Post 4 of 90.
Out in the afternoon to my favorite coffeeshop. The barrista gives me a free pound of coffee and shows me his new tattoos on his arms, still crusty as they heal up. I describe seeing a work friend way back when get a celtic knotwork tattooed at the base of her spine and how her face squinched up as the needle hit bone.
I read the first chapter of G's Beelzebub's Tales.
A girl nearby is wearing a pair of noise cancelling Bose headphones, which must come in handy in the noisy environment of this coffeeshop, which overwhelms most music on the Apple earbuds.
My pal E, regular coffeeshop denizen and men's clothing salesman extraordinaire, is obsessed with Jennifer Connelly and evaluates all women against her standard. Headphone Girl rates well, but still does not reach the heights of beauty embodied by Jennifer Connelly (no woman probably ever could). He's pleased to know I've been wearing the new shirts and coats he sold to me a few months back. We plot my return to the clothing store for a semi-secret half-off sale in a few weeks so I can load up on new shirts and pants. I tell him I'll see him next year.
Torrential rains most of the day, now quiet.
Frequent sightings of passing ambulances while in the coffeeshop are a bad omen. I resolve to head home and stay off the roads tonight.
Back home, the cat has gotten in a fight and has some kind of infected area that is now draining. He'll be going to the vet ASAP. I whip up a quick veggie dinner and watch a documentary on the history of marijuana, full of hilarious outtakes from Reefer Madness. Ah, those hopheads and their crazy jazz...
Ear training on Absolute Pitch Blaster. It's hard to spot the high C note right now, especially since it's not in the short Bach outtake used as the "melody word" to refresh the sound. As usual, I struggle through the first wave of aliens, then the second wave is much easier. I need to see about getting the new version of the program.
More emails to Loren talking about strobe tuner weirdness, harmonics, etc.
Phone call to Don to catch up and plot out ideas for swinging back into action with both Ohio Guitar Ensemble and the Chicago Group.
Now down to the studio to practice and record. I intend to ring in the New Year with a guitar in my hands.
Sunday, December 31, 2006
Saturday, December 30, 2006
over the river and through the woods
Post 3 of 90.
Day off. Went out of town for family stuff and a very rich dinner at high altitude over big city streets.
"Rock N Roll Hoochie Koo" comes on the XM car radio, and is soon banished by one family member for not being "soothing." We later also discover that live cannon fire is a connecting factor between AC/DC and the 1812 Overture.
AC/DC--songs about sex, drugs, rock-n-roll, explosives, and electricity.
Another revision to the Trinity, which I saw carved into an Indiana high school lab table circa 1986:
"Sex, Skoal, and Rock-N-Roll!"
Tired. Shortly to bed.
Mild weather in the high 30s, no precipitation.
Day off. Went out of town for family stuff and a very rich dinner at high altitude over big city streets.
"Rock N Roll Hoochie Koo" comes on the XM car radio, and is soon banished by one family member for not being "soothing." We later also discover that live cannon fire is a connecting factor between AC/DC and the 1812 Overture.
AC/DC--songs about sex, drugs, rock-n-roll, explosives, and electricity.
Another revision to the Trinity, which I saw carved into an Indiana high school lab table circa 1986:
"Sex, Skoal, and Rock-N-Roll!"
Tired. Shortly to bed.
Mild weather in the high 30s, no precipitation.
Friday, December 29, 2006
day and night, night and day
Awoke in the early afternoon. 15 minute sitting and then made an overdue phone call to CS.
In the evening, watched Serenity on satellite TV.
Then it's ear training on Absolute Pitch Blaster (I think I've been through about three hundred waves of Space Invaders-type aliens, and I'm still working on several octaves of C). I've noticed lately during the exercises that when I hear C in a chord, arpeggio, or melodic bit, the note seems to light up in my mind as it passes, as if to say, "I'm C!"
Guitar practice. I find myself shortening the strap to raise the guitar a little higher in response to work on Position of Readiness. It seems to be a more comfortable position for relaxing the right arm and allowing the guitar to support the weight. Some practice standing. When sitting, the lower edge of the guitar brushes my right leg and I have a habit of leaning the guitar on that leg and then slouching onto the guitar.
Several iterations of a gradual pressure exercise on the right hand to inhibit a tendency to reach down into the strings with the pick, way farther than necessary. I'm trying to get calibrated to using mainly just the tip of the pick. There's also sometimes a strange reaction to look at in the ball of the thumb in response to putting pressure on the string.
First Primary in the left hand, no-tempo practice looking at balance and transfer of weight between fretting fingers, especially when switching strings. I also notice a sympathetic reaction in the right hand, where it once again goes way too deep with the pick.
My Petersen tuner cannot seem to get a satisfactory sound on the low G and C strings, and it shows drastically different intonation in response to how I have the eq set on the preamp. The harmonics within these heavy strings also seem to be skewed. The 12th string harmonic shows flat vs. an open string that is supposedly in tune. Then when I tune the fretted low D and tune it to the open 4th string D, and my ear tells me it's correct, the tuner then shows the string to be flat across the board, both fretted and open. Maybe the tuner has trouble tracking these low strings (although it doesn't seem to have any problem with my Fender bass). When in doubt, I'll go with my ear for these two strings.
In the evening, watched Serenity on satellite TV.
Then it's ear training on Absolute Pitch Blaster (I think I've been through about three hundred waves of Space Invaders-type aliens, and I'm still working on several octaves of C). I've noticed lately during the exercises that when I hear C in a chord, arpeggio, or melodic bit, the note seems to light up in my mind as it passes, as if to say, "I'm C!"
Guitar practice. I find myself shortening the strap to raise the guitar a little higher in response to work on Position of Readiness. It seems to be a more comfortable position for relaxing the right arm and allowing the guitar to support the weight. Some practice standing. When sitting, the lower edge of the guitar brushes my right leg and I have a habit of leaning the guitar on that leg and then slouching onto the guitar.
Several iterations of a gradual pressure exercise on the right hand to inhibit a tendency to reach down into the strings with the pick, way farther than necessary. I'm trying to get calibrated to using mainly just the tip of the pick. There's also sometimes a strange reaction to look at in the ball of the thumb in response to putting pressure on the string.
First Primary in the left hand, no-tempo practice looking at balance and transfer of weight between fretting fingers, especially when switching strings. I also notice a sympathetic reaction in the right hand, where it once again goes way too deep with the pick.
My Petersen tuner cannot seem to get a satisfactory sound on the low G and C strings, and it shows drastically different intonation in response to how I have the eq set on the preamp. The harmonics within these heavy strings also seem to be skewed. The 12th string harmonic shows flat vs. an open string that is supposedly in tune. Then when I tune the fretted low D and tune it to the open 4th string D, and my ear tells me it's correct, the tuner then shows the string to be flat across the board, both fretted and open. Maybe the tuner has trouble tracking these low strings (although it doesn't seem to have any problem with my Fender bass). When in doubt, I'll go with my ear for these two strings.
Thursday, December 28, 2006
tight scrummy
I just returned home from a day spent in town on errands and on general loafing about in my favorite coffeeshop and then at the bookstore. It was one of those days when I ate next to nothing and my caffeine intake was enormous.
Now preparing for some ear training on a computer program (Absolute Pitch Blaster) and then to practice.
I think tonight will be some basic left and right hand stuff, especially some very slow/no-tempo practice to study moments of balance on the fingerboard and with the pick applying pressure to the string. I'm sure there will be plenty of tension to let go of and other less-than-useful physical starts and reactions to inhibit and direct. (A while back I read an essay by a classical double-bass player talking about the need in playing to replace muscular tension with "pressure, weight, and balance" wherever possible. This spoke to me in an Alexander sort of way, so I've been keeping that in mind in practice.)
Things I need to get organized with in practice:
1. Metronome benchmarks for Primaries indicating where they tend to break down
2. Inventory of repertoire I know, listing parts I know and metronome benchmarks
3. Fretboard familiarity--this is a major weak area, the one I always avoid working on. Shinkuro showed some interesting exercises on my Level 2 that I have yet to implement.
And I think that's as much as I want to think about scary stuff like practicing before I manage to frighten myself away from the big, bad amount of work I have to do on the guitar in the near future.
In other areas, I'm looking at getting a ProTools LE system. I checked up my original receipts for my Powerbook G4, which stated I had the RAM expanded to a full gig, but when I look at the "About this Mac" window in the pulldown menus, it says I have 768K. Hmmmm...
I read on Wikipedia that the Powerbooks had heat dissipation issues that tended to damage and disable the memory boards, so I'm suspicious about that now. That could possibly explain why my machine is a little slower than it used to be. Naturally, my Powerbook model is one of the models that Apple is still refusing to service for this problem.
I may take it into the Mac Store next week and see what they can tell me. If there's nothing wrong, I might see about adding some more memory. If not...well, I found myself looking at officially refurbished MacBooks as a possible option. I woud like to avoid getting a new machine for recording if this one can be cleaned up to run efficiently, but the refurbished machines were attractively priced, so we'll see. I'm not going to settle on anything until after New Year's, so there's no immediate hurry.
I have a 18-track Roland machine, which is still a nice-sounding piece of equipment, but it uses a proprietary Roland file format, so I can't export files, which would be nice if I hope to collaborate by distance and trade sound files over the Internet. The age of this unit is beginning to worry me lately, too. If the hard drive crashes it could be either pointlessly expensive to repair or even impossible to repair due to the obsolescence of the system.
My drum machine, a very good one that can achieve some very human-sounding rhythms, is also from about 1993, and I sometimes get the feeling it could die at any time. I've also gotten sick of the 7-8 hours it can take to fully program out a three-minute song. It looks like some of the new software plug-ins coming out are both faster and way more realistic, so it would be nice to work faster when the songwriting bug hits.
Once 2007 rolls in, it'll be back to work at the day job, so I'm also going to have to manage my time more carefully if I want to keep moving forward as a Crafty Guitarist. I tend to fritter away time hanging around in the city after work because I hate the commute so much, so I'm going to have to make some choices about whether I have that luxury and instead get back home to practice. Having a performance on the horizon tends to motivate me, but I suspect this is actually a general pattern of laziness extending back to my time in high school band when I hardly practiced my saxophone, but still managed somehow to make passable music. "Passable" isn't good enough anymore.
Now preparing for some ear training on a computer program (Absolute Pitch Blaster) and then to practice.
I think tonight will be some basic left and right hand stuff, especially some very slow/no-tempo practice to study moments of balance on the fingerboard and with the pick applying pressure to the string. I'm sure there will be plenty of tension to let go of and other less-than-useful physical starts and reactions to inhibit and direct. (A while back I read an essay by a classical double-bass player talking about the need in playing to replace muscular tension with "pressure, weight, and balance" wherever possible. This spoke to me in an Alexander sort of way, so I've been keeping that in mind in practice.)
Things I need to get organized with in practice:
1. Metronome benchmarks for Primaries indicating where they tend to break down
2. Inventory of repertoire I know, listing parts I know and metronome benchmarks
3. Fretboard familiarity--this is a major weak area, the one I always avoid working on. Shinkuro showed some interesting exercises on my Level 2 that I have yet to implement.
And I think that's as much as I want to think about scary stuff like practicing before I manage to frighten myself away from the big, bad amount of work I have to do on the guitar in the near future.
In other areas, I'm looking at getting a ProTools LE system. I checked up my original receipts for my Powerbook G4, which stated I had the RAM expanded to a full gig, but when I look at the "About this Mac" window in the pulldown menus, it says I have 768K. Hmmmm...
I read on Wikipedia that the Powerbooks had heat dissipation issues that tended to damage and disable the memory boards, so I'm suspicious about that now. That could possibly explain why my machine is a little slower than it used to be. Naturally, my Powerbook model is one of the models that Apple is still refusing to service for this problem.
I may take it into the Mac Store next week and see what they can tell me. If there's nothing wrong, I might see about adding some more memory. If not...well, I found myself looking at officially refurbished MacBooks as a possible option. I woud like to avoid getting a new machine for recording if this one can be cleaned up to run efficiently, but the refurbished machines were attractively priced, so we'll see. I'm not going to settle on anything until after New Year's, so there's no immediate hurry.
I have a 18-track Roland machine, which is still a nice-sounding piece of equipment, but it uses a proprietary Roland file format, so I can't export files, which would be nice if I hope to collaborate by distance and trade sound files over the Internet. The age of this unit is beginning to worry me lately, too. If the hard drive crashes it could be either pointlessly expensive to repair or even impossible to repair due to the obsolescence of the system.
My drum machine, a very good one that can achieve some very human-sounding rhythms, is also from about 1993, and I sometimes get the feeling it could die at any time. I've also gotten sick of the 7-8 hours it can take to fully program out a three-minute song. It looks like some of the new software plug-ins coming out are both faster and way more realistic, so it would be nice to work faster when the songwriting bug hits.
Once 2007 rolls in, it'll be back to work at the day job, so I'm also going to have to manage my time more carefully if I want to keep moving forward as a Crafty Guitarist. I tend to fritter away time hanging around in the city after work because I hate the commute so much, so I'm going to have to make some choices about whether I have that luxury and instead get back home to practice. Having a performance on the horizon tends to motivate me, but I suspect this is actually a general pattern of laziness extending back to my time in high school band when I hardly practiced my saxophone, but still managed somehow to make passable music. "Passable" isn't good enough anymore.
Wednesday, December 27, 2006
the 90 day challenge
I'm going to take on a 90-day blogging commitment, starting tomorrow, which should place the 90 day mark at March 27, 2007. At that time, I'll take a look at how things are going and decide then whether to take on an additional 90 days, make some other commitment, or stop.
My intention is to blog mainly about musical issues and the sorts of things that come up in my ongoing music studies, in general, and my work on the guitar in particular, as well as music performances and guitar circle work with the Ohio Guitar Ensemble and the Guitar Circle of Chicago . I'll talk about practice routines, ear training, whatever bits of theory hold my interest at any particular point, etc. I'm not planning to say much of anything about my day job, politics, or any deeply personal issues, given that this is a public blog with my real name on it (unless, of course, such things are directly relevant as seen through the filter of music practice and performance).
I'm also planning to publish entries on a time-delayed basis, probably several days behind. Some other diarists/journalers/bloggers in the larger Guitar Craft community have adopted this method. I definitely like the idea of being able to look over what I've written at least one more time before I release it out into the world. If I'm travelling and unable to get online, then I will fill in backlogged entries when I return.
At minimum, if I have absolutely nothing relevant to say, I'll report on the weather for the day.
My intention is to blog mainly about musical issues and the sorts of things that come up in my ongoing music studies, in general, and my work on the guitar in particular, as well as music performances and guitar circle work with the Ohio Guitar Ensemble and the Guitar Circle of Chicago . I'll talk about practice routines, ear training, whatever bits of theory hold my interest at any particular point, etc. I'm not planning to say much of anything about my day job, politics, or any deeply personal issues, given that this is a public blog with my real name on it (unless, of course, such things are directly relevant as seen through the filter of music practice and performance).
I'm also planning to publish entries on a time-delayed basis, probably several days behind. Some other diarists/journalers/bloggers in the larger Guitar Craft community have adopted this method. I definitely like the idea of being able to look over what I've written at least one more time before I release it out into the world. If I'm travelling and unable to get online, then I will fill in backlogged entries when I return.
At minimum, if I have absolutely nothing relevant to say, I'll report on the weather for the day.
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