The Bass Geek

Between holidays and travel (business and otherwise), it’s kind of hard to get a side project back on track. Nevertheless, the Playboy Psychonauts reconvened and started getting our set together for a March 3rd appearance at the Melody Inn’s Cocoanut Grove lounge night. In addition to brushing up some older material, we added a couple new songs to the repertoire, which can be harder than it sounds. Getting the sitar to sit comfortably in familiar pop songs can be difficult, due to fixed tuning issues. It’s something like working with bagpipes (which should sit around B flat and often drift here and there, depending on the skill of the piper). The sitar in this instance is set in C, although the frets can and do move around to accomodate alternate tunings. Given these circumstances, picking up the Cream tune that we did feels like a minor triumph. For those keeping score, that means our set list runs the gamut from Henry Mancini to Iggy Pop with several detours (from Motown to Manchester) in between. The drummer’s new stand-up cocktail drums also add some new vibes to the proceedings.

We also added an original tune to the mix, something we hadn’t attempted before. It just seems natural that any band with fezzes needs their own theme song. It’s a law or a cosmic truth or something.

Finally, I had some troubles getting the bass MIDI rig up and running Sunday afternoon - needed an oddly-timed reboot, and I couldn’t get the laptop to recognize the GI-20 interface. Turns out I’d neglected the driver when I reloaded the computer, and my reliance on “it just works” went a little too far. I should probably put a list together if and when this happens again to remind me what to install (or even better, work up a generic image for reinstallation), but that’s a lesson for another time. I could have just transferred the applications and my accounts from my old hard drive, but I wanted a clean installation.