Normally, I don’t like virtuoso guitar pieces. They bring to mind too many players like Yngwie Malmsteen, Michael Angelo, and Steve Vai. There are a rare few pieces that are genuinely amazing though, and one of them is Stevie Ray Vaughan’s adaptation of Hendrix’s “Little Wing.”

Stratocasters are unforgiving instruments. They catch everything. The difference between a picked note and a legato note is completely clear. If your pick scrapes as you’re picking a string, you can hear it. A lot of times, this is a bad thing—try watching some people’s performances of this cover—but here, it’s something really special. Everything about Stevie Ray Vaughan’s performance is perfect. The dynamic range is abnormally broad, with delicate and perfectly articulated pieces as well as the screaming bent notes that the guitar is famous for. The trills are buttery, and some of the faster picked passages seem to melt into legato that drips off the fretboard. The way notes are picked is used to as much effect as whether they’re picked: quiet sections using the middle or neck pickup¹ are picked cleanly, giving a bubbling articulation, and the screaming sections have more scrape to the picking, which combines with the overdrive and the noise from the vibrato² to give a more Janis-Joplin-made-of-wood feel. Every single note in the recording, and how each one is played, is completely deliberate.

If you can, I suggest listening to this straight off the CD or in the best quality you can find on a good stereo. The amazing thing about this performance isn’t just that it’s beautiful or that it’s hard to play, it’s that it’s played in a way that uses every nuance of the instrument to its advantage, and that’s the mark of a true master.

1) The strat has three pickups, one close to the neck, one close to the bridge, and one in the middle. Since the neck pickup is closer to the peak position of the fundamental, its tone is dominated by the fundamental and the first overtones and sounds warm and slightly muted. The bridge pickup is much further from the peak of the fundamental and so picks up higher order overtones and sounds much brighter.

2) It’s audible on every setting, especially on a strat, and especially on the bridge pickup: the sound of the string scraping on the fret. The most famous example is the beginning of Hendrix’s “Foxy Lady.”

I’ve been a half-assed user of Quicksilver since it came out. Several of my friends were really impressed and immediately started incorporating it into their workflows, but I never really picked up on it. Lately, that’s starting to change.

I have a lot of stuff in my Applications folder. Even on my MacBook Pro’s 1920×1200 display, the dock would be severely cluttered if I actually had all of the stuff that I use fairly frequently on it. Instead of having a cluttered dock, I started launching things through Spotlight. This was a step in the right direction, because it saved me from going to the finder for Applications I used more rarely, and it’s easier than looking through a stack for the Applications folder. The only problem is that the spotlight search feels slow, since I’m comparing it to the the run menu in GNOME or Enlightenment. Quicksilver is fast. I find myself removing things from the dock unless I run them every time I log in, because running them through quicksilver is inevitably faster.

I am also enjoying Quicksilver’s ability to figure out what text is. Bringing up quicksilver, typing a url or an email address, and having a Safari or Mail.app window open is great. Putting ideas into DEVONthink—which I am just starting to use—is also pretty straightforward once you toggle the “switch to text mode if no match is found” option.

There’s a lot of power behind Quicksilver. Try it, and soon you’ll miss it wherever you don’t have it.

Continuing on the previous post, I would now like to take the opportunity to comment on some things which are not from the astonishingly awesome Phillips Brewing Company.

Tin Whistle Chocolate Cherry Porter

Up until a couple of months ago, I didn’t like porters. I found them flat and bizarrely without taste. The Longbow Double Chocolate Porter mentioned before was the first porter that I enjoyed, and it got me thinking that maybe, just maybe, porters had potential that I hadn’t previously considered.

This beer adds one huge wallop of evidence for that hypothesis. Where many cherry beers are taken down by a strange maraschino-chemical taste, this one just tastes like cherries. And chocolate. And porter. Really, it’s exactly what it promises to be, and it’s awesome. Three cheers for Tin Whistle; this one is a winner.

Cannery Brewing Blackberry Porter

After all of this lovely stuff with cherries and chocolate and porter, my interest was piqued. Right when I found myself thinking I should see what else was available in the world of porters, I found this.

Dramatic pause here; imagine a taste tester picking up a pint of dark, almost opaque beer. They look at it, admiring the expert pour and its quarter inch of head. They take a sniff, but don’t really detect much because, you know, beer doesn’t really smell like much. They shrug and take a sip. After a fraction of a second there’s squirming: it almost looks like they’re going to throw up, except that their eyes lit up and they’re smiling like crazy. Later analysis reveals that they were trying to swallow the beer before the instinctive urge to shout “holy shit!” made them soil their clothing.

Cannery Brewing Naramata Nut Brown

There doesn’t seem to be much point to writing about beers that I don’t enjoy. Although it is definitely fun to wonder at what stage in the brewing process someone peed in the beer, I’d rather recommend beers that people will enjoy. And this is one of them. It’s a prime example of a nut brown and is extremely drinkable, but the nut flavours seem to be more obvious more unadulterated than any other nut brown that I’ve tried. It’s great.