Waterpup

Archive for December, 2008

Keith Richards tells the stories behind his 10 all-time-favorite Rolling Stones riffs:

Satisfaction

When I wrote the song, I didn’t think of that particular riff as the big guitar riff. That all fell into place at RCA [recording studio in L.A.] when Gibson dumped on me one of those first Fuzz-Tone pedals. I actually thought of that guitar line as a horn riff. The way Otis Redding ended up doing it is probably closer to my original conception for the song. It’s an obvious horn riff. And when this new Fuzz Tone pedal arrived in the studio from the local dealership or something, I said, “Oh, this is good. It’s got a bit of sustain, so I can use it to sketch out the horn line.” So we left the track and went back out on the road. And two weeks later I hear it on the radio. I said, “No, that was just a demo!” They said, “No, it’s a hit.” At least Otis got it right. Our version was a demo for Otis.

Mother’s Little Helper

The main riff is a 12-string with a slide on it. It’s played slightly Orientalish. This was even before sitars were used in rock music. It just needed something to make it twang, ’cause otherwise the song was quite vaudeville in a way. And it was just one of those things where somebody walked in with it and we went, “Look, it’s an electric 12-string.” It was just some gashed-up job. God knows where it came from or where it went, but I put it together with a bottleneck and we had a riff that tied the whole song together. There’s probably some gypsy influence in there somewhere.

Paint it Black

Brian [Jones, Rolling Stones founder and Richards' original coguitarist] got into the sitar and used it on a few things, like “Paint It Black.” I found it an interesting instrument, the idea of the sympathetic strings underneath that resonate to the strings on top. But as far as actually playing it-leave that to the Indians. There’s just something about the strings; they were too thin. But Brian loved to dodge around and play dulcimers, mandolins… things like that. [Former bassist] Bill Wyman was also instrumental to the sound of “Paint It Black” by adding the organ pedals. That song is another one of those semi-gypsy melodies we used to come up with back then. I don’t know where they come from. Must be in the blood.

Keith Richards - Rock Royalty

Jumping Jack Flash

“Jumping Jack Flash” comes from this guy, Jack Dyer, who was my gardener-an old English yokel. Mick and I were in my house down in the south of England. We’d been up all night; the sky was just beginning to go gray. It was pissing down raining, if I remember rightly. Mick and I were sitting there, and suddenly Mick starts up. He hears these great footsteps, these great rubber boots-slosh, slosh, slosh-going by the window. He said. “What’s that?” And I said, “Oh, that’s Jack. That’s jumpin’ Jack.” We had my guitar in open tuning, and I started to fool around with that. [singing] “Jumpin’ Jack…” and Mick says, “Flash.” He’d just woken up. And suddenly we had this wonderful alliterative phrase. So he woke up and we knocked it together.

On the record, I played a Gibson Hummingbird [acoustic] tuned to either open E or open D with a capo. And then I added another [acoustic] guitar over the top, but tuned to Nashville tuning [tuned like a 12-string guitar without the lower octave strings]. I learned that from somebody in George Jones’ band, in San Antonio in ‘63. We happened to be playing the World Teen Fair together. This guy in a Stetson and cowboy boots showed me how to do it, with the different strings, to get that high ring. I was picking up tips.

Sympanthy for the Devil

Mick brought that to the studio as a very Bob Dylanish kind of folk guitar song, and it ended up as a damned samba. I think that’s the strength of the Stones: give them a song half raw and they’ll cook it.

Street Fighting Man

When we went in the studio, we just couldn’t reproduce the sound of the original demo I did on cassette. So we played the cassette through an extension speaker and I played along with it-we just shoved a microphone into an acoustic and overdubbed it onto the track from the cassette. Then we put it on a four-track, played it back, and at the same time the guitar was going on, I had [session keyboard great] Nicky Hopkins playing a bit of piano and Charlie [Watts, drums] just shuffling in the background. Then we put drums on it and added another guitar while he was doing that, and we just kept layering it.

At that time I was into really compressing the acoustic guitar by running it through the early Phillips and Norelco cassette recorders and really overloading them. They came with a little plastic mic and I’d slam that right down into the acoustic guitar. I did that on “Jumping Jack Flash,” too. With all of those songs, I wanted the drive and dryness of an acoustic guitar, but I still wanted to distort it.

On “Street Fighting Man,” there’s one six-string and one five-string acoustic. They’re both in open tunings, but then there’s a lot of capo work. There are lots of layers of guitars on “Street Fighting Man,” so it’s difficult to say what you’re hearing on there. ‘Cause I tried eight different guitars, and which ones were used in the final version I couldn’t say.

Gimmie Shelter

That was done on some nameless Australian full-bodied acoustic [a Maton]. It looked like a copy of the Gibson model that Chuck Berry used. The thing had all been revarnished and painted out, but it just sounded great. Some guy crashed out at my pad for a couple of days, then suddenly split in a hurry and left that guitar behind, like, “take care of this for me.” I certainly did. At the very last note of the take, the whole neck fell off. You can hear it on the original track. That guitar had just that one little quality for that specific thing. In a way, it was quite poetic that it died at the end of the track.

Can’t You Hear Me Knocking

On that song, my fingers just landed in the right place and I discovered a few things about that [five-string, open G] tuning that I’d never been aware of. I think I realized that even as I was cutting the track. And then that jam at the end-we didn’t even know they were still taping. We thought we’d finished. We were just rambling and they kept the tape rolling. It was only when we heard the playback we realized: “Oh they kept it going. Okay, fade it out there… no wait, a little bit more, a bit more…” Basically, we realized we had two bits of music: there’s the song and there’s the jam.

Miss You

That was basically Mick’s song. He said, “Let’s try this disco shit out.” I think he’d been to too many nightclubs, actually. The guitar riff basically suggested itself from the melody Mick was singing. I just shadowed that and ran it behind the voice. It’s just a piece of fun, that song. It can get really funky if you get the right tempo and slam it in. Basically, you’re sitting on Charlie on that.

Start Me Up

I was convinced that was a reggae song. Everybody else was convinced of that. “It’s reggae, man.” We did 45 takes like that. But then on a break I just played that guitar riff, not even really thinking much about it; we did a take rocking away and then went back to work and did another 15 reggae takes. Five years later, Mick discovered that one rock take in the middle of the tape and realized how good it was. The fact that I missed “Start Me Up” for five years is one of my disappointments. It just went straight over my head. But you can’t catch everything.

• Why Buy an Acoustic Guitar Over an Electric Guitar? There are a number of reasons to choose an acoustic guitar over electric. Acoustic guitars are easier to play for...
• Acoustic Musical Instruments Defined Acoustic musical instruments are musical instruments that are capable of creating sounds entirely via acoustic means as opposed to by...
• Learning the Acoustic Guitar Quickly pt 3 10 - Take the time to learn different barre chords in addition to open chords. You should not skip learning...
• Acoustic vs Electric Music Gear There are different categories of musical instrument gear, and a wide range of different musical instruments and supplies, but they...
• Music In Video Games Video game music is great, most people who play video games do not even realize how much the music makes...

Here are some of the most amazing pictures from space that I’ve ever seen. There are many more than I have posted here at the DailyNews website

It’s been quite a year for Hubble! New galaxies, colliding stars and more… Check out the magnificent views through NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, released in 2008.

Above, Hubble discovers carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of a planet orbiting another star, an important step along the trail of finding the chemical biotracers of extraterrestrial life as we know it. The Jupiter-sized planet, called HD 189733b, is too hot for life. But the Hubble observations are a proof-of-concept demonstration that the basic chemistry for life can be measured on planets orbiting other stars. Organic compounds can also be a by-product of life processes, and their detection on an Earth-like planet may someday provide the first evidence of life beyond Earth.

Credits: NASA

This is a composite image of Jupiter storms. The background image is from Hubble Space Telescope and shows the turbulent pattern generated by the two plumes on May 11, 2007 (upper left part of Jupiter). The two bright plumes detach in the superimposed small infrared image obtained at the NASA-IRTF facility a month before, on April 5, 2007. Detailed analysis of two continent-sized storms that erupted in Jupiter’s atmosphere in March 2007 shows that Jupiter’s internal heat plays a significant role in generating atmospheric disturbances. Understanding this outbreak could be the key to unlock the mysteries buried in the deep Jovian atmosphere, astronomers say.

Credits: NASA

Astronomers took the first visible-light snapshot of a planet orbiting another star. The images, released Nov. 13, show the planet, named Fomalhaut b, as a tiny point source of light orbiting the nearby, bright southern star Fomalhaut, located 25 light-years away in the constellation Piscis Australis. An immense debris disk about 21.5 billion miles across surrounds the star. Fomalhaut b is orbiting 1.8 billion miles inside the disk’s sharp inner edge.

Credits: NASA

A powerful collision of galaxy clusters was captured by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and Chandra X-ray Observatory. The observations of the cluster known as MACS J0025.4-1222 indicate that a titanic collision has separated the dark from ordinary matter and provide an independent confirmation of a similar effect detected previously in a target dubbed the Bullet Cluster. These new results show that the Bullet Cluster is not an anomalous case.

Credits: NASA

A delicate ribbon of gas is a very thin section of a supernova remnant caused by a stellar explosion that occurred more than 1,000 years ago.

Credits: NASA

Hubble made the first detection ever of an organic molecule in the atmosphere of a Jupiter-sized planet orbiting another star. This breakthrough was an important step in eventually identifying signs of life on a planet outside our solar system. This illustration depicts the extrasolar planet HD 189733b with its parent star peeking above its top edge.

Credits: NASA

This image of two interacting galaxies, Arp 147, demonstrated that Hubble was working exactly as it was after going offline in October. The two galaxies. which lie in the constellation Cetus more than 400 million light-years away from Earth, happen to be oriented so that they appear to mark the number 10. The galaxy pair was photographed on October 27-28, 2008.

Credits: NASA

• carnivals roundup I had articles included at three different carnivals over the last week, and as always I really appreciate the opportunity!...
• Credit Repair Fast Secrets Hand Tasheba M. Of Orlando, FL, The Good Credit Life...Once And For All! "Repair credit fast promises cost me lost time and money," says Tasheba M. of Orlando, FL. "Within 41 days, I...
• Sunday Money Madness - Happy New Year! Happy New Year Everybody! Let's kick off the first of this year's roundup with a bang! Credit and Debt No...
• Eliminating Credit Card Debt For Dummies There are many different types of debt, some good, most bad.  Credit card debt is decidedly in the "bad debt"...
• Reader Story: How I Ruined My Credit Score, and How It Didn’t Ruin My Life This guest post from the redoubtable Tyler K is part of the new “reader stories” feature here at Get Rich...

I would laugh and call FullTilt Poker a joke but they really have had some of their pros put out some good and really helpful articles on playing poker.

However they have now thoroughly confused me with this “tip” by Phil Gordon. I suppose maybe they needed him to actually do some work for what they pay him. Too bad Phil Gordon failed.

Phil I’d like to give you a good kick in the nuts if you were serious when submitting this to FullTilt. Do you really not think poker players run this through their head? It’s soooo basic that even a beginner will do this. Phil Gordon you are a joke.

The Script

Phil Gordon

April 4, 2005

In an effort to simplify my decisions, every single time it’s my turn to act, I try to run through the same script in my head:

Are my opponents playing conservatively? Aggressively? Tentatively?

What are some of the hands my opponents are likely to hold?

What do my opponents think I have?

Once I have the answer to the first question, and feel confident about my range of answers for the second and third questions, I move on to the most important question:

Should I bet or raise?

If I think I have the best hand, I nearly always answer “Yes” and I bet or raise.

If I think I can force weak opponents out of the pot with this bet or with future bets, I nearly always answer “Yes” and I bet or raise.

If I don’t think betting or raising is the right decision, I move on to the last question:

Should I check (or fold)?

If I think I have the worst hand, I nearly always answer “Yes” and I check or fold. If I think my opponents are strong, I nearly always answer “Yes” and check or fold. After a careful analysis, if I’m not sure if I should raise and I’m not sure I should fold, I feel confident that calling a bet (or checking) is correct.

I find that even in straight-forward and obvious situations, by running through the script I often find opportunities that other players might miss. And by asking the “raise” question before the “fold” and “call” question, I ensure that I am playing aggressive, winning poker.

Try using this script next time you sit down at the table, and see if simplifying your inner dialog forces your opponents into making more complicated decisions.

• Play for Haiti The world, we’ve watched the headlines and rumor develop with the remnants of popular online poker rooms will swarm Play...
• The Real Sarah Palin Live on Saturday Night Live - Seriously. UPDATE - HERE's THE VIDEO FROM NBC! (Video coming as soon as I can find one - youtube keeps pulling...
• What is Your Niche? When you are working to find your blog's niche, it would be a bad idea to choose one that you...
• Sunday Money Roundup - Soccer Season Begins Edition. This year, I am playing adult co-ed soccer, and I fully expect to end up in the hospital. It has...
• Why Index Funds are Bad Investments The entire personal finance blogosphere is in love with index funds, and I'm here to tell you why they're bad...