Seven albums that changed my life

My PC is on the blink this week so I’m having to run it in safe mode just to get the main programs to work. Which doesn’t leave me with much I’m able to do…fortunately most of my music collection is on both CD and my hard drive so I won’t be going completely insane from boredom just yet (although I suspect it’s only a matter of time).


In terms of my guitar geekiness, it’s originally this bloke’s fault. Cheers for that, Nick

Since I want to write *something* to take my mind off the obvious annoyances but can’t watch fansubs or DVDs to write about, I figured I’d do a variant on the ‘favourite albums’ thing. Lists like those are self indulgent and meaningless so I’m outlining albums that have left a big impression on me and have marked important moments in my life as a musician/music fan. Still self-indulgent I guess, but at least somewhat meaningful – I also recommend you listen to them if you get the chance.

I’ve watched a lot of films in the past couple of weeks

I had loads of annual leave that wanted using up before the end of next month so spent the past fortnight chilling at home and getting various things organised. This mostly consisted of spring-cleaning the house but when that was all done I started nailing a few song ideas down then sat back to watch some movies I’d been promising myself to see.

Fortunately I enjoyed pretty much all of them. Red Cliff was great, Shutter Island was a mindf***, Green Zone was also great, Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief was kinda fun…even Tim Burton’s take on Alice in Wonderland wasn’t as bad as I expected. I got through rather a lot of beer and ice cream during all this…

New amp day

My live playing is on a bit of a hiatus at the moment (all members of our semi-serious band are still preoccupied with Real Life things) so I’m concentrating on solo stuff for now. I’ll be ordering a copy of Cubase Essential at the end of the month assuming nothing expensive hits me in the meantime (I MOT’d the car last month…what more can go wrong?!) but I was in need of a new amp that’s built for home recording/practice rather than a higher wattage performance amp.

My Marshall DSL 401 does have a line out socket but that sounds a bit sterile and thin; the general sound of the amp isn’t really suited to the style of music I play anyway. A bit of shopping around helped me decide on a piece of kit that’s right for the job (see above).