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I cut a little 2 minute video from a handful of phone recordings from our gig last saturday.

On saturday, our band Forkalyst played its first live gig. It was a sold out show at a popular brewery pub here in Düsseldorf. Lots of our friends came around. It was great fun. And I placed my GoPro on the stage railing next to me to record some of it.

The return ride of the Big Muff pickup on a different route.

I bought a used Bass Big Muff pedal, and this is the bike ride to the person I purchased it from.

It’s a sunny weekday morning ride from last October with not much traffic or people around. It’s fairly long, but somehow, I like to document my bike rides every once in a while. The route until minute 13:40 gets cycled frequently - the remaining bit, not so often.

Not only did Zoe learn how to ski, she also learned how to film videos while doing so.

We went on a one-week ski holiday, and Zoe was so confident by the end of it, that I had difficulties following her. ;-)

I bought clicky switches for my Planck (Kailh Box Blue‘s). And new keycaps, too.

I’m pretty obsessed with this song. And something with delay is usually very fun to play!

Here are a few shaky POV rallies of tennis I played with Jenni a few weeks back.

And next time, I’ll make sure I’ll wipe my lens in between.

Played this song recently with friends for another friend’s birthday jam. And I wanted to record this real quick. This song is really fun to play. But not easy, mainly due to all the string-skipping, muting and timing. And you can unfortunatly see this in this take.

Recently the magical Moises app was recommended to me, and that’s what I used to play the backing track. The app removed the guitar tracks for me, so that I can play over the rest of the band. Crazily good!

My cover of this Entombed song that never gets old.

Sound is not that great to be honest, but actually not much worse than what came out of the speaker. The signal went through the Eyemaster pedal into my overdriven Katana Mini. And I feel like that little amp/speaker can’t quite handle the amount of distortion. And also sending the backing track through there, too, certainly doesn’t help. I also haven’t figured out what the best postitioning of the little microphone is in front of the amp.

Anyhow. Great song. Easy and fun to play. Tuning is Drop-A#.

Backing track is from HumanPrey2 on YouTube. Thanks!

Here’s a little Monolord bass riff for you. Could never get this out of my head after I first discovered it. It’s good practice for my finger playing, which I’m still not fully used to (but which is a lot more fun than playing with a pick – for some bass parts at least).

And this entry is also a little test for my new video setup, which should look (and sound?) better than previous tries. And this new arrangement is also a little easier to set up, so I’ll hopefully record a little more in the future.

Oh, and I bought another bass. A 5-string this time. Because I ended up leaving my first bass in the rehearsal room permanently, I missed one at home.

Riding through Düsseldorf Bilk to and from the doctor where I got my Covid booster. Since it was during daylight hours, I thought I’d record another one of these POV cycling videos. And this time I did my little commentary in English. And it’s only half as long with 16 minutes.

For this recording “Sharpening” was set to “Low” on the GoPro. And I think that is too low. I think I’ll prefer a little “too sharp” over “not sharp enough and then needing to do that in post”. I also only uploaded a HD 1080p version this time. And I might just record in that resolution in camera. 4K results in such big files. And I’m again figuring out encoding settings and formats. And that seems like a science to me; maybe I should just use YouTube.

Join me in cycling half an hour around the Rhine. I start pretty much at home in Flehe, go through Volmerswerth, over the “Südbrücke” towards Neuss, then south, and over the “Fleher Brücke” back to Düsseldorf. And I even do talk a little. Santa brought me a GoPro Hero 10 for...

Started learning Dissection’s “A Land Forlorn” from “The Somberlain”. But it has too many riffs to learn quickly. But this ending riff and melody is fun to play using a looper. And I thought I’d just record that for now.

Recorded directly into the iPhone with the headphone mic in front of the Katana Mini.

Covering Bloodbath’s “Buried by the Dead” on guitar, having a bit of fun with my “Eyemaster” pedal. This album has definitely one of the most gnarly Swedish guitar tones out there.

Signal chain is:

• guitar
• Eyemaster pedal
• Apogee Jam Audio interface
• GarageBand
• Fender amp simulation with a bit of overdrive
• output to my Marshall Stanmore speaker – together with the original track from Spotify
• recorded into my Apple earphones’ microphone hanging directly in front of the speaker, recorded straight to the video filmed with the iPhone.

In case this video is not fair use, and you’re the/a copyright holder and object to this video, please let me know, and I’ll just take it down.

I recently learned the intro solo to Metallica’s “One”, so I thought I record that as well.

This bit lent itself well to looper usage – which I use in this video to record the rhythm guitar.

It’s just played freely, so it turned out a little slower than the original. Also, playing without metronome or drums shows here, as a few sections are rushed.

This time, it’s simply recorded together with the iPhone video using the headphone microphone – on my leg, and directly in front of the Katana Mini amp.

Here’s my take on the melody and solo part of Spiritual Beggars’ Look Back. I love that melody.

But I’m actually not a very good lead player, so the solo part is a bit so-so. And it’s only loosely based on the original anyway. But hey, I’m doing these mostly for fun, and to be able to look it up later again. So that’s my excuse for being lazy.

I used the Pitch Fork pedal to shift down my guitar by one octave to simulate the bass track underneath. And I used my looper pedal to record this and play it back as the backing track.

The lead uses the EHX Cock Fight plus expression pedal for the Wah, distortion, a bit of delay and reverb.

Oh, and this is played in standard tuning while playing all the notes like on the recording. It’s very likely they had their instruments tuned to C standard.

Pedalboard-shot:

I got a ukulele for my birthday. And here’s a little phrase I came up with recently.

Playing Robin Trower’s “Bridge of Sighs” on guitar. It’s a bit improvised, though. Of course, I first got to know this song via the great cover version from Opeth.

And still figuring this video stuff out. This time, it’s filmed with my iPhone’s back camera and shared in 1080p with 60fps.

Update: Settings.