One year ago today: April 21, 2017, how programming got sloppy.
Five years ago today: April 21, 2013, at Forrest Gump Park.
Nine years ago today: April 21, 2009, spittin’ image.
Random years ago today: April 21, 2016, I solo at a coffee house.
One of my least favorite tasks is crawling around in attics. Nor is it the greatest blog topic. That’s why you get things like this broken nozzle getting top billing. That’s the kind of crap the world is made of now, it gave out from water pressure after sitting in the sun over the winter. I have all my brass fittings so I’m okay. But I would not want to replace them at today’s prices. Remember, I’m not a millionaire over here and I was also shopping for supplies to insulate the attic. That’s going to be fun. I’m just going to run R-13 between the rafters and see how well that works. I wasn’t happy with how much that cost either. How am I ever going to get to the Smithsonian and take Taylor out to dinner?
My rule of thumb is to play two new tunes each week of a house gig. I’ve found it takes just two to keep the show refreshing. Normally I do this by having a larger than needed song list, and staggering the sets. This time I’m at the mercy of how fast my guitarist can pick up the tune. I’ve seen this before and it’s the situation where she had no idea what she was getting into when she joined up. Like every other guitarist, she thought this would quickly bog down into a repeat of the last group or two they’d been in. Now, sixteen weeks later, the work load has doubled because we’ve used up all the easy tunes.
Another thing I’m used to is guitar players who never realize how bad they are until they meet a real bass player, such as myself. They prefer clone bassists who note-copy guitar-centric cover tunes. That amounts to zero guitar experience presenting a new or different piece of music with a bassist who can play such things. Ah, but then again, bass is easy, they think. And don’t understand why they don’t get five years to learn the tune like they did with the rest of their list.
Pondering such things takes one’s mind off the cobwebs and dust, I only got a few feet into the attic space. Vacuuming mice droppings, plaster flakes, all the neat things. To make things worse, the only space big enough to get into is right along the peaks, so the insulation and tarpaper has to be pushed in by stick and stapled only with the greatest acrobatics.
Changing of the guard.
Remember to use BACK ARROW to return to blog.
Then you get this electrical panel. You can see why I’m running out of space. There are three double breakers in there already. The stove, the water heater, and the former monster A/C that was also a heater. It’s now lying in the dirt on the north side, waiting to be cannibalized for robot parts. Particularly sought after are mechanical selection switches. They are hard to come by in this era of pushbuttons. Plus, the electric motors are useful, this one is destined to drive a home-made paint shaker.
I had no luck finding a ceiling fan bracket that fits a 24” rafter spacing. The alternative is to build a really solid frame and use a 16” unit. More crawling around. Hey, I didn’t do this when I was younger so now it’s like work. In my defense I didn’t know what I wanted except to get rich by doing things better. Boy, did I find out how badly that no longer works in this country. You got to do it cheaper even if that means plunging millions into debt. Interestingly it is still possible in America to borrow enough money to charge such low prices that you drive the competition out of business, then crank your prices. The only reason it doesn’t happen more often is the concept is self-limiting.
Ah, but once you are in business, you have to be careful of the laws. No predatory pricing, no vertical monopolies, no price fixing. If you are a startup, however, you can get away with all such things by stating it is your business model. It’s hard to argue with progress.
Back to the windows, I’m going to replicate some of the badly damages stoops and sills. Toward that goal, I invested in a set of nail punches. I’ve always devised something since I’ve never owned a real set before. Just before I threw away the package, I noticed it said the punches have a lifetime guarantee. Huh? They can’t mean my lifetime, so what is the lifetime of a nail punch? Until it breaks or gets rusty, I suppose. But you can’t complain, because for all you know, that is the life span of a nail punch. I see what you did there, Harbor Freight.
Where I had a man at the till try to get my phone number and information on if I was receiving their flyers in the mail. It wasn’t busy so he spent five minutes sparring with me over how Harbor Frieght’s privacy policy was somehow different than the VA or Equifax, or any of the millions of stolen identities. He assured their policy was better, but could not explain how. When I asked him if they’d put up a bond of $10,000 that my information would never leak, he conceded defeat. But reluctantly so. It’s amazing how indoctrinated these people have become. Sheeple.
ADDENDUM
Following is a bit of a musical recap, since the question I get asked most often by newcomeers (you can always leave me a comment) is what’s the background of what I talk about. Sadly, blogs were never designed to have an adequate index and I’ve never seen one except by reverse order of calendar days. It pretty much means a lot of reading if you want to find out what led up to today. I myself don’t recall where one could find the first mention of many topics in here. So here’s the abbreviated version of how my present band, a duo, came to be.
Yes, I have tons of experience, but not that much singing and almost zero at fronting a band. I’ve played bass since I was 12, but with gaps when I was in school, or something else interfered. Like a job. I didn’t really get serious about bass until past 30 when the current generation of limp-wrist finger pluckers began to arrive on the scene. They are not by any means the idea in bass playing and quite frankly, it looks funny.
I was always at the mercy of finding a compatible band that needed a bassist. I tried learning to sing many a time, including taking lessons. But all such training was predicated on you knowing at least how to stay on key. I didn’t and now I realize these “vocal coaches” didn’t know the answer either. Then, around 8 or was it 10 years ago, I went to a club that had truly bad Karaoke. I thought, I can do better than this and something clicked in my brain. Now, by memorizing the notes, I can sing—as far as others would say. Actually, I begin every note off and instantly “correct” it that it passes for singing.
Next, I thought, this is going to be easy. There are thousand of guitar players out there who will never be in a band because they cannot sing. I’ll just pick the one who strums the best and come up with a dynamite duo. As you know or can guess, boy was I wrong. I went through something like 33 guitar players without finding a single winner except Jag, who was 15 at the time and could play the songs, but had never heard of them. The others were a massive waste of time. This is the period where I began to really notice there was a pattern to their unsuitability.
Primarily, they all had “guitar-think” syndrome. I first asked all the guitarists I knew to audition and they turned out no more fitting than picking random players off Craigslist. Pat-B and the Hippie had fixed set lists, but they were already soloing (which they will live to regret) but the rest, twelve songs maximum.
They had rote memorized and average of twelve songs and could not or would not (same thing in my books) learn any more. Worse, the songs were from the same grouping which I eventually tagged “the Guitar Center list”. Hotel California, Last Dance, House of Rising, you know the exercise.
While not in equal proportions, these 33 people, plus another 17 since I moved to this area, have the identical bad traits. In any order, they are inability to learn new music, an attitude that other instruments are inferior, that they are the natural leader of a band, that everybody else’s taste in music sucks, and worst—they call themselves guitarists but often cannot strum entirely through a single piece of music. They will lie to get in with the intention of taking over the band and getting it to play “good” music.
Yes, that’s the short version. I drop the bad ones asap, then the next batch will call back before the next rehearsal and quit. That’s when they realize this band doesn’t involve them sitting back and waiting for their new underling to learn their already perfected song list.
By late afternoon, I’ve put in nearly five hours learning (since Thursday) the new band material. The vocals are the toughest. I have to memorize since I don’t really have an ear. I wonder if my guitar player put in even an hour. Probably not, but even if so, I question the effectiveness of that time. Is it being put to the best use? If so, why the constant mistakes on stage? She’s doing some of the work because she gets most of the chord patterns (most is hardly good enough) but still has very weak intros, always waiting for me to pick it up. Also, she hasn’t yet spotted the connect between the pace I count us in and the tempo I’m going to play the song.
Return Home
++++++++++++++++++++++++++
