Music. Photography. Thoughts.
The webpage of Christopher basses in Germany has a changed address – you can now leave away the “en” for an English description, so it’s simply https://www.christopher-bass.de/ for now…
I have the DB202T Gamba model which now seems to be their base (cheapest) model:
As I’ve learnt when I once asked, the “T” in the name stands for the size of 3/4. So now I’ve also updated the link in my Wikiloops gallery.
As always, thanks for reading.
If you have seen screenshots of my desktop, you have seen conky – it’s the one thing which is always and on all of my desktops. Looks like this:
or, a bit bigger, like this:
It’s a beautiful piece of software, avaliable for almost all Unix-like systems including MacOS and the BSD family. I just found a video where its maker explains it:
Of course, on a modern Linux system you don’t have to compile it, since it’s usually in all software repositories of the available distributions – my example from above for instance was on Arch, but I have the same on Debian or on my login on Mitchie’s Ubuntu desktop.
There’s a Wikipedia page about conky where you can find more info. And its homepage is on GitHub as you might have seen.
As always, thanks for reading and for viewing – and thanks to Brenden for his nice little program.
What a lovely song in a Jazz Manouche style from Frankie and from Thierry – couldn’t resist to add a little bottom end to it:
As always, thanks to my friends and to Wikiloops for all the fun, and thanks to you for listening 🙂
Oh, and for this one I used foam again, close to my instrument’s bridge:
Thanks for viewing.
Lately in Wikiloops, I stumbled upon a song made by a guitar player, then someone played harp over it, and a guitar, this time soloing, again. And the musician who played the harp complimented the soloist on using the phrygian mode which got my head spinning a bit…
Well phrygian is simply said the 3rd if you start thinking from ionian – so if you take all the white keys on a keyboard, with C major being the ionian mode, you start the same keys (only those white ones, remember?) on the 3rd note which is e, and you’ll have phrygian. So C major played from e to e’ (the octave above) would be E phrygian. Easy, no?
Well yes and no – how to improvise over this? On a guitar, think minor pentatonic plus two notes, the minor second and the minor 6th, and you’re there. Here’s a nice tutorial about that from David Wallimann:
I like this example – he’s using G phrygian – because he also shows how this is simply G# lydian if you start playing that same scale from the second note which is G# or Ab. You could also think Eb ionian (or simply said, Eb major) if you’re more familiar with that. Ron Clemens commented: “I like the sound of that relative Lydian arpeggio (AbM7) in the (G) Phrygian context – sounds Zappa-ish.” – and I have to agree, that was a nice one 🙂
That’s a cool lesson I think, it opens up all the possibilities you’ll have when starting to think that way – and it sounds great, like all of these modes do.
So thanks to David for a nice and understandable and enjoyable tutorial, and thanks to you for reading and viewing, as always.
Cookie, our male visitor from somewhere in the neighbourhood, is very busy lately. One could easily call him our “chief mouser” now, like the one at 10 Downing Street. I lately saw him tracking down, hunting, killing, and also eating a couple of mice, and he’s always on the watch for more:
Of course, even a cat has to rest sometimes (like 16 hours a day). So here he is shortly before the sun reached him in the afternoon:
At the moment, he’s resting on the sofa (the door to Zuleikha’s room, which probably is his favourite place in our flat, is closed)…
As always, thanks for reading, and for viewing.
Paul Thompson meant a combined Fender Rhodes and real piano sound overlaid over each other, but here he’s talking about the five great bass players on one of my favourite albums, Donald Fagen’s “The Nightfly”:
And the next one should be interesting for singers as well, because she’s a legend herself:
Now if you’re a bass player, do yourself a favour and go and transcribe these bass lines yourself if possible. And in case you’re a singer/songwriter/poet, have a look and listen to Joni Mitchell’s iconic album. Love them both.
As always, thanks for reading, and/or viewing.
“Next Thursday, 16 June, is Bloomsday” – so begins an article in The Guardian about the upcoming 100th birthday of “Ulysses” by James Joyce. And yes, I still have to read it, and yes I know that it’s hard to read, but I’m still very much looking forward to that. I’d rather start with “Finnegan’s Wake“, but that might even be harder to read…
Just learnt yesterday that over a year ago, Jim Stinnett had passed away. RIP, and thanks for everything Jim!
Recently I reported about another article on why people run Linux on their machines. And one of the reasons is always: because it doesn’t make your hardware obsolete, like Windows or MacOS both are doing. Proof of the pudding: here is Mitchie’s old Lenovo SL500, a dual core (Intel T5670) 2GB notebook from ca. 2008, running a current Arch Linux with the latest 5.18.2 kernel, the same which I have on my main machine:
If you enlarge the photo on Flickr you can probably see that its CPU is at 1%, which means it’s doing nothing except wait for any user input. And the system together with the very nice and modern XFCE desktop consumes just about 750MB of the total 2GB main memory – so it’s perfectly usable. Well maybe not for real number-crunching, video de- or encoding, or music production, but you get the point – as an everyday surf machine or even to watch videos on your lap, it’s perfectly fine.
I always encourage friends to try this, and we have converted many older machines in the greater family to Linux, no need at all to constantly spend any money just to stay “current”. As you can see, the version of Linux I’m running here is as current as it can get, much more modern, safe, and stable than your typical consumer OS.
We only boot into Windows if we absolutely must, and we’re all doing that since years (and Zuleikha since she was born). So this is an easy recommendation from friends to friends, ’cause that’s what we’re doing here. Oh, and by the way: thanks again to my son Jeremy who first suggested trying Arch to me some years ago. If you need “current”, that’s a nice one!
As always, thanks for reading.
I had this wonderful song from Sami, Shi, and Peatric on my computer since almost two years. And now I played a bit to it:
As always, thanks to my friends over at the ‘loops for all the fun – and thanks to you for listening 🙂