December 31, 2017

Yesteryear
One year ago today: December 31, 2016, connected to nothing.
Two years ago today: December 31, 2015, New Years, meh.
Three years ago today: December 31, 2014, 8 channels, 1 at a time.
Four years ago today: December 31, 2013, all on the upswing.
Five years ago today: December 31, 2012, champagne at midnite with Estelle.
Six years ago today: December 31, 2011, missing every 3rd note.
Seven years ago today: December 31, 2010, ironic corporate piracy.
Eight years ago today: December 31, 2009, only 1 in 5 obeyed.
Nine years ago today: December 31, 2008, coffee is vegetarian, dude.
Ten years ago today: December 31, 2007, she got six months. Suspended.
Eleven years ago today: December 31, 2006, one song.
Fourteen years ago today: December 31, 2003, I missed BB King.

           Band news. We had a lousy rehearsal today, just mistake after mistake. The casual observer would conclude she never even tried to learn anything since last day. On the other hand I’m quite happy with what happened. How can this be? Because we’ve gotten further than with any other guitar player in years. Pull up a seat and I’ll walk you through this, if you don’t play music, this is not information you’ll get from any music academy in the country. Why is a failed practice a sign of progress?

           It’s because of how the learning curve works. Have you ever sung along to a favorite song on the radio and been sure you knew it. Then later, without the radio, you can’t sing it at all. Ah, because without realizing it, you were getting all kinds of subconscious queues from the radio and now they are gone. It’s a similar process of learning a new tune on the guitar and most people will strum along to a recording. I supply MP3s to ensure everybody is learning the same version. When the MP3 is gone, so are all the tiny prompts. Then, you show up for practice and there are suddenly a complete new set of inputs from the other musician.

           That’s what was really going on today. This is why I tell people a smart phone isn’t good enough. You have to be able to hear and know what the other musician is doing. And those prompts have to override any tendencies to play things some other way. In other words, the song has to be taken apart and put back together. I often hear flak that this is wrong, but I don’t hear those people showing me any better way. And I mean show me, not tell me. Otherwise they’re full of hot air, Glen.
           This harks back to the countless times I’ve warned guitarists who think they can get away with not learning the song by watching my left hand. That is not going to work with me because I’m not your ex-guitarist root-pumper. It took me a lot of years of wasted time before I learned to fire such guitarists after a single warning. Learn the song and quit trying to pull a fast one. Which gets back to learning the song. I’m aware the process has phases, we’ve studied this before.

           For instance after I play over a new song around eight times, I’m worse than when I started. But I recognize this is part of the process, I’m really taking the song apart. After some fifteen repeats, you get spells of self-doubt, what did I get myself into? At twenty you may hate the song, but then you begin to put it back together and it can often become a thing of beauty. That’s why Johnny Cash music can captivate many a bass man.
           The frustrating practice today was the lady unused to getting all her incoming tips from just the bass player. Ah, so it becomes imperative to know exactly what the bassist is doing, particularly when there is nobody else on stage. Too bad amongst guitarists this lesson is not universal. Quite importantly, after a short session of said mistakes, she figured out quite on her own what was causing the problems. Now she wants to go back to the MP3s and relearn the strumming based on what she heard me playing. And that represents a milestone. She must have gone over the music enough times to reach the point where such mistakes are possible. That means she has been practicing, after all.

Picture of the day.
Henderson, world’s most remote island.
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           The fireworks began before dark, so no sleep until the wee hours. Back to music, the new guitar lady took an instant liking to some of the weakest material I do, so I have plenty to learn myself. She doesn’t know that some of this music I just learned a short few weeks or months ago myself. I like to give new people a week for homework between sessions, but she wants to meet again this Wednesday. I’ll quickly determine if that’s a suitable interval. I also have to relearn some tunes that I learned to solo with, that is, I did not arrange what I play for a duo. What? You want an example?

           Okay, “Mama’s Broken Heart”. You know what a struggle that was if you’ve been reading along. By now it’s become one of the most over-arranged tunes in my book. I learned to fake it on the bass, not how to accompany a guitar. When I played a few bars of it to check my tuning and she took to it on the spot, saying she will learn whatever it takes to play that song. Which is the right thing to say around me.

           She also okayed a tune that has been so bothersome to other guitar players in the past that some have quit over it. That’s my inverted version of “Tennessee Flat Top Box”, the one where I pick the guitar runs on the bass. The objection is them saying I’ve just finished telling them not to do things like that. But they are wrong, what I said was do nothing that changes the character of the song, and playing this one “my way” conforms to that rule by being handily recognized as the same song, just with the musical roles reversed. The objective is novelty, not taking over. Their true objection is likely they want to be the one playing the lead, and I understand that.
           First of all, if they play the lead, the song would be nothing new. Just another ho-hum old song. If my arrangement makes the presentation novel, that’s something the audience wants. Plus, they must conform to the other criteria as well, the major one being they must still play every chord in the rhythm just like I play every bass note. What’s more, I handed them the completely arranged version, including the recording and the chord chart. They are 100% free to find a different song, arrange it so they are featured, and hand me the charts. That’s how I do it, I don’t expect them to learn my arrangements by themselves so I make it easy. Not one of them has ever gotten that far yet. Too much like work.

ADDENDUM
           I’ve got a mystery. One of my pastimes is the newspaper cryptogram. On my birthday, I received a gift magazine of them. These are simple substitution codes that I generally crack by noticing word patterns. I got one that had no easy solution, so I pinned it above my work desk. Over time I noticed that one of the words ended with an R, then a blank, then another R. This means there must be a vowel “O” or “E” at the blank. But the part of the puzzle I solved eliminated either of those as the answer.
           Figuring it must be a misprint, I waited a month and went on line for the answer key. Hmmm, wrong answer, not even the same number of letters. Going back to the original puzzle, I toyed with it over this morning’s coffee and began to suspect there is more than a typo at work here. The word pattern tells me that word is “HORROR”, but there are no double letters anywhere in the clue. Since persistence always works with these things, I noticed that if I presumed two different letters represented an R, then other words in the text made sense. Then it hit me. Every second letter in this puzzle uses a different substitution code.

           Saying to myself the odds of that happening by mistake are not reasonable, which means it was done on purpose. I thought back to that movie I once saw where government codes are tested for the geek factor. You know, to see if some independent party on the outside can solve the equation. But my solution of two codes would make it much too easy for that. Could it be I’m up against some puzzle-writer’s sense of humor? I’ve also noticed the substitutions are not entirely random, but offset, like the old Playfair grids.
           This implies the solution may involve figuring out two keywords to two Playfairs. Ah, a secret message. Let’s see how far I get with this. I’ll keep you posted.


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