Good morning. And what a nice cover that is – listen:
Awake now? I was… 🙂
David Gilmour – The Girl In The Yellow Dress
I know I know – sometimes I’m really late to the party, more than 4 years this time. The following track was on David’s “Rattle that lock” album from Sept. 18th, 2015:
Awesome, isn’t it?
Have a good start into the new week and month everyone.
Tetsu Suzuki Double bass Maker in Cremona, Italy 鈴木徹 コントラバスメーカー
Wow. Look and listen:
Also see his home page. I’d love to visit and meet this man. Tho I’m afraid that these instruments are just ever so slightly out of my price range…
Wonderful.
To ground myself
I have all of my own albums (which you can see on the right side of this page) in my car – in fact that is part of the reason that I’ve made these albums – to be able to put some music on a CD, and to listen to it while away from my computer.
And I also “discovered” several new and – as I think – great singers both on Wikiloops and elsewhere (like on Youtube).
But to ground myself, so to speak, to get back a feeling where true North is, and to compare whatever I do with what else is out there, I also have some copies of commercial albums which I own in the car – and from time to time I like to listen to these, especially when it’s music with just a voice and some acoustic instruments for example.
Like Youn Sun Nah. This morning I listened to her “Same Girl” album on my way to work, and it’s so incredibly good. Listen to this as an example, where she’s also with Lars Danielsson, one of my favourite bass players:
The composition is by Ulf Wakenius, who’s also the guitar player here. Everything here fits, and sounds amazing.
Highly recommended stuff, if you like something like this. I also have her “Voyage” and “Lento” albums, which are equally good.
As always, thanks for reading. Enjoy the music.
Bill Evans Trio – Nardis
Here’s something rare – an interview with Bill Evans. And then they play Miles’ tune Nardis in front of a small private audience in 1970:
Enjoy – and see and hear Eddie as a young man (I was 13, he was 26 while he played this).
DW – Meet the Germans
If you’ve never been to Germany or are just trying to understand us “Krauts” a bit better, our public radio station Deutsche Welle has some funny videos about it – called “Meet the Germans”. Here’s the first of several I/we saw (and liked):
Found on the DW News Youtube channel. Enjoy.
An evening with Eddie Gomez
This one is for the musicians – and for everyone who loves music:
And for those of you who probably haven’t heard about him before, here are some links to the German and English Wikipedia pages about him, and to his own webpage of course. He’s also one of the bass players in John Goldsby’s ‘The Jazz Bass Book’ (on page 131), and in this video he talks about many others who are, and who came before him. The host for this evening was David Gage, famous amongst bass players for his pickup, and for his service.
Enjoy, as I did.
Mark Wallace shows how to make a Gobo
Here’s a nice and quick way how you can make interesting portraits of your friends and/or family (and I’d have everything shown except that I use Olympus cameras, not a Leica (but I have a Leica lens 🙂 )):
BAM! A very good explanation and demo, what Mark explains here in 10 minutes took me a bit longer… 🙂
And now try it on your own friends and family. Have fun! 🙂
Cheap double basses
My brother Willi had a double bass when we were younger – and we both would love to have one now. I have checked some locally and at Thomann’s (Europe’s biggest music store), and was always kind of put off, either by price (~2.800€ for a solid Romanian bass I loved) or by setup.
But lately I saw a review of a Thomann “Rockabilly” – one of the cheapest Chinese plywood basses they offer. That review is in Italian, but the guy can play, and that bass sounds and looks wonderful (with additional Thomastik Spirocore strings (about 160€) on it):
Miked (or picked up? Both?) a bit closer, and with a jazz standard, it sounds pretty good:
So this one is from Thomann’s plywood line of basses, and also comes in black or different shades of wood. My brother’s comment was that if that is how plywood sounds, it would be good enough for him…
I agreed (with the remark about the changed set of strings on it), but there’s a slightly more expensive hybrid model available now at Thomann’s, would love to check that out as well:
It’s the Stentor 1950 Student bass, and it indeed sounds wonderful as well:
I agree about that “melting the audience” remark – at least you could melt me with that one 🙂 Available at Thomann‘s as well, for a real good price in my opinion.
I’ll have to try that one. And maybe take my brother with me, maybe they’ll sell two of these 🙂
As always, thanks for reading.
How much CPU power do I need?
I was reading the latest c’t magazine and also just watched an hour long video talk they had about the finest article in it. The topic: once a year they publish suggestions of ideal machines to build for yourself, with low power consumption, which are quiet, run smoothly, give you the best bang for the buck, and so on.
I find these very useful, and all of my self-built PCs – some of which are distributed to the wider family by now – were always at least based upon their suggestions.
While discussing PCs with my brother (his doesn’t start anymore at the moment, after years of service (it also was a very good one)) and after reading that latest article with a remark that multitrack music productions would love to have many CPU cores I decided to check my own one. So I’ve made a short video about it:
The music I’ve used for that demonstration & check was my latest collab with Arno from Wikiloops. Merci Arno for your wonderful track!
And yes, for what I’m doing, an old 4th generation Intel Core i5 is more than enough as you can see. So a nice actual 9th generation one is the one I’d take for any new build, these integrated graphics are more important to me than any assumed or measurable advantage of AMD chips…
Thanks for watching, and for reading – as always.