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.