Real Music Forum

Who am I to talk about “real music”? 

An important question to determine how much salt to apply to my blog posts. 

 I am 33 years old, but as a journalist, I am a complete newcomer.  This is my first and only blog and these are the frst articles that I have ever written. 

As a musician, there is more of a story to tell.

When I was very young, I told my parents I wanted to learn how to play the trumpet, so after months and months of badgering them, at age 7, they finally bought me a piano.

The deal was that my grandmother was a piano teacher, so if I could prove an aptitude for music, they’d buy me a trumpet later.

By age 14,  I had reached grade 4 on piano, but the sorts of music I was being taught on piano were a million miles from the jazz I had wanted to play on trumpet, and further still from the music I was now listening to, that being almost exclusively Iron Maiden.

So, after much begging, I was bought my first electric guitar, a Marlin Loner superstrat-style guitar that I found at Grotts Guitars in Newcastle-upon-Tyne in late 1989.  A guitar that I loved intimately, learned my first chops upon, and was devastated when it was utterly destroyed (along with my amp) at a party at a bandmates house (that I wasn’t even invited to) when the bandmate in question decided to recreate the actions of endless famous rock and punk bands, by smashing the guitar as hard as he could into the amplifier, repeatedly, until there was nothing left but firewood.  Rock… and… roll.   Needless to say, that band split up shortly afterwards.

I picked up my second guitar, a second-hand Squier Stratocaster in a sparkly blue finish with a varnished maple neck, for £110 at a guitar show, again in Newcastle, shortly after the demise of the Marlin.  Being an avid Iron Maiden fan, I was delighted to own a guitar that looked more like those wielded by my heroes, although I quickly found that it takes more than a guitar that looks like a Fender Strat, made by a Fender subcompany, to sound like one of Maiden’s guitarists. 

Endless hours of practice later and a broadening of musical tastes to include pre-Britpop proper indie/alternative and grunge, heavier metal (than Maiden) like Metallica, Megadeth, Slayer, Testament, Helloween, and other guitar-based hard rock like Van Halen, AC/DC, Deep Purple and Guns’n'Roses, and it became obvious that a regular Stratocaster clone just wasn’t up to the job anymore.

A third trip up to Newcastle was in order, this time to Windows, where in the basement I found a brand new black Ibanez RT150 for sale for… I can’t remember exactly, either £189 or £289, but either way, to me it seemed a fortune and I was absolutely delighted with its heavy-metal-esque spikysuperstratness, humbucker pickups, and delightfully slim neck profile that allowed much easier movement for all those speedy scalar exercises and searing heavy metal solos that I was attempting to play.  For the first time ever, I owned two guitars.  I was becoming.  Or to put it another way, I had tasted for the first time the ailment that I would later know as GAS – Gear Aquisition Syndrome.

Soon afterwards, I finished my A-levels in Physics, Pure & Applied Maths and Computing, and relocated to Stafford to attend Staffordshire University where I hoped to gain a degree in Computing but instead met a guy who would change my life forever. 

He was the other guitarist in the first band I played in after moving South, wielding an  Ibanez “Jem” that he had built himself from individual genuine Ibanez Jem parts, Desert Yellow with pink pickups, pyramid inlays, Floyd Rose whammy system…. a true beauty of a guitar, and if the sight of the guitar wasn’t impressive enough to my 18-year-old “metaller’s” eyes, hearing it in his hands was breathtakingly awe-inspiring.  MAN, that guy could play!  I’d never even heard of sweep-picking until he demonstrated it, effortlessly gliding around the Jem’s neck with creamy legato solos as if he’d been born with it umbilically attached to his body.

 I was blown away.  I was in a band with this guy.  Learning his tricks, his chops, his finger exercises, being introduced to music by bands and artists I’d never heard of but who made the musicians in my own collection seem like technical beginners… Dream Theater, Joe Satriani, Steve Vai… and my friend had already convined me that I could be just like these guys with enough practice.  Could life get any better than this? 

It was at some point during this first year at uni that computing had started to lose its appeal, and as such my studies suffered and I failed the first year.  My bandmate and mentor, having completed his own studies, moved back to his old stomping ground of London, and so, still believing it was my best shot at a career, I managed to get back onto the 1st year again, but my heart just wasn’t in it and the band, now with only myself on guitar, was preparing to play our first gig.  MY first gig.  Battle Of The Bands at Staffordshire University’s midtown bar, The Whitely Bar, the best venue in town, now unfortunately a collection of classrooms belonging to Stafford College.

I was terrified before the gig.  Absolutely terrified.  I was shaking, I didn’t know if I could do it.  I’d only ever played in private jam sessions and band practices, never in front of a crowd, and we were the first band on.

For the entire first song I couldn’t even look at the crowd.  Every time I approached the mic to do backing vocals I could feel my legs shaking.  I’ve never felt so self-conscious in my life.  But then the first song ended and the weirdest thing happened.  Something I’d never experienced before.  Something that had never happened in all the months of practices we’d had  in preparation for gigging .  Something I simply hadn’t accounted for in my mind.

We played the last chords of the song and ended as usual, but then unlike the usual moment’s silence that followed the end of each song in our practice sessions leading up to the gig, there was another noise.  Utterly unexpected…  the sound of a crowd cheering and clapping… what the hell?   This was a completely new experience.  Instantly, my fears evaporated.  My self-consciousness disappeared.  This stage was my world.

The rest of our set is something of a blur.  Heightened emotions, and yet feeling utterly relaxed, my next memory of that evening is wandering, nay, floating around the room in a post-gig stupor, I had my first ever epiphany.  This was my future.  Whatever happened, I wanted to play guitar on stage for the rest of my life.  All the indecision, all the searching, all the teenage angst about my place in the world, gone in an instant.  I was a guitarist, and I’d be a guitarist until the day I died.

I didn’t even bother with the second half of that second first-year of my degree, instead choosing to stay at home spending all day everyday practicing the “best bits” from the “Steve Vai 10-hour Guitar Workout” over and over and over and over and over, and continuing to write and gig with the band.  To my parents’ dismay, I was throwing away a computing career to be in a rock band.

Alas, that band split explosively after a year or so, but my love of music, of gigging, of playing in a room with other musicians and a newfound love of recording remained, and I quickly found myself in another band, although not the style of band I had previously dreamed of playing in.. 

My music tastes had broadened even further by now.  Dream Theater had led me to Rush, Marillion and It Bites, Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin.  Industrial, alternative and indie music like Nine Inch Nails, Faith No More, Rage Against The Machine, Levellers, Pop WILL Eat Itself, The Wonder Stuff and Sisters Of Mercy had led me to Senser, Jamiroquai, Skunk Anansie, Living Colour, and I was starting to take more of an interest in jazz and funk, although at the time I really didn’t know where to start.  I think my first jazz CDs were Larry Carlton’s Kid Gloves and George Benson’s gratest hits.

The new band was very different from anything I’d ever done.  I’d be the sole guitarist, the rest of the lineup being a superb funk bass-player (the first bassist I’d ever heard that could play slap properly), two “keyboardists” who were both into trance music and were closer to what I now know as “programmers” than real keyboardists, a female soul vocalist in the Aretha mould, and a hardware sequencer covering the rest. 

The music was a combination of Chic-esque disco, funk, soul and “modern” electronica, but with occasional ridiculous guitar solos.

I had sold my Squier Strat to a friend from uni, and had since bought my first “real” Fender Stratocaster – a beaten-up old vintage blonde Strat that someone had said they’d found in their attic, which appeared to be a late 50′s / early 60′s model, but actually turned out to be completely fake.  It cost me £300 and played like a dream.  The neck was much thinner than any guitar I’d owned and it actually sounded like a real Strat, although in hindsight slightly on the bright side, whereas my old Squier had sounded like a piece of balsa wood with some pickups glued to it.

At first employed as a session guitarist (my first ever session gig), I was almost immediately asked to join the band, and I stayed with them for seven whole years through a variety of lineup changes. 

In this entire time, this band didn’t play a single gig.  We always had almost an album’s worth (or a live set’s worth) of material, but no sooner were we writing a new song, we were “ditching” one of the older ones because it sounded poor in comparison with the new song.

That is not to say the entire experience was non-productive.  Quite apart from the learning experience and associated musical resarch and practice that comes with spending so long playing an unfamiliar genre, we did manage to make a whole $550 USD from our 14,000 downloads from the once-great unsigned band community website, MP3.com

Not long after joining this band, I bought another Fender Stratocaster.  This time a real one, albeit a Japanese one, which was a second-hand 90′s re-issue of a 60′s Stratocaster, in salmon pink.  I didn’t care about the colour, I was in a disco band – it’d be good for the band image.  It was £230 and is still a staple of my arsenal.

This guitar was a complete contrast to the blonde fake-strat.  It had a deeper tone, a much thicker D-shaped neck, actual sustain, and although slightly harder to play, was much closer to providing a usable disco/funk sound

Not long after I had joined that band, the “keyboardists” had left to pursue more trancey dreams, but at one point we had eleven people in the band including the horn section, percussionist and 3 backing vocalists.  To date, the largest band I’ve ever been in, albeit never played with alltogether in the same room at once, and in fact only ever being in the same room as all of them at once on one occasion – the photoshoot for the MP3.com page.

That is not to say that I didn’t gig for those 7 years.  At the same time as being in that band, I played live in numerous other bands, mainly rock and metal covers, but also original material in a post-Korn hardcore / nu-metal band, (first as guitarist, then as bassist one day when our bassist failed to turn up for a gig and was never seen by any of the band again, then as drummer – an instrument I had been lrarning on and off for years from living in shared houses with various drummers), and also wrote solo material (I was reviewed in Guitarist magazine as “one to watch” and “needs to buy a guitar tuner” in a postage-stamp-sized article on the readers demos page in the mid-to-late 90′s).  I also did a few solo acoustic gigs here and there and regularly went to “jam nights” wherever I could find them in the area.

At around this time, I bought another guitar, an Ovation Celebrity, a roundbacked electro-acoustic, for around £400.  Not an outstanding guitar, but it played like an electric and did the job for me for all my electro-acoustic needs (which in fairness were few).

When I first joined the disco band, I was unemployed.  I soon found myself working in a large factory, where I tested and calibrated and wired and assembled for as long as I could take, before deciding that I could be an electrical or electronic engineer and should return once more to university.

I decided to visit the uni to see which courses were available and while being shown around, the guide opened a door and announced “and this is our new Music Technology department, part of the School Of Engineering”.

And so ended my desire to be an electrical or electronic engineer.

Seven days after that initial visit to the university, I had left my job and started my new university course… a B.Sc.(hons) in Music Technology, which I graduated 3 years later with a 2:1 (a “B+” to the rest of us).

While at uni, I came across a bargain… a black Ibanez RG550 but with a slightly damaged trem – £110.  The damage to the trem made no difference to the way the guitar played, or even on the use of the trem itself, and it lasted for 3 years before giving up the ghost, at which time I replaced it with a brand new top-of-the-range Ibanez trem, and the guitar has still cost me less than it should have.  This guitar would be my weapon of choice for the heavier side of my playing for years to come.

Working for the next three and a half years (for a pittance) as a Technician for Music Technology and Performing Arts at a College Of Further Education, I had some wonderful opportunities to learn from an endless supply of new and enthusiastic Music Tech students, practice my studio talents out-of-hours in the college recording studio, utilise a free practice room at the college, and also the chance to poach the best young local musicians for my own bands.

The disco band, like my previous “main” band, ended somewhat explosively due to… artistic differences… and I found myself to be the oldest member in my new funk-rock band that contained a young female uni-student vocalist who had “failed” an audition for my old disco band, and two highly talented young (late-teens) students from the college, a drummer and a bassist, who had recently found themselves sans-bands.

Alas, this band was short-lived, relatively, but still managed a number of successful gigs and the beginnings of a fanbase, not to mention an emotionally-charged and exciting time for all involved.  The drummer was later to become my best friend, brother, hetero-lifemate, inspiration, housemate, party-partner-in-crime, and much, much more.  To date I’ve played in no less than six bands with him, and have just started a new project with him, from Christmas 08.

After three and a half years working at the college, I made it.  I got a job in the “proper” industry.

I would be working for one of the “big” major labels at one of the UK’s biggest, busiest, best-equipped professional recording studios as a Technical Engineer, which involved me moving to London, where I spent a lot of time writing music and partying, and managed to not play a single gig for the duration.

During this time, my view of the industry changed dramatically.

Modern stars were now just people, not gods, and some of them weren’t even very nice people.   Many were down-to-earth, lovely people (often the ones I least expected) but others seemed so far into their own hype that they didn’t much have time for mere mortals.  Luckily for my sanity, it turned out that most of those who were “idiots” were the members of bands that were relatively new on the scene, had recorded one or two albums and were NME pin-up boys, playing pseudo-indie faux-alternative pop-music-with-guitars while sporting Tony & Guy hairstyles and designer clothes.  I couldn’t help feeling they’d missed the point somewhat.

On the other hand, the stars who had been in the game the longest, the likes of Eric Clapton, AC/DC, Tony Christie and Meatloaf, turned out to be some of the nicest, most down-to-earth people you could ever hope to meet. 

That is not to say that this rule is universal.  Some “younger acts” were perfectly affable, while one or two of the older stars were conspicuously aloof or even downright rude and ignorant, but it is certainly enough of a trend to be an adequate generalisation for the moment.

As time went on, leading up to my inevitable redundancy, the music studio industry was falling apart at the seams. It had been a suspicion of mine for most of my post-pubescent life, but from viewing it first hand it had become unignorably obvious to me that something serious was missing from the majority of the music in the mainstream.  The art. 

Having also witnessed the artistic enthusiasm of the Performing Arts students at the college, and having heard the music from their Music Tech students being heavily influenced by the true-art mindset of their Performing Arts neighbours, and I realised that most of those kids had more artistic integrity and talent in their pinky fingers than most of these “professional” musicians have in their entire bodies.

From that moment, I have redoubled my efforts to find the music worth listening to, sending my real-music-seeking mental tentacles out in all directions, all genres, leaving no stone unturned in my quest.

And that brings me to the present day.  Proud new owner of a 2008 Gibson Les Paul Studio guitar (review to follow shortly), an Ibanez AFS-75T jazz guitar with Bigsby-style trem, Squier Vintage Modified Jazz bass, and Marshall ED-1 Compressor, Tech21 Sansamp VT Bass and Electro-Harmonix Double Muff stompbox pedals, that I procured all in one morning’s glorious shopping spree at GAK after being left some money in a will. (Thanks, Aunty Lily!  I know you would approve!)

GAS indeed.

So… today’s post hasn’t turned out exactly as planned.

I started writing this with the intention of reviewing my new 2008 Gibson Les Paul Studio, but instead have rambled on for far too long about my musical background.

Ah well, the story has been told now, so if I die tomorrow, at least my story will remain… at least until my hosting subscription runs out, anyway.

If anyone has made it this far, then thanks for reading.  You now have a better idea of who I am and what I’m about.

Unlike many such blogs, I haven’t created this site to make money, just to aid my quest to hear the best music ever written or performed.

I can be a bit melodramatic at times, but I’m a good guy, so please, join the forum (the link is at the top of the page) – and have your say on the matter.  Hopefully one day soon we’ll have a proper 24-7 community here of like-minded music fans discussing their favourite music.

Best regards,

Muso.

P.S. 2008 Gibson Les Paul Studio review to follow.

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