So some of you may know that I’ve been working on a second book- this one is music-based. Anyways, I have a few friends who are new to guitar and my book is more or less aimed at them, however some of them don’t know how to read tab- hence this post. So here’s the rundown: <br></br>e|-------------------------------------------<br></br>B|--------x----------------------------------<br></br>G|--------x-------5---5-7b9r7-5--------------<br></br>D|--------x--5h7---7--------------7~~~~------<br></br>A|---5/7--x----------------------------------<br></br>E|-------------------------------------------<br></br> The above is a sample of some tablature. Each of the 6 lines represents a string on the guitar, each number represents a fret on that string.

I’m the first to admit I’ve been slacking on my scales practice, mainly sticking to pentatonic (because I’m lazy). So while reading through my Scales and Modes book and I stumbled across something obvious, yet I’d never recognized. Each scale has a mode for each note in the scale- Major scale having 7, pentatonic scale having 5, etc. That I was remotely aware of, but didn’t think much of it.

So I just realized that I’ve become uber busy as of late. My current side projects look like this: – Warhammer Army builder for ChrisP written in Ruby (on Rails) – reviving radio.morgajel.com and rebuilding my stream (RoR, again) – SecretWord module and Logging for Ziggy (Perl + Po::Co::IRC) – ImportLDIF plugin for Luma This isn’t including the miniature painting, work, or Ian. The weird part is it feels nice to be busy- but only when it’s busy on my terms 🙂

Doing another annual recap this year like I did last year. 2006 was a pretty rough year- move from DC Metro back to Grand Rapids, got a crappy job, found out jackie was pregnant, got laid off from crappy job, spent 3 months unemployed, and at the end of November was offered an awesome new job in Troy, MI (the other side of the state). Other than Ian, and the new job, the best good news is we finally have a decent couch- two of them, actually.

So I just got back from my first concert without jackie in a long long time- went with my friend phil to the orbit room to see Coheed and Cambria. The events are as followed: * went and got dinner * went to the orbit room, realized phil was the “old guy” there (actually 3 or 4 people ended up beating him for that title) We got a table in the back because, since we were 10-15 years older than 9/10ths of the crowd and needed the support.

So Today is the last day that I get to play with Jackie’s M5. I’m gonna miss it 🙁 on the bright sid,e I did find out something cool- the battery almost died on the way to work- that’s because it hasn’t been charged since monday. The long ass battery life this thing has is very nice. I thought when I connected it to a USB cable it would trickle charge, but it turns out, as I just found out a few moments ago, you have to slide the power charge on, then the “charge button” I mentioned on day one glows bright red- it’s a light, not a button!

So I’ve been using the M5 for the last few days and have been pretty impressed. I missed a few days due to a long holiday weekend, but the last few days I’ve been on it. I still haven’t read the manual- I need to check the CD tonight. It’s still broken on their site… Actually, I could just check google’s cache of the iAudio M5 mamual. I think I’ll do that now.

Since my music collection is 100% legitimate and ripped in Ogg Vorbis, finding a portable audio place that can play my music is a bit tough. There are 3 major players and a bunch of minor ones- the Neuros, the Rio Karma and the iAudio series are the leaders however. The Rio Karma is very difficult to find these days since it went out of production. I purchased a Neuros about a year ago and it was such utter crap I returned it (which broke my heart since I was looking forward to it).

Hrm… I think I’ll try something new this year. As some of you know, 12/31 is my birthday, and I’m 26 now. That makes it twice as good to look back on my life and reflect. So what’s changed? Quite a bit. I always had a goal growing up, that when I was 25, it would be the one of the best years of my life. Looking back, I think that it very well could be.

So jackie and I did our christmas stuff early (sorta- we’re still trying to pick out a monitor for her) and I got a Pod XT Live. My friend Ryan told me about his brother’s Pod way back when I started playing guitar, and it seemed pretty cool. I’ve wanted one ever since. What’s it do? it models certain amplifiers, stompboxes and setups, effectively emulating thousands of dollars of equipment I could never afford.

a couple of weeks ago the lotto hit $200 million, and I bought my annual lotto ticket. The lotto has a strange effect on people. It gives hope where there is none. Even I sat at a redlight imagining all of the wonderful things I could do with that amount of money. Of course erasing family debt, replacing vehicles, real honeymoon with jackie, etc was at the top of the list, but what would *I* do after that was said and done?