My musical interests

For more years than I care to remember I have been interested in music – both in listening and playing instruments.

Musical tastes.

As a teenager in the 50′s and 60′s my chosen music was Rock & Roll, Rhythm & Blues, Blues and guitar instrumentals.  I enjoyed (and still enjoy) bands such as The Rolling Stones, The Yardbirds, The Searchers, John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers, The Shadows, The Ventures etc.  although I never really liked the Beatles!  On reflection I think it was the music not the words which I listened to.  I can recall the riffs but the words passed me by.  Probably why I am not a fan of country music where the words are all and the music is incidental.

My current tastes have developed to include Jazz, Classical, Spanish (some!), Latin American and many others.  I’ll try most types of music but find I can only take some of it in small bursts.  Heavy rock and high speed guitar solos fall into this category.

My son has introduced me to some music which I probably would never have heard so I’m grateful for that.  An example would be the music of Ry Cooder.  My iPod now has almost all my music collection on board and I’ve found that by setting it to random play I get to hear many tunes which I never knew I had.  I feel that this alone has helped enormously in widening my musical interests.

The latest musical genre to appeal to me is slide guitar as exemplified by Michael Messer, Toby Walker and others.

Playing music.

I have played musical instruments of one kind or another since I was about ten or eleven.  I played (joke) a violin, a mandolin and an accordian.  I still have the violin and mandolin although the latter is in need of repair. The accordian disappeared many years ago.  We also had a trumpet but I could never get the hang of that.

When I reached teenage years I was given a spanish guitar.  Cheap, nasty, hard to play and lousy intonation.  Despite that the guitar bug bit and after buying a couple more useless castoff’s I eventually bought a decent guitar – a red Watkins Rapier 33.  Being some sort of electronic engineer I built my first guitar amplifier – a 15W valve amplifier.  I bought a secondhand Watkins Copicat echo chamber and was made – I could at last emulate my heroes – The Shadows.  I played with some friends which was OK until they bought 30W amplifiers.  They drowned my sound.  Yes – I still have the Watkins Rapier, the Copicat and the homemade amplifier.

I played with a friend who later became my best man.  It was our guitar playing which introduced me to my wife.  After I got married a didn’t play much until the late 1980′s when a friend at work put up a notice asking if anyone would like to come along and play some music.  I jumped at the chance.  Our music was awful.  I still have tapes of our early sessions.   One of the members who’d played real music in a band showed us how to do it properly.  After that we improved dramatically culminating in us playing at our daughters wedding.  By this time I was the proud owner of a Fender Stratocaster guitar.  I still play on a regular basis with two of those founding members.

My musical instruments and equipment.

The trouble with guitars is that as soon as you’ve obtained your dream guitar you find out that the sound you want comes as much from the playing technique as it does from the guitar.  Despite that the temptation is great to try different guitars in pursuit of that elusive sound.  The following list is the result of my quest for that sound:

Fender Stratocaster guitar.  This gives the authentic Shadows sound

Gibson Les Paul Custom guitar.  I expected this to be my perfect guitar – it isn’t

Epiphone ES-335 DOT guitar.  This is a good all round guitar for instrumentals, jazz, rhythm.

Epiphone Joe Pass Emporer guitar.  I wanted to play jazz.  Jazz didn’t want me to play it!

Epiphone Slide guitar.  Not as easy as I expected but good fun.

Takamine nylon strung electro-acoustic.  Sounds brilliant.  Solo playing only.

Martin D-28. Fantastic sound. They say the sound improves with age. My age or the guitars?

Watkins Rapier 33 guitar.  Also good for Shadows.  Slight intonation problem.

Olympic acoustic guitar. ‘F’ holes + a round hole added by previous owner. Bought for £5 in the sixties.

Peavey Classic 50 amplifier.  Too loud.  Too heavy.  It will be going soon.

Vox AD30VT amplifier.  My main amplifier.  Modelling amplifier with built in effects.

Marshall AS50 amplifier.  Used with the Ovation guitar and drum machine.

Alesis Quadraverb GT effects unit.  Echo effects.

Line 6 JM4 looper.  Just bought this.  Allows you to play along with built-in backing tracks/drums and/or layer your own guitar creations.  Good for seeing how good/bad your playing really is.

Boss drum machine.  This has a volume control unlike live drummers.

Improving my Sound

The guitar which seems to best suit my playing style, i.e. instrumentals, is my Stratocaster.  It’s easy to play, not shoulder achingly heavy like my Les Paul, and I really like the twangy sound.  However, in my quest for ‘that sound’ I found I was struggling with my Strats shortcomings.  The most annoying was he top E string.  This was noticeably lower in volume and was lacking in tone compared with the other strings.  To combat this I was tending to avoid the top string whenever I could.  Quite limiting!  I more or less cured this problem by fitting replacement pick-ups.  I chose Tonerider Pure Vintage pick-ups.  These improved the top string output and also the overall tone of the guitar.  Not perfect but much more useable.

Spurred on by this success I fitted Tonerider pick-ups to my ES-335 DOT.  This guitar suffered from muddy sounding lower strings.  The Toneriders gave greater clarity to the sound making the 335 more playable.

The latest addition to my arsenal of sound improving devices is the purchase of software patches for my Alesis Quadraverb GT.  The patches are called EFTP (Echoes From The Past) and give me access to all the early echo machines used by the Shadows.  They really are excellent and transform the playing experience.  It is surprising just how much using the right echo sound affects the way you play the music.  Still got to learn the finer detail of some of Hank Marvins playing style though!

The final gadget is a high pass filter with sharp cut-off of the low frequencies.  This gives clearer notes without losing the body of the sound.  It also gets rid of that annoying hum pick-up which plagues Strat players.

So I’m getting quite close to that sound.  But there is a little way to go.  Maybe another guitar or amp………!

Astronomy – what astronomy?

It is many months since I last used the telescope.  We had week after week of cloud last year followed by several weeks of below freezing night temperatures.  It is difficult to get motivated when, by the time all the equipment is set up, you are frozen to the marrow and your fingers won’t work.  Also, during this time Mars completely disappeared and Jupiter is now so faint that I can’t expect to get any half decent pictures.  Of the planets only Venus is currently photographable with my modified webcam.  Venus is a featureless, crescent moon shaped, white blob so not that interesting.  But – Saturn will be visible in the Eastern skies towards the end of February so will make an effort to see that.  As 2009 is the International Astronomical Year I would like to do something related to that.

Telescope modifications

Somewhat disappointed with the quality of the astronomical images I’ve captured so far I searched for information on why this might be. I found a web site about our particular telescope, a Meade LX90, which went into some detail about improvements which can be made.

Apparently the main problem in achieving good images is getting the focus spot on. It seems that the focussing system used on our telescope is subject to backlash. This makes it difficult to be certain that you have homed in on the optimum focus point. Two ideas to help came out of my investigation.

The first cost money. This is a kit with precision ball bearings which, when fitted to the focussing control, takes out most of the slack which causes backlash. The kit came from America and cost me $32, around £17. Interestingly I found the same kit sold by an online UK astronomy shop for £29! The kit was ‘reasonably’ easy to fit and resulted in a much smoother focussing.

The second was free. It consists simply of a mask which fits on the front of the telescope. The mask has two holes in it. The idea is that when the image is not in focus it splits into two images. To ensure accurate focussing it is simply necessary to merge the two images. Here is a picture of the mask I made:

Armed with the mask and improved focussing control I set up the telescope last night to see what I could achieve. Unfortunately Mars and Saturn have moved away so I couldn’t photograph them. My modified webcam is not sensitive enough to photograph star clusters, galaxies or nebula so I spent some time trying out the mask and improved focussing using an eyepiece. At 11.30pm I was delighted to see Jupiter appear. It was very low so I didn’t expect great results but I just look at my first attempt. I’m delighted.

Can’t wait for Jupiter to get higher in the sky and out of the heat haze. I think by the end of July I should be getting even better pictures.

The Moon

I thought I would have a go at photographing the moon using the telescope and modified webcam. Quite an easy subject – large, bright – but the size actually causes a problem.

The webcam can only see about 5% of the moon’s surface so the technique is to take many pictures trying to make sure that all the visible surface has been captured. This proved harder than it sounds so I finished up with some shots which overlapped by 50/60% and some which only just made it.

The images were then pasted as transparent images into PaintShopPro. A bit tedious but surprisingly successful. Some touching up was necessary particularly extending the black background. And this is the result:

I’m really pleased – much more satisfying than my pictures of Saturn!

Yes, I know!!

Yes, I know, there is no real difference between  the original and ‘improved’ image of Saturn.  Every one’s told me and I can only agree.

I have been searching for clues as to why my images are worse than those obtained by others using much the same equipment.  The most likely culprit is poor collimation of the telescope optics.  Put simply it ensures that the two mirrors are accurately aligned.  Apparently this is a simple adjustment which should be checked every time the telescope is used.  Next time the weather is kind I will see what can be done.  If better images result I will, of course, put them on the blog and boast a little.

Improved photo of Saturn

I’ve been trying to improve the image of Saturn.  I use a program called Registax with which it is possible to selectively sharpen the image and adjust contrast and brightness.  The image below is the result of applying Registax’s image improvement features.

Registax was specially written for astronomical imaging.  It accepts individual .jpg images or .avi video consisting of hundreds of frames.  The first run through of the program sifts out the best images and ignores the unusable images.  An area of the image is then defined and a second run through ensures that all the images are aligned.  This is necessary because astronomical imaging is subject to atmospheric effects – the twinkling star effect – which blurs the image.

The sorted and aligned images are then stacked.  This is a statistical averaging procedure which doesn’t increase the brightness but is utilised to eliminate random noise.  The final operation is to sharpen the image to bring out the fine detail.  Sharpening is achieved by adjusting wavelets – no, I don’t understand what they are either – but it is surprising what can be achieved.  Finally the brightness and contrast are adjusted.

The image above probably represents the best I can achieve with my modified webcam.  My next target will be the moon.  This will have different problems because the camera cannot get the whole of the moon in one shot.  Apparently the technique is to take several images covering the whole of the moon and then using a program which ‘stitches’ them together.  Watch this space!

First attempt at photographing Saturn

I have just spent the evening trying to get a decent picture of Saturn.  The picture below is the best yet – but I’m not really satisfied with it.  Seeing conditions were not ideal – plenty of haze and turbulance.

It was taken using a modified Philips Toucam webcam attached to our Meade 8″ LX-90 telescope.  The hardest part about capturing the picture is getting the telescope pointing in the right direction.

The telescope is initially set by using the sighting telescope followed by fine adjustment using the eyepiece.  The eyepiece is then replaced by the camera.  The field of view of the camera is somewhat less than the eyepiece so the chances of the image appearing in the right place is a bit hit and miss.

I also tried to get an image of Mars but it is now travelling away from us and has become a bit too small.  Maybe if we get better seeing conditions soon I’ll have another go.