vesterberg.se

I stumbled over this interesting video from You Tube where Todd Johnson explains the floating thumb technique when playing bass. This technique means that instead of anchoring your thumb on the pickup or on a particular string (B or E), your rest the side of your thumb on top of the lowest strings. As you play on higher strings you just move your thumb from B/E/A to E/A/D for example. This way you can mute several strings with your thumb and your hand has the same natural position whether you play on E-string or on G-string. Also the angle of the wrist is smaller and healthier than with the traditional way.

I had an interesting conversation with Byron Santo some time ago that inspired me to pursue this change of thumb position. The video mentioned above is an excerpt from Todd Jonsons DVD “Technique Builders”. In the video he demonstrates how to do it and the advantages of using it. The DVD might be worth buying.

The other day I was looking at EJB3 and JBoss 4 to see what has happened since last time. I have developed a number of applications in EJB2 and EJB2.1 and I have, as many else, many times found the EJB-way lengthy and clumsy. As a minimum, you had to add xdoclet to ease the pain. I went off in the JDO direction for a while and liked it very much. Now in EJB3 they have applied annotations in a way similar to xdoclet and JPA persistence has learned from other framworks. Entities are local only, but we only used remote for Session Beans anyway. Pragmatic. Fewer interfaces, dependency injection for resources and elegant use of event handling instead of callbacks. I like it.