Comments by "Harry \x22Nic\x22 Nicholas" (@HarryNicNicholas) on "Rick Beato"
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i'll be 70 this year, i've worked in graphics of all kinds since i left school in 1970. i got caught up in computer graphics at uni, i got my degree as a mature student in 1984 and my first job after leaving uni was working for digital pictures in london, but my direct boss was more interested in pop videos and commercials than CGI so i spent a year or two doing all manner of graphics for music videos. i moved to CFX, another cutting edge computer graphics house and there i learned computer animation from the basics, and in those first 5 years out of uni my cv included a top of the pops titles, teletubbies titles, dozens of commercials, dozens of corporate videos, architectural, automotive and space exploration videos.
i went freelance around 1990 and since then i've clocked up hundreds more videos and even games and four feature films.
to me youtube was just a place to promote my freelance work and to store any animation i was tinkering with.
my impression of youtube when it appeared was that here was another source of work for me, everyone would want titles and everyone would want graphics, but what happened in fact was everyone got photoshop and everyone got 3ds MAX or blender, or some other pirate 3D software, and animation i we charged at CFX and DP £20,000 for suddenly people wanted done for £50.
so i just use youtube to save my animation work, i do some sculpture these days too, and i've been uploading my music since about 2013 too.
youtube is just a storage facility for me, despite being on since about 2006 i still have less than 200 subs, i never promote my channel (until recently that is, since youtube want to force me to watch their crummy ads - they've used my content for free all this time so it would be nice to get some revenue back) to me youtube has just been a vanity project and a way to store my work so i can show it at will.
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as a player it's taken me 50 years to find out there are better brands you've never heard of that make guitars for either 1/10th the price that are better or 100X the price that are better than gibson / fender / whatever. in fact some of the lower end mass produced makes are turning out mid price guitars at high end quality.
as an audience member, other than acoustic sets i've been to, floyd, elp, mayall, martyn, whoever i've gone to see brands have been really low on my priorities.
i play acoustics, i have 2 gibsons, i have a martin, but i also have a larrivee, a maton and i suppose framus aren't that widely known. but there are tons, and tons, of boutique guitars out there well, well worth the effort and if you have it, the money.
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i think clapton would say hendrix too, but i think clapton is more popular and widely known by non guitar and non music-types. which gives me an opportunity i never miss, i went to kingston poly in the 80's and our illustration lecturer tells of his predecessor at kingston school of art saying "you'll never get anywhere until you put that guitar down, clapton".
again zep is probably more influential, but in the background, whereas i bet more people have a floyd album than a zep, although if you have a zep album you probably have more zep albums than people with floyd albums have floyd albums.
bowie has more range, jagger is good, but i'm sure bowie could do jagger, but jagger couldn't do bowie, bowie doesn't stand still.
damn, i wanted something to listen to while i work, not something i have to comment on every five seconds.
st pepper's has to be the more influential, it came out first, it had so many novel ideas for people, philosophy, art, music, instruments, lyrics, dark side of the moon is probably my favourite "play every track" album (i went to visit a friend when it first came out, i walked through the door to his place, he gave me a tab of acid, put headphones on me and put dark side on the turntable, it's the only way to listen to it) but sgt pepper's really changed everything, not just music. dark side came out of "pink floyd pink floyd" the album with the white cover. relics, that one, psychedelia, all of it.
money for nothing and satisfaction have pretty much the same guitar sound.
they are both underrated.
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i've had a 66 J45 since the 70's that's pretty good, i paid £350 at the time. the newest guitar i have i think is a maton ebg808TE from 2014, and, well, you can't go wrong with maton - that cost me £950 - a snap. i'd avoid paying more than 1k for a guitar, i'm strictly a bargain hunter.
thing about guitars is like anything, if something is tried and tested and you do your research and know what to look for - positives and negatives - then buying "an older model" makes sense, it's shrunk and expanded enough times, it's played in, any faults would've shown up by now, you should know what you're getting. new guitars - i doubt i'd buy a new guitar unless i had one made for me, i prefer older guitars anyway but at least if it's not fallen apart ten years after it was made, it will prolly last another ten at least. having said that, i'm tempted by those PRS santana models...
and there is the pleasure factor, if you're going to get a million bucks worth of pleasure, well. what i did was i wanted to find out how good certain makes actually were so i'd buy one as cheap as i could and that's how i've wound up with two gibsons (j45 and j35) the maton, a larrivee and a plastic martin - the plastic martin is the best of them all, and cost the least £350 with case.
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i think every generation goes through this, i remember when i was a kid
in the 60's my dad arguing with my brother about whether the beatles or
the dave clark five would last - they both did, but obviously the
beatles made the headlines. my beef with today's music is, most of it
isn't music, it's bass lines, most of it isn't lyrics it's two lines
repeated endlessly, and like rick said it lacks delight, that magic
that's hard to define, i've spent forty years trying to figure out how
arnold layne and pictures of lily got to be so popular, a song about a
guy who steals underwear and a song about soft porn posters, today it's
songs about rolex's and fake tits. there is very little "wonder". i
think the importance of a "group" should be emphasised, art is usually
about angst of some kind and the bands of the 60's and 70's typify that,
the beatles, stones, who, floyd - they fought with each other, and
fought cos they wanted to be honest about the music, lyrics and
themselves. today the goal seems to be chart position, and those
rolexes.
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i have some friend's i see very occasionally, we all started learning guitar around the same time, i have never played with other people in my fifty years of playing so i get GREAT pleasure from playing with my friends. we love the blues and as we're all fairly crappy players we love simple chord progressions.
now one of my friends is always trying to learn me (!) music theory, i cannot absorb it, it is dyslexic to me, EVERYTHING he says goes in one ear and then over my head. but, what is really weird, to me, is when i play "rhythm" and he takes lead, he can't follow my timing. i swear i;m not doing anything out of the ordinary, i don't know anything about music, but a twelve bar blues isn't that hard to grasp, but even then i get accused of having some weird timing he can't follow. but i find the same when he plays rhythm and i take lead - i can follow him but his timing is weird to me.
just sayin.
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when i discovered ideogram i couldn't help myself, i generated a couple of thousand images in no time (i'm obsessive, i just posted my 14,000th the photo on instagram). what will i do with all these images, i thought?
well i got chat gtp to write me a fairy tale (this is eight months ago according to youtube) and it wasn't fantastic, but it was good enough to make a video and post. but then i had this notion of starting a channel dedicated to fairy stories, so i got chat gtp to do me two sequels to my fairy tale. they were crap. well, not totally crap, but incredibly derivative, it was glaringly obvious they were just variations of the initial story. so, that burst that bubble.
if you look at deviant art, and that genre of illustration, some AI generated images could be mistaken for human produced art, but there is a lot of AI art that is obviously AI, but also a lot of AI art that is incredibly "human" in feel, i did hundreds (if not thousands) of women;s faces, and some of them are staggeringly beautiful - "original by me: 'dusty struthers' - for my therapist" is my poor guitar playing, but AI generated faces.
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