Toot Your Horn

What a great prompt for a music teacher, especially one who teaches the saxophone! I of course like to think that music in general is what I excel at. I think I’m a good sax player and pianist and I hope that my students get as much from their lessons ass I do teaching them.

I wonder sometimes though, if anyone else finds they tend to go a bit over board on what they excel at? Take the other day, a new student called and mentioned that he was buying a sax. I was immediately intrigued asking what he planned to get and happily sharing expertise on which saxes play well and which, in my opinion don’t. Before I knew it I’d been on the phone forty five minutes and hadn’t got around to booking a lesson time. Fortunately my new student didn’t show any signs of being worried and I hope found the discussion helpful. I was rewarded a few days later when he called again for more information.

So maybe besides the playing and teaching I can add ‘useful opinions regarding saxophones’ to my list of musical things I excel at. Of course it could just be that I excel at talking…

32 Flavors

It seems to me that in this day and age everyone wants something a little bit different from the norm.  Just having the choice of vanilla or chocolate isn’t enough and if you were to pick one of these simple flavours you might be tagged as boring.

The same goes for more than just food though. How many times have we heard kids screaming for an iPad white, because, like, everyone has the original one. Even simple things like admiring a friend’s shoes end in you buying them in a different colour, because it just isn’t done to be the same.

But what if you have a product that is better than your average bear? How do you go about promoting it to the masses? After all it should be obvious that what you have is superior to the competition, but unless you have the gift of the gab then no one will know about it.

That’s what has been happening to my best friend. Scott runs LightBeat Laser Disco which is a disco with a difference. The light show is all lasers; he has some of the most up to date lasers in the country and can create stunning effects on a budget that any party host can afford. He really believes in giving his clients the absolute best and so goes the extra mile for clarity of sound and atmospheric lighting for their events.

Don’t believe me? You can check it out at:

www.lightbeat.weebly.com

Standard laser setup

Locked in a room with something I fear

The daily prompt today is to describe what would happen if you were locked in a room with your worst fear.  At the moment that would be spending another three hours trying to decipher computer code to make my website more visible on Google.

Having noticed that the website for my music school doesn’t appear on many of the relevant searches I thought I should try and do something about it. I suppose the smart approach would have been to talk to someone who actually knows about these things but that’s not for me. I bought a book and it’s called Get to No.1 on Google by Ben Norman. Catchy title; it appears to say it can do just what I’m looking for.

I think it’s been thought out very well. So far there have been many handy screen-shots to show you what your computer should be doing and it goes about describing a lot of the free software included in Google Webmaster, which is very useful. It’s applying that knowledge that I’m finding hard.

For instance once you log onto Google Webmaster it asks you to verify your website by planting a bit of code onto your home page… Ok but where exactly? In the title box, the main text, the side bar the menu? I tried them all and all failed the verification test.  The book doesn’t explain this (or if it does then I haven’t reached that page yet) fortunately Google itself offers other solutions. The first was this piece of code and the second is creating a sub-domain through your host. Lost yet? I was, thank God for step by step. Until, that is you get to the last step when you get the red error message of doom and suddenly it won’t work after all.

Their other suggestion is to include a Meta Tag in the html code under the header but before the body, I think. But there are no instructions on how to do this either. By process of random clicking I found a box in my settings menu that said you could input things in html. It didn’t say where but I gave it a go anyway and HURRAY it works!

Storm Dynamics has now been verified on Google through its Meta Tag. I have no idea what this is or what it does but I’m very pleased with myself for managing to do it.

Any ideas what the next step is?

Daily Prompt: Call Me Ishmael

‘Prince Rupert rode his unicorn into the Tanglewood, peering balefully through the drizzling rain as he searched half-heartedly for the flea hiding somewhere under his breastplate.’

This is the first line from Blue Moon Rising by Simon. R. Green which has been my favourite book ever since the first time I read it aged about twelve. Don’t be mistaken, this isn’t a kids book. It isn’t even a teenage fiction; it would probably give the average Twilight reader nightmares. This is a dark fantasy but with all the trappings of a typical girlie fantasy book.

You have a prince on a white horse, a princess in need of rescuing from a dragon and a kingdom calling out for a hero to save them. Only in this book the white horse is a unicorn (they can only be ridden by virgins in case you don’t know your mythology) leading to a lot of sniggers for our valiant prince. The dragon ends up being rescued from an over bearing princess most people want to be rid of and the hero the kingdom is calling out for is not Prince Rupert but his older brother Harold. All this happens in chapter one. A few chapters later demons come spilling out of the dark wood intent on slaughtering the people of the first kingdom fuelled by the magic of the evil Blue Moon.

I suppose I should have realised earlier that power metal would be the form of ‘heavy’ music I’d be most attracted to, going by this book anyway. I once heard power metal described as:
“The protagonist arrives riding a white unicorn, escapes from the dragon, saves the princess and makes love to her in an enchanted forest.”
Which sounds very saccharine until you realise that you can apply that to my favourite book which is anything but.
Some of the other metaphoric definitions -which can be found here – don’t fit all all. For example:
HEAVY METAL: The protagonist arrives on a Harley, kills the dragon, drinks a few beers and f***s the princess
This doesn’t really appeal at all, though I admit it isn’t exactly a true definition of heavy metal music, which appeals greatly to listen to. But when it comes to actually playing the music heavy metal just isn’t as fun as power metal.

The obvious and most egotistical reason for this is that a lot of heavy metal bands don’t employ a keyboard player and I’m fairly untalented on the guitar. Like most people I enjoy the things that I am good at. But also it doesn’t matter what effects pedal you drive your guitar through you just can’t create the wall of sound you can with a keyboard. You can play the same chords in the same rhythm as the guitarists but you can do so much more with them. Inversions, for instance. By changing the inversion of a chord you not only change the overall sound but you give yourself far more options for where to progress to next.

There are also instances where the keyboard player can change the tonality of a chord, in this case whether it is major or minor, despite the fact that there are (in Draegon’s case) three other guitarists in the band. This is because guitarists like to play power chords which consist of open fifths. As they’re not playing the third this leaves the chord’s tonality ambiguous and it is the keyboard player who fills it in. I should point out that if you have a guitar soloing it is a good idea to tell him which chord you are using or you could end up in a mess. You also have the option of playing an awesome solo as well as the wall of sound which you can alter to your hearts content.

All in all it’s a bit like my book. There you have a book pretending to be a bright sparkly fantasy which contains elements of horror and a wicked since of humour. With a keyboard you have the task of being labeled ‘rhythm section’ and keeping the song flowing, but you also have options coming out of your ears.

Quote me

“Facebook Official” is possibly the most annoying phrase that never seems to go away. Nothing is real until it’s Facebook Official. Since when did I need to post my life up on Facebook for it to become real? I’m fairly certain that I was dating Russell before I announced it on Facebook but one question my cousin continually asked me was:”when are you making it Facebook Official?” In her eyes it wasn’t a serious relationship until I’d posted it.

I have friends who have tried to fight this. If you read their profiles then Facebook will insist that they are twelve and ten years old and are married. Alarmingly this is fine – shouldn’t Facebook have a filter for that? You’d have thought that flagging up child marriage would be a priority, but apparently not. As the marriage is “Facebook official” though it must be true and both of my friends have been asked how long they’ve been married and if it was a nice service.

On a more depressing note my poor mum was greeted by name by one of her managers today after adding him on Facebook last night. It’s the first time he’s used her name yet she’s been working there for six months. Facebook Official can’t apply to our names as well, surely? Does this mean that there are millions of nameless people running round out there who only become real once they’ve joined Facebook and uploaded a photo? What if they don’t upload a photo? Does their visage cease to exist and they become just a blue outline? Where does it end?

It should begin with common sense. I accept, as reality, that people are still doing things when I am not around. I also accept that people sometimes lie. If you add these things together you get Facebook posts that are not only random but often completely idiotic and pointless as well and that’s fair enough because it’s cyber-space not tangible reality.

However as they’ve written it on Facebook it’s Facebook Official and so must be true.

Stroke of Midnight

I was most definitely not where I thought I’d be at the stroke of midnight. The plan was the same plan my disco partner DJ Scott and I have used for the past few years.

1) Book New Years Eve gig for Lightbeat Laser Disco.
2) Run disco.

As plans go it’s not that complicated and previously has worked it well. Not this year. This year we got a call saying it was all off on the evening of the 30th. Lovely. New Years Eve is always the Big Event in the disco calendar. We even had a brand new PM-1800 Swiss Las multicoloured laser which, naturally, we we’re dying to try out, but it was clearly not meant to be. So what do we do? Well, after what felt like a million phone calls we were left with the evening to ourselves.

So what do you do if you’ve spent all your previous years making the party for someone else?

You do the exact opposite.

So Scott, myself and our respective partners Russell and Inga ended up in a restaurant called Sang Thai in Dorking. If you haven’t been then I highly recommend it, they serve the best Thai food I’ve ever eaten. The service was brilliant, I don’t think I’ve ever seen staff so happy to be doing their jobs and they had also really put a lot into the atmosphere which came complete with glittery cowboy hats for all patrons, party music and free Champagne.

We didn’t stay till midnight, however. We wanted to do something that no one in our merry little group had ever done before. We wanted to see the fireworks and for that we needed a view.

The view from the top of Box Hill durning the day is spectacular. The rolling hills of England stretch out for mile after breathtaking mile. At eleven thirty at night, however, the drive up is quite spooky. The narrow road complete with twisting hairpin bends is crowded on both sides by looming trees which hide any sign of an outside world. We were all trying not to think about it when Russell yelled:
“Hang on. I think this is where the Olympic cyclists rode!”
He was correct and we spent the rest of the drive up looking out for slogans such as ‘Kiss my Cav’ and ‘Go Team GB.’

At night Box Hill is just as spectacular as during the day, but this time it is the lights of the towns and villages below that took centre stage.

We might not have had a microphone to announce the count down over, but between the four of us were can be pretty loud and we may not have had our sound system but Scott had Auld Lang Syne on his iPhone. So we shouted the count down out from the top of the hill and stretched out before us the lights from twenty different displays played themselves out.

I think we had the best seats in the house.