One year ago today: January 31, 2017, explosion? What explosion?
Five years ago today: January 31, 2013, totally Americanized.
Nine years ago today: January 31, 2009, that loud & booming voice.
Random years ago today: January 31, 2003, that’s 25 years ago now.
Awwww. Geeee. Awwww. Lookit the little doggie. Awww. Neat. Meet Valentine, the little gal who likes me best. Here she is on the sofa up in Combee Settlement. Sure, you can pet her, she’s as quiet as she looks. That fur is the softest. Awww, such a cute little doggie. Okay, now sit down because the rest of the news today is about 50/50 good and bad. Or maybe 30/70.
Today was the pits, rehearsal was a disaster. That’s a good sign. Really? Yep, it was predicted and I just wasn’t expecting it so soon. There is no substitute for band management experience and so very few musicians have any. This was the worst practice yet, but by now you can guess the situation. If not, I’ll walk you through it and let you take it from there.
This band is grappling almost all new material. Around 80% of my list is new, so it is not like I had any major head-start with this. She is struggling both with the material and with the novelty of strumming so recently introduced. She reverts to comping and I get a laugh because that used to happen to me. It’s a hard habit to break. That right arm just will not obey the brain waves. So, I walked her through around 15 of the best tunes we’ve got. This is where infinite patience comes into the formula. She knows if she comps on stage it is going to sound goofy compared to what I’m doing. Comping will work, but call it sub-optimal.
What else has changed is I’ve advised her to begin practicing through her full setup as she intends to use it on stage. The two purposes with that are familiarity with your gear and to watch how prepared she is for things that go wrong. Musically, stage gear does sound different each time, I’ve wondered if it was the humidity or air pressure, trust me, it is not just your hearing because I can hear it too. It also means playing at higher than practice volumes, and that is where she is learning not to comp at their own peril. It sounds pretty bad against my bass lines and I find it is always best to let them spot that on their own. She did.
There’s another quirk about learning. When I say, as I have for decades, that you must play a song 30 times to own it, there are conditions for that. I do not mean just strum through it. I mean you sit down in learning mode and play along to the recording. If you get past the first verse and screw up and start over, then get halfway to that tricky part and start over, and finally get through the whole song, is that three iterations? Nope, sorry, that is only one. One of thirty. You have to blast through the entire song start to finish in learning mode. You are learning how to recover from your own mistakes.
Discouraged yet? Too bad, there’s even more work involved. How about the times you have an extra hour, so you grab the guitar and start playing through the song list. Does that count against your 30? Nope, that is ordinary putting mileage on, which you are expected to do anyway. When strumming along, you are not in full learning mode. Playing through the list is helpful, definitely, but this activity is not a true learning experience.
Rundle Hall.
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You bet all this work can be discouraging. That’s why I did it much earlier in life. The rehearsal was terrible but the situation is great. Normally it takes half again as long to smack into this obstacle, where you sound worse than when you started, and worse than the previous session. I do my best to minimize the impact, and to keep the band thinking past that. What went worst for Lady Nik today was the strumming. As we move toward stage time, the pressure is on and it is depressing because she thought she had these songs down pat. (How well I know the feeling.) Then, as soon as the gear is set up and the situation is more realistic, things go blank. She was angry enough with herself that I said nothing. Yet, none of this would happen if she wasn’t determined.
What went right? Very little. It could be we are moving fast enough that the foreseeable problems are simply arriving sooner and in batches. There’s another factor that has no substitutes—stage time. She saw how my bass playing was carrying us through the rough spots. It might sound harsh though the fact is, it is best they become confident in my ability to do this. That, however, is not a comfort zone. With it comes the stark realization of what you will sound like next to me on stage if you put on a second rate performance. That usually gets them motivated.
She knows the pressure to play out is on the way. I asked her to put out feelers, since she’s in an area of town I do not know. She knows two other duos, by the way. A lady guitarist with backing tracks and another with two guitar players. (Both these options I solidly rejected years ago for good reasons.) I hesitate to play where I’m known because too many people have heard me stand in with bigger bands and sing Karaoke. She’ll find something because she is becoming conscious of externalities like how much it is costing me to show up at her place and that she knows I could split for another band instantly if the right opportunity arose. To counterbalance that, consider the financial incentives.
When we first began to rehearse, she was amused but also mystified by how I knew which parts of each song were the “tipping points”. I knew the locations where the audience was most likely to compliment or put money in the jar. The explanation is sheer experience. It’s no big deal, I would say things like when we get to this part of the song do this little extra note or move, or in some tricky passage how to count it out so we look like we aren’t even paying attention to each other. Yes, folks, a lot of these deeds are as planned as the rest of the show. Well now, as we play through the songs, even done badly, she sees the results of doing these things from the word go.
Boy, does she see what I meant. I’m also stepping her through how to play surprise endings, which she finds hilarious. At first many musicians are hesitant to admit any viewpoint on money, which I understand. No need to be like that around me. She has learned to spot the tipping points on her own has already declared her confidence that we will “fill up the tip jar”. We will.
The only thing in a musician’s life that never lies is the tip jar.
ADDENDUM
For those who may never have seen this, it is a Win 95 style defragmentation operation in progress. It actually shows the sectors as they are being moved around. It was a vastly better system than the newer defrag utilities in Windows. Today’s apps show wimpy bar graphs or none at all. You got here a prime example of how MicroSoft, when it occasionally gets something right, ‘improves’ it out of existence.
The purple section is your MFT, Master File Table, which usually tucks itself around the middle of your hard drive for reasons of efficientcy. I believe the blue files may be programs. This display fills your whole screen, showing every sector on your disk, so if you know what it going on, it can be fascinating to watch. Later, the red fragments will be re-assemble into consecutive files using the white spaces shown here.
What intrigues me is how each defrag app is different, but none of them seem to ever defrag the entire hard drive. They always leave a lot of fragmented files even though there is obvious empty space to continue. Nor does it help to run the different apps in series. They have a tendency to ignore the same fragments and I’ve never seen a reasonable explanation. What I would like is to find, or write, a defrag app that shows not only the files being moved, but names them and explains if they are left fragmented.
There is also another operation run after a defrag, called optimization, which is similar but moves files from the front of the disk to the back, then returns them in a slightly better configuration, making pass after pass, but also never quite finishing the job. Be aware that defragging does not free up any disk space. It simply makes your computer more efficient by re-grouping any fragments of data into longer single adjoining chains for slightly faster access.
There are some files which must exist at certain addresses and cannot be move. Sadly, this program, called UltraDefrag does not indicate them. The program is standalone, you do not have to install it. Just download it and run.
It seems to include a handbook, but then they make it useless by requiring that you be on-line to read it. As ever, be vigilant against defrag programs that want to upload your data, or that need to access the Internet to display reports or results. Trust me, you do not want any of your data on the cloud. Ever.
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