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Stub Mandrel

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Everything posted by Stub Mandrel

  1. Stub Mandrel
    Three rules to walking basslines: Play in key Play in time Play whatever you want without contradicting 1 & 2 In practice what you want to do is play a sub-melody that 'pushes' the song along, a good walking bassline should sound totally aligned to the song, It can be repretitive or not have any repetitve figures, its the acme of good playing because it's like playing an ace guitar solo but has to stay grounded in the song not go off into the stratosphere.
  2. Stub Mandrel
    Next week i'm playing an assortmment of istruments (bass, guitar, mandolin) with my brother and SIL for my sister in law's birthday, and depping a coupleof songs with my other brother's band on bass. Today went with B & SIL to the hall to check it out and we did a few songs, one of which I've never heard before, and they all went reall well:-)
  3. Stub Mandrel
    Well I've come upto scotland to meet up with eh Tanglewood (and a large quantity of wine). My brother who had collected it also has custrad of my very first bass, a Hohner Jazz,, which was un to meet again, it has tiny guitar frets and a wide neck so doesn't feel very jazz but the action is negligible and it plays great. The pickguard has faded so all the red has disappeared! The Tanglewoood is behnd me: The Tanglewood was pure acoustic so i brought up an pickup whcih cost £9! from Indonesia. Clear that the action,like all tagelwoods was awful, A play wth the truss rod borught it down nearly 1mm, but I cut another 2.5mm off the bridge (allowing for teh piezo pickup) and all is now lovely. Not a buzz but low action. the bargain tuner/5 band EQ works absolutely great. It was traumatic drilling and hacking holes all over it! £400 guitar reduced to scrap in minutes 🙂 But my bro hoovered the sawdust out, I added a second strapbutton for my Chowny (R) elephant strap and its absolutely wonderful to play and hear! 🙂
  4. Stub Mandrel
    Tell that to a dyslexic...
  5. Stub Mandrel
    My brother and SIL enjoyed that but said that my best John Cooper Clarke sounded like Liverpool.
  6. Stub Mandrel
    My brother suggests adding anusol to that list. Piles can be very distracting...
  7. Stub Mandrel
    While waiting for our room at Pirate last night in the Corridor of Doom I noticed my case has not one but two Bass Centre stickers on it, if you count Elites.
  8. Stub Mandrel
    No lack of teenage rebellion lyrics there 🙂 We're all wasted, And we're not going home tonight.
  9. Stub Mandrel
    The irony is my music teacher said I had the best relative pitch of anyone she;'d ever taught. I could sing a long song unaccompanied and the last note would always be spot on. Last night our guitarist sang a bass riff for me and I played it straight off.
  10. Stub Mandrel
    http://theconversation.com/how-the-brain-reads-music-the-evidence-for-musical-dyslexia-39550
  11. Stub Mandrel
    I take the approach "I've be taught formally in school with generic music and violin lessons for a year, I've spent 40 years having a go at learning on and off may times with various levels of seriousness and taken singing formal lessons for a year as an adult where I pretended to be reading and still couldn't read something as complex as Claire de la Lune, so I'm probably a hopeless case". Interestingly I did an online test from Classic FM, where you had to identify classical music from the score, with multiple choice answers. The typical score was 4/14 and I got 9. I found it quite easy to match a song from its rhythm, and dynamics, but I think there was only one where I made any attempt to match the melody to the score. If I can read rhythm but not pitch after all the effort over the years I'm sure it's not just laziness...
  12. Stub Mandrel
    The whole thing started because he recounted an example of a company using a sham recruitment exercise to avoid paying those fees.
  13. Stub Mandrel
    Right from the beginnings of heavy metal the lyrics have been macho, vacuous and devoid of relevancy or social comment: Generals gathered in their masses, just like witches at black masses. Evil minds that plot destruction, sorcerer of death's construction. In the fields the bodies burning, as the war machine keeps turning. Death and hatred to mankind, poisoning their brainwashed minds... Oh lord yeah! Politicians hide themselves away They only started the war Why should they go out to fight? They leave that role to the poor Time will tell on their power minds Making war just for fun Treating people just like pawns in chess Wait 'till their judgement day comes, yeah! Now in darkness, world stops turning, ashes where the bodies burning. No more war pigs have the power, hand of god has struck the hour. Day of judgement, god is calling, on their knees the war pigs crawling. Begging mercy for their sins, Satan, laughing, spreads his wings... Oh lord, yeah!
  14. Stub Mandrel
    With respect, that's dog's danglies... For you maybe, but for me it's probably the most difficult mental skill I've ever attempted to acquire. Without willy waving, I'm pretty good at abstract, technical skills - maths, engineering, GIS, computer programming, including assembly language. I make a living as a consultant in an expert field, edit a popular specialist magazine and have written several books. Three things I struggle with - chess, Connect 4 and reading music. The two games I just make stupid mistakes in by looking right through what's in front on me; I'm sure it's a strong analogue to music because I simply cannot decode the positions of the notes except by painstakingly working them out one by one. I can vaguely follow a simple melody by looking and seeing if the notes go up or down by a little bit or a lot. I can relate their values to durations fairly well - I could easily develop this skill with practice. But I can't relate them to pitch. I think the main problem is my main skill set is 'seeing the wood despite the trees' and to read music it's the individual trees that matter.
  15. Stub Mandrel
    Reminds me of 'Great Rap Battles in History':
  16. Stub Mandrel
    Not... brown?
  17. Stub Mandrel
    You have now, that's a score annotated by Bernstein. Assuming what a conductor does is essentially the same thing.
  18. Stub Mandrel
    Examples are grace notes and triplets, but grace notes are fairly crude and not many triplets are three equal subdivisions of a note in real life. Don't get me wrong, musical notation is excellent and efficient and it must be great to be able to read it. Lesser ebings like me make the best they can of tab or other alternatives.
  19. Stub Mandrel
    What's voluntary about it? If anyone here can actually help me learn to sight read, I'll gladly accept their help.
  20. Stub Mandrel
    No, I'm just saying there are things you can't notate, but I would also observe there are various other ways to get what notation passes on; not least well-written tab, although it struggles with the same issues as notation. Any form of written music is like written poetry, it doesn't come to life until spoken, even if it's in your head.
  21. Stub Mandrel
    Rubbish! It's a well-proven fact that stickers add value to Kay guitars.
  22. Stub Mandrel
    As any amputee will tell you there's a big difference between the tools you have to use and what you can achieve with them. Written music is just one perspective on a piece of music. There's far far more to a performance than just a crude indication of note pitches, lengths and dynamics. With my pathetic work-it-out-one-note-at-a-time skills it's not difficult to see how totally inadequate a conventional score is for communicating, say, Led Zeppelin, songs - even supplemented by text annotations by Bonham and Page.
  23. Stub Mandrel
    Certainly true for the originals bands I've been in. The covers bands, we evolve our own treatment. This time round complicated by access to so many versions of the same song. Transcriptions can be wildly different let alone the fact that many songs have multiple versions. The main challenge for ANY song is not how to play it, it's agreeing how to end it!
  24. Stub Mandrel
    Mine are velroed, but batteries mean if I lose 9V I can just pull th power plugs out.
  25. Stub Mandrel
    At the end of '95 I was in an originals band that were pretty proficient, we just played locally but always went down well, and had a good, professional demo and distinctive songs. I changed top a much more demanding job, met my future wife and moved further away over the first few months of '96, and decided I had to put the band to one side, helped by a disastrous last practice where my amp sounded crap. Over a decade later I fixed the amp (just a broken joint on a smoothing capacitor!), but there were years when the only thing I played was an hour bashing on my acoustic. Life brings changes, and I started playing a bit more, and my duaghter started drum lessons, which meant regular sessions sitting in a music shop diddling with the guitars and deciding I ought to get an Epiphone electric. Then one day a courier arrived at the door. Inside the huge package was a guitar case and inside that was an immaculate but nicely worn Tokai SG - my brother had let me know he was sending em something, but not what! From there, my enthusiasm for playing grew slowly and steadily again and with encouragement I started to learn some stuff rather than just diddling the same riffs and runs. I started trying to play along to every song that came on Planet Rock. To my surprise I reliased my bass playing hadn't got worse, if anything my ear had got better and now there were tab sites to help me get the difficult bits. I realised I wanted to be in a band again, did a 'weekend warrior' event aimed at folks just like me. Had the good fortune to be matched with an excellent guitarist and drummer (in four bands, I've been blessed with four good drummers!) and behold it's happening again. And it's great 🙂 My one regret is that I now realise that I was actually a half-decent bass player back in the day, I'd always considered myself 'competent' and assumed people were being polite, what would my playing be like now if I had kept it up? So don't be afraid to take a break, but my advice is that 23 years is a bit too long.
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