Went for a pizza that a pub was doing and my guitar teacher just walked past, chatted for a while and gave him my email address (which is literally first name, first name last name .com so it's not hard to remember
). He's already emailed me a bunch of new guitar tabs (these tabs aren't like normal tabs, they're musical notation with a 6th line added and fret numbers instead of notes) and recommendations and told me I was a dear student to him, which was just lovely to hear.
To be honest, growing up, my family knew I was good but didn't really do anything by way of encouragement, half the time they didn't even show up to my concerts.
Thanks for the encouragement about adding some significant upgrades to my set up, so I can perhaps record a proper album without depending too much on twiddling software effects. I really dislike interacting with computers despite being excellent with computers (I can code a bit as well and I use design software all the time, in case that wasn't common knowledge!) so I would like something more musical with knobs. A valve compressor that naturally acts slightly as an exciter might be nice for smoothing out waveforms so that there is less "twiddling" to do. I just can't be bothered to do automation, but I can set faders to touch mode on my master midi controller and do it that way... Perhaps with some look ahead so it syncs up. I just don't enjoy this part!
I used to enjoy live mixing but my mixer blew up. Perhaps I can source a replacement for it, but, it's not that good sounding and the preamps on my Focusrite are probably much, much better anyway. It did a very, very good job for the money (22 channel mixer for £280 I think it was) but you can't expect those pre-amps to be much good for that sort of money due to the physical cost of all thos jacks and pots alone.
So, as I have been thinking for some time, perhaps I will take a short sabbatical from my design business and focus on music (as well as painting) for a little while, and see what happens. And I can meet up with my old teacher too, once this is OK, and perhaps learn some new tunes and refine old ones!
Thanks for the positive comments. That piece, Romanza (with the first half pretty straightforward finger style and the second part much more difficult so most people never learn it), I've been playing for a very long time. There's some seriously interesting other stuff (some of it quite rare) in my repertoire that I can record in earnest... I just have to try not to be too much of a perfectionist or accept that punching in recording is OK to correct flubs.
I used to learn tabs from my teacher as soon as he had written them and most of them weren't available until he did it himself, and not many of his students could play them either.
I was fortunate to have a great teacher for a very long time (about 12 years regularly) but I think I do owe it to myself, that I stuck with the instrument and I challenged some really hard material.
GOing to do some more snooping around just for ideas and not spend too long doing that so I can play a bit this weekend and rediscover what I'm already capable of producing...
Unfortunately I forgot to save the TWitch archives so they are gone - those of you who checked out the clip, that's it, it's gone forever now! I have no local copy or recording at all, that moment of madness at the end is part of the sands of time. To be honest, I might prefer it that way. It's very easy for me to get prissy about keeping recordings of everything.
And it's also like the band is cursed... I've failed to get a recording at all never mind a decent one at about 95% of our live events/gigs, despite possessing all manner of devices for doing so
so I have hundreds of hours of jam recording and none of the "results". Very strange.