I submitted the site to a couple of other tab site listings today. One of those sites, Top 100 Tabs, has already accepted me and sent linking instructions.

Sites included on these lists have two stats given beside them: hits in and hits out. "Hits in" are the number of people who visit Top 100 Tabs by using the link placed on the listed site. "Hits out" are the number of people who visit the listed site from its link on Top 100 Tabs. Sites are ranked by the number of hits in.

If anyone is so inclined to help my site out a bit, all you'd have to do is click on the Top 100 Tabs link on the AGTA home page sometime (it's the flashing one that says CLICK HERE!, you can't miss it) and have a visit to Top 100 Tabs. You might even find some other tab sites you like!

I'm not really concerned with trying to move up the listings too much on that site. A number of the other sites there are really large tab sites that are naturally going to give them lots more hits in than my site ever could. I just kind of would like to put my site on the map on that site, showing that they can (hopefully) get a few hits in to their site from mine. So if anyone visits their site through that link, thanks, I appreciate it!  

(Also, in regard to hits in, these kinds of sites will register a hit from a given IP address only once per day. I guess sites that rank other sites by hits in have to have various failsafes to prevent abuse of their system. It makes sense. This particular site even lists abusers.) 

Last I checked AGTA was listed at #27 near the top of the second page. (But I'm not sure how it got up that high! 1 hit in and 1 hit out were both me, testing the links. There was one other hit out.)

Mood:  cheeky

When I do some tabbing, I generally set up with my guitar, a pencil and tab paper, my CD remote to my right, and I take a guitar pick off of a side table to the left. Then I tab away. Sometimes, when I pick up the remote to reverse, pause, or un-pause, rather than put the pick down I'll just tuck it in the corner of my mouth for a second, then grab it when I need it again.

The other day I guess I was looking at just the right time to see one of my cats marching around on the side table, then sitting down right on top of the guitar pick currently in use, and looking at me like 'look where I am!'. I was just glad I saw her there so I at least knew about it! I immediately thought...Note to self: Remember to retire that guitar pick right away before you stick it in the corner of your mouth without thinking next time you're working on a tab! 

Somebody said to me, "You should get some really good 'bottom' notes from that pick now."   (groannnn)

But I wonder how many other times she sat on it that I didn't see!  

(That's not my cat in the picture.)

Mood:  special

It's a special occasion. I've actually blogged for a whole month now! 

Who knows, maybe some people even read it! 

How about a little mid-80's hair metal?

I can remember seeing these guys a couple of times at Rock'n'Roll Heaven in Toronto, in about 1987 or so. This song, some will remember, was one of their big hits. It's in the same vein as Helix' "Deep Cuts the Knife" or Dokken's "Alone Again". Tabbed here is the song's Intro.

BRIGHTON ROCK - "Can't Wait For the Night"      (G.Fraser/G.McGhee)

https://www.angelfire.com/planet/zerofret/annesblog/canriffs.txt

You can hear the song here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N_ubd0TEBac

Last night was website maintenance night. I had a list of things that needed to be added to various pages. Here's what was done: 

Girlschool Tabs Page
-added a link directly to the Riff-In-A-Jiff section of the blog
-added a link to a Girlschool site (Girlschool - The Unofficial Site)
-added a link to the World's Cutest Killers page - This has kind of been the "hidden" page of the site ever since it went up a couple of months ago. There was no link to it from anywhere else on the site; the only link I posted to it was from a thread in the Girlschool Forum. It was originally intended to be a temporary page, but two different Kelly Johnson tribute sites/pages that I know of have linked to it, so I decided to leave it up. But having done that, I figured it was time to make it accessible from the site that it's actually posted on! The only link to it, though, is through the Girlschool page. (Links to all other pages of the site have been added to the WCK page.)

Canadian Tabs Page
-added a link directly to the Riff-In-A-Jiff section of the blog
-added image links to the official websites of Headpins and The Guess Who

Various Tabs Page
-added a link directly to the Riff-In-A-Jiff section of the blog

Video Page
-added a video of The Guess Who's "Runnin' Back To Saskatoon"
-added a video link for Headpins' "Don't It Make Ya Feel"

And I think I'm all caught up for now!

I passed the 100,000 step mark of my ongoing tribute walk last night. Now...four more times.

https://www.angelfire.com/planet/zerofret/annesblog/halfamillionsteps.txt

There are a lot of elements to Kelly Johnson's guitar playing that I like: tone, vibrato, sense of melody, tasteful phrasing, spontaneity, plenty of other things. But it always seems to come down to that basic tone-vibrato combo for me; that's the basis of it. I think I've talked a couple of different times on the Girlschool Discussion Forum about what a spectacular vibrato she had. People probably start to think, 'yeah, yeah, tone - vibrato, what's the big deal'. But I come by the fascination honestly; there is a reason why that stands out for me so much.

Around about 1983-84, two things coincided. I was in my first year at University of Windsor and I started seriously getting into learning lead guitar technique. While those two things might not seem to have anything to do with each other, they actually do. I was a music major, but my instrument major was alto saxophone, not guitar. When I started that first year, I could see I had some catching up to do compared to the playing level of a lot of other first year students. Part of the music program included taking private lessons on your main instrument from one of the music school instructors. I had a great instructor who made the trek to Windsor a few times a week from across the river in Ypsilanti (Michigan). I guess he saw too that I had that catching up to do. So most of that first year consisted of a back-to-basics crash course. And what do you suppose he stressed over and over again as a good basic foundation? You got it. Tone. Vibrato. And lots and lots of scale exercises to practice them with. That year of tone and vibrato "boot camp" left a lasting impression. And since I was picking up lead guitar on my own at the time, those same principles transferred over to that.

Ever since that time, I've had the tone-vibrato fascination. It goes without saying, of course, that all guitarists try to have good tone and vibrato. But they're both pretty subjective things. A person might like a guitarist's vibrato or their tone, while another person might not hear anything special in them.

I guess for me, I heard those two elements combining perfectly in Kelly's playing, that cutting, super-mean Les Paul tone, contrasted with a very fluid, graceful, expressive vibrato. With all the other elements mentioned earlier factored in, as well. I've always said that, with that tone and vibrato, I could listen to Kelly Johnson play C scales and enjoy it. 

So I'll sign this post off with a little of that. (No, not C scales.) This is a tribute video done by (fellow Canuck) filmmaker Johnny Terris. A very nice piece of work, set to Girlschool's "A Love Too Far". Anyone who has taken the time to read this whole post has probably seen this video before, but it's well worth watching again.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HtN8wSG8wqU

The number of Girlschool songs that include any acoustic guitar in them are very few and far between. A handful come to mind. "A Love Too Far", of course. "I Told You So". "My Ambition". "Let Me Go". Since they use acoustic so sparingly, it can stand out to great effect when they do use it.

Today's riff is an Intro I like a lot, a nice mix of acoustic and electric.

GIRLSCHOOL - "Don't Walk Away"      (K.McAuliffe/C.Bonacci/D.Dufort/T.Lamb)

https://www.angelfire.com/planet/zerofret/annesblog/gsriffs.txt

The Intro can be heard here: http://fiesta.belmp3.com/preview/1520/5839/59851/ 

Even after all these years, in my opinion still the best pop music video ever made.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TWCHFj_QUiQ

Creative, attention getting, and artistically impressive.

And despite New Wave being years gone, even the song is still catchy.

Randy Bachman is a pretty amazing guitar player, and now and then with BTO he'd show off his jazz chops a bit on songs like "Lookin' Out For #1" and "Blue Collar", which today's riff comes from. I've always wanted to do a full tab of this song, but it would be a real project. What really stands out is the soft touch and subtlety of the playing, in comparison to the full-throttle attack of most of BTO's songs.

BACHMAN-TURNER OVERDRIVE - "Blue Collar"

https://www.angelfire.com/planet/zerofret/annesblog/canriffs.txt

I tabbed the Intro of the song and I couldn't find a sound clip of it, so I linked to the closest thing I could find. In the sound clip on this page, the guitar part between the verses is almost the same as the Intro, but for the lower staff guitar part only. The lead guitar part in the sound clip (single line lead) is different from the lead in the tabbed Intro (octaves).

http://www.amazon.com/Anthology-Bachman-Turner-Overdrive/dp/B000001DZ2/ref=pd_bbs_sr_2/002-1917792-7767241?ie=UTF8&s=music&qid=1189985301&sr=1-2

Mood:  not sure

Any time I do a tab of a particular artist or band for the first time, I generally add a link on the site to that act's official website. If they don't have an official website, I'll pick out the site with the best information on that band and link to that. The question is what to do when a band does have an official website, but it might not be the site that best represents them.

That's been my dilemma recently in regard to The Guess Who. Back at the beginning of September I added a Guess Who tab to the site for the first time. So I went looking for their official site to link up to it. But when I found it, I discovered the site in no way reflected the Guess Who that people are familiar with, with all of its history, or a band discography, photos through the years. Nothing like that.

The current line-up, of course, bears little resemblance to the classic line-up(s) of the band. It's not that they're not decent musicians (there are one or two original members, I think, and in researching, I discovered something I didn't know...the band's current singer/guitarist is Carl Dixon, formerly of Coney Hatch), it's just that without at least one of either Bachman or (particularly) Cummings, people don't relate to it as The Guess Who. And when the band doesn't even put a discography on their website, it's almost like they don't want you to even think about those former line-ups of the band.

So overall, if I'm tabbing classic older Guess Who hits like "Runnin' Back To Saskatoon", the band's official site doesn't seem like the best site to link to, because it doesn't even acknowledge that past. I still haven't decided what site I will link to, though.