| Getting sounds OR Keep it simple, stupid |
[Sep. 8th, 2008|09:26 pm] |
Just spent quite a while with my POD trying to get some sounds for the revue. The POD has lots of built in effects, and allows me to switch presets using a MIDI foot controller. But it ruins my clean sound, so I think I'm just going to stick with the Boss distortion pedal and forget about the POD.
And I'm slowly becoming one of those analog fascists I used to pick on. |
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[Sep. 6th, 2008|07:30 pm] |
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Kind of drowning in work at the moment. On the plus side, I'm discovering cool things. I just don't have a lot of time to appreciate them just at the moment. |
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[Sep. 6th, 2008|01:49 pm] |
Modules are driving me crazy (I'd prefer not to divulge how many hours I've just spent on my algebra homework), so I'm going to take a short break from that and write about Science Revue band stuff.
There are about four weeks until the Science Revue. We don't really know what we're going to be playing yet, apart from a few tunes that are in the show for sure. The music is more in the funk/pop vein than jazz, so my Strat turns out to be just the thing. Our rehearsal space is in Wesley College, which sounds great as it's free and at Uni. except that it also means that occasionally we get there and find that it's full of cupboards or someone's vomited in there and it didn't clean up very well. There used to be some amps there that we could use, but someone seems to have taken nearly all of those, so we have to bring our own. Rock'n'roll!
We're playing something with some simple tapping in it. I'm not much of a finger tapper, but in this case it's a pretty straightforward part. We also use distortion on a tune or two, so I've been having fun with my Hypermetal pedal. The only other effect that I think we might need to make the tunes sound authentic is a wah pedal, but we could do without it. In spite of my perfectionist nature, I think I'm more of a pedal person than a rack/multieffects person. But then again, I don't use a lot of effects. For me, the more things there are to fiddle with, the more distracting it is, and the less music I end up making. |
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| It's not just coders who write programs these days ... |
[Sep. 5th, 2008|04:56 pm] |
We're writing a lot of code in statistics at the moment. It made me think about how so many more people are writing programs these days. Of course, a lot of these people aren't really drilled in good coding practices, and a lot of the code is throwaway code. Or, it's written as throwaway code. As most programmers know from experience, most code lives longer than you intended.
This is kind of a pity, because if you're under time pressure to produce a statistical analysis, you might write something that no-one else is going to be able to understand afterwards. Today in a prac I wrote some R code
xbar_1 = apply(skulls.mat[1:30,], 2, mean)
xbar_2 = apply(skulls.mat[(1+1*30):(30+1*30),], 2, mean)
xbar_3 = apply(skulls.mat[(1+2*30):(30+2*30),], 2, mean)
xbar_4 = apply(skulls.mat[(1+3*30):(30+3*30),], 2, mean)
xbar_5 = apply(skulls.mat[(1+4*30):(30+4*30),], 2, mean)
M = rbind(xbar_1, xbar_2, xbar_3, xbar_4, xbar_5)
Now, I ask you, what does it do? We seem to be applying a thing called mean to some bits of skulls.mat. Then we gather it all up together in M. No idea what the groups of 30 mean. Statistics code written by my fellow students is often even worse, being absolutely chock full of magic numbers and mysterious constants. I think it's pretty awful code. What I actually wanted to write (but didn't know how to write) was
group_means = by(skulls, Year, mean)
M = t(sapply(group_means, as.vector))
Now, I'll ask again, what does it do? Well, it seems we're taking the means of things in skulls, grouped by year. Then we stick the result in M as vectors. This explains the mystery of the 30s above - we had 30 skull measurements for each year. What would have happened if we received a new data set, with group breaks in different places? We'd have had to start from scratch! In fact, this is what most of my fellow stats students do. Every problem is a totally new problem. This isn't getting the most out of a computer.
I don't know what the solution is. I'm just throwing the question out there. Schools already have computer classes as it is. Perhaps eventually programming will be seen as an essential skill for everyone, like arithmetic.
Oh, and a big thanks to the authors of gvim and R for providing tools that let me get a lot done under pressure. |
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[Sep. 2nd, 2008|04:36 pm] |
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I don't post about peak oil much anymore because I think most people are at least aware of the issue. But I came across a particularly good site recently, Chris Martenson's crash course. It has a very good explanation of how environment, economy and energy interact - probably the clearest I've found. |
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[Sep. 2nd, 2008|04:31 pm] |
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I'm half-way through the semester already. Soon I'll be finished my undergraduate degree. It's starting to seem like it's all going by very fast. We had our last undergrad. probability theory lecture in stats today. I think I'll miss it. |
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| BuckyBall tomorrow |
[Aug. 29th, 2008|07:00 pm] |
So I took the week off from practicing to let my finger/hand/arm/shoulder get better. It's mostly better, which is great, but that was frightening. I've taken the hint and started stretching my fingers, wrist and arm before I play now, and that seems to really reduce the tension in my arm.
The big gig's tomorrow. I've just changed my strings and stretched them out. They should be nice and completely stretched by tomorrow. Old strings sound terrible (no brightness or attack) and don't stay in tune.
Speaking of which, my guitar's intonation is out. Twelth fret low E is at least five cents sharp. And I still have the problem that the high E and B strings don't always pass cleanly through the nut, but there's no time or money to fix any of that now. And guitars with parallel frets are inherently somewhat out of tune all over the neck anyway, probably by a lot more than five cents! And as my tuners are non-locking, as I play through the set the strings will go out somewhat anyway (think how much fun it is when these problems combine - I have a love/hate relationship with the guitar). Sometimes I dream of a mythical perfect instrument that wouldn't have these sorts of problems, but I think it would be a piano. Sometimes you've just got to make do.
So, I'll get a good night's sleep tonight and hopefully everything will go smoothly. |
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| Hands |
[Aug. 23rd, 2008|07:15 pm] |
Guitar players ask a lot of their hands. I've been asking a little too much of mine recently because I have a jazz gig coming up in a week, so I've been practicing a lot. In the Science Revue band I'm part of the rhythm section and my job is to comp. Being jazz, there are lots of extended chords, some of which are hard to fret. Most of them involve the fourth finger in some way, and there are some tricky grips. I seem to have overdone it a bit, and now my fretting hand's sore - especially the fourth finger.
I'm going to take it a bit easier for the next few days, and hopefully it'll clear up. I don't want to be playing a gig in front of people with a sore hand.
If ever you have the same problem, here are a few things that helped me
- Ice
- Massage - this site on sore muscles from computer work had some really good tips
- Last but not least, stopping when it hurts, which this time around I was smart enough to do
- Substitute a guitar-free practice session occasionally. By that I mean spend some time learning scales, chord voicings, maybe some music theory. It's probably good for your ears and your mind to do this without the guitar some times.
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| Discipline |
[Aug. 20th, 2008|07:03 pm] |
Some days I don't really feel like practicing. But we're playing in front of people in two weeks, so I practiced anyway. Band rehearsal this weekend, gig next weekend.
And strings wear out fast when you're playing every day. And I'd like a jazz guitar strung with flatwound 0.011s that stays perfectly in tune, and a volume pedal. And a strobe tuner. But guitar players always want more gear. |
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| Tuning |
[Aug. 16th, 2008|04:00 pm] |
If you play a tunable instrument in a band, then being in tune becomes an issue. It raises all sorts of questions, some interesting, some perhaps not:
- Who should tune to who? Does someone have a good enough sense of pitch that he/she can tell your D string is flat? Should you tune to a tuner?
- How in tune is in tune? The open strings on a guitar are always going to be a bit out of tune, and your intonation isn't perfect all over the neck anyway. So how much should you worry about that?
- Should you tune between songs? General consensus is no - it's better to be slightly out and keep the momentum of the performance than spending a couple of minutes letting your audience get bored while you get everything just right. This increases the importance of being as in tune as possible when you start, of course, because your instrument will drift out over the course of the performance.
- What sort of tuner should you use? Pitch pipes, tuning fork, electronic tuner, strobe tuner? Most guitar players I know use a cheap electronic tuner. I've been wondering whether getting a more expensive one i.e. virtual strobe would be worthwhile.
- Who cares? If the music's bad, it's not going to matter how good your chords sound. On the other hand, if your instrument is hopelessly out of tune, even the most tin eared of audiences are going to notice. It's a hygiene factor - no-one notices when it's OK, but everyone will know when it's not.
- Which brings us back to: how in tune is in tune? Most audiences will not know the difference between a guitar that's 5 cents out and 0.1 cents out. And you probably won't. And if you do, you probably won't care. If you run across an audience that really does worry about this sort of thing, then either they have perfect pitch (blessing and a curse) or they need better things to worry about. If it's the latter, play them a 440 Hz sine wave for an hour. Then walk off stage.
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| The Great Commuter Race |
[Aug. 3rd, 2008|09:26 am] |
There's a pretty interesting series of articles on public transport in the SMH. The test journey is from Ryde to Parliament House, roughly the same journey our Transport Minister enjoys. They tested bus, train, car, scooter, bike and one brave man travelled on foot. Unsurprisingly, the scooter and the bicycle did well.
I can't help but wonder about a few things though. The scooter and the bike did so well because they were able to use transit lanes i.e. uncongested pieces of road. The car fared worse because it was stuck behind other cars. The train traveller made a major mistake by buying his ticket on the morning of the trip during peak hour, rather than buying a rail pass which cost him time waiting in the queue and missing a train.
So it seems the problem is really congestion/gridlock. Of course, we knew that. You might take the articles as a guide to commuters as to which modes are transport suffer least from congestion at present, and how to take advantage of that. Of course, if everyone rode scooters or everyone rode bikes and they lost the advantage of the transit lanes, the problem would be the same. Well, except of course our air around here would be cleaner and there would be less parking problems :)
But what I'd be more interested in is how to solve the congestion problem. Scooters and bikes aren't going to do it. I think we need to increase capacity - new rail links, more frequent buses. But of course, that doesn't make for as amusing a story. |
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[Jul. 18th, 2008|01:00 pm] |
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OK, the Stratocaster's tremolo system isn't useless. I saw a good reggae band last night and the guitar player was divebombing and then slowly bringing chords up to pitch - it sounded great. |
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[Jul. 11th, 2008|10:09 am] |
CSIRO report says petrol could reach $8 a litre within a decade. That's a worst case scenario, but it's still pretty terrifying. Almost unimaginably bad.
On a more positive note, there are very smart people working on alternative energy sources. I'm optimistic that a combination of approaches will help us, but see in particular this talk by Craig Venter. He's working on custom designing organisms to produce biofuels using carbon dioxide as a feedstock - pretty elegant if he can get it to work. And greentech is moving more and more towards the mainstream. |
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| Fender vs Gibson: the Movie |
[Jul. 4th, 2008|05:37 pm] |
Nearly anyone reading this would be at least vaguely aware of the endless PC vs Mac debate. For electric guitarists, there is a similiar thing going on between Gibson and Fender. Is the Stratocaster the ultimate rock guitar, or is it the Les Paul?
While the whole question is silly in a sense, guitar players have been talking about it for decades and will continue to. So it really deserves to have a movie made about it.
( The debate's sort of silly, and sort of not ) |
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[Jul. 1st, 2008|11:28 am] |
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It was interesting to read about direction action to stop a third runway at Heathrow today. While I can't comment on the political necessity of direct action, I was under the impression that airlines were in trouble already, and that high fuel prices and carbon cap-and-trade systems were going to reduce either the number of flights people take, the amount of carbon airlines emit or probably both. I'd expect the fuel surcharges most airlines are beginning to bring in to start to reduce the amount that people fly very quickly. |
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