridge-freezers, hair driers, washing machines, water heaters, tumble driers, dish washers, central heating, overnight storage heaters, immersion heaters, hot water, shower units, burgular alarms, street lights, cash withdrawal machines, lifts, escalators, mobile phone chargers, telephone exchanges, power plants, nuclear reactors, business, commerce, or life as you know it is completely gone, vanished!

Life would go on and we would naturally adapt to the situation, but life as we know it would slow down to something resembling the dark ages! Electricity, once discovered has become the main energy choice of the planet and we depend on it more than we realize. I can't begin to itemize the potential fall-out from such an event, but it doesn't take too long to imagine what the consequences would be given the current sorry state our societies are in.

I can remember in the 70's here in britain, several power cuts were induced through stikes if I remember correctly, and at night too, that was bad enough having to endure candle lit nights, yes, you could say "how romantic!" but you knew that the power was going to be turned back on again eventually so it never became an issue of concern or worry it was just an inconvenience with no underlying threat of permanency attached to it.

Gas, solar power, or other alternate energy sources would come to the fore and prices would soar because……………………………

Enough of that!

Smegging tangents?

Power to the people I say.

This is my studio, it is responsible for taking up a lot of my spare time when I'm in a creative mood. The studio is primarily analogue although I have digital mastering available (CD) and other effects devices that are purely in the digital domain. The central hub of any sound studio is the mixing desk (console) and of course the medium with which you record, in the centre of this picture you can see the 'Mackie' 24-8-2 desk and on the right most part of the picture is the 'Tascam' MSR 24 track tape recorder.

On top of the mixing desk you can see the Digitech 'Vocalist workstation', this device although not cheap to buy produces an expensive sounding vocal, in fact it is possible to split your original voice 5 ways with counter harmonies coming from the 3rd and 5th's of a chord, Oh the joy of a toy for someone who don't sing too well (me) it's got me out of trouble a few times I can tell you.

Obviously when you compose music for a four piece band, namely… guitar, bass, drums and keyboards, there will be certain elements you could never record or fit in such a small sized studio, take drums for instance….this being a good example of how technology can help you, My drum sound is produced from a box of tricks! a drum machine capable of being programmed to suit your exact musical needs.

Other peripherals are housed in racks both above the console and to the left of it, there are too many to name individually but suffice to say there are a few. The synthesizer (bottom of pic) is a Korg X5D, a keyboard which is very good at 'wind instrument' reproduction and if you listen to "Millennium Dance" (hear my music link) you can hear exactly what it is capable of doing.

My studio has been slowly developed over a decade, and from humble beginnings it has matured and come of age, it is now fully functional in every department from track dubbing right through to the mastering process. I have recorded stuff for other musicians, mainly friends or other people they know. I enjoy sound engineering for other people because it's a lot easier than doing for myself and less work believe it or not!

I currently own four guitars, two acoustic, and two electric… I have other instruments too but the guitar has always been my forte, but when you compose music these other instruments come in handy when a different sound is required for asthetic reasons.

I hope you enjoyed this brief insight into my universe, more later.