More equipment

I should also mention that a few weeks back I picked up a Behringer Multicom Pro-XL four channel compressor that I'm using now too.

New Guitar

Those of you who have been listening to me on Second Life or following my facebook/twitter would know that last week I finally had enough of the problems I was having with the electrics in the Vantage so I went and bought a new guitar.

The guitar in question is the one pictured, a Tanglewood TRD-VSE. It was a close call with a Washburn in the shop that I didn't actually look at the model of.

I have to say that I absolutely love the sound that I'm getting out of it and it feels lovely to play. I am finding it amazing the extra energy I am feeling while I am playing a nice guitar, and I am passing that energy on to the listeners when I play, so it's all good.

Australia Day Pass the Mike

On the evening before Australia day I got a message from Lacey that she wanted to get a few Australian Second Life performers together to play at her place (in Second Life) with a definitely Australian Theme.

So it ended up with four of us doing a "pass the mike" for four hours! The participants were:

• Jaggpro McCann (Rob Fisher),
• OhMy Kidd (Matthew Davies),
• The Lohners (Shan and Byron), and
• Me Tpenta Vanalten (Alan Hargreaves)

I have to say I have not had so much fun performing in a long time (and I generally have fun performing). The format that we went for was simply three songs and then pass the stream to the next performer (well I did one set with two, but "The Band Played Waltzing Mathilda" runs about 8 minutes). For the most part we played a lot of Australian music, I did a few I wouldn't normally (what is Australia Day without Slim Dusty's "Pub with no Beer" ?).

Apparently for the four hours we had about 30 people listening constantly. We all had a fantastic time. I love this format!

Video from kameleonz in Second Life - "Hot Cappucino"

Two Weeks ago I was playing in a new place called Kameleonz in Second Life. Before I went up I had a request from Fabios that he would like to take a video of me playing. I requested that he only record one of my originals as I don't have the rights to allow for something else to be videoed (in spite of lots of people on youtube doing it).

The result is the clip below of me playing my own "Hot Cappuccino".

Widget to play "Goodbye Heaven"

Widget to play "That's just the way that it goes"

Jamming

I had my brother visit today. We set up our respective gear in the lounge room and jammed for a bit. Him on his lovely black Ibanez with Marshall amp and I did a combination of my Vantage and the Gibson L6S.

Lots of fun.

One of the things we did was an earlier version of "How Can It Be over", where he set up the Ibanez with some nice warm distortion to play the original riff that "made" the song when I wrote it. Really nice to get the feel of that one again. I backed off to my original finger picking style to play against him as against how I do it solo now.

He has spent so much more time getting to know his guitar and working on his technique. It puts me to shame at times; but the great thing is that he loves to jam against the music I write, so we have a ball. Maybe I should get him on some of the recordings that I'm doing at home :)

The bad news was that I think my old practice amp has a small rip in the speaker. The nice thing to know was that my big amp (The Jade twin 130) sounds as good as ever and I really had to watch the levels in the house. Especially with the electric acoustic as I couldn't find my feedback buster quickly. At a later time I'm going to try running the full mix into the jade to see if it might work in a pinch for a small PA.

Also got to muck about with a few ideas that I had and progress them a little.

A great day for jamming.