Find a penny, pick it up, and all day long, you'll have a penny.

Oh, hi there. Do come in. :) It’s 1 o clock in the morning, and what does one do at this hour? Why, one blogs.

Since the last episode of the ProgBlog, my focus has been split between many projects. And as a result of this, nothing significant happened on any of them. So I decided to get a bit more serious with one and then nail the rest in due course.

My current project, therefore, is the remodelling of my old SX GG2 guitar. As a quick reminder to new readers, when I bought it, it looked like this:

Then after one small mess around with electrical tape, it had white stripes on it. I can't find a picture of that right now, but it was pretty cool, even though it was a shoddy job.

Just recently I decided to completely deconstruct and rebuild it, so here’s a run down of whats happened so far, and maybe a guide to people who haven’t done this before, and want to have a go. I found the whole process so far pretty exciting and not as much trouble as you’d expect. I recommend it if you have an old guitar.

Anyway...

*cue cheesy 80’s montage music*

Just before Christmas:- I Took the stripes off the guitar, and the markers off the fretboard. It took longer than I expected, because I had to polish off a load of sticky marks that the tape left in its malicious and adhesive wake. We then headed into the festive season, with my guitar looking like this:

Shortly after Christmas:- Due to receiving a small toolset for Christmas, I took all the hardware off my guitar. This is anything that can be unscrewed without having to break any wires or permanently disconnect anything. This is my little box full of guitar hardware at this stage:

1. Misc. Screws

2. Tone/Volume Knobs with washers

3. Machine Heads and all relevant screws & washers

4. Big screws for Strap

5. Pickup... holders? Not sure what they're called.

6. Tune-o-matic bridge (sounds like a wallace & gromit invention) with screws

7. Pickup selector switch with washers & screws

8. Bridge with screws

9. Pickguard, trussrod cover, and all relevant screws

10. Back panel and screws

About a month ago: I got me a soldering iron! And set to work on what was at this stage the manliest part of the process. Burning metal off other metal. It was brill, despite the very minor burn I incurred during the process and it got better quickly and I had a cool scar for about a week. I’d say it was worth it. So with all the pickups and electronics removed, here’s how they looked:

And here’s how the guitar looked:

Last Week:- popped into a shop in Huddersfield where a lovely old woman sold me several sheets of sandpaper. This’ll do me, I thought, until later that night I ran out of sandpaper and my guitar still looked very much clothed...

Today, however I bought 12 sheets of the stuff, and only two sheets in, with the help of some good friends, I managed to finish sanding down the front, including the headstock. It now looks like this.

Impressive, eh? I even managed to get started on the back. Although at the moment it looks more worn than sanded.

And here’s what my supposedly black pants looked like after a day of sanding. New fashion trend maybe?

I think that’s about it for the guitar workshop!

In other ProgBlog news, my Progressive metal band is ready for action! I sorted most of this out just before I got properly started on my guitar, and now the lineup is confirmed, maybe short of an extra guitarist and a singer. The band name, and album name have both been decided and the track listing is done, even though I’m going to have to write lyrics for a couple of songs so that they have titles.

The name of the band is MetroGnome, it consists of me on guitar and vocals, my good friends Ben Wareing and Dale Cross from back in’t Runshaw days on bass and drums, respectively, and James Goetz, the newest addition to the crew, on what is likely to be a mellotron. We may settle for miscellaneous key based instruments, however. ;p

The album will be called Worlds Apart, after the title track which is 23 minutes and ten seconds long, and split up into 4 sections. There are 3 as yet unnamed B-sides, all of which I am very proud of :D and they last between 5-10 minutes each. I fully cannot wait to get started on this, I think recording will commence next July, so watch this space.

Finally, a few developments have been made in the ProgPit construction plan, which if you’ve never heard of it before, is the name of my home studio next year! I have managed to get hold of a pretty powerful Mac for about £400 and a very basic drum kit for free! I’m going to Prog up the kit with a china cymbal and a splash, that I managed to haggle from a music shop for £100 quid for both, and I need to look into getting a cheap double bass pedal.

After mentioning this venture on the Frost* forums a while ago, I received a thoroughly amazing reply for a man I know only as SerFox, advising me in pretty much every aspect of my studio development. On his recommendation I am on the market for some Rokkit monitor speakers and the lil pads that you put underneath them that stop your desk and room from being bass-raped from the low end output. It’s all coming together rather nicely, if I’m honest. Thanks, Fox, if you're out there!

Oh, and I’m going to get 2 of these bad boys put up on the wall either side of the computer to make it look more like a mad science lab. Dont’cha love it.

Well thanks very much for checking in and let me know on facebook or something if you want to ask anything. I’m still open for suggestions about what colours to paint my guitar ;)

Peace out! A-town,

Xxx

so many things....

good arfternoon Ladies and Gentlesirs!

I come to you this instalment from a fervent bubble of ennui at the back of a composition 1 lecture. I haven’t posted anything on here for a while, due to a mass exodus of effort consisting mostly of attempts to get work in on time for Uni. Shortly before Christmas I made a list of my projects for this year, so here’s my 2010, part 1 itinerary:

2 Demo EP's for Cartoon Explosion and nameless prog band. I might call it MetroGnome.

HQ album

work on my workshop guitar (see list below)

and get my uni work done.

I wont bore you with the details of the latter, im not one for complaining about uni work via a blog. Here's the rundown of the things I must do with my workshop guitar!

Yeah, many a thing to do...

This Thursday, however, Cartoon Explosion has booked out studio time to record our songs. The main twist to this tale is that we haven’t technically written them yet. We have songs, but if I am permitted to let them speak for themselves the working titles for the 2 finished songs are ‘Sumptuous Willy’ and the hauntingly beautiful ‘Tears On My Cock’.

No, there's no picture to illustrate that.

Obviously the lyrics aren’t finished yet, and many of the solos aren’t written but my opinion for the moment is on a very basic demo we want to capture the real soul of the messaroundy band that we are at heart, as we are slowly becoming squashed into the box that far too many bands feel the need to constrain themselves within, which is that of the ‘serious band’.

And yes... that may mean we will have to change the names. Of both the songs, and the band. But dammit, Me and Ollie will fight for our rights to keep that name. I don’t feel a band should be forced to be serious. Just do what you want and let the public decide whether to take you seriously. As this bunch of rapscallions showed us not too long ago...

On a slightly contradictory note... we were playing around last week with Gay Bar by Electric Six and came up with a smug jazz cover, called Wine Bar whose lyrics were cobbled together amazingly by Mr Harry Doodson. A short preview is as follows...

Girl,
I wanna take you to a wine bar.
I wanna take you to a wine bar.
I wanna take you to a wine bar, wine bar, wine bar

Let’s have a white.
A chardonnay white....

And so on. :D

I may or may not post the entire song some other time. I might even record it one day :)

Also, in ProgBlog news this week, I typed my name into google images and the first thing that comes up is a picture from my blog! Well done, all. I feel just a LITTLE bit famous. Though these days it seems like an inherently vain act to google one’s own name. I don’t know why.

But I have a week off next week, and though that screams ‘work’ and ‘revision’ to some, to me it simply screams ‘Prog!’ so maybe I’ll make a start on Worlds Apart. Most probably by seeing how much I can do with MIDI, without playing them in because a lot of the solos are at a Jem Godfrey level of insanity befitting a prog odyssey and my weedy fingers cannot keep up. I almost get the feeling that guy TRIED to set his fingers on fire. He looks a tad young... oh well.

Finally, 1 last plug. If you have never heard of audiosurf, for the love of god look for it on youtube or something it’s one of the greatest ideas of all time. ;)

Ooh, and a big hello for all of you from Funk Snail Bye guys! I’ll try and leave less of a gap between this and the next one. This gap was caused partially by a massive 2 day computer fail.

Oh well, see on the flipside, motherflippers!

xxx

The Rob Rideout ProgPit Constuction Blog vol.1

Well, hello there!

It’s a new year, a new decade, and now that Jenky Aid is done, thar be new projects to get on to. Not least those of the mountain of actual university work I’m supposed to do this term. But as a start to the new year goes, the gig my band, HQ played last night was proper bo. We got one of Tom’s parents’ friends to do guest guitar on Johnny B Goode and Purple Haze. The man is almost definitely a blues genius. We polished of the evening of several arrangements of auld lang syne ranging from a punk rock one to a nice reggae rendition which was my personal favourite.
But as good news goes, this next nugget is up there.

A couple of weeks before the end of term, I sorted out my living arrangements for my next year. It’s a fantastically lovely 7 bedroome house on an ol’ school cobbled road, with 6 of the awesomest people ever. Proper looking forward to it, but that’s not even the best bit...

After seeing my room for the first time I immediately decided that I would be turning my room into a bit of a home studio, so over the last few weeks I have been wondering about what exactly I need to buy. Essentially I’m planning on an Imac, a reasonably large MIDI keyboard, some adequately badass speakers and maybe a little DI box or something like that for if I want to record guitars. Well after posing the burning question of ‘What shall I get’ to the Frost* Forum community I got some fantastic advice of the dudes there which definitely helped to shape the mental image of the finished product, and then something wonderful happened. Jem Godfrey, Keyboardist and songwriter for Frost* has recently been tweeting about how he was moving house and dismantling his old studio; and I thought seeing as how some things would be thrown away, I might ask if I can just nab them before they get to the skip so I can use them in my evil plans. And it turns out that If I can get down to london before the 4th, I can get this: for free, and this: for just £100! It makes me so very, very happy! This is possibly the best opportunity ever. It makes me feel like this: (i would like to point out that in real life that jacket is a nice manly red... but this camera apparently disagrees.)

I expect I’ll get the majority of the money towards the Imac for my birthday and will buy the monitor speakers over a great deal of saving up. But as for now, that is all the news about the Rob Rideout ProgPit. I’m still settling on the name to be honest...

Peace out, and enjoy the new decade! (Apparently we’re in the ‘Teenies’ now)
xxx

The Official Rob Rideout Christmas Blog!

Hello from back in little-old Bolton!

Well, there is big news on the Christmas front, so I’m going to start from the beginning. I finished the Christmas song! Jenky Aid is now out, advertised in a very minimal way and up for grabs. It even got a small amount of radio airtime on RadioHUDD, courtesy of Mr Dean Morris and Adam Findley. I’ve never been on the radio before...

It’s Proper Exciting.

But now that project is off, all I need to do now is see how it goes. And due to an unexpected and VERY welcome intrusion by the good sir Marti March it’s now looking as though it could raise a reasonably be-proud-of-myself amount of money for the Make A Wish Foundation.
Basically, upon hearing I was doing a bit of charity work, he was eager to jump on board, because a part of his course requires him raising at least £50 for charity. So I let him use me as a medium through which he can get his work done, and it turns out it’s making a massive difference in the number I’ve sold! Because it’s for his course, he’s flogging one to pretty much every member of his family, and so are all the other people in his group, including putting a fiver in each! So this has been a boon to my project meaning it’s going to raise a bare minimum of £50 which is much more than I expected, and recent news suggests £100 is easily within reach. So today in celebration I bought myself a sausage roll.
So today, Monday the 14th of December my single is officially out for public purchase. I’m printing out the low budget coversheets as we speak. (Well, as you read. Unless you’re reading this from some time in the future in which case robots have probably taken over the world, and I have long forgotten my toiling.)

Here’s the sleeve for it:

And for those who are hard of sight, or if I just uploaded it badly here’s the notes at the bottom:

“This whole record was fantastic to work on, and my whole-hearted thanks go out to all involved, all the singers, the people who gave me ideas and the people who were unable to participate due to illness or other misfortune.
All proceeds from the sale of this single are going straight to the ‘Make A Wish Foundation in the hope that we can help others to have an equally rockin’ festive season!
Thanks, also to the people at uni for letting me persistently borrow their equipment and rooms and helping me during times of epic computer meltdown! For more details of the recording process and other musicy things please visit http://www.robrideoutsprogblog.blogspot.com/
I Genuinely hope you all have a very merry Christmas and a positively spiffing new year.
Jenkinson A is on a Boat!
Copyright 2009 Rob Rideout & Jenkinson A & Captain Fantastic & his Epic Robot Army”

If anyone outside of Huddersfield wants a copy I won’t be able to charge you for it, because I lack the technical prowess to set up a Paypal thing. So if you email me I’ll send you the MP3 and in return you must promise to be very nice. And give a pound to a charity at some point. :P pinky swear!
Also today I finished all my uni coursework until after Christmas, and consequently rewarded myself with a kinder egg. The toy was admittedly disappointing as there was no assembly required but my general feeling of elation negated that as I chomped happily upon the egg itself. Fantarstic.

I have a feeling, my friends that the next blog will be uploaded sometime next decade, but thankfully that isn’t long off! Gawd il be twenty soon. I can smell mortgage...

Merry Christmas, and a Happy new year!
Prog bless us. Every one.

Rock and Roll and Ebay.

In the words of the late great Geoffrey Chaucer, all good things must come to an end. And my Christmas project is in deep danger of coming to an end. God knows when this is finished I might have to do some actual university work. It’s all recorded, mixed, mastered, signed and sealed all that remains is to deliver it to Dean for his radio show next Monday and it’s gonna hit the airwaves harder than a drunk Scotsman. I found out the other day that it’s possible to borrow a HD video recorder from the tech room, so depending on the state of my actual coursework at the outset of this week I might make a start on the video!

I’m starting to get that odd feeling of Stockholm Syndrome with this song now in that I keep tweaking the mix. Things never really seem to be final anymore but I realised I should really stop messing with things after I tried putting a vocoder on the master track. This failed to give me any kind of increase in sound quality other than to make the record playable on some kind of dalek radio, I don’t even know what possessed me to think that would be a good idea. There was a strange insight into my musical world the other day with the release of this (http://the-doncastrian.tumblr.com/post/271144157) from Dean. It’s essentially his blog explaining this whole process from the point of view of someone who’s never been in the studio before. It’s quite refreshing to see someone so excited by all the knobs and buttons. All the people who recorded their voices on this record were uniformly amazed at the faders that moved themselves. It never ceases to make me chuckle.

And now onto a totally new uncharted piece of life I have moved into. Some things you always hear about as both good and dangerous. It’s apparently highly addictive and I can see why because it’s such a rush when you finally get what you want out of it. Don’t worry kids, I’m not on drugs. I’m talking about that superbly stunning stack of stuff that is the sultry world of Ebay. Not least because you can own something new without having to go to any kind of shop, or even move. Not even because it’s so fantastically cheap. But because of the clever use of the word ‘win’. Now in my understanding of shopping buying something has always been something of a mundane activity, but once you have bought something, it delights in informing you that you have ‘won’ it. Which instantly leads you to think: ‘won? Me? Fantastic! ... Let’s play again!’ which is a bad road to go down. So I now own a thoroughly awesome J rock jacket which is currently hurtling through the air to find me. Sensational. On a rather final note, I have contacted the lovely people at the Make A Wish Foundation about making the donation so there’s no going back now. I just made the little sleeve I intend to provide the CD in so the admin is now dangerously close to the ‘all done’ stage. I’m going to miss this when it’s gone.

Here’s a little preview of what the sleeve will look like:

(I know you can't read it, il put a better version up once it's finalised and out there to purchase.)

And I intend to add a little design on the front, of which I will ask the lovely Miss Sarah Lowe, as her artistic skills far surpass my own. I wonder how good she is at drawing reindeer...

Bye, all!

The Nearly-done Stage!

Well HI!

Good news, prog fans! Well. More Christmas fans.
First of all on the agenda, all the vocals are done! And you all know what that means...

Thar be a ticking afoot!
Ah that’s better... but wait... there’s another box to tick! And it’s a biggun!

So that’s done now. And although it was stressful, time consuming and ultimately tiring it was also thoroughly marvellous. i got to know a few people around Jenkinson a bit better, found out that some people are fantarrrstic singers, and had an all round awesome time. This is without a shadow of a doubt the best thing I’ve done since being at Uni. I can’t stop listening to it back now and it I chuckle every time; it makes me feel like this:
Also, in the age old tradition of the Christmas single, I needed something else on here. For a while I couldn’t quite put my finger on it, it just didn’t have enough Christmas flavour. And today after hunting high and low I found it. Sleigh bells! So now with them on the track it’s sounding entirely festive! Ooh I could have a bit o’ mince pie right about now.

So that’s all the instruments recorded, all the vocals recorded and everything is nearly mixed. I thought id struggle to meet the deadline, but I should be finished by the end of this week! What could I possibly do with the time spare...

Did someone say ‘music video’? I’ll ask who’s prepared to do one. :D

So now I’m nearly done it might be a good time to have an emotional montage of photos from the studio. Cue the emotional and inspirational music!

Ah. Good times we had by all.

And you know what? I have thoroughly earned this sausage roll.
Now what’s left to do...
Well, I’ve been trying to mix it as I go along, so I don’t have to mess about with it too much and as far as I can tell it’s been quite good, so I shouldn’t have to spend TOO long on that and it sounds pretty good now. So it’s just a matter of very fine tuning, I’m so EXCITED! Meanwhile, in another panel of my Christmas comic book, Rob toils away upon his guitar...

Yep, I got started. I started with stripping off all the tape and taking some hardware off. In short I did everything that was possible without tools. The stripes were a bit stubborn as they’d been there for a while, and decided out of spite to coat most of the surface of my guitar in what can only be described as a traumatic post-adhesive sticky mess. So at the moment I’m in the admittedly dull process of setting upon that with some polish to get it off my precious fretboard. I’m not going to bother taking it off the main body, as I’m planning to sand that down. So logically the next step is to get me some tools so I can actually do something interesting.

Finally, my new band, Cartoon Explosion, has got our first gig on the 17th at Livingstone’s in the Hudd, and it’s going to be awesome. Especially for me, as it’s my drumming debut! I love drums, and usually end up playing guitar or singing in all my other bands, so this will be a very welcome change. It’s a very accepted change of style too, so I’m going to get on writing some more stuff for them which will be a nice change as its more of a rock band so I won’t be able to use my usual 13/8 widdly widdly crazy cacophony of guitars every other bar. Hmm. Power chords anyone?

Bye guys!

xxx