RhythmJunky

I've been learning piano/ keyboards for about 7 or 8 years. I get online lessons every fortnight, which work well and don't have any wasted time (meaning I don't have a 30 min drive each way etc). It took me a long time to find a tutor who didn't want to just work through the grades. There's an entire industry based around them here in Ireland, so much so that they made a film about it. ('Making The Grade'). I had a local tutor once who suggested Phil Coulter songs when I said I wanted to learn more contemporary songs. I was thinking 'Fairy Tale of New York'. She was suggesting 'Puppet on a String'. I didn't last much longer with her. Funnily enough I had a choice of excellent and local bass tutors when I wanted one. BTW don't forget that you don't have to do Classical grades. There are Jazz grades and Rock grades these days. I occasionally throw in a piece from one or the other from the respective books into my repertoire.

I still laugh about when I was walking past the window of a charity shop in Wimbledon (my son was living there at the time) and there was a cello in the window. I still like to think about the decision behind donating it 'well Crispin has moved on and needs a better instrument and Arabella is much more into expressive dance....'

Yup. Same here. Education (and youth in general) is wasted on the young.

I've admired how much use of 3D printing you've used in your build. I'm sat here reading this in my post Christmas lethargy when my mind started to wander and I ended up thinking if it'd be possible to 3D print an entire cabinet. Or maybe a frame into which you could bond ply or MDF panels for damping. That'd be an interesting build. Just a thought.

Whenever I used to interview people I always used to respect someone with an OU degree higher than from a 'bricks and mortar' place as I recognised how much they must have actually wanted the degree. I do have to admit some bias though. I did an MBA with the OU when I was doing a job with a huge amount of travel (some years up to 80 % of my life was in a hotel room).

I know that this might not be the main point of what you were saying, but i worked with a tech once who used to brag to anybody that would listen, that 'no child of his was ever going to go to university'. I don't believe a university education to be the be all and end all, but I could never understand why he wanted to handicap his kid's futures so much.

That was an interesting Christmas present. Was she under the tree or wrapped separately ?

They know that all their listeners have reached the age that by the time they've played a dozen songs, we've forgotten what the first one was anyway. Buying any more than a dozen would just be a waste of money. Now what were we talking about again ?

I was given a Digitech Trio which I'm planning to use with my synth workstation (Roland Fantom 08). I purposely asked Santa for the old model, as I didn't want his elves making additional features that I didn't need ( and the new one was approx 3 times the price) .

Absolutely love it. It has a great 'Lego' vibe to it. Nice one.

I just used 4 of those to rebuild a piano bench so that I could bolt the padded bit down to the leggy bit. Great job. Very neat.

Nothing irrational with that. In fairness I can enjoy other small, folkie stringed instruments as much as the next person. In moderation and in the right environment (ie typically an Irish bar with the Guinness flowing like water) But not ukuleles, and absolutely, definitely, without any question whatsoever. Not banjos.

I've had some success with activated charcoal which apparently isn't the same as your regular barbecue briquettes. I bought a car recently that smelt a bit plasticy inside and I left an (open) lunchbox full of the activated charcoal in a footwell for a while. I took it out before it got kicked over but it took most of it away.

Folks, This is really too good not to share. Apologies if its already been posted elsewhere but I couldn't see it. Miss Chile stuns everybody at the Miss World contest with her death metal vocals. Too good not to share