Guitar
Photography
Reading Matter
Languages
Guitar
Photography
Reading Matter
Languages
I play an
Ibanez S540
from
Ibanez Guitars,
which is by far the best guitar I have ever played, but for which I am having a custom
neck built. This new neck will have a scalloped fretboard, which most players hate, and
is being done for me by one of Jeff's luthiers at
Machinehead Music
in Hitchin, England.
If you like ordinary necks, I'd take a look at the
Ibanez
site - their instruments really are first-rate. Notably,
Ritchie Blackmore
and
Yngwie J. Malmsteen
(the 'J' is essential for unambiguous identification) both had their
fretboards scalloped, which is where I first came by the idea.
Steve Vai's
Jem series
instruments had the top four frets scalloped. The idea is, you scoop the wood between the
frets into a curve, a millimetre or two in depth, so that the fingertips do not rest on the
wood while fingering the strings. If you employ a firm, ham-fisted grip on the strings,
you'll bend them out of tune, but if you have the control you can feel and grip the strings
much better. You also suffer virtually no friction across the fingerboard, making vibrato
and string bending a breeze.
The necks I prefer also have a satin finish, with hardly any varnish for sweaty fingers to stick to, and a dead flat ebony fingerboard with fat, Gibson-type frets. The hardness of the ebony gives more sustain and a brighter, if thinner note, while the thick frets are easier to feel without looking. The flat camber is helpful when using wide string bends - if you bend a string at about the 12th to 14th fret on a traditional, curved Strat fretboard, you tend to pull the string down towards the frets higher up, killing the tone or even choking the note out altogether.
Ibanez use a Floyd Rose licenced locking tremolo, these days the de facto industry standard. The name tremolo is something of a turkey, considering that its purpose is to provide vibrato, but the Floyd's engineering is second to none. The strings are clamped in place just behind the nut, and just past where they pass over the bridge, leaving no room for the string to slide and then stick, altering the tension of the free length of string and thus losing intonation. The metals are also very hard, providing great stability, and come in a choice of chrome, black chrome or, as in the case of my S540, gold-plated. The bridge is pivoted around two bolts, with the tension in the strings balanced out by springs hidden within the body. Many of the effects heard in post-Hendrix rock guitar are owed to the tremolo's capacity to bend the strings up or down, providing a range of effects from almost any breadth of vibrato to dive-bombs and an almost vocal control over the pitch of a note. The combination of tremolo arm use and earsplitting harmonics are trademarks of players such as Steve Vai, Joe Satriani and myself, he said modestly.
For much of my adult life my defining passion, I devoted several years to building a wildlife photographic portfolio. I did in fact manage to get a number of shots and articles published in Amateur Photographer magazine, but I've pretty much given up hope of becoming a full-time Pro, as once was my dream. There are too many competent photographers out there prepared to do the work simply to see it published, and it's very difficult to undercut people who work for free. However, I still have the kit and the interest, so expect to see a few more shots published in the future. I also have a couple of hundred pictures with the BBC Wildlife Unit's picture library in Bristol, and the same number in the vaults of Amateur Photographer.
I use a Nikon FM2 and a Benbo Mark II tripod, together with a variety of add-ons and lighting gear. One of my published articles was about the Vivitar 283 flash, my main working flash for field-work.
I lived for three-and-a-half years in Osnabrück in Germany, not too far from the Dutch border, and speak fluent and idiomatic German. In fact, I can almost grasp conversation in Plattdeutsch, a horrific regional language similar to Dutch which is spoken in northwest Germany. I'm told by Germans that my accent is distinctly platt. Imagine a German coming to England and speaking broad Geordie and you'll get some idea of the effect. If this seems an excessive claim, bear in mind that I was not only fully immersed in the culture for over three years but that I also had the advantage of 'O'-level German and a previous German girlfriend before I went.
Although Osnabrück is a garrison town with about 17,000 British soldiers, I went there partly to work on my wildlife photography in an environment where wages are high enough to make only working half the year possible, and partly to work on my German, so I avoided mixing with my own nationality for the most part. The result is that I can almost pass for a native if I speak with Germans coming from sufficiently far from Osnabrück that my regional accent drowns out my english one.
My French is a somewhat more sorry story. Although my parents own a gîte in Brittany, which I have helped to renovate and which I generally visit at least three time a year, my conversational French has been sorely neglected since I left school. Although I can get by in bars and supermarkets, I'm not about to win any prizes for French literature.
My current passion is Arabic, in my eyes and ears one of the world's most beautiful languages. Unfortunately, it's not that easy to come by courses on Arabic in the Southwest, although I have high hopes for some of the teaching software that I've seen advertised on the Web. Trying to learn a language like Arabic out of a book is an exercise in futility.