You see, I’m getting concerned about my entitlements. Others tend to regard things like the spiraling national debt with detached fascination, sort of hedging an attitude that such things don’t directly concern them personally. I’m not so foolish. It takes five of my precious retirement dollars to put gas in the scooter. That’s ten times the price of when I first began saving those dollars.
The only difference between inflation and devaluation of a currency is that inflation doesn’t usually happen overnight. But it is on the way. All the heavy industries have fled America and the few commodities still made here must usually be purchased on credit. (Because the prices are so high.) I would rather have something set up in a place like Belize before the dollar becomes worthless. These are interesting times but one day soon we will wake up to find that everything imported suddenly doubled in price. I experienced this once while living in South America. As I look around my room, I cannot see a single product that is not manufactured elsewhere. A serious price increase means instant poverty for me so I can’t imagine the effect on those who have only credit cards to fall back on.
I might add that a lot of our canned and packaged food is imported, so don’t plan on that being available once the fresh foods run out. The process by which the government creates the money to pay its bills is not clearly understood by anyone, really. An utterly terrible “market correction” has been pending for years, I’m frankly amazed how it has been staved off this long. Don’t think even the military is immune, for as far back as 1973, the Syrians—mental dwarfs equipped with Russian missiles—were able to shoot down Israeli warplanes faster than American factories could build the free replacements. And that was a sideshow compared to Chinese capabilities today.
Back to the topic of Belize, the most expensive place to live in Central America. I could right now live like a prince in Belize. The country is Anglo-owned and Latino-operated. My Spanish is more than passable. If you study the publications, you well get a wide range of estimates as to the real cost of living, but one figure I rely on a lot is the GDP. Gross Domestic Product. The average person cannot live on less than the average income, for that tends to result in starvation, homelessness, you know, things like that, which are not seen in Belize much. The Belize GDP is $8,900 per year. A rule of thumb is you should be good for twice that before you move to a place. There are no suppliers of electronic parts in Belize.
Another phenomena is the drop in websites and good sources of information over the past few years. I was struck by how little is available and the real estate pages are focused on the high end properties. Reeling in the suckers. Belize, population 300,000, does not even have a Craigslist page. There is an island for sale listed in Belize for $36,000,000. It has a golf course included; the ad says 0 bedrooms.
JZ is not answering his phone. He tends to forget it on the dash of the truck. The driving distance to Charleston is 525 miles one way. That’s $81 in gasoline for the batbike, half again more if we take JZ’s truck but split two ways. The most economical trip would be the motorcycle towing the pod, which I would slightly modify in advance. With a slab of memory foam, I’d be good for who knows how long. If I can get to Seattle for $612, I can make South Carolina for $80. That sounds reasonable.
Then I went back to music practice. It is not so easy to find music suitable for the guitar-bass duo setting if the rhythmist plays no lead at all. That is the case here. But I dug up the old Stones hit “The Last Time” and adapted the groove to the bass. It is more of a melody accompaniment than strictly lead guitar, it even has a name. It is called an ostinato. I had to change one note, but I can play the pattern well enough to fake the song. Most guitar players will cringe when they hear me play this, but not nearly as badly as I cringe when I hear one of them try to play bass.
I have a question. When a robot cars take over driving, will it be like taking a taxi, or will the bureaucracy degenerate further and require a driver’s license to ride these things? I was watching a video on robots and, like computers, there are plans well afoot to make the device less of an assistant and more of a companion. This is, of course, unnatural. I’m using a computer right now that has more features built in for dummies than for getting anything productive done. This trend has become so overwhelming that it is no longer possible to get a good working computer at reasonable cost. It took seven weeks to find out how to get rid of the Calibri font and its equally asinine paragraph indent. (I am too busy most of the time to start hunting for obscure hiding places and usually correct the formatting manually.)
I don’t mind that they build computers designed specifically for disgusting social purposes, but that they do so at the expense of truly useful machines. They build in so many gimp shortcuts that I can’t tell you how many files have been lost over typos. Each generation of MicroSoft search software gets worse, the WIN 7 cannot find files that you know are there. All of this holds up progress while the manufacturers gear up to sell computers for just about any purpose except legitimate scientific inquiry.
ADDENDUM
Still here? Good, that means you want more information about music, a topic that has no ceiling. Computers and music. You’d think that is all I do all day. Let me tell you about a song that boiled my brainwaves today. Good old “Walk Away Renee. My advice to most bands who try to play it is to find a real bass player before you start. This tune replaces all others on record for having the most pukey versions by dismal guitar players who think they can play bass. Fact Number One: guitar players make lousy bassists. Not one of the countless “tabs” available were accurate, they all stunk badly of guitar-player.
I got the impression every band of the 70s recorded a cover of that song but none had found a decent bass player. It is nuts to think you can toss a bass to a guitar player and fool anyone but a room of drunks. I decided to spend six hours and re-write the real bass line. To make it sound right. Musically, not one of the tabs available were right. Every last one had been written by a dunce.
This blog is different, in that you can learn tricks of the trade here. Should you need confirmation guitarists cannot play bass, give a listen to a few verions“Walk Away Renee” on youTube. No two versions are alike (in an era when covers strove to sound identical) and each has indistinct passages where some half-retard six-banger is trying to cover up or slough off his lousy bass work. I finally gave up and re-wrote the bass line to “sound more like the original”. It contains every note in the Am scale. Extracting the notes that work from out of bad recordings is like cracking a code.
The closest match to what I came up with would be the version by Left Banke, but I’ll now challenge ANY bass-playing guitarist to a contest on this one. Guitar players have a fundamentally wrong philosophy of how bass is played. The reason the guitar “tabs” are funny—and not just this song—is the stark inability of guitar players to see anything or any different instrument in another light. Look at this cut and pasted chordie version of the instrumental break: (Bear in mind this is what a guitar player wrote as the BASS line.)
F#m Db(F) A G#m D F#m7 D B.
That is the kind of ranting done by a madman. Even if you know what that means, try playing it.
Here is my treatment, where the apostrophe is the actual note played:
Heartbeat: F#’-F’-E’-Eb’-D’-Db’-D’-B///.
To interpret this, heartbeat is a very common riff played by amateur bassists. It sounds like a heartbeat, lub-dub-dub. So each note is given that feel and repeated three times, in this case. (The term heartbeat is my own hint to dumb it down.) Try it, and you’ll instantly hear what is missing from the recordings. It's always easier once somebody else has marked the path.
“Walk Away Renee” consists almost entirely of passing notes which are important in bass playing and they are much different than the riffs or fills used by guitar players. Why? I think because of the construction of the fret-boards. Guitar chords, if they contain any of the passing notes, tend to place them in the wrong octave where bassists tend to play notes that can be easily reached over the wider fret intervals.
That may seems over-technical, but I use this knowledge to make my bass playing “look prettier”. And that is part of the reason I caution guitar players not to try to follow by watching my left hand. How does one make it “prettier”? First, I reconstruct the guitar chords on the keyboard. Then find the nearest common notes as they appear on a fretboard. Guitar players are inherently lazy so the nearest notes are always your best bet. I have never seen an exception.
From there, correct the octaves and find the passing notes. There are four groupings of these notes which apply in different situations. Often, they are played in the “key” of the next chord change, that is, before the other instruments get there. Funny as it sounds, guitar players often lack the confidence to do this on stage, because it really does sound better when done by a seasoned bass player.
Good question, Bill. Did I discover or invent any of this? Probably not, but I do know I didn’t get any help whatsoever and had to do it all myself. That counts for something. Maybe somebody else did it before me, but it’s not good enough to say those things—you have to show me some proof. I’m not blindly accepting that you just somehow “know” these things. I make it a rule not to learn anything alone if there is any study material available. If anyone else did what I do, they are hiding deeply underground. And part of what I do is publish my findings. I know they aren’t doing that.
