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Thomas Hardy's Ale - Vintage 1975

I bought a couple of bottles of Thomas Hardy’s ale in my college days at Bath in 1975 (yes I’m that old) and somehow they have remained intact during my travels around the world. Finally yesterday curiosity got the better of me and I decided to open the raggedier of the two bottles and share the experience with a beer connoisseur friend, Bob and my son Richard.

First of all I had to ensure that the bottle was upright for several days to allow any sediment to settle…and of course you don’t serve beer like this cold !

Finally I popped the crown cork and gave it a sniff…a rich complex aroma, with hints of ale but also a complex sherry or port tang. I carefully poured three tiny glasses and the colour was a great surprise to me, a very dark amber but still clear. The taste was strong and complex and the sensation changed as each drop went down the the throat, still recognizably an ale, but with fantastic character derived from oak barrels and age.
Bob declared the ale to be in perfect condition and exactly as he had hoped for in a beer of such age….and he knows his beer.

Curiosity assuaged, the second bottle will sit now and maybe mature for another 36 years, who knows.

I was shocked to read that the LA Times applauded Viagra for the use of Howlin’ Wolf’s Smokestack Lightning in their ad.Here’s a link through

While I’m all in favour of the blues featuring in commercials and hopefully the musicians getting some cash, i was just appalled by the mashup of the tune they actually used, which disregards the 4-bar riff structure and creates some horrible lopsided phrasing. Am I alone on this one ?

This year I fell for the Japanese Tenkara method of fly-fishing, hook line and sinker one might say and I’m trying an experiment to make a couple of bamboo tenkara rods using the bamboo that thrives in my backyard.

The steps are pretty simple…..
(1) Select and cut two eleven foot pretty straight bamboo sections….completed
(2) Dry these for several months, tied to a straight rod to make sure they don’t curl….completed
(3) Cut into 2 sections and attach ferrules (I made sure to cut at same thickness so that the sections are interchangeable)….completed
(4) Using a blowtorch heat and straighten the rod at each bamboo joint. Actually very easy…..completed
(5) Sand down each of the joints….completed
(6) make a cork handle for one rod. The other has a nice bamboo root rhizome that will do as a handle,,,,to do.
(7) Attach the little tip core to which the tenkara line is knotted…..to do
(8) Put on a little decorative whipping…..to do
(9) Varnish the rodes with tung oil……to do

The bamboo must have a lot of natural sugars in it. When you heat for bending it forms a wonderful caramel colored glossy finish which you can see in the photo.

I feel good about this. By next spring I should have 2 nice bamboo tenkara rods and I can’t wait.

If you trawl through the bluesblast archive you’ll find many up-tempo jazz blues tracks. It’s just a thing of mine, I’ve always loved that bop blues sound and keep trying to improve my improvisation in that vein. One challenge is to avoid sounding kind of rinky dink ragtime-y over circle of fifth changes which are the main feature that distinguishes jazz blues.

I found this great tip to help with that on Dr. Bops site – it’s quite counter-intuitive , essentially using the chord majot scale over chords that don’t resolve via the circle of fifths and using the core key blues scale over the chords that resolve.

Link to Dr. Bop’s soling tip Here’s a link to the original tip – great stuff.

Now the tech stuff – so I made a jazz type blues track to try this out. It’s in E which is not really a great jazz key, but what the heck….try it.
Jazz Jam in E here’s the track.

This track is quite fast at 170 BPM and I really noticed my bass track getting out of synch due to sound card latency…..I did some tests and figured out that the latency was around 20 milli-seconds, whish is quite significant as a single beat at 170 bpm is 350 milli-seconds. My soundcard is not an ASIO card and I’m using Adobe Audition 1.5 which is not ASIO compatible. So I just edited 20 milli-seconds out of the tracks and it synced up pretty well…..but I need to think about an ASIO upgrade…..and will that in turn mean a new computer as i’m sure a new Audition will need more system….hmmm

Here’s what I guess you can call an up-tempo blues-rock in E — just wail away stuff.

E jam

MSNBC – Can Windows 8 Save the PC ? I was reading this article about declining estimates for future PC demand which will inevitably increase PC prices.

Those of us into home recording have really been getting a ‘free ride’ for years, building studio PCs around low-cost powerful machines designed primarily for other purposes. As the consumer switches to other platforms for photo/video/gaming I wonder if we will be left keeping our old XP/Windows 7 machines alive to protect our investment in software and cards as the cost of replacements becomes prohibitive ?

Here’s an update on my homemade resonator guitar progress. My concept was basically to build a reso guitar just by recycling wood and guitar parts that I already had. I decided to use a camping frying pan as the resonator and use a biscuit bridge type approach.

I took a bolt on Les Paul neck from an old Bently guitar and I used the Les Paul guitar size as the basis for the body making sure it would accomodate the pan. I drew that out on plywood and I built a laminated headblock and tailblock with some old wood and glued them to the guitar back.

I already had some thin maple sides as I’ve been thinking about making another lute. I bent them to shape and glued them to the back with some strengthening and home made purfling blocks. Bending wood is pretty easy once you get the feel – its like at a certain point the wood just turns into thermoplastic. Once its cool again it sets – wierd.

Now I needed to cut the neck pocket….this is where it gets fun as you now need to understand all the geometry of the guitar in terms of the angles at the bridge and also get the woodwork right to have a tight neck pocket. I gave the neck a bit of a back tilt and I was pleased to get a really tight pocket. I drilled 2 long screw holes in from the back and put in 2 screws, also glued the neck in place…should be fine.

Finally I constructed the sound well, which is the hole the resonator sits in and glued that behind the hole in the front, glued on the front and constructed a bridge from a piece of angle iron.

Here’s what it sounds like. resoslidedemo

Now I’m working to get the action and intonation nice and then I’ll think about finishing…maybe black to hide some of the imperfections in the woodwork and a nice cover plate.

I finally decided to take the plunge and upgrade my recording PC OS. It’s not a bad spec machine, 2.4 Ghz and 2 gig memory and I had kept it on Win 2K just because it was stable and pretty quick. But new software won’t typically run on Win 2K so I had to make a move…..going to XP which is already on its way out seemed like a wrong turn, so with some trepidation I bought 7, fearing I’d end up junking the hardware if it all ran like a dog.

Well, I hate to say it about a Microsoft product but Windows 7 is really great ! Not at all bloatware ! It installed quickly and easily, it’s very quick, nice clean UI, helped me get the various device drivers installed and most times my old software installed and run off the bat. I’m a happy camper !

Off topic, but I’m stoked – I purchased a Tenkara fly rod online this morning and now I can’t wait for it to arrive. Tenkara is a Japanese minimalist approach to fly fishing and I think this is going to be a blast on the little creeks around here.

Check this video out….. very cool

Update ! Tenkara rod arrived – easy to set up and I spent an hour down on the local FFO creek section – no trout but a half dozen feisty bluegills caught and released….its a blast.