Es Don Ross, le conocí gracias a un amigo, y lo primero que escuché de él ha sido lo que más me ha gustado. Una vez profundizas se vuelve muy complejo y “para expertos”, en sus directos por ejemplo suele haber 15 o 20 personas sentadas escuchando.

Un poco en la línea del anterior autor, estudioso de la guitarra, blues, jazz y folk por un tubo. Afinaciones diferentes para cada tema, armónicos imposibles, sucesiones de acordes, ritmo, intensidad y calma, una guitarra que llena todo.

13 discos ya lleva este canadiense que estudió composición musical en la universidad de Toronto, una carrera nada desdeñable, vive por y para la música ,¡si!. Ganador de varios premios finguerstyle guitar, el único en ganar dos veces el de E.E.U.U.

Una curiosidad de este tío es que en su web (http://www.gobyfish.com/Home.html) pone los acordes de sus temas, pero luego vende la tablatura completa para el que quiera hacerse con ella.

Usa variedad de tipos de guitarra y actualmente a la carta, hechas por un luthier canadiense, a veces guitas de 7 cuerdas.

Os dejo con él.

I recently experienced the bliss of attending a finger style guitar gig in Toronto. I am not too big a follower of the genre but I do own all of Andy McKee albums and I have listened to a fair bit of Don Ross music as well. To my surprise the place was packed with talented musicians. Most of them played original instrumentals while a few played instrumental versions of well known songs from the rock music genre. Most of the musicians there used pedals to loop their music but a fair bit didn’t use any such pedals and they definitely outshined the others.

It does take a fair bit of skill to play lead, rhythm, bass as well the vocal sections of a song simultaneously. It’s something I myself have been working on since the last few months. You hardly hear such intricate guitar music on the radio today but that’s a whole other debate. Michael Hedges was one of the few well known musicians who employed such guitar playing techniques coupled with numerous alternate guitar tunings. Unfortunately he is dead now but he did leave an extensive collection of tasteful music. Check him out if you’re into acoustic guitar music.

Uzun, yorucu ve bunaltıcı bir dönemin hemen ardından; daha uzun, daha yorucu ve daha bunaltıcı olacağı her halinden belli bir dönemin hemen öncesinde tekrar merhabalar. Battlestar Galactica ile ilgili yazacağım yazıları biraz daha ertelemem gerekecek gibi görünüyor.

Daha uzun, daha yorucu ve daha bunaltıcı olacak dönemde bir parça yükümü omuzlaması, dert ortağım olması için, önümüzdeki ay içerisinde okumaya fırsat bulamayacak olsam da üç adet cillop gibi kitabı kütüphaneden ödünç aldım.

İlk kitap Marvin Minsky‘nin The Emotion Machine adlı eseri. Yapay zeka alanındaki çalışmalarından haberdar olsam da, Minsky ve fikirleri hakkında açıkçası çok da bilgi sahibi değilim. Bu kitabı okumadan önce belki de Minsky’nin içerisinde yapay zeka, akıl, beyin vb. konulardaki görüşlerini derli toplu bir şekilde sunduğu The Society of Mind adlı kitabını okumalıydım. The Emotion Machine ile sırayı bir nebze olsa da bozmuş olacağım sanırım, canımız sağolsun artık.

Genel bir fikir vermesi açısından, kitabın konusunu kısaca özetlemeye çalışayım. Minsky’nin bu kitapta ve diğer eserlerinde temel olarak yapmaya çalıştığı şeyi,  popüler bir anime serisi olan Hagane no Renkinjutsushi‘ye (Fullmetal Alchemist – a.k.a. FMA) selam durarak anlatmaya çalışalım. Simya (alchemy) disiplininin konu edildiği FMA serisinde, bir nesnenin simya ile dönüştürülmesi sürecini üç adımda özetliyorlar: İdrak etme (understanding), parçalara ayırma (decomposition), ve yeniden inşa (reconstruction). Benzer süreçleri Minsky, insan aklı ve beyni ile, özellikle düşünme eylemi ile, izlemeye çalışıyor. Minsky kitabın ilk bölümlerinde beynin ve aklın nasıl çalıştığını anlamaya yönelik oluşturduğu teorileri sunuyor. Kabaca, düşünme eylemenin belirli aksiyonlardan oluşan bir dizi çok daha küçük parçalara indirgenebileceğini iddia ediyor. Böylece, karmaşık düşünme sürecini meydana getiren göreli çok daha az karmaşık lego parçalarını tespit edebileceğimizi düşünüyor.

Kitabın ikinci bölümünde ise, düşünme eyleminin ve sürecinin nasıl işlediğini idrak ettiğimizde, Minsky bu bilginin (lego parçalarının) yapay zeka kullanılarak insanlarla benzer düşünme süreçlerini takip eden ve dolayısıyla duygulara / hislere sahip makineler (emotion machines) üretme konusunda bizlere nasıl yardımcı olabileceğini tartışıyor.

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İkinci kitabımız, büyük üstad, yüce insan, sevilesi, sayılası tonton dedemiz Daniel Dennett ile ilgili hazırlanmış bir kitap. Cambridge University Press’in Contemporary Philosophy in Focus (CPiF) serisi dahilinde yayınlanan bu kitabın editörlüğünü Andrew Brook ve Don Ross yapmış. CPiF serisi felsefe alanında çığır-açıcı eserlere imza atmış, çalıştığı alana önemli katkılarda bulunmuş, kendi döneminin ve sonrasının akademisyenlerinin fikirlerinin oluşmasında önemli rolü olan, fikirleri sadece kendi çalışma alanı ile sınırlı kalmayıp diğer birçok alandaki düşünürleri ve onların çalışmalarını etkilemeyi başarmış saygıdeğer felsefe düşünürleriyle ilgili olarak hazırlanmış kitaplardan oluşuyor.

Tüm bu güzel sözleri hak eden Daniel Dennett’in birçok farklı alanda çalışmaları mevcut. Bu alanlardan en önemlileri: Bilinç, gelişimsel psikoloji (developmental psychology), bilişsel etoloji (cognitive ethology), yapay zeka (artificial intelligence) ve evrim teorisi (evolutionary theory). Dennett’in özellikle bilinç konusundaki çalışmaları ile ilgili önemli bir detay, kendisinin bilinç konusunu hem felsefe alanı içerisinde hem de nörobilim alanı içerisinde inceliyor olması.

Not. Geçtiğimiz ay Sabancı Üniversitesi’nde Darvin Yılı Kutlamaları vesilesiyle konuşma yapmak için gelen Dennett üstadımız hakkında Evim Çalışkanları güzel bir yazı hazırlamıştı. Dennett’in eserlerini okumadan önce onu kısaca tanımak isteyenler için güzel bir başlangıç.

Bağlantı: Evrim Çalışkanları sitesindeki Dennett yazısı

Bu kitap (ve genel olarak CPiF serisi) ile ilgili olarak hoş bir detay kitabın klasik bir biyografiden ziyade düşünsel bir biyografi olması. Kitapta yer alan çeşitli makalelerde, alanlarının (bilişsel bilim, bilgisayar bilimi, evrim teorisi vb.) önde gelen araştırmacaları Daniel Dennett’in eserlerinin ve fikirlerinin kendilerini ve alanlarındaki çalışmaları nasıl etkilediğini anlatıyor. Bu şekilde, hem Dennett’in fikirleri hakkında bilgi sahibi olurken, hem de Dennett’in çalışmalarının disiplinlerarası etkileşimdeki etkilerini birinci ağızdan okuma fırsatımız oluyor.

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Çok keyifli bir eser olacağına inandığım üçüncü kitabımız ise, George Mandler‘in MIT yayınlarından çıkmış olan A History of Modern Experimental Psychology (Modern Deneysel Psikoloji Tarihi) kitabı. Mandler, 1879 yılında Wilhelm Wundt’un deneysel yöntemlerin kullanılmasına olanak sağlayan ilk muntazam laboratuvarı kurması ile başlayan modern psikoloji tarihininin izini 20. yüzyılın sonlarına dek sürüyor. Bu tarihsel yolculukta iki konu özellikle ilgimi çekeceğe benziyor. İlki, 1930′lar Almanya’sında psikoloji alanının geçirmiş olduğu dönem (henüz kitabın içeriğini detaylı olarak gözden geçirme fırsatım olmadı ancak, Albert Hoffman’dan umarım bahsediyordur); ikinci konu ise, özellikle 20. yüzyılın sonunda kendi kimliğini kazanmaya başlamış bilişsel psikoloji alanının doğuşu ve bilişsel bilim ile etkileşimi.

Simplesmente fantástico!

Este domingo me ha cogido guitarrero y virtuoso gracias a David Zaragoza, socio de Avanzis, una de las manos que mueve los hilos de todoexpertos.com, paellero ruso y buen amigo.

Siguiendo la tendencia que últimamente empieza a imponerse en esta sección de mi blog, aquí tenemos este temazo de Don Ross, interpretado por él mismo y por el inefable Andy McKee (lo de inefable es casi cierto).

Si no te gusta la guitarra instrumental, ni has seguido a los grandes guitar heroes como Steve Vai (quién por cierto tiene un dominio cojonudo) o Joe Satriani (a quién tuve oportunidad de ver en directo y conocer personalmente en el Palau de la Musica de Barcelona unos meses atrás) quizá no te interese este tight trite night (comieron trigo en un triste trigal), aunque si sabes apreciar mínimamente el talento, verás un auténtico despliegue de virtuosismo en las cuatro manos de Don y Andy, que en ocasiones parecen ocho.

Un buen vídeo para disfrutar un domingo menos ventoso de lo esperado…

I will be working hard on writing some album reviews. I don’t know where to start… except for loading up my bong with these dank ass green sticky buds, and popping in some cd’s. For now, you can check out the following list of some bands I like.

NOTE: If your favorite band is not on there, it doesn’t mean that I don’t like them. It just means that I didn’t think of them.

The List (In No Specific Order):

• 311
• Incubus
• Umphrey’s McGee
• Red Hot Chili Peppers
• Moe.
• Dispatch
• State Radio
• Bob Marley & The Wailers
• The Police
• The Eagles
• Allman Brothers
• Cream
• Blind Faith
• Eric Clapton’s Other Stuff
• Traffic
• 10 Years After
• Bob Dylan
• Peter Tosh
• Tool
• A Perfect Circle
• Puscifer
• Fishbone
• Reel Big Fish
• Mighty Mighty Bosstones
• UB40
• Bootsy Collins
• George Clinton
• Larry Graham & Graham Central Station
• Andy McKee
• Antoine Dufour
• Don Ross
• Mason Williams
• Edgar Cruz
• Time Lapse Consortium
• Soulive
• Phish
• Grateful Dead
• Janis Joplin
• Jimi Hendrix
• The Beatles
• The Rolling Stones
• The Flaming Lips
• Slightly Stoopid
• Robert Randolph & The Family Band
• Pepper
• Victor Wooten
• Sublime
• Long Beach Dub All Stars
• Pink Floyd
• Led Zeppelin
• Lynyrd Skynyrd
• Lou Reed

Alright. That’s the short list. That’s all I want to think of right now. Do me a favor and load a fat bowl and chief it up like a mad scientist.

Hacía tiempo que no sabíamos algo de la faceta interpretativa de Natalie Portman. Hace unas semanas se paseó por Venecia, cuativadora y aclamada como siempre, mostrando su primer trabajo como directora, pero su agenda como actriz parecía un tanto descuidada. Hoy sabemos que la israelí protagonizará Love and Other Impossible Pursuits, adaptación de la novela de Ayelet Waldman que prepara Don Ross. En el filme veremos los avatares por los que atraviesa una joven para recuperar su matrimonio. Comedia romántica para la Portman en la que también interviene como productora ejecutiva a través de su compañía handsomecharlie. Dato adicional: en un principio la protagonista iba a ser Jennifer López, pero abandonó el proyecto.

Nu zic eu ci niste oameni care stiu ce vorbesc

Cred ca daca Mona Lisa l-ar fi ascultat pe tipul asta ar fi fost 100% happy!
Ladies and gents, I give you Don Ross!

Don Ross, Andy McKee
“Rylynn” (mp3)
from “The Thing That Came From Somewhere”
(Candy Rat Records)
More On This Album

For a tune that makes you want to just sink in your lazy boy chair or on your sofa after a hard day’s work, this is the instrumental track for you. Andy McKee and Don Ross collaboration is golden to the ears. I know I will be grabbing this CD real soon and this will be in my line this upcoming weekend on my netcast.

Beskaitinėdamas Rokiškio Balbo blogo įrašus apie neeilinių sugebėjimų būgnininkus, prisiminiau kažkada pusę dienos sėdėjęs jūtiūbėje ir stebėjęs bei klausęs Andy McKee akustinės gitaros kūrinius. O šiandien, mano dideliam pasitenkinimui, radau ir jo duetus su Don Ross, sugrotus paprasčiausio bonsai (jei gerai pastebėjau) fone. Gero žiūrėjimo ir malonaus klausymosi!

I can’t even express how amazing Tuesday night was for me. I’ve been playing guitar for far less time than just about all of my friends, but I’m luckier than most of them in that I’ve found a style of playing that inspires me like some mythical muse. As such, I have latched onto it like the proverbial obese child does a piece of particularly moist cake.

However, a few months back I had my mind blown back in pretty rorschac-like patterns against the wall when I discovered Andy Mckee. He will never be mainstream, as his style of playing is decidedly not marketable, and as such I realize it’s not everyone’s cup o’ tea. But, to me, this cup of tea is delicious and warm to the soul. He handled the guitar in a way in which I’d never seen before, using the entirety of the instrument and changing the very way people thought about guitar. In fact, I’d heard that in concert he changes his guitar tuning after just about every song. That concept itself was fascinating to me, the idea that one would change the instrument so that it serves as the medium only, and not the end.

On to the show. I looked at Andy Mckee’s touring schedule, and found out he was playing a show at a small venue in Felton, called Don Quixote’s, about 8 miles from where I live. I decided that I was going to go if I had to sell my soul or my first-born child, whichever they asked for at the door. Luckily for my both my progeny and my eternal fate in the afterlife, it was only $12 advance tickets.

Walking in, the place is divided into a couple different rooms: the dining area, a room with tables crowded around the stage, and the main bar room. The lighting made it all somewhat reminiscent of the bar in The Shining, but I wasn’t drinking so I don’t know if they relegated the soul-gouging prices to the bartender. The crowd was mostly of the elder persuasion, which seemed rather strange to me considering it was a Tuesday night near a college town. Anyway, my friend and i took our seats near the back, which was only about 25 feet from the stage anyway, and, giddy as a school-girl, waited for them to begin.

So, my favorite guitarist and his favorite guitarist, Don Ross, walk on stage and immediately launch into Spirit of the West, the first song off their duet album. My friend promptly starts punching my arm demanding that I look at whatever the hell it is they’re doing, specifically Andy, as she had never seen anyone play like that before.

They introduce themselves as they finish, and it becomes immediately apparent how large a man Don Ross is, and how tiny Andy is by comparison. A reference to David and Goliath is not entirely out of line here, both because of the massive difference between their relative height and girth and the rather bear-like quality Don’s hair gives him compared to the more hobbit-like quality of Andy’s.

Don then launches into a solo song of his called Afraid to Dance, and the arm punching continues. At this point, the order of the set list gets a bit foggy in my mind, but I’ll relate the songs they played and the prefaces they gave them as well as I can.

Andy comes up to the mike after having to adjust it down a good foot and a half, and talks about growing up listening to 80’s music (he’s 28), and how that had influenced his musical development. As a side note, it’s worth noting that he was quite the metalhead before picking up this style. Anyway, he started doing a drumbeat on his guitar one day that reminded him of a song by the band Toto, and so he arranged it for solo guitar. If you don’t know the song, check out the original first before you listen to his rendition of Africa, just so that you can appreciate the fact that he seems to have somehow captured an entire band and sealed them within his hands using some sort of ancient and forbidden black magic.

Don steps up to the challenge and slaps the shit out of the audience’s ears with a rather nice twist on his song Never Got to Pernambuco, in which he hits some sort of delay pedal halfway through the song, and the hypnotic quality it induced really only became apparent after he turned it off and finished the song. I felt like I’d gone on some sort of drug trip. Great way to kick off their set, all in all.

So, they go on to play Rylynn, Andy’s tribute to his brother’s best friend’s daughter after she passed away. I enjoyed this one a lot, because the external mike that is used in the video captures a lot of dischordant notes from the hammering on at the end, but they avoided most of that during the performance because they were plugged in. Little things like that bug the crap out of me and can ruin a great song, but it was performed beautifully.

Other duet songs they played: Dolphins; Ebon Coast, one of my favorites; With You in Mind, Klimbim (the German word for junk), which Don described as being a project in which he’d somewhat miraculously been able to fuse two different compositional pieces into something resembling a song.

The duet pieces, while strikingly beautiful at times, were also occasionally a bit overwhelming. As each of them can play two or three distinct guitar parts by themselves, there was almost too much coming at you at once, which took away a bit from the relaxing and peaceful nature of some of their music. Overall, though, it was fantastic to watch, and each, without a doubt, shone brilliantly when playing solo.

Throughout the course of the show, Don revealed himself to be quite the personable character, almost bordering on the stand-up comedian during his various stories that were usually only loosely related to the material at hand. It turns out that at the very beginning of the tour, a couple weeks ago in Hawaii, the airline lost one of his guitars. I was horrified at the thought, as, to me, that would be like going in for an operation and the surgeon casually informing me afterwards that they had managed to misplace my liver. However, Mr. Dean Markley himself was apparently kind enough to lend Don his personal guitar.

Andy was also quite amiable, but in a more reserved fashion. While Don was up playing solo, he’d be sitting behind him, closing his eyes and weaving his head around through the atmosphere of the music. Of course, the truly impressive part is that he was often doing the same thing while he was playing. I can’t even imagine trying to hit all those slap harmonics with my eyes closed. He never stops impressing me.

Don’s solo songs for the night included: Brooke’s Waltz, named after his wife who helped him compose it. Personally, I thought it was one of the highlights of the show; it’s got a rather ethereal quality to it. He played Dracula & Friends Part II, the name of which was apparently the result of Don’s young daughter telling him that he should name the song after a movie monster, but as if the monster had a Saturday morning kid’s television show. He also treated us with a song called Any Colour But Blue, which was about the arduous road trip to a concert he played in northern Canada in the coldest winter ever recorded. He actually sang, and I won’t say that his lyrical ability was fantastic, but it was surprising to hear that good a voice come out of that man.

Andy’s solo songs: Art of Motion; Drifting, which could arguably be said to be the song that almost singlehandedly shot him into the Youtube Hall of Fame; Keys to the Hovercar, a song inspired by the type of science fiction stories which said we’d have flying cars by the year 2000.

At one point in the show Don explains to the audience his bizarre-looking guitar, a fan-fretted baritone, but without a doubt, the award for the most bizarre guitar of the night goes to Andy for when he brought out the harp guitar to play Gates of Gnomeria, a song meant to make one feel as if they are traveling through subterranean caverns and then emerge into the magical Gnome city of Gnomeria. Andy also won the award that night for biggest nerd in the room. Apparently this particular harp guitar was “made by a dentist in Virginia, of all people and places.” Andy first saw it when he went to watch a Stephen Bennett show, and later bought it from him.

The best piece in the entire show, however, came at the end when they played a duet version of Don’s song Tight Trite Night. Apparently Don was judging a guitar competition which Andy was competing in, and when Andy placed in the top three (missing first by about half a point), he had the audacity to play his own rendition of Don’s song, which Don apparently liked better. I was a little disappointed that the balance was slightly off, so that Don was drowning out Andy a bit. Still a spectacular performance, though.

After the show, both of them were quite kind enough to stick around and sign whatever we wanted signed, and I’m proud to say that I got to shake their AMAZING hands. I was gushing a lot of babble by the time that I actually talked to Andy, but he was really humble and took it all in stride. I was struck by the fact that I had a good half a foot of height on him, and therefore a significantly larger reach on the guitar. In a way it was rather inspiring because it meant that if I ever ran into any limitations in my playing ability, the size of my hand wouldn’t be one of them.

And so, I stepped out of the venue into the cold night air, still rather star-struck about it all, but knowing that I had just been to one of the best shows I’d ever see in my life. If this kind of music strikes you at all, I cannot recommend highly enough going to see either of these two if they swing your way.