zbd1960

Rather than piggybacking onto the threads of others, I thought I really ought to create my own about my own musical journey. For bass, I'm in the local Rock School franchise playing with the adult learners group. I have a lesson one week and the jam session alternate weeks. Bit of a hiatus with lessons due to tutor being on paternity leave... but he's back this week. I already know all about GAS - you're talking to someone who is into astronomy, hi-fi, photography... before we get to music and I have two viols, 2 cellos, 4 saxes, and currently 4 (soon to be 5) basses... I've been able to read music (bass and treble clef) since I was about 12. The viols mean I have to read alto and octave treble clef; cello means I have to read tenor clef as well.I've got G6 theory and I'd like to get G8 done. I started singing lessons in my 30s and have sung in various sizes of choir since then. I have performed in probably several hundred concerts over the years. Some have been major concerts in big concert halls. I've performed at Philharmonic Hall (Liverpool), Bridgewater Hall (Manchester), Symphony Hall (Birmingham), Royal Albert Hall (London). I've also sung in about two dozen of the UK's cathedrals. I'm not in a choir at the moment as I'm retraining to sing tenor instead of baritone - I hope to join a group in the autumn. I started cello and sax in 2011. I joined local community music groups straightaway as I know how important playing with others is. I'm working on G6 for sax and my teacher says I'm around G7 on cello. Currently, I play cello in two orchestras. For sax I'm struggling to find a wind band near enough that meets on a usuable day that doesn't conflict with other things. I do play sax in a small ensemble which I run, but it only meets once a month. Although I bought my Fender back in 2016, I really struggled to find a teacher I got on with and it was only just before lockdown hit that I found someone I got on with. It's not that I'm difficult (honest! 🤣) but a lot of people who put themselves out to teach beginner bass players find I start asking questions they can't answer... The pic is me and my cello a couple of weeks ago at my first concert since late 2019... The orchestral part of the programme was the suite from Peer Gynt (Grieg) and a medley from Lady be Good (Gershwin). A bit different from the Blitzkrieg Bop at Rock School...

Have to agree. This has been an interesting thread for numerous reasons. I became 'classical only' around age 10, maybe 11.... Started with mainstream classical/romantic composers (usual suspects). Apart form odd bits of Mahler, Richard Strauss, Stravinsky, I always struggled with C20th composers in those days. I moved earlier to the baroque through late teens and twenties. Move on a bit more and early music - renaissance and medieval start to become key. More C20th is slowly added over the years. The big change comes in my 30s when I start singing lessons and performing in concerts which exposes me to a much larger repertoire. Around this time I start to be interested in some jazz and some New Age music. I have not listened to 'pop' / chart music since about 1970. I am 'aware' of the names of various bands, I might have heard various pieces, but I tend to not have a clue about them. It's a conversation point between my bass teacher and myself when whatever piece we're working on for 'Rock School' I'll have either never heard of it, or I might recognise it, but no idea what it's called or who wrote it... Music is a large universe and we can't know everything. Is it odd that I'm not familiar with some popular genres/bands of the last 40 years? Perhaps, but we're all different and I'm an individual.

As a cellist I sympathise about the cost of strings. Fortunately you don't need to change them too often - a new C string for me is £125

Entirely true as it's all highly subjective.

Most serious classical music aficionados that I know are not particularly big fans of ClassicFM... it serve a purpose, but... there's only so many times you can take Rach2...

Bach is certainly a great composer. Vivaldi is significantly more varied than many realise - but he's writing in a very different style to Bach (by definition Italian rather than German baroque). Vivaldi's cause has not been helped by excessive use of a small number of his works to the almost complete exclusion of anything else (I'm looking at you ClassicFM - the Four Seasons, concerto for 2 mandolins, and the concert in C for soprano recorder). I'm currently working on Vivaldi's concerto in G minor to two cellos with my teacher. I play the cello 1 part. I've worked thorugh the first movement and just started on the second. The video includes the score.

7/4 is sometimes written as alternating 3/4, 4/4 to avoid frightening the horses, or to make the rhythmic pattern clearer, particularly to avoid ‘tripletising’ the 3

I agree. In terms of vocal range I'm pretty sure he's no better than a lot of modern pop singers who struggle to cover more than a fifth. As a base level, a competent singer would usually have a range of about 2 octaves.

I use Designacable too

Elvis was always on the radio in the 60s when I was a kid and my mum loved him... (she was a teen when he erupted on the scene). I never liked him.

I should add that disliking football and having no interest in it at all when growing up in Liverpool in the 60s/70s.... didn't help... (I still can't stand football, I just have to accept I;m in a minority on that one)

Yeah, been there...

I was 50 when my dad died of cancer. He had seen me in many concerts (and many other things) some really big ones. All I ever got was negative feedback.

My dad was never supportive of anything I did, so I'm envious of those who didn't have that experience.

Well, my preferred genres are renaissance and baroque (although others are OK). I have sung quite a lot of both. I like to play renaissance consort music on viol, but there's absolutely no one round here to play that with. I get to play some baroque on cello. The orchestras/bands I've played cello and sax in over the years tend to a lot of film music and musical theatre medleys, with the odd symphony by Beethoven, Haydn, Dvorak, Sibelius etc thrown in. I don't yet play bass in a group

Ugh SAP/Concur - as a now retired employee of a large company that was how we claimed our expenses. It was horrendous. One of the clunkiest and user hostile systems I've encountered. We decided it was a conspiracy to deter us from submitting expense claims...

I discovered a couple of years ago that there is a plaque on the wall of a hotel in Shrewsbury commemorating Paganini performing there...

I know you'll all go 'uh, what?' but as a teen in the 70s this all passed me by... although I was aware of them as people in my class used to talk about them etc. In recent years, I've got to know people who've worked with them so I am more aware now than I was nearly 50 years ago...

I would hope that no one would take those ads seriously. They're incoherent, don't make sense, spelling and grammar are both optional. I would hope that that's enough red flags to deter people...

Just played in my first concert since 2019 due to Covid. Mix of Grieg - Peer Gynt- and Gershwin.

I think I'd be looking for a second opinion from another GP that's more sympathetic.

I suppose I'm a 'serious' hi-fi person... It was around late 80s/ early 90s that cables started to become a 'big thing'. I remember Hi-fi Answers (magazine) got obsessed with it... It got to be such woo-woo that I stopped buying the mags. It got to be absurd. There is some mileage in quality of cables, insulation, shielding, connectors... but I think the law of diminishing returns kicks in quite quickly. So is the £10/m speaker cable better than the bell-wire stuff you used to get? Pretty sure yes. Is the £200/m cable much better than the £10/m? Almost certainly no. A big issue is no one that I am aware of has come up with a scientifically provable way of impartially determining cable 'quality' beyond things that can be measured like resistance, capacitance, inductance, purity of conductor etc. This means that either it cannot be measured, or we haven't found out 'what' to measure. This means it is highly subjective and that also means it's open to suggestion, which is how the snake oil merchants get in.

OK I'll start off with admitting I'm probably weird... but I never developed any interest in rock/pop etc when I was a youngster - I went straight to classical. I have no idea why anyone would listen to rap. You can probably make a stronger argument for it being a form of urban poetry than music. As I've got older, my tastes have changed and widened. These days I like some jazz, New Age, and World stuff. In order to get meaningful bass tuition I had to join my local branch of Rock School and it's hilarious as "We're going to play x" and I haven't a clue what it is, no matter how famous... sometimes I might recognise it. (My intention is to play bass with a big band and possibly some jazz.) OK so onto unpopular opinions... In the jazz world I've got no time for Coltrane. Randomly playing 3 million notes a minute might be technically very accomplished but leaves me cold: it's just noise. I'm not a fan of Beethoven symphonies 3, 7, or 9. The reasons are quite complex. Some is over exposure, some is I think they're very difficult to do 'well' as consistent works, especially 9. Everyone raves about the last movement (Ode to Joy) but it's actually quite weird and the other movements suffer. I think the issue is that too many performers treat LvB as a 'heroic romantic' composer and he isn't - he's late classical/transition.

There's not a lot that can be done with fixed frets. Older fretted instruments like the viol (viola da gamba) have moveable frets. They are just loops of fret gut tied onto the neck and you move them to tune them. Players who are better than I am will will adjust the tuning of the frets to some sort of temperament (e.g. sixth coma mean tone etc.) that will produce better tuning in specific keys. Some will even 'split' the frets (they are double loops) so that for example the diatonic semi-tone of C# in the key of say D maj is distinct from the chromatic Db... Complications like that are why keyboards and fixed fret instruments settled on equal temperament.

I suspect some of this (i.e. awareness of tuning) is down to musical background and context. If you're playing in a band with wailing guitars with a lot of overdrive etc. then tuning is not going to be that obvious. If you're playing in a set-up where the sounds are much cleaner and purer, then tuning/intonation are going to be more obvious. The other factor is the harmony and the function the note you are playing in that harmony. If you are just playing roots and fifths, tuning issues will be less apparent than if you're playing the major third.