More B&W

Christmas just gone  I went back to Spain to see my family and have a brake from my monotonous life here in Wales. I had my beloved Minolta X-700 with me and lots of film, so I had great fun and lots of things to immortalize.
Here is some of my favourite shots from the black and white films.
I been using  Kodak BW400cn, it is an ISO 400, so is quite flexible and it can be used for many things. I particularly like how it work on low light situations, and on portrait specially. I had the pleasure to have my daughter Aida posing for me in a few occasions, so I finally got the chance to experiment with portrait, and I must say that the results are better than I anticipated. I only wish that Alexandra, my other daughter, was just as keen.

I see everything black & white.

Walking around Newport’s town centre I realise the amount of interesting people and things that are worth the picture. This is “Street photography”, and is not a photography style for shy people. Is handy to use a large zoom lens, the subject don’t realise that is being photographed, but if there is a lot of activity in the street things become a bit harder due to the amount of people walking between you and the subject, at list the actual subject is the activity in the street.
Anyway, the first time I used black and white film I was quite impressed with the outcome, so I decided to purchase more, now the results are even better than the first time. Also, I been using a fully manual camera, a Minolta X-700 for which I own three different lenses.

Some changes to "House of flies"

I decided to change the appearance of “House of Flies”, the old red background with the banner on top with the red lettering was a bit unpleasant, so I decided to pull my little digital camera out and set up a little photo shoot on my table with some of my beloved items, like some of my favourite CD’s, cassette tapes that only just recently I start to use again, some great books too, like “Zombies“, or “Day by day Armageddon”, or the creepy “The rising”. Also added my good hi-fi headphones, some of my 35mm cameras and lenses, and some 35mm negatives.
All together was a big mess on the table, but made for a great picture, and below here I added some pictures of the hall process.

And now the chosen picture with the conversion to black and white and the final result.

Music category bursts gone wild.

When I listen to music I normally do it in music category bursts. For example, today, for some reason, I feel like listening to some Jazz, and I may expend a week or two listening mostly jazz. Then maybe I see a music video of a metal group and I just listen to Thrash Metal for a while, or maybe something a bit more classic like Motorhead, Iron Maiden, or AC/DC. Sometimes I’m in the mellow electronic mood and I want to listen to some Trip-hop. You get the picture.
I Been missing my guitars quite a lot lately, and when this kind of things happens I get more sensitive with music. My ears seems to open more to the sounds of music, and my brain separates one instrument from another, every note from each chord, while my heart and my lungs get affected by this much audio activity by acting odd, what we call a rush, something similar to what you would get out of drugs.
I seem to have this feelings with many different types of music, and right now I been going through some of that, but the difference this time is that I’m not just listening to one kind of music, but many, like if my music listening routine is gone wild.
So here I am, with Deftones “White Pony”,  Il Nino’s “Revolutions”, KT Tunstall’s “Tiger suit”, U2’s “The Joshua Tree”, The Police “Zenyatta Mondatta”, Portishead’s “Third”, Ojos de Brujo “Aocana”, Gossoos “A L’auditori”, Dave Pearce “Trance Anthems”,  Iron Maiden “Best of the beast”, Miles Davis “Kind of blue”, etc.

Satisfaction on inspiration.

I got the impression that I left this blog a bit neglected; no because I run out of things to say, but because I run out of time.
Life sometimes give you a handful of things to do, and sometimes nothing is there for you to do. In occasions it gives you far too much to do, and that’s when life becomes faster, more interesting, and also stressful. Is then, when you stop to breath, that you realise all the things you used  to do for fun and for love, and whatever that made you happy, can’t hardly do any more.
In my case, I think is a little bit of this, and a little bit of that, that is making me loose inspiration, and I feel like something inside me is missing, like if I left something behind, and it kips on buggering me, going round in my head, feeling like a song from the Rolling Stones, I can’t get no satisfaction, because playing games on the net is not what I want, hanging about in FaceBook is not what I need, seating watching films doesn’t cut it anymore. I need to create something, a new tune, some new drawings.
However, while I look for this lost inspiration of mine I can very well listen to some good music, watch some really good and inspiring films, view some pictures from my favourite artists, and some photos from my favourite photographers.
I must say, my life is not as busy as it once was, but I still haven’t find the time to organise my self.
Hopefully, I’ll be talking about music next, and maybe I bring something new here. Until then, hasta la vista.

 

A little thing I made while bored.

My Own Music Journey Part4

Wasn't long before two of the guys and I decided that what we really should do is to reform the band and try with our ideas. This time, we had help from a friend of Pablo, the lead guitarist. His friend was a kin guitar player too, so that throw me out of playing the guitar, and seeing that it was very hard to get a decent bass player I decided to change my instrument and aspirations and use my guitar knowledge and techniques in to playing the bass and try to be a less ordinary bass player, and by then I realized that me being the lead singer wasn't the best move, so after auditioning quite a few people we finally found the girl with the right voice... and the right looks, yeah, definitively the right looks, we couldn't agree more... but the important thing was that she did sing great.
My obsession and insistence about getting it right with the bass guitar finally give some positive results, I used to get comments by people after the gigs, and I even got ask "who was my teacher, cos he/she must be awesome"; little they new that I actually learn by my self to play the bass, and listening to people's comments and questions considering what little experience with the instrument I had a the time made me feel really good and got my gears rolling and will for more skill to be even better.
My first bass was a Samick 5 strings through neck, meaning that it had 5 strings instead of 4, making the extra string a fatter and lower note, so instead of having an “E” string as you top string I had a “B” string, looking like “G” as your bottom string, the one that will give you a higher pitch note, followed by a “D”, then up on top you would find the “A” and then the “E” ending on top with a thick “B” string that would give me lower notes, making me sound like an Earthquake if I needed to. This set up is currently used by many bass players, like Fieldy, Korn’s ex-bassist ( who have his own signature bass, the Ibanez K5), or another one who play with an Ibanez, Sam Rivers from Limp Bizkit.
By having an extra string in the neck of a bass guitar I founded that the space between strings was narrower, so for me it was a lot easier to play due to my experience with normal 6 strings guitars. The one think on that Samick that did bother me after a while was that it didn’t had active pickups, and one thing I was getting interested in was “slapping”, and for “bass slapping“ I noticed that I would be better off with a normal 4 string bass with active pickups. Then there came Roberto, my neighbour who turned up to be an experienced bass player and wanted to sale his old trusty Westone Thunder IA and I just happened to have the right money.
It turned out that with this bass I wasn’t so interested in “slapping” but more on the “Clank” chunky sound that I loved in bands like Iron Maiden (Notice that Iron Maiden’s bass player, Steve Harris, was playing with a Fender Precision Bass that sounds and have way more quality than this Westone, and cost ten times more). Because of this I developed a technique that would let me play a note 3 times in a fraction of a second using my fingers instead of a plectrum, inspired by the “Horse galloping” effect that Steve Harris made so popular in the Iron Maiden song “The Trooper”. After some time of playing in the band I started to write songs, and as it is to expect, the bass in this songs was one of the main features, so I used this “Horse galloping” technique in one song and turned to be one of our coolest songs.
Now that I had a pair of bass guitars that where very different from each other and would give me a wide choice of stiles things turned out to go wrong between some of the band members again, being the drum player the main cause of the argument, eventually we split and never got back together because while this was going on with my beloved band my life started to head to the wrong direction, and after doing some really bad wrongs I had to move on and sort of started from scratch in a new place with a new life.

White version of my Westone Thunder IA. Picture taken from "The Westone bass and guitar resource site"

My own Music Journey Part 3

Time came for me to go back home to daddy and mammy, but the past year had done something to me that would really help, made me grow up. Now I was looking forward to work, to earn some money... and to party hard.
My first job was in a book distribution warehouse, and there you would find many, many, maaaaany books, from little calligraphy booklets, to heavy pounders that you could only carry something like two at the time, three if you had muscles like a body builder from Austria.
There, I found my self singing on the solitude of the immenseness of that warehouse, with a team of only nine workers, and a place as big as “Nou Camp”, it was easy to drift away mentally and end up singing on full voice, something that is nice if you have a good voice, and in my case I thought that I was a rock star, so imagine, I did got a lot of practice.
I never thought that I was a good singer, but one day, on a night out we ended up in a karaoke and I ended up singing, and to my surprise it sounded quite cool, so when one of my mates from my hood ask me to go and see his band practicing he didn’t needed to ask me twice. Once there I realized that they didn’t had a singer, and then after some drinks and a few smokes I got ask to have a go at singing, and then I became the lead singer. By then, I already got my self an electric guitar and an amp, and I didn’t just sing, I was also playing the guitar, so I was well happy.
We only had two gigs when the lead guitarist and the drummer had a massive argument, and because they where both a pair of idiots we ended up splitting, plus the fact that the guitarist was the owner of the practice room had a lot to do to.
By then, my musical influence was quite rich and varied and because of it I could maintain a decent conversation with any estranger, because one thing we all have in common is that we like some kind of music, and many of us like to talk about it.