The Bass Geek

I’ve spent many hours telling laptop users to buy a nice, padded bag to safely protect their investment. Not only do I want them to keep their laptop in working condition for their sake, but I don’t want to deal with it once they’ve damaged it. Small equals complicated in most cases, and pulling out all of those parts can ruin an otherwise wonderful day.

My dog Sadie agrees with keeping padded bags, but for different reasons. Having evidently tired of her crate and bed, she carefully emptied out my wife’s laptop bag recently and made it her new residence. That part doesn’t surprise me. It was the neat pile all of the removed gear had been arranged in. Kinda cute, kinda disconcerting.

Since things are beginning to slow down a bit in my little section of Fountain Square, it seems a good time to log in what I’ve been doing.

• As I write this, whoever is kicking for the Atlanta Falcons just shanked a field goal into what appears to be the hot dog stand of their stadium. It’s late in a preseason game, so I’m expecting to see that kicker on the waiver wire soon. Football seasons is creeping up, and I made it through the first telecast of a Steelers game without a burst blood vessel or cardiac event. This bodes well for the overall season, I think.
• I just finished a run in the house band at the American Cabaret Theater for their Elvis retrospective. The review from Nuvo was abysmal, but there were large crowds that were generally enthusiastic (even as they trended towards the nursing home set). Once I get the songs out of my heads, I’m sure I’ll better appeciate playing with the caliber of musicians I did - they were quite fantastic.
• The Playboy Psychonauts managed a couple gigs with new material (”Tears Of A Clown” seems to go down especially well). I’m still only using the MIDI bass and laptop on a couple songs, though, and I want to expand on that. I’m just running a couple of percussion loops and using some additional synth sounds, but I want to work some more into the songs. It’s only a three-piece, so there’s some room to tastefully work with. Realize, of course, that I say tastefully while wearing a fez and swinging the rhythm to “Blitzkrieg Bop.”
• The Warner Gear managed a 2+ hour gig at the Pine Room in Nashville, IN with no issue, which was a blessing given the amount of new songs we had to throw in to fill out such a set. I had a bad feeling about the show at the start, but it turned out that it was just the premonition of accidentally playing Sheryl Crow on the jukebox during the set break.
• There should be three books with my name in them somewhere hitting the shelves within the next few months. I’m in the author review phase of “Expert Podcasting Practices For Dummies,” which means my editors are throwing my words back at me with all inadequacies revealed, begging for correction. This is always the part of the process where I swear never to take fingers to keyboard in such an effort again, but this time things seem to be moving along well. I say this with a few chapters still unseen by my eyes, though, so I could be walking directly into a literary tiger trap. I’m seeing the other side of the process as a technical editor for “Second Life For Dummies” and “Composing Music Digitally For Dummies,” both of which are flinging chapters at me with great rapidity. I think I’m caught up now. I could be wrong.
• One of the cool things about the composing book is that I’m playing more with Sibelius, a music composition and notation software package. I don’t do a lot of work with sheet music, but my recent experience with it left me a bit cold. My bright idea to play the examples for Teach Yourself VISUALLY Bass Guitar on the MIDI bass into a notation program worked so poorly that I had to go back and edit everything manually. Part of that could be MIDI bass itself, which can be a little inaccurate by nature. Part of that could be my seeming inability to hit that millisecond window that causes the note to actually show correctly, instead of wrapping itself in a tangle of slurs and dots and ties, rendering it so much tonal gibberish. Sibelius promises to be more forgiving, but I haven’t had time to test it yet.
• Recently loaded on my iPod were the new albums from Talib Kweli, Common, along with CDs from King Crimson, Trey Gunn and Kenny Garrett. The first two were because they were indeed new, and therefore begging to be experienced. The King Crimson and Gunn recording I blame on my ongoing fascination with the Stick (only ~$4000 to go before I can afford one!), and Kenny Garrett because he’s coming to town this week, reminding me that I should see this show.

So there you go. Things are looking calm for the foreseeable future, but the last time I wrote that, two books and about four shows came down the pike. My desire for rest time is beating me for writing that last sentence.