vesterberg.se

Today I was reviewing my playing and I came to the conclusion that I must strive to play every note with a purpose, especially in the simple songs. It is easy to start the autopilot and just drift away in mind and just pedal around. Playing can be just a series of muscle combinations and if you get lost in the middle of a sequence, you are lost. Have you ever been there? Embarrassing! I sense there is a dimension when you play a note and mean it. You purpose the attack, the note length, the vibrato etc. I have tried to visualize the fretboard and worked my way through the song in my mind. I will continue to work along this path.

You can use unix find to remove cvs folders. This is how you write for cygwin
$ find . -name ‘CVS’ -exec rm -rf ‘{}’ \;
The blanks between -rf and ‘{}’ and also between ‘{}’ and \; are important for cygwin.

I have had some interesting dicsussions with friends the last week that accentuated the need for regularely stretching our muscles. Problems build during the years and sooner or later the body strikes back. I also know of several bass players that have had problems with their hands. So lets not cheat on this.

Streching is different than ordinary warmup. You stretch your fingers for example two by two to their utmost position for about 30 sec and then you rotate on all fingers and wrist. Use your imagination and vary the positions. Do it slowly and use the other hand or something else (a table) to move the fingers slightly beyond their limit, but don’t hurt yourself. Do this several times a week when you have time. It is better to do it a few times thoroughly than rushing it over every day in a few seconds. If we neglect this, tension can begin to build up in the hand with pain and worse as result. I have no medical traning but this is what I have picked up and is practising myself

One of the small utility programs I use frequently is hotfolders. Often you have to browse through endless levels of folders when accessing Open, Save As and Browse dialogs. This utility integrates with the shell and places an icon in the upper right corner of these dialogs. You can access folder and file history as well as configure your own favourite folders. It saves a lot of time, when you jump back and forth between dialogs.

Ruby is so elegant in its handling of open class declarations. I had an experience teaching Java and trying to explain io and its constructors (calling other constructors …). My students responded: so unneccessary complicated and ugly. yeah! Sometimes I feel that frameworks are forced into the language, so much code, for doing so little. Not so Ruby.

It was my eldest son (thanks Mattias) that did wet my appetite for a broader kind of music. I decided to take the challenge and I (forced) myself to listen to everything, I mean punk, funk, rock, metal, reggae, nu-metal, indie, folk music and you name it. And, after a while, when I opened myself and listened I, found that most kind of music gives something and is enjoyable. But I don’t listen to Slipknot. There goes the limit! Most people in my age still only listen to the music they listened to when they were teenagers. What is produced these days is interesting. Have you listened to Lamb and the album What Sound, for example?

One of the things I picked up from reading Guitar Principles is the so called no tempo practice. It is a method you can use to learn a relaxed playing style. No tempo means that you disregard the tempo of the part you are practising and focus on the movements of your fingers. Find a comfortable fingering and stick to it. Train very, very slowly. So slow that your fingers are relaxed all the time. This has helped me a great deal in my bass playing. Bass playing is kind of heavier than guitar playing, but you can find a posistion where your fingers dance on the strings in a light way.

As a side effect of learning the importance of a relaxed playing style, I considered other areas in life. Living with tense muscles is not heatlhy and can be dangerous. Our muscles seem to be built to be used in a relaxed way. I have friends that have permanent problems with their right arm because of using a computer mouse. I avoid a ordinary mouse. I don’t like them at all. So, we should strive in all areas of life to live and move our limbs in a relaxed way. The people of the Orient have known this for a while.

When I got turned on to bass playing, I wanted to learn as quick as possible and since I also have a pedagogical interest I payed close attention to the most effecient way to learn. One of the key elements seems to be relaxation. In both left and right hand you have to find and maintain a relaxed feeling. It was so obvious when I tried to learn a song and to quickly played at full speed. I was frustrated until I learned how my fingers and muscles operate. You cannot cheat and force your hands to play quickly. At first, decrease the tempo so that you can relax completely in left and right hand. You have to make sure your hands keep the relaxed feeling as you increase speed. If you just train to play as quick as possible, you will be good at playing sloppishly fast.