DrGaz's Music: Jingle Balls!

Another little Christmassy treat for you! This is Jingle Balls, my own rendition of Jingle Bells (obviously). It is perhaps nearly as irritating as my Hark the Hells Angels Sing. Play them loud and annoy family & friends over the festive period. Well that's it for me for 2007! I'm off somewhere hot over Crimbo and will be back in the 2008 with some more mildly interesting stuff for your entertainment.

By the way, this is the 1st anniversary of DrGaz's Stuff - a bit worrying since I only started it for a laugh with absolutely no intention of taking it seriously at all.

Coming to DrGaz's Stuff in 2008

• The rest of the 2008 Nicola Bryant calendar
• More of my terrifying Horror Dream Diary. Dare you read about The Man in the Chair, or The Void?
• Some more recipes perhaps
• Generally more of the same stuff as before (Doctor Who, sketches, photoblog etc etc)

DrGaz's Music: Hark the Hells Angels Sing

Merry Christmas! Here's a little treat... possibly the most irritating version of a Christmas carol you will hear this year. It's intentionally crap, and I also think it has an "imperial" feel to it! Enjoy.

2008 Nicola Bryant Calendar: January

Oh, yes. Here's a special Christmas treat for all you Nicola Bryant fans out there! This is the 1st installment of my very own "DrGaz 2008 Nicola Bryant calendar". This is something I hope to do on a monthly basis (it would take me ages to issue the whole year right now), so please pop back at the end of each month for the following installment! If you don't want to miss out, just sign up to my mailing list (don't worry I won't spam you), and I'll make sure you're notified the second each month is ready!
INSTRUCTIONS: Just click on the above image to open the larger 580x580 version in your internet browser. Then right mouse click to save to your PC. When you've done that just make it your desktop wallpaper. Bingo! You now have some saucy pics of Nicola to keep you company throughout 2008!

The Monopods

This is something I came across on YouTube recently. I thought I'd post it because I've done a few Tripods posts recently. Anyway, I thought this was quite amusing - it's rather silly. I'm really impressed with how they've done the title sequence so accurately to the original.

Purple bally thing in space

This is something I did ages ago in 3D on Autodesk Inventor 9, that I just found on my PC. I thought I'd just give it a quick Photoshop job (add some stars and stuff) and bung it on here.

Horror Dream Drary: The Haunted Apartment

I was living in a Victorian mansion that had been divided up into individual apartments. My apartment looked out onto beautiful gardens.

Soon after moving in I realised that the apartment was haunted, and it became worse over the space of a few weeks. The ghosts were three black servants – a man, a woman and a young girl in her early 20s (possibly their daughter). The man and woman were both in their 50s, and were extremely menacing characters. The man was particularly frightening. He had deformed hands and I would often turn around to find that he’d been standing behind me, glaring at me.

The hauntings started off pretty low-key – Just a fleeting glimpse of one of them in a mirror, but when I turned around they would be gone. It wasn’t long before they were still be there when I turned around, fading away seconds later. Soon they were around pretty much all the time, and I decided to try to exorcise them, which was very difficult at first because they mocked me as I read prayers. I persisted and gradually the hauntings got less and less until I stopped seeing them.

DrGaz on the keys

Just got back from my 4th piano lesson! I've played guitar (mainly electric) for the last 15 years but it's always been a compromise, because since I was a kid I have ALWAYS wanted a piano! Sadly this is something that was always been impractical for one reason or another - usually "It's too big", "It's too expensive" "It's too noisy" etc etc etc... (the list of excuses not to is endless - you'll never win), so I've decided to go for it in adulthood and learn it properly with a teacher, and hopefully very shortly I'll be purchasing a digital piano. Not the cheapest hobby with lessons at £24/hr, and yes an electric piano WILL take up space, but what the hell! Sometimes you have to say balls to it just do it!

What I really want to do is go through the grades, and I'm aiming to make grade 1 by summer 2008. For now as a novice I have to start somewhere, so I'm currently working my way through the Grade 1 scale book, and another book called Piano Time 1 by Pauline Hall (both pictured below). Piano Time 1 is written for 5 year olds, and contains exciting stuff like "She'll be coming 'round the mountain", but as I said, you have to start somewhere. You can't just start bashing out Beethoven straight away.

A tricky thing about learning an instrument "properly" is learning to sight read (I learned guitar completely by ear and tabulation or "Tab" as it's called) . The thought of learning how to read music sounds pretty scary, but in the last couple of weeks I've actually been getting on quite well with it. This is largely thanks to a piece of software called Note Card which tests you on all the notes. I downloaded it to my PC at work, and give my self a quick test every lunchtime. It's amazing how quickly you pick it up.

DrGaz's Music: Tuesday Night: The Video!

Just for the hell of it:

DrGaz's music: Tuesday Night

This is a little thing that I recorded on the PC this evening. It's just a 30 second ditty I did on the guitar as a little test. I wanted to see if I could plug it into the mic port on the PC soundcard and record in Audacity (a nice piece of Freeware for sound manipulation that allows you multitrack). This is about 5 or 6 tracks together. The sound quality isn't wonderful, but it's nice to know that I can do this so easily. I wouldn't mind having a bash at doing some guitar stuff in Garageband (if I can ever get around to it).

Below is a pic of my guitar. It's been recently dusted down after spending a year in storage. It's a US Fender Stratocaster that I puchased new in 1996. Cost me £500 from Cranes in Cardiff.



Actually I quite like this little tune, so maybe I can turn it into a proper song. My ultimate aim is to make an er "album" (it'll be called DrGaz's Party), and with a bit of work I can also develop some of the other tunes on this blog to go on it too!