I've read a couple of articles recently about a new coffee table book that's coming out soon that lists the Top 100 Canadian Pop/Rock albums. The author polled various people to come up with his results, asking them to list their ten favourite albums by a Canadian artist/band.

What surprised me the most about the list was how few of these records I have in my own collection. I've bought lots (lots!) of Canadian music over the years, but I only have a grand total of eleven albums of the 100 that made the cut. Here are the eleven I have and where they appeared on the list:

5. Fully Completely - The Tragically Hip (1992)
9. Moving Pictures - Rush (1981)
15. Up To Here - The Tragically Hip (1989)
21. Day For Night - The Tragically Hip (1994)
26. Road Apples - The Tragically Hip (1991)
37. Ingenue - k.d. lang (1992)
42. The Best Of The Guess Who - The Guess Who (1971)
60. Hot Shots - Trooper (1979)
67. Outskirts - Blue Rodeo (1987)
87. Living Under June - Jann Arden (1994)
100. A Farewell To Kings - Rush (1977)

If not for The Hip, I would have barely made a dent in that list. Of course, lists like this are always very subjective. But they make for great debate, because everybody thinks they're wrong! You can see the full Top 100 list, and read a bit about how it was compiled, here:

http://www.canada.com/globaltv/globalshows/et_story.html?id=981a7cd4-4a31-4c0a-a024-0ffd50445df4

So I asked myself which ten Canadian albums would I have chosen? What would my ten Canuck "Desert Island" picks be? I could change my mind by tomorrow, or ten minutes from now, but at the moment this list looks pretty good to me:

1. A Farewell To Kings - Rush (1977)
2. Greatest Hits - The Guess Who (1999)
3. Stand Back - April Wine (1975)
4. Lookin' For Trouble - Toronto (1980)
5. Best Of Max Webster - Max Webster (1989)
6. Triptych - The Tea Party (1999)
7. Images At Twilight - Saga (1979)
8. Line Of Fire - Headpins (1983)
9. Road Apples - The Tragically Hip (1991)
10. Living Under June - Jann Arden (1994)

I've loved the song "Phasors On Stun" by FM for ages, and I did a tab of it for guitar earlier this year, (although there actually aren't any guitars in the song.) That tab is posted on the website, of course. So I thought this was pretty cool when I came across it on YouTube a few days ago. It's a guy (a professional musician, I would say, judging by one of his comments on the page) demonstrating his Godin electric mandolin with an excerpt from "Phasors". It's in two parts.

Pt. 1 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GfImUwxbBUw

Pt. 2 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rcrW_LVi-t4

I've gotten a pretty good start on the first of the two tabs I mentioned a couple of days ago. I'm about halfway through. There's some good footage on YouTube to compare it to, as well, to make sure I'm placing certain parts in the right fretboard positions. The videos don't show me everything I'd like to see, but you can't have everything. The parts they do show have definitely helped.

I don't know if I'll manage to finish this one off (on paper, that is) tomorrow or not. I think a fair amount of what's left is repeating parts of what I've already tabbed, but there is one more short solo and an Outro part to work out. 

Starting the blog has had one beneficial side effect that I didn't expect. Google finds the site regularly now. The Googlebot crawls the blog several times a day, and also pages from the website, often including several individual tabs. This doesn't make them immediately searchable, but maybe over time it will.

One interesting thing has turned up in my stats. Since the beginning of this month, eight different people have found the site by doing a Google search. Seven of those eight people found their way here by searching for Headpins tabs.

They were probably surprised to find one, too, because they're just not out there. I hope they like the one they found here.

Maybe all that searching for Headpins tabs is an indication I should do some more of them? I was kind of planning to, anyhow.

(A tip of the cap to Rick, who asked me awhile back if I had any Headpins tabs, which resulted in me finishing the one I had had sitting around half finished for ages. And that resulted in drawing some traffic to the site. ) 

It seems like I'm not getting too much done so far in October. I posted a tab on October 1st and nothing since. I actually did a tab about a week ago, all in one night, but there were some issues with it, so I've shelved it for now. After I did the tab I went to 911Tabs.com, looked it up, and found pretty much what I expected. There were 82 listings for that tab! In reality, that breaks down to about 7 different versions, just all posted on multiple websites. Still, it means the world won't miss my version too much. I might post it sometime if I'm ever more satisfied with it.

I'm hoping to get started on a new tab tonight. The one after that is lined up already, too. That second one is a request. Both of those tabs will be in the Canadian section. And that should take care of the better part of the rest of October.

Have a good weekend!

There's certainly no shortage of cover tunes in Girlschool's back catalogue. Gun's "Race With the Devil". ZZ Top's "Tush". The Rolling Stones' "Live With Me". "20th Century Boy" by T Rex. "Burning In the Heat" by Slade. "Do You Love Me" by Kiss. Gary Glitter's "Leader Of the Gang". The Sweet's "Fox On the Run". As a matter of fact, seven of the band's ten studio albums include a cover song. Only the three most recent studio albums don't have one.

Today's riff is from their cover of Mud's "Tiger Feet". It's not a riff, actually, it's a ten bar instrumental section that's played twice during the song.

GIRLSCHOOL - "Tiger Feet"          (Chapman/Chin)

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

You can hear that guitar part in the sound clip on this page:

http://www.girlschool.de/

(Scroll down the page to the Nightmare At Maple Cross album.)

HAPPY THANKSGIVING!!

By Anne & special guest Sheilagh (Thanks, Sheilagh!)

When I started my website back in January, I didn't know anything at all about HTML. I gave myself a two-night crash course from a site on the web, then built the page. Now, months later, I've improved, the page has become a site, and I know next to nothing about HTML rather than nothing at all.

No, actually I've learned quite a bit over the last several months. Having tried out doing a few tables now, I'm getting the hang of it, so over the last couple of days I've done one thing I would like to have done right from the start. It required knowing how to do tables.

I overhauled the Girlschool tab page, putting the song title links in a list beside the album covers rather than underneath them. This way everything isn't running just in a column right down the middle of the page. I wanted to have the titles beside the images right from the beginning, but I didn't know how to do it.

I went on to do the same thing with the rest of the page, as well, setting up the Links section by tables. It allowed me to get rid of all my "cheats" on that page. Not knowing how to space things initially, I'd just do it by separating things (two images, for example) with a dotted line, then coding the line to be the same colour as the page background so that it didn't show on the page. Not exactly correct HTML, but effective enough! (And no, if you're wondering, I don't use that same method to put subliminal messages on my pages, as I hear some sites do. You're welcome to highlight the pages or look at the source coding and check for yourself.  )

This is what the re-vamped Girlschool Tabs page looks like. It looks a lot the same, but, as mentioned, the song titles have been moved up beside the album covers.

https://www.angelfire.com/planet/zerofret/page2.html

Listening to: Girlschool - 21st Anniversary: Not That     

Leafs over Habs tonight in their first meeting of the season.   Ugh!

The long weekend is here, both here in Canada and in the US. Does Mexico have a long weekend this weekend? I think they should. Shut the whole continent down for a few days! Hey, why not? Hang a sign saying, "North America will re-open in 3 days. Please call again".

So to all of you Canadian blog readers and site visitors, have a great Thanksgiving Day weekend! Have a good time and eat lots of turkey! (or veggies, if you don't eat turkey)

And also a very Happy Columbus Day weekend to all of you American blog page/website visitors!

On this Thanksgiving Day weekend, I'm thankful for (among many other things) all of you who visit this website and blog, and make them worth doing.

Take care, if you're travelling, and have a great long weekend, everybody!   

I might need to make some adjustments to the tab most recently posted on the site. ("Hey Operator" by Coney Hatch)

It's not a big change, mostly a timing adjustment in the Chorus and in the Intro. I think that D5 chord at the beginning of each line maybe anticipates the beat rather than coming in on the downbeat. So I might have to move it just left of the bar line. And I think it has a couple of lead-in notes on the bass strings that I missed.

I'll have to give it a closer listen to see what adjustments might be needed, but I probably won't get to it until tomorrow.

I'll update this post in a day or two either to confirm that the changes were made, or that they weren't needed...whichever it turns out to be.

Does this larger font work better for people? Anyone? How 'bout you bots, can you read this better?

I think it makes things a little more reader friendly.

Update: (Oct. 6) The adjustments have been made to the Coney Hatch tab, and the final tab is posted.