More charts...

I finished writing out The Red One today, and it is much easier to read now.  I am trying to get it and Soul Cowboy memorized.  I started to work on Question and Answer.  It is an interesting tune.  I tried to play it on acoustic, but had a hard time hearing my acoustic thru my pickup and headphones.  What I did hear was... well...  not that great.  Have I been spending too much time working on electric these past few days?


till next time...

Writing out charts...

Today I spent time copying over the chart to The Red One.  The Metheny Song Book has a written bass part for this song, and I think it is pretty crucial to the feel of the tune.  The format of the chart in the book has two guitar parts and a bass part.  This makes for lots of pages, for what is really a fairly simple tune.  I think it is good to go back and write the part out, however I have noticed that my writing has suffered over the years.  I am spoiled from using software to write out the charts.  I think it is good to write out the charts particularly because it makes me think about how the rhythms should be played.  I have never been very good at reading rhythms.  When I copy the charts out, I try to follow the good practice of spacing the rhythms appropriately.  For example, a quarter note should take the same amount of space as 2 eight notes.

Roughly something like this:

|♩ ♩ ♩ ♩ |
|♫   ♫  ♫  ♫ |

In other words, a bar of eight notes takes up the same physical space as a bar of quarter notes.

I have already copied over Soul Cowboy and transcribed the melody to bass clef.  That makes it much easier to play the head.  I do read treble clef...  It is just a bit of a mind-game to keep the clefs straight in my head.

Duets...

I have been trying to squeak in a few minutes here and there this weekend on my bass.  While I have had a few good run-thrus with headphones on Soul Cowboy and The Red One, a good part of my practice time has been playing with Joel and Taylor as they practice piano.

I think it is a good experience.  I remember when I would play duets with Mr. Bashford.

All for now.

Trying to fit it all in...

I have been trying to do a blog post every day, and practice every day recently.  It has been one of my priorities.  Today, I did manage to get this blog post... well...  started at least.  I also played for just a few minutes with Taylor, and also worked on a couple of bars from Soul Cowboy.  I was hoping that I could get some time in just listening to some tunes I am working on while riding my bike this morning.  That worked OK, I guess.  I have been trying to use the Amazon "Cloud Player" for music.  It works OK, if you are on a high speed connection, but at 3G it pretty much sucks.  I downloaded my music from my "Cloud Drive", to my Android, and that seemed to work better.

I am not sure how much posting or practicing I will be doing for the next few days since my Parents will be in town visiting.  Hopefully, I will at least get some stuff posted, but if not...  well...  I guess it will just show that my priorities are in the right order.

'till next time...

A Good Gig...

Today, I accompanied my daughter's as she played piano in her kindergarden music class.  It was her Birthday, and also her "Teach the Class Day".  A day in which she was supposed to teach her class something that she knew how to do.  She chose to teach her class the words to "Steamboat 'Round the Bend".  It is a song that she is learning for her piano lessons.  I arrived shortly before her class started, and then talked a little about my bass (I brought an Upright for the event) to show the kids.  They thought it was pretty cool.  (I say that based on the wide eyed-open mouthed expressions that I got when I bowed a low F for them!)  Taylor did a great job.  I think that our practicing actually helped.

A good gig, to be sure.

Till next time...

Joplin...

Pat Metheny grew up in Lee's Summit, MO.  It is about 140 miles due North of Joplin, MO.  My brother was born in Joplin, MO.  Yesterday, a tornado killed over 116 people in Joplin.  May God be with their friends and families as they try to understand this senseless tragedy.

Recorded before a live audience.

That line always confused me.  How did they record TV shows prior to live audiences?  I mean, did some guy exploring a cave discover a ancient trove of old sitcoms?  Was there some impact crater some place which, at it's center, had some type of alien container of old shows?

Once I realized that before meant "infront of" and not "prior to", the mystery cleared up a little.  But still, who cared?  Then I realized that they were trying to make it clear that the laughing wasn't all just pre-recorded.  (Even though, I am sure, in some cases it was).  Times have changed.

We went to see a great production of Annie today at the Children's Theater Company in Minneapolis today.  The cast did really, and my only complaint about the performers was that it would be nice if they could have trained Sandy to face the audience a little more rather than showing us his back side.

Aside from that, the one thing that really was a drag was that the music was pre-recorded.  I find that to be, well, insulting.  I am sure that it is easier, and certainly cheaper, to record the music track and play it back along with the performance.  Particularly a show like Annie, which does call for a pretty full pit orchestra to pull it off.  That said, I really don't think that it is true to the musical *art form* (if you will excuse me calling it that) to not have the real thing.  Also, for a company like the CTC not to use a live orchestra is an extra bummer because kid's miss the chance to see that aspect of the show.

I hope that the CTC will continue to use live musicians for it's musical productions.  I really do think it makes a difference.

Until next time... 

The end of the world as we know it...

Its the end of the world as we know...  and I feel fine.  The band was the Insomniacs, and I played with them in college.  It had played in bands before.  Rubber Nurse was one.  It was a great band;  less focused on becoming famous and more on just having fun.  The Insomniacs were a little different, however.  Not so much obsessed with becoming famous as trying to make the best music possible.  Sometimes we were close, and other times we were not.  I still remember standing on stage with that band and thinking...  "This is it.  I am gonna think back some day and remember just how great this was!" I can honestly say that I tried to enjoy it will all I had.

I play big band Jazz and some combo stuff now.  It is more compatible with my life.  (Starting a gig at 9:30 is not something one does with 2 small kids at home, a day job and...  well...  a few more years under the belt.  Not that I am responsible...  just getting older and being responsible tends to take a bit less energy, I guess.

I just wonder...  someday will I think back about my life today and remember just how great this is?

That's all for now.

Practice, practice, practice...

One thing about music that I both love and hate is practicing.  I hate it because it reminds me all too often of the things that I cannot do yet.  At the same time, I love the reward of learning something new, and then actually having that work out on a gig.  Last week I spent some time working on a funk tune called Hit the Ground Running by Gordon Goodwin.  It is a monster funk chart, and has some very specific rhythm section stuff.  We pretty much nailed it (or at least came fairly close) at our gig on Tuesday.  It was rewarding for me in that I pretty much carried the last riff for the rhythm section (who were all subs but me).

My kids are now starting piano.  We try to *encourage* them to practice every day.  When I hear them practicing, I remember how, when I was a kid, I was forced to practice for 30 min every day.  How my parents put up with sqwacking Clarinet, I'll never know.  I remember that I never got to watch Three's Company because that was when I was supposed to practice.  In hind sight, maybe I am the better for that.  At any rate, I did get better at clarinet, which lead to saxophone, which (after the briefest of detours thru Bassoon) finally lead to Bass. 

That's all for today.  And yes...  I did practice for 30 minutes today.  ;) 

The songs for Pat Metheny Clinic...

On Monday, I received the songs for the Pat Metheny clinic arrived.  They are:

Soul Cowboy
Message To A Friend
Bright Size Life
Question and Answer
James
The Red One

I am familiar with all of them, except the first one.  It is a very interesting tune.  At first listen it sounds like  a standard 12 bar blues number.  The version linked to above is not the one on the Trio 99-00 disk.  I am looking forward to learning it.  The other numbers are pretty standard stuff.  The last one was a Scofield/Metheny collaboration.  The second one is a nice example of Metheny/Hayden.

I am continuing to think about the tunes that I am going to bring to the clinic, but have not made much headway.

We had a nice gig last night with the Big Band.  Bob mentioned that he is thinking of arranging a Spivak tune, with a little bass feature section.

Well, that is all for now.

The King of Swing.

A while back, I asked my bandmate, Bob Parsons, if he could recommend some good reading on big bands.  He suggested that I check out "The Swing Era" by Gunther Schuller.  It is the send in a series about Jazz.  I am only a very short way into the book and already I am captured by it.  Schuller is a great writer.  That combined with his insight into Jazz as performer, composer and arranger make his book somewhat difficult to put down.  While I did spend several years in music school at a fairly respected music school, one thing that I never did get much exposure to was the history of Jazz.  Most of that I have come across on my own, and by catching the occasional TV show, or by reading Jazz by Ken Burns (not cover-to-cover, of course.)  I also have the Smithsonian Jazz history collection on vinyl.  Just noticed a cool site for Smithsonian Jazz too.  All that said, I am learning a great deal from Schuller's book.

So far, the book has focused on the "King of Swing", Benny Goodman.  I really was not all that familiar with Goodman despite the fact that I started out on Clarinet.  It is fascinating to read about how Goodman really didn't feel that Jazz was all that commercially viable despite his own success.  It is also interesting to read about the many players and writers (Gene Krupa, Harry James, and Fletcher Henderson to name but a few) that had some involvement with Goodman.  I was also astounded to read about Schuller's assessment of Benny's Bass playing brother, Harry.  In Schuller's opinion, Harry Goodman was not that great a bassist.  In fact, the writes about how he feels that Krupa had to do a good deal extra to compensate for Harry's effort.  It is very difficult for me to hear the bass in some of the those old recordings due to several factors, and so I guess I never really thought about it much.  I also feel like the rhythm section in those old recordings are really not as developed stylistically as the other sections seem to be.  Most of the time it just seems like "chomp-chomp-chomp-chomp".

At any rate, I would highly recommend Schuller's book if you have any interested in Jazz.  I am already learning a good deal about the subject.  I should have probably read the book years ago!

That is all for now.  My charts have arrived for the Pat Metheny clinic.  More on that next time...

Cypher 2.

I have finished my rough draft melody for the Cypher tune.  It is in the 4/3/4/2 pattern and I was able to preserve the key note (F in the 4th bar of the melody.)  Here is the most recent version of Cypher.  I have a rehearsal tonight, and am going to to try to carry my Modulus in my gig bag.

More later.

Much progress was made over the past two days on the new tune. Here is a rough idea of the song so far (without melody.) It is pretty much the 4/3/4/2 idea that I had before, but the bridge is in 4, not 6. I am working on a melody, but it is not there yet. I have just one note in mind. Kinda trying to build around that idea.

The other progress was made with the MIDI synth thing that I have been working on.

The first part of this was to create a *preamp* that could boost the signal of my bass so that the Arduino can process it. I have managed to create such a preamp. Here is a video of the preamp. (Note the nice little LED action!) The next part of this will be to take the voltage that is currently driving the speaker and try and sample the frequency and use that to trigger a midi signal. It should be doable. I have several examples of triggering MIDI. The real trick is going to be getting a little Arduino to sense the frequency (quickly). I have seen a video (see my last post) that seems to indicate that this is something that can be done. I guess we will see.

In other news, I did hear back from back from the folks that run the clinic, and it appears that there will be 3 other bassists there so far. That is just about the ratio that I was hoping for. I do hope that some drummers show up. Otherwise, it will be kinda lame. They are sending out tunes from the Pat Metheny Song Book for us to review before the clinic. In my case, it will be my second copy of the Pat Metheny Song Book, but hopefully I will get a signature on this one!

I noticed in a post from a bass player acquaintance of mine from way back that he was traveling with his bass. I asked him if he was carrying on his bass for his trips, and he said that "it's not even doable post-9/11". I was hoping to carry on my fender jazz on my trip to CT, but it now looks like it might be more likely that I will be shipping my Modulus to the resort instead. Kind of a bummer, but It should make the trip a bit more comfortable anyway.

At any rate, that is the update for now.

Happy Mothers Day!

Last Night's Gig...

The first and third Tuesday of every month my band, the Acme Jazz Company plays at the Shorewood Bar and Grill. Even if you are secluded in the most remote corner of the twitterverse or have only 2 friends on Facebook, this is probably not news to you. We have been playing at the Shorewood for over a year now, and except for the fact that they seem determined to NEVER get their stage door fixed (which is a HUGE issue for upright bassists, drummers and keyboard players) it is a pretty good gig. The room is great. The house not only tolerates Jazz, but really embraces it and the crowd (being any group that out numbers the band) are almost always good.

Last night was a pretty good night for us as a band. Playing publicly a couple hours a couple times a month is a very good thing for me. If you are ever looking for something to do on a Tuesday night in Minneapolis, head on out to the Shorewood Bar and Grill in Fridley. There is a good chance that we will be playing, and you might enjoy what you hear.

My regular Metheny diatribe will return next time... Now I am a bit tired.

Here is a tune from the evening. Pure Gold is the bass feature. We don't play it much...

Oberheim TSV-1...

Back in high school, we had one of these... It is an Oberheim TSV1. It was very cool, and I was very fortunate to be able to mess around with it. At the time I was starting to get into Metheny, as well as continuing to listen to bands like Rush, Yes and others. Around the same time, I became acquainted with Metheny's Are You Going With Me?". This tune feature a synth that Metheny was playing... with his guitar. I have always been interested in making my guitar sound like... well... anything other than a bass. I tried plugging in my bass directly into the Oberheim TSV1. No luck. I had no idea what I was doing. I did manage to create some pretty cool sounds, however. I even eventually figured out how to make it do that thing as the beginning of Tom Sawyer by Rush. For the more hip... Tom Sawyer (but no Oberheim TSV1.)

Years later I got interested in the Arduino platform. The Arduino is a open source microcontroller, a small computer that interfaces easily with electronic hardware. While browsing the internet yesterday, I came across this interesting post for an Arduino based guitar tuner/midi synth device.

Now my goal is to build a Arduino based bass tuner/synth that I can use in my odd meter tune... Just 'cause it would be fun.

Stay tuned.