A friend of mine makes guitar pedals and it got me excited to try and design some of the cases. I don’t know how I would ever go about getting these printed, but I like the idea of designing the pedals well. I have seen some pretty boring ones out there.

The first one I was influenced by (that is designer talk for “I completely ripped it off”) Eric Clapton’s ‘crash designed Fender’. Crash is this graffiti artist that Fender has commissioned to design 50 Strats. Eric’s was one of the first ones.

The second design was me just having a bit of fun. A bit of medieval, a bit college football.

ben and I are going to see Tommy Emmanuel play. Going to be amazing.

before I head off to work each day, I usually try and quickly scan through my CD collection to find an album or two that I haven’t listened too that much. I find that out of all the albums that I buy: 40% get a real spin (and I mean, I listen to them inside out), 30% I only end up liking a few songs, and the other 30% I start to get into but get distracted by other albums I have bought.

Every now and then I will find a gem that I just didn’t give a good enough go – it slips through the cracks. So this new system sets out to find those. The other day I found the dears – no cities left. I put it on and discovered a whole new world. This band is amazing. 6 Canadian musicians and they just have an amazing creativity for timing, song structure, harmonies, arrangement and just general groove. I haven’t stopped listening to it for weeks now. I love it.

Now I find out that they have a new album coming out! gang of losers.

I am so excited. Can’t wait to get down the shops and grab it. I visited their website and they had a video clip that you can download. The songs is really cool and it is growing on me more and more.The song is Ticket to Immortality and it is worth a look.

The guitarist uses this mad strat. Sounds amazing. I have this white strat copy, it is getting fixed at the moment … seeing this has g’d e up to muck around with it more …. that and watching this eric clapton’s crossroads DVD where every one plays strats.

Took some more shots recording last night. I took the one of Scotty’s rhodes and Scotty took the one of my tele while I was recording. Scott also took a bunch of quite … novel shots of a cereal wrapper – some would say too many.

Our recording is coming along really well. I got a CD last night of what we had done so far, and it is sounding really impressive! I can’t wait till it is all finished and we can hand them out and stuff. I will hopefully upload one for people to check out.

Gee the Rhodes sounded amazing last night! I love that thing. We played it through my ‘Fender “65 Deluxe Reverb’ and it gave it so much life.

Talking about beautiful sounds – I got this Robert Keeley modded Blues Driver. It just ads so much to my sound; the best impersonation of an amp speaker overdriving that I have ever heard. The harder you hit the chord, the more overdrive it gives you. The lighter you touch it, the cleaner it is. When you crank the gain, you get this rich overdrive/slight fuzz sound. It is so beautiful. I bought it at a good price thinking “If I don’t like it, I will flog it off and make some money!”, but this thing is staying right where it is.

Phuket: unlike Pharmacy, the ‘Ph’ in ‘Phuket’ is pronounced differently – it is said ‘poo-ket’. This was taken at the beach where we stayed. That is Laura sitting down (right) and that is some pesky kid running past … sort of worked for the shot instead of against it which was good. They had amazing sunsets most nights we were there.