Busy these days with work and lots of stuff. So here\u2019s catching up on a few random things. Work has been busy and problematic, and I\u2019ve putting in extra evenings and fixing other people\u2019s bugs to keep things on track. I think we turned a corner mid-week last week. We have a release coming up this week, and now we\u2019re in good shape.<\/p>\n
My book has been done for a couple of weeks, but now I\u2019m waiting on the publisher to get back to me.<\/p>\n
We got our xmas tree up today. A nice wide bushy one. Lots room for ornaments. Went out to pick one up in the rain. Always a nice feeling to have the tree up.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve been starting to get back into the music recording thing, picking up my half-finished third Buzzy Tonic album. So far the focus is on playing. I have a backlog of half-written songs, so I think I\u2019m gonna work them up to play and sing live before I get back into tracking. Ought to go faster with the arrangements worked out and under my fingers.<\/p>\n
The other day I was showing Michelle how to hammer-on on the bass. I’m kind of a lazy bass player and will often hammer-on or pull-off when I’m doing a fast chromatic riff, just so I don’t have to articulate the note with my right hand. I use my thumb on the right hand alot, especially on the bottom two strings. I generally switch to fingers-only as a tonal effect, from rounder to punchier. So my hammer-ons and pull-offs on the bass are really quite solid, which is weird since I’ve never really consciously worked at it.<\/p>\n
One of the most amazing musicians I\u2019ve ever played with was this cat Jim Wynne, who was a master of the two-hand tap technique on the bass. I little two-handed-tap blues improvisation for Michelle to demonstrate his style, playing the bass line in the bottom two strings with my left hand and tapping the 3rd and 7th on the offbeats on top two strings with my right. To my surprise it came out sounding really good! I guess it’s not that different than piano. I’m gonna have to work a part like that into one of my songs.<\/p>\n
The girls are having a good fall. Yesterday they had the holiday show at the performing arts group they belong to, Young at Arts. Michelle has been working out Do a Deer from The Sound of Music by ear on the piano. Talented girl. Meanwhile Lizzy is enjoying being in 8th grade and her grades are up, and that comes at a good time. She\u2019s finally getting algebra. She was cast as one of the leads in her school play this winter. The theme of the play is New York, and the songs are all taken from classic shows, with an original story to string them together. She has six songs. Her character is British, so she\u2019s been having fun practicing her accent. I\u2019m going to be playing in the band again this year. I got the list of songs and put together a playlist. It\u2019s a fun set. We listened to it as we put up the tree today. It has two different songs called New York New York.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Busy these days with work and lots of stuff. So here\u2019s catching up on a few random things. Work has been busy and problematic, and I\u2019ve putting in extra evenings and fixing other people\u2019s bugs to keep things on track. I think we turned a corner mid-week last week. We have a release coming up … Continue reading “Catching Up”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3764","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","category-music"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zingman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3764","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zingman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zingman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zingman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zingman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3764"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.zingman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3764\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zingman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3764"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zingman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3764"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zingman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3764"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}