caitlin

There's tempo and there's time. There's pocket and there's feel. There's pace and there's energy.

Everyone needs to have internalised time and the only way to truly get that down is to play with metronomes, that's everyone's job.

Time is what no-one plays, you can be up the beat, down the beat. The best bands share that common pulse implicitly and perhaps often un-spokenly. It MIGHT line up with the little blinky light on the metronome or it might breathe a little, but if it's not shared then each player pulls in their own direction till it falls apart.

Having the drums sitting perfectly on the beat and the bass pushing just slightly, not sped up but early on the beat can give everything a driving energy but with the pace and the beat really solid, right? That's not the bassist trying to speed up, the drummer will never follow, that's the tension built around a shared idea of the silent pulse.

I can reliably hit whole notes at 30 bpm without barely thinking about it.

I have a metronome with an optional blinkenlight and a little vibraty pad that one can feel in the dark to get a tempo from, and a footswitch to flip to the next programmed tempo.

Just now, LukeFRC said:

your basses have got more colourful recently. What are they?

I remember when you would show off 6 basses all made between 1971 and 1974 in three colour sunburst and tort plate....

Yeh, they're really sharp looking in that colour scheme in that room.

I'm not sure your stereo image is going to work too well with those shelf speakers mind

3 minutes ago, LukeFRC said:

On a serious note. Would a rack case with a few units underneath and a tilty rack for the desk on top - sat on a cheap table - be simpler? 

Yes but it wouldn't fit, so there's that. I expect you've possibly not experienced living your life in a small room with two drumkits in it and their damnably inconvenient dimensioness

So this is a complete threadjack, perhaps I should make my own thread to put this rubbish in, but since it IS pictures of bits of music room: I'm building a tiny desk for my logic pro laptop and my (stupidly large for my needs) mixer, for various reasons of tiny room it's being built to slip OVER a stored bassdrum and under a piano so is just a frame I'm going to cover in plywood with a hole cut out to let the mixer sit in the frame on some metal legs I can get from B&Q for a fiver each.

I'm going to sneak 4 or 5 units of rack between the bottom of the desk and the top of the bass drum, I hope.

Get to the point, caitlin. Just in case (although I have no need for it yet) I have a patch bay and wonder where to put it. it can either go down near thigh height to be fiddly when i'm playing the piano, or it can go here in the way of the mixy slidey thingys

or here all fiddly behind the wiring that goes to the soundcard inputs (and curiously blue, like it was underwater):

Do you kids have any experience of this kind of rubbish or should I drag myself off to the gearslutz forum to get laughed at for not having any decent microphones?

i was looking at cort also. staying 4 for a while though yet.

On 12/03/2019 at 17:54, Frank Blank said:

I’m putting the Samsara video up (again) but only because I’m not sure what bass he’s playing..?

 

Not soul seller but promised land, I've had a wee go at pointing my ears at it and fumbling at it with my fingers. I wonder if anyone would be willing to spare the time to see how far off I am with this score (possibly with tab): http://cat.scot/promised_land_tab.pdf

A pup isn't much more than a coil of wire around a metal core, they fail the same way any winding does, either open or short. If the wire cracks anywhere along the length, electricity is gone from it. If it shorts *somewhere* then performance will suffer in weird ways.

You can of course rewind a pickup if you can be arsed and can count to quite high numbers or have a stepper motor you can employ

2 hours ago, greghagger said:

Very simple to me, and I agree that there is no downside to being able to read music.  My only caveat, is for someone learning, also work specially on developing your ear alongside learning to read. 

I am glad of this thread because I realise I am working exclusively on dot to finger placement and I should be doing some interval audio work or sutin, certainly attempting to explore the difference between a minor chord and major one and probably a bit of flat 5 and add7 add9 because my ears are crap.

What resources are there for this? She asks like a tragic noob, LOCK THE THREAD NOW

Isn't a pirouetting sousaphone doing a bit of a leslie kind of effect though?

1 minute ago, Richard R said:

What was the question again?

Can you lick your own elbow?

Dunno what's go into me, but with the help of my talented assistant and on the ongoing theme of 'tidyness' in the creative (HAH, I have never created music) spaces we got this far with some solid storage today.

Just some sanding to do and some plywood to go on to the framing and stuff won't fall through.

The wall behind is knackered from where someone literally *smashed* a wardrobe system into it, something need to be done to pretty *that* up, but short of ripping out the drywall and redoing it, I feel.

My vibe is 'rehearsal studio drum kit storage', which is my excuse for perfunctoryness and ugliness.

No backflip! Disappointed.

2 minutes ago, Stub Mandrel said:

If I can read rhythm but not pitch after all the effort over the years I'm sure it's not just laziness...

Nope, it just turns out you're a drummer after all

10 minutes ago, paul_c2 said:

If you see yourself using alternate tunings

Heh, as a complete beginner I'd probably better get used to THIS one for a bit first. I wouldn't actually know where to start.

I think there's a difference between reading music and sight reading in that it's the difference between reading a book 'in your head' and 'reading aloud'

When adding the performative aspect there's two things you've got to do. I can rapidly 'work out' a phrase and then learn it, then next time i look at that phrase i 'remember' it and play it hardly reading it at all. That shortcut is what's stopping me sight reading because every time I reach a large pitch gap or 'tricky bit' I panic.

I'm working really hard at the moment at getting direct recall between the notes on the stave and where my fingers want to go for that note, otherwise I've got a two step process, figure out what the note is and then work out where it is on the bass.

basically this makes sure that if I ever change tunings I'm ruined

4 minutes ago, Geek99 said:

You could teach yourself - it’s not hard 

I hope this is true, it's just like anything else you can practise. start slow, speed up. "sight reading" is just being able to read faster than the music is proceeding, isn't it?

haha, reaching for Louis to back any of this up is uh, i... er. hmm.

I do find a lot of 80s and 90s rock hard to listen to now with my old and wisened feminist ears, or maybe it's just the tinnitus?

5 minutes ago, Richard R said:

My main band job is actually FOH sound engineer. Mute buttons or faders down will end any song, no problem. 

I have yet to see any form of standard notation for FOH. "Piano up a bit in this section", "Nice bass riff in two bars time, duck the keyboards " That sort of thing. 

INVENT THIS NOTATION. I have always maintained that sound engineer is intrinsic part of band for BEST effect and whatnot... what if there was a way to help whoever's riding the faders keep up with the changes.

Surely theatre has this covered for scene changes and so forth? annotated scripts.

Music is so haphazard, too many times choosing the set list backstage.

2 minutes ago, Twigman said:

We don't do covers - none of the bands I've ever been in have been covers bands.

what are you? talented?

30 minutes ago, Twigman said:

The total opposite of what it is to play in my band (or most bands IME) - nothing is ever written down - everything is performed from memory (with improvisation if someone goes off track)....totally different ball game.

Hmm, I guess I've not noticed other people's processes in my bands but I've always listened to covers, charted it, compressed the chart till it fits on one page, then played it till it's committed to muscle memory.

So I do the whole thing, listen, hear, write, read, read, read, never read again. But then drummers... thick, right?

This ^ do not overlook ventilation, it's a perforation so a frequency leak, but also with all that mass and the fact that the walls are literally turning sound into heat, and your sweaty human bodies in there they can get unpleasantly hot very quickly without ventilation, commonly the fresh is delivered from the floor line and extracted at the top so convection helps the process along.

Just now, Jus Lukin said:

Or to put it another way, as much as we like to pretened we are cultured and clever, the human race is doomed without a damn good thingy or two!

That or some really quite expensive laboratories and willing volunteers

4 minutes ago, Unknown_User said:

I have long loved PUSA, but they're always banging on about insects and other animals. In nearly every song.

Lots of great tunes and good entertainment value though.

I think you're being a bit unfair, they're only on about animals and insects in most of the GOOD songs.

Anyway, some of it is metaphor. you're just not *getting* it, man 🤣

Anyway everyone DOES want to be Naked and Famous and we're definitely not going to maaaaakkkkeeee eeeeeiiiiiiit,

You can usually spot a room in room by there being two doors and a weirdly wide door jamb.

None of this stuff is not true, but I really like PUSA lyrics.