At the age of 16 I taught myself a little guitar. Ever since then, I played – sometimes more, sometimes less, but at a certain point all autodidactic efforts came to a stop. For my last birthday, friends and family gave me some money to get professional guitar lessons. And in about 30 minutes I have my first. Uh-oh… stay tuned.
Just to show off – I’m probably the first person to have a ticket for the show in November 
On Thursday night I should have been on the fourth concert of the new “Drive Me Mad!” tour by Fiddler’s Green in Cologne. I intended to go there by train, so I would be able to drink a beer and might even catch some sleep on the way back. Hurricane Kyrill didn’t like these plans, and even before I finished work that day, German railways have shut down all trains first in my county, and later nationwide.
This turned out the be lucky for me, since people got stranded in Cologne where no hotel room was available due to a large fair. And even today, two days later, train schedules have not yet fully recovered.
So my next chance for the concert is in March, when the Fiddlers come to Bochum.
Finally Saturday evening arrived! The concert was part of the “Schicksalsfest” (Destiny/Fate festival) – a 3 day festival for fans of the Middle Ages. The setting was an old castle in Belgium, close to my hometown, and many attendees dressed in medieval costumes or phantasy costumes (a lot clearly influenced by Tolkien). Since my ticket was valid from 8pm on and the concert started at 10pm I was able to attend a very interesting demonstration of the different wrestling, knife-fighting, fencing and swordfighting techniques along with a historical explanation.
Finally the 6 Fiddlers Ralf, Stefan, Rainer, Frank, Tobias and the “new guy” Pat entered the stage. Since I never visited a Fiddler’s Green concert before, I was a bit surprised when one of their roadies – dressed with rags and a sheep’s skull – opened the concert with a ceremonial drum banging, but I was informed that this is the traditional opening of the “Folk Raider” character. I was approximately 7 meters away from the stage and once the first chords played I was glad that I had my earplugs since the sound was deafening. Well, I’m not 20 anymore, but I saw that several other people also had earplugs. Actually I was surprised to see that I was not the oldest person around. I would assume that I was at the lower end of the oldest third, but quite a lot of guests were clearly in their Fourties and even Fifties.
Lead vocalist Ralf ‘Albi’ Albers had a knee injury which forced him to wear a bandage, so he had to sit quite a lot. But this didn’t kept him from wildly moving and gesturing around. Along with fiddle player Tobias ‘Tobi’ Heindl (in typical tartan kilt) and Pat, the new guitar player who only joined the Fiddlers some 6 weeks ago), they did all the talking. Apart from being new, Pat also seems to be the youngest of the group and was subject to many (friendly) puns because he doesn’t know all the song titles and meaning of the lyrics yet. Accordeon player Stefan Klug celebrated his birthday that night and was spontaneously greeted with our regional birthday song “Hass Jeburtstach – Au hur!” which is too rude to translate and which clearly puzzled the group from southern Germany. Stefan, be assured it was meant friendly and actually it was quite an honour to receive such a chant.
The 90 minutes of concert were quite a good workout session, not only for me and the other visitors, but for the band as well. I knew almost all of the tracks excpet the 2 (3?) of the new album they are going to record soon. 
I was especially pleased when they played my favourite song “As I roved out“, especially since they gave it a Reggae-touch I never realized before (or which they evolved only recently). My other favourites were “Queen of Argyll”, “Lanigan’s Ball” and of course “Folk Raider”. I had the impression that the program was “aiming for safety”, playing more the traditional-like songs – probably due to the fact of the medieval setting. I had hoped for more modern songs like “Tangerine” or “Out of the darkness”. As for the traditional repertoire I had hoped for the “Black Sheep Rag”. But even so it was a great concert which made all of the estimated 200 guests dance one way or the other. A small group in my vicinity started to Pogo-dance on a few occasions. Though I had my share of pogo dancing when I was at the university it seemed quite out of place and a bit annoying during the Fiddler’s Green concert.
After the concert the musicians were available at the merchandising booth. I bought the “Celebrate!” CD which was recorded at their 1000th concert and had Ralf, Stefan and Tobi sign it. I also had the opportunity for a small chat with Ralf. Tobi was under siege by female fans, so it took me a while to get his autograph. I only had limited cash with me (as a precaution), so I couldn’t buy the “Fiddler’s Songbook”. However it’s available in their online shop, and since it is my birthday soon…
Finally, when the roadies began to pack the equipment after 2 (3?) encores, there was a demonstration by the fire artist group “Evil Flames” which was very impressive too. Nevertheless I left early since it was a rather long and tricky country lane leading to the parking field and I didn’t want to be struck in congestion in the middle of the night. I was home at about 1am and poured myself a glass of Laphroaig single malt whisky to chill down.
And what about my checklist? I should have taken a spare T-shirt since mine was soaking wet with sweat. I had too much water with me, but since I left the second bottle in the car it wasn’t too hard to carry. A towel would have come in handy too.
Thank you, Fiddler’s, for this perfect evening. I’m sure I’m going to visit one of your concerts again!
Ticket? Check!
Digital camera? Check!
Water in plastic bottles? Check!
Earplugs? Check!
Rain cape? Check!
Rucksack? Check!
Anything I forgot?
Only 3 days to wait for the Fiddler’s Green concert at the Eyneburg castle in Belgium. There is supposed to be a weather change towards the weekend – I hope we won’t have thunderstorms that night. I’m going to post some more after the concert.
As mentioned in an earlier post I am brushing up my guitar – ahem – “skills” during my vacation. Yesterday I was sitting with my friend Holger who dusted off his old electric bass in a similar attempt. I told him about my guitar and when I mentioned the manufacturer’s name “Framus” he raised an astonished eyebrow. Since I bought the guitar back in the early Eigthies from a classmate for 100 DM (”felt” value today ~100 EUR) I always thought it was some cheap far-east factory stuff. But as it turned out Framus is a respected German guitar, bass and banjo manufacturer founded back in 1946. They went bankrupt in 1975, but began production again in 1995. Among the artists playing Framus instruments, there are the “German Elvis” Peter Kraus, John Lennon, George Harrison and Rolling Stones bassman Bill Wyman. There is quite an extensive article on Wikipedia as well as the history section on the bilingual homepage.
I was not very kind to my Framus guitar. It came in a light blue finish which didn’t look “cool” enough to me back then. So I “attacked” it with my dad’s hot-air fan and scraped the paint and finish off it, leaving bare wood and lot of scars. Then I glued a mirror between the pickup and the neck since that looked cool too. Click on the thumbnail to see the full image of the guitar. Last night I took some pictures of my guitar and sent them to Framus’ “Vintage Specialist”. This morning, he answered and told me that my guitar is a “Framus Junior de luxe (Model 10370)” which was built in the early Seventies, most likely in 1972. He also told me that it was modified since the original model only had a single coil pickup – my model is equipped with a humbucker-pickup. They only have a picture of a Junior 4 bass from 1973 on their page, but the similarity is quite obvious. So my guitar is probably only 5 years younger than I am. I have not yet made my mind up whether I should renovate it (I always feel inclined to use the article “her” on my 3 guitars), give it a new finish, get rid of the mirror etc. – or whether I should leave it like it is. Right now I’m tending more to leaving it like it is. What do you think?
A couple of years ago I was first confronted with the task to create a small (educational/promotional) video. Since I am working with Adobe Premiere since version 4.2 the production of the video was not a big task. But since it was to be used for commercial purposes, the soundtrack was the real difficult part due to licenses and royalties. Finally I discovered Magix Music Maker – a tool aimed at amateurs which came together with huge libraries of soundbits and which allowed the easy creation of royalty free tracks. Over the years, a handful of songs have been created – and more will follow. I have released them under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 License. Feel free to download and use them according to this license. The tunes can be found on a special page: http://www.technozid.de/music/
I’m on vacation right now. So I began my long planned task of improving my guitar skills with dusting off my electric guitar and putting on new strings. I have not yet cleaned & repaired my amp so I plugged the guitar into the PC and abused it as a makeshift amplifier. This worked surprisingly well, and before long I discovered a few guitar-centric websites where I found dedicated amplifier and DSP-effect software. The most promising one was GuitarFX, and with it my PC worked as a better amplifier (in terms of available effects) than my real hardware amp & effects ever worked. For those of you who dare, here is a first example
That was mostly on Saturday. Since I recommended a few links to BoingBoing during the weekend, I checked the site a few times. Already then I had a rather odd feeling, which was confirmed today: both BoingBoing and Lifehacker show a statistically above-average amount of guitar-, guitar-amplifier and guitar-effect related ads:
I was pretty surprised to see such targeted ads. Actually I never saw targeted ads to such an extent before. But only after similar ads showed up on Yahoo as well I started to realize that someone has hijacked my browser. So I ran virus and spyware checkers – but they didn’t find anything special. I did a thorough run around the Windows startup options only to find nothing. So I had a closer look at the ads and finally clicked the “Remove these ads” button. This transferred me to a site which said:
Annoying ads in your internet browser? Don’t scream like a baby! You have ads in your TV, but you don’t panic even you can’t remove ads from your TV.
The site showed a few links – one redirects to a Google sponsored Firefox download promising FF does remove ALL banners, and another one to payable (sic!) banner removing software. OK, so where has this bugger embedded itself into my system? The ads are showing up in Firefox and Internet Explorer, so it must be pretty low level. One link dubbed “recommendations for stupid beginners” had something interesting to say:
Special notes for GuitarFX users: you must uninstall this software via Windows Control Panel. Sometime you must install it and then uninstall immediatly, this helps in 100%. Note: you was informed about ads in the licence.txt file of GuitarFX, if you run it, you agree to see ads. Uninstall it via Windows Control Panel and do not see ads.
A-ha! So it was GuitarFX! Unfortunetaly the mentioned licencse.txt file wasn’t there, but there was a readme.txt and it said:
The Demo version can change your default home page in Internet Explorer and can show banners or other ads and can visit some www pages that can content banners, other ads and standard internet counters wich can track info available via internet and internet explorer you use and, may be, some other tech info about GuitarFX itself and your PC hardware and software. [...] Use of this software indicates you agree to this.
My IE hompage is protected so this one could not have been changed. So I dug a bit deeper in the installed software and finally
found a small batch-file which had the timestamp of the installation of GuitarFX and which was manipulating my hosts-file:
copy C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc\hosts.001 C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc\hosts
copy C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc\hostsb C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc\hosts
That was the culprit! I thought my hosts file was write protected – but maybe the software did clear that too. I gave Spybot S&D a run at it, filled it with its default entries and write protected it again – and now the ads are not showing anymore.
I’m pretty disappointed about this behaviour. The program looked good and was very versatile – I was even considering to buy the full version. But implanting spyware on my system is so out of bounds! I should have been warned though. The creaters of GuitarFX made such a pathetic approach at search engine spamming, distributing their program across various domains and Geocities accounts. It made me smile inwardly. But they caught me. They did. And that’s the part that really surprised me since I consider myself a Pro at spotting shady methods like that.
So, beware of GuitarFX (.net, .org, .info) – unless you want to get your browsers hijacked! Gladley there are alternatives who are playing fair. I’m currently evaluating Guitar FX Box and it looks good.
Due to the Warholian 15-minutes-fame moment of my Bodenständig 2000 iTunes post and its appearance on BoingBoing, the artists decided to put some more songs available for download onto their webpage. Everybody who thinks they are making neo-nazi rock can listen to it and hopefully see how wrong this assumption is.
I’m still trying to talk them into releasing some material to CC:Share Music or CC:Sampling. I’ll keep this blog updated on that matter.
Update: Youtube has a video of their 2004 concert in the Scala in London