Month: May 2017

Dave Bradley latest song – When the mood takes you

I came up with a funky little riff in my head Monday, thought: I’ll never be able to work that out on guitar. But, had a go anyway…it was just a single not pull-off, hammer-on thing…so I figured out simple chords that seemed to fit: F, Em, Am, G…and a turnaround F Em, D, Am, G, with a few embellishments, minor 7ths, the odd dominant 7th, a sixth here and there, maybe even a 9th, at least in the harmonies.

I also had this lyrical phrase in my head: How can you be lost in the light? It’s easy to get lost in the dark…but not so much in the light?

Well, Tuesday night, quiet house, means quiet studio, so I put together some funky drum loops and had a go at blasting out that riff on my Telecaster and then attempting to fit some lyrics…they seemed to work, so a bass track on top of that and the obligatory guitar solo…

Mixed it down Wednesday morning, but re-recorded the vocal completely and did a new simpler, but raunchier guitar solo, added a couple of harmonies, generally cleaned it all up, mastered it and labelled it version 2.

Well, you know what I’m like by now, ever the perfectionist, I can hear a few things I need to tweak in this mix. I might even use Melodyne to make those harmonies, well, more harmonious. Watch this space, inevitably version 3, 4, 5…will be along soon-ish…

You can stream the track on Soundcloud and Bandcamp right now. I’ve already tweaked the second version so we’re now at version 3, please let me know if you already downloaded it from Bandcamp and I’ll send you the upgrade FLAC or MP3 (please state preference).

I’ve now done a version 4e, just little tweaks since the original second upload…that’s the version in the lyric video, now on Youtube too.

Eurasian bullfinch – Pyrrhula pyrrhula

UPDATE: Seen several bullfinches in and around Rampton since spotting this one in May. Saw a pair flitting in and out of the trees along the Lode and on my return home saw one feeding on fluffy ragwort seeds; light was low, but I got a half-decent shot at him:

The male bullfinch (Pyrrhula pyrrhula) has an almost salmon-pink breast and cheeks, grey back, black cap and tail, and a bright white rump, a plaintive call and a shy demeanour. I’ve probably only ever seen this bird half a dozen times. I spotted this one about a week ago and got a very poor shot, I heard him before I got to his territory this time and crept up to where I imagined he’d be, he still darted away hiding among the rapidly obscuring leaves of the trees. Still got some. A security shot. Proof he was there.

RSPB suggests that you’re most likely to see bullfinches in Woodlands, orchard and hedgerows. Best looked for at woodland edges, as per this shot, although we did see one in our back garden many years ago.

It was 60 million years ago today…

Well, circa 50 to 60 million years ago during the Paleocene, present-day County Antrim near Bushmills in Northern Ireland was intensely volcanic. Highly fluid molten basalt oozed through ancient chalk beds to form an extensive lava plateau. As it cooled, the material contracted causing fractures just as does drying mud with cracks propagating down as the mass cooled, leaving the pillar-like structures of the Giant’s Causeway (Clochán an Aifir or Clochán na bhFomhórach ). These pillars are also fractured into “biscuits”. The extensive fracture network produced the distinctive columns seen today. Here’s a shot I took on my second trip to this natural wonder in 2006.

Giant's Causeway, Northern Ireland

Venture was part of a scientific fact-finding trip to Queen’s University Belfast back in October 2006 to meet bongo-playing chemist AP de Silva and his colleagues.

Fans of the rock group Led Zeppelin will know the place from the infamous cover their album Houses of the Holy.

Goldfinch – Carduelis carduelis

We’ve often put food out for the garden birds. Usually it’s starlings, house sparrows, and wood pigeons that attack the feeders, years ago we may have had one of the local black squirrels having a go. The dunnocks and our labrador hoover up the seeds that fall to the ground. I’d seen goldfinches (Carduelis carduelis, yet another tautonym meaning that this is the “type” of the family) flitting around the houses and occasionally landing on our TV aerial, but never landing on the feeders.

It seems the goldfinches are not so keen on sunflower seeds and other delicacies found in the generic 20 kg bags of wild-bird food one might pick up at a garden centre for a tenner, much preferring the floral embryos of the Ethiopian plant Guizotia abyssinica, commonly known as niger seeds and sometimes nyjer, ramtil, ramtilla, inga seed, and blackseed. There were a pair of goldfinches feeding either side of the niger seed feeder and I snapped them through glass. The seeds are botanically a form of fruit known as an achene. Another member of the Carduelinae, the greenfinch (Chloris chloris) also favours these seeds over the mixed bird food.