Music. Photography. Thoughts.
Today during lunch break I took my camera for a short walk again – taking some photos of a relatively new construction area just on the opposite side of the street. So here are some photos straight out of my camera, no processing at all:
That last one was taken out of a window at my employers’ office. All taken with my E-M10 Mk2 and the PanaLeica 25mm/1.4 lens.
As always, thanks for viewing.
My last upload (also called ‘remix’) on Wikiloops was the 99th, so my next one will be number #100 – and like most people do, I’m thinking about that a bit, contemplating about which song to choose to play upon.
And that also brings me back to an interesting thread and discussion we had on the ‘loops lately (or rather, which we’re still having), with the initial question from Wade “What type of player are you?“. I answered that one already, lengthily going on about how I found the loops and so on and so forth, but in general agree with what Klaudia (‘jamlady’) wrote short after that: something along the lines of “the music comes first” and/or “serve the music”. Well said, Klaudi! 🙂
So while thinking about my #100 I also found something incredibe, first on an album by my friend from Paris, Mr. OliVBee (and Ms Anne from sunny California), and now again from user ‘Filo974’ from Reunion: a fretless guitar (I think Filo even has more than one of these?). Listen:
On this lovely track which Filo played for his grandson Hector, there are two more uploads already – some keys by Mario (another very good bass player from Spain), and a violin by Jean-Paul whose tone I also love.
But does that track need me, or leave a bit of space for a bass? Tho it has another remix by a German bass player already, I’m not sure of that. Yes, I could ornament it all a bit – but in my opinion and in my understanding, music needs some breaks and some space to take a breath as well, just before the next one gets in with his or her awesome solo or melody. Filling these gaps would possibly do a disservice to the music rather than improving it. So while I love love love this track, with a heavy heart I gave up upon the thought of playing, took it out of my ‘watchlist’ and put it into my ‘hit list’ instead, to join dozens of other tracks which can’t be improved in my opinion (at least, not by me).
And the same is true and was done to Oliv’s and Anne’s “Shadowplay”. Listen to my first ever experience of a fretless guitar, played so masterfully by Oliv himself (between Anne’s great lines):
Well if this ain’t awesome then I don’t know what is. And no, it doesn’t have a bass (yet), and tho 5 people tried already, I didn’t even listen to one of them. Why not, if I don’t want to play? Maybe because of the same reason Oliv took exactly *this* version onto his album with Anne: the track has some certain kind of ‘airiness’, it feels light like a feather (tho it’s deep, dark, and blue) – playing a bass would probably rob the song of this light and airy feeling. So no, I had it in my ‘hit list’ already, and took it out of my ‘watchlist’ just like the one from Filo (and company).
And while these two examples stand for fretless guitar tracks (and I still would love to play on one), they also reminded me of another and much older track with just a singer and a piano. Listen to one of my all time favs from the loops:
Hurzel’s and Shi’s “When the lights go out” has 155 thumbs and 26 remixes, 11 of which are from bass players (as the first added instrument) alone. But does this track need a bass?
I doubt that, really. Maybe, just maybe if *I* would happen to be a producer and had to come out with making this the hit it deserves to be, I would possibly re-record it on a real stage and with a real piano in an empty ballroom (or with a dead quiet audience which wouldn’t be hard to get on this level), just a Grand Piano and that voice (taken with the best vintage tube mike I could find or rent). Would I add a bass? I don’t know. Charles Mingus isn’t around anymore, and I don’t know if Christian McBride or another great double bass player could improve this – but certainly not me (first, I don’t have a double bass, second, can’t play it on this level).
So this track will forever stay in my heart and in my ‘hit list’, but I’m really not sure if some day I’ll come back and play on it. ‘Serving the music’ can sometimes mean: leave it all alone, it’s great as it is. Such as these three examples.
So a big thank you to my friends over at the loops for their wonderful music – but none of these will be my next track to play on; they’re just too precious for me to ruin them.
As always, thanks for reading.
Today I provided a quick after-work jam to greet a new member in Wikiloops. His username is ‘BrotherSinArm’, and he uploaded his first template as a singer-songwriter in a (dying, as he wrote) East-German dialect which I found quite charming. Here’s how it sounds with my simple bass line on it:
So for the moment, that makes just two of us in the list of musicians:
As always, thanks for listening.
FrankieJ remixed his nice guitar on our song which he recorded back in mid November already. Sounds much better now; here it is:
Thanks again, FrankieJ for your wonderful add to this 🙂
Thanks for listening.
A first cat snapshot since we’re back from England:
Taken with my Olympus OM-D E-M10 Mk2 and the Panasonic Leica DG Summilux 25mm/1.4 lens at f/2.0, converted with Olympus Workspace on Windows 10 and with RawTherapee on Linux. Uploaded to Flickr manually.
As always, thanks for viewing.
Haven’t heard this one since a while, but yesterday I used it in a comment on the ‘loops (on a track of ‘jussef63’ who is one of the best bass players we have there). This is a cover, but featuring Kate Davis who is an awesome player and singer. Listen if you don’t know it yet:
If I could play an upright like her I’d be happy 🙂
Thanks for viewing.
After writing something in German again in my last post I thought I’d switch to Gaelic for a moment 😉 Fun aside, this is a famous Irish Saying, and number #32 on this page. And this is, according to the the explanation to be translated as:
May God never weaken your hand (when someone has done you a kindness or a favour)
Why do I write about it here? Because it’s also the title of a very very beautiful song (a film score to be more precise) of Wikiloops user ‘fanne’. Listen:
I love this one, and it has some very remarkable remixes already. It’s in my ‘watchlist’ as well, so maybe I’ll sit down with it myself. Oh, and Zuleikha liked and commented onto it as well…
Thanks for sharing this with us, John!
And as always, thanks for listening.
Letzte Woche Mittwoch und Donnerstag wurden in 3Sat zwei ‘Eberhofer’ Krimis gezeigt – das sagte mir erstmal nix, aber da Mitchie Krimis mag und die Filme ab 12 sind dachte ich am Donnerstag, man könne ja mal reingucken.
Haben wir gelacht! Und gleich den verpaßten Film vom Vortag in der Mediathek gesehen, einer ist auch jetzt gerade noch in der ARD-Mediatek verfügbar…
Zuleikha und ich haben dann später auch noch den 3. von bisher insgesamt 6 Filmen (und 10 Büchern) in der Mediathek des Schweizer Fernsehens gesehen, nacheinander und auf einem Mobiltelefon mit der ‘Zapp’ App aus dem F-Droid Appstore (unbedingt mal danach suchen, das lohnt!).
Also – wer der Eberhofer Franz und sein bester Freund Birkenberger Rudi eigentlich sind, worum’s geht und was es mit all den komischen Speisen der Oma oder dem Kraut vom Papa so auf sich hat erfahrt Ihr am besten auf der Webseite der Autorin:
Der neueste Film kommt am nächsten Donnerstag, den 1. August in die Kinos, zum Beispiel in Groß-Gerau. Den werden wir uns in der Woche danach auch ansehen – um aber erst einmal die anderen Folgen alle zu sehen hab ich eben die ‘Kruzi Fünferl Box’ bestellt:
Und weil’s hier 5 DVDs für 23 Euro gibt und man dafür beim größten Versender auch noch Porto bezahlen müßte (weil unter 30 Euro), hab ich noch ein Buch mit drauf gelegt:
Bin ja seit einiger Zeit auch Murakami-Fan. Der ist zwar weniger lustig, aber mindestens genauso Kult wie der Eberhofer Franz.
Wird alles am Samstag kommen; cool!
Und wie immer danke für’s Lesen.
Over at the ‘loops, I’ve put my albums into/onto my ‘Showcase’ tab of my user profile – which is the first any visitor would see of me (in case there’s anyone interested, but of the members I do indeed have some visitors from time to time). Looks like this:
Don’t know if that is any useful, and until yesterday evening I’ve never thought about it, but it’s another nice way to scroll, or to ‘swipe’ through my album collection, even if you could see it all before in my ‘Playlists’ tab as well (where there are also albums of others who were kind enough to include tracks with me in them).
Anyway, and as always, thanks for your interest, and for reading. And now, I’ll have to start working.
At work I requested a new portable drive to which I can backup my notebook’s files – backups are always a good idea. After looking up the available models I opted for a small 500GB SSD from Korean maker (and market leader) Samsung, the T5. And it’s tiny as you can see:
And yesterday I installed Debian 10 “Buster” onto it, making use of encryption – I changed that again today since my notebook refused to even “see” it as a vaild and connected USB device, so I reformatted it at work and also made my first backup.
This installing of Debian at my home machine had consequences tho – I somehow managed (like with the latest Windows 10 update as well) to corrupt my grub-efi boot sector so that I was able to still boot into Windows, but not into Linux, my main work system (I keep Windows only for the Olympus and some free (giveaway) music programs, but almost never use these).
So in case you should end up with that
grub>boot sector message instead of a menu with options to boot one day, here’s what you can do.
First, don’t panic! Your system isn’t severely damaged, and everything can be repaired quite easily. If you want to make sure that everything is still where it belongs, try this:
grub> lswill give you a list of hard drives and partitions, depending on what is installed in your system. In mine, I have two physical hard drives, the first one with several partitions (like EFI, Windows, Linux, and so on), the second and much bigger one is only for my /home directory. So these are easy to identify. I also know that my Linux system is on partition 6 (in the following, the variable ‘y’ represents it) of hard disk 1 (in the following, the variable ‘x’ stands for that one). So type in the following lines, setting the disk number instead of ‘x’ and the partition number instead of ‘y’:
grub> set root=(hdx,y)
grub> set prefix=(hdx,y)/boot/grub
grub> insmod normal
grub> normalAt this point, you should see something like your normal grub menu from which you can start your system.
Once in it, you can’t repair it from here tho – you need to start it another way to do that, using your installation media (in my case, this was a USB stick) which itself is EFI-formatted, and using a GPT instead of the old legacy MBR boot sector. So don’t throw away that CD or DVD after installation, or make a new USB startup disk with Debian Live on it. You might have to press some keys during startup to get your BIOS to boot from that one, make sure to use it in GPT (EFI) boot mode.
Once that image is up, the by far best and easiest description I have found to go on is the one on askubuntu.com. You may need some program (they mention gparted which isn’t available on a Debian Live image, but another program called ‘disks’ is) to again identify your partitions and device identifiers, which they describe with ‘x’es in the following.
The highest rated of the current 7 answers (with 48 votes as I write this) is the one which works flawlessly. Here it is:
Reinstall the GRUB boot loader to your Ubuntu installation in EFI mode this way …
Boot from the Ubuntu installation medium and select ‘Try Ubuntu without installing’.
(Boot your install medium in EFI mode, select the Ubuntu entry with UEFI in front.)
Once you are on the Live desktop, open a terminal and execute these commands :
sudo mount /dev/sdXXX /mnt
sudo mount /dev/sdXX /mnt/boot/efi
for i in /dev /dev/pts /proc /sys /run; do sudo mount -B $i /mnt$i; done
sudo chroot /mnt
grub-install /dev/sdX
update-grubNote :
sdX= disk |sdXX= efi partition |sdXXX= system partition
To identify the partitions use GParted, the tool is included in the installation medium.
After having run the commands GRUB will be installed in the separate EFI partition.
And that should be it – this solution from user ‘cl-netbox‘ works as described. So should you ever need this, please go and thank him (or her) instead of me.
So I’m typing this from my repaired system. Life is great.
As always, thanks for reading.