October 2024

24/10/24

(Originally titled: "More stuff on my mind")

So this post is gonna be way more scattered, and I have no clue how to tie it all together or do segues, so have fun reading I guess.
On the day I'm writing I recorded a few things on my bass, the first time I actually record what I play since I broke some shit on my first bass, which was acoustic. I'll pepper this stuff throughout this post.
I guess I'll order these topics from least to most unhinged.

Devices which emit sound with the purpose of being listened to by human beings

A couple days before I started this blog, I broke my pair of Koss Porta Pro headphones, which I loved dearly. They were lightweight to the point of being kinda flimsy, but they packed some serious punch despite how they looked. They were very warm and bassy.
After having broken them, my mom gave me some cheapo wireless earbuds, I'm grateful but dear god it was such a downgrade it hurt my soul. Sound-wise, they're way too thin, the bass is quiet and if you try turning it up, you get blasted by screeching highs, it makes everything you listen to sound like Nattens Madrigal by Ulver. They run out of batteries after 90 mins and take 30 mins to recharge, and if they fall out of your ears or their case, you better hope they end up somewhere easy to reach.
A few days ago, I bought some cheap wired headphones for a game night so I wouldn't have to worry about batteries running out. They actually got bass, but the highs are muffled like you're listening from inside a coffin, probably cuz they're closed-back. They just broke a couple hours ago at the time of writing this because I did the absolutely CRAZY maneuver of spreading them apart, you know, the thing you do to put headphones on your head? So that fucking sucks.
Out of desperation for that bass, I decided to listen to music via the aux input of my bass amp, and it's actually pretty damn good, after years of almost exclusively listening to music through headphones, it's pretty refreshing to actually feel the kick drum through my body.
My ideal headphones would be similar to the Porta Pros, but less flimsy.

"Alternative Lounge"

Recently, I've been dreaming about starting an "alternative lounge" band, in less pretentious terms, live barber-beats.
I've been listening to quite a bit of barber-beats as-of-late (like punishment by Oblique Occasions), I love the heavy but still relaxing atmosphere of some of this stuff, but the very minimal sample manipulation without credits kind of turns me off, the reason an album like Floral Shoppe is good is because Vektroid, the artist behind it, manipulates the ever-living shit out of her samples in fairly unique ways.
When listening to music, it's more fun to imagine a more involved process for making it than slowing it down and adding reverb in Audacity.
In the meantime, I'll be listening to genres with that sorta vibe: Lounge, RnB, smooth jazz, muzak, downtempo, trip-hop, shoegaze, dub, drone, ambient, noise, other styles of vaporwave, etc...

A cool site I found

Last week, I discovered internet based ghosts and I love it, the part that appeals to me the most is the huge repository of underrated music.
It got me into listening to shortwave radio in the evening again, which is peak comfy activity.
I also found this ambient/drone sesh that was broadcasted on NTS that I really enjoy, I'm a fan of how the sample peeks through all the noise, gives the listener something to latch onto.
I'm definitively gonna include his site button on the home-page when I'll add a section for it.

HCRAESDROW

I have a small word-search game book that is absolutely battered to shit, the covers are barely hanging on, it has been through hell and back.
It was given to me a couple years ago, but I started going through it regularly about 1.5 years ago, got a bit tired of it, and I'm starting to get back into it, I have about 30-ish puzzles left to do.
My usual method for going through a grid is starting with horizontals, then with verticals, and finally doing what's left.
There are a couple variations of the game in there, but the only one that's noteworthy is number-search, which is so much more tedious and methodical than normal word-search since you have to go through both diagonals, you can't rely on recognizing words.

In the Bocchi sauce

I just watched Bocchi The Rock, and I don't want to say Bocchi is "literally me" buuuutttttt...
This show's premise is really relatable to me, WORRYINGLY SO (am i being stalked????). Though I suppose that goes to show how many people are in the same situation as me, people who have social anxiety but still yearn to make themselves heard and to connect with other people.
Bocchi The Rock is genuinely heartwarming and inspiring, it may be one of my favorite animes of all time (Along with Mushishi, Samurai Champloo and others...)
As-of-late, I've taken on a mildly unhinged undertaking. I've been going through a lot of Bocchi The Rock fanfics on AO3, starting from least to most recently updated. I don't read everything though, but I think I'll have read around 50% of all Bocchi The Rock fanfics on AO3 by the end.

And that's all for this post! I hope you enjoy the new style of images, I prefer it since I don't have to worry about making stuff look "perfect" since it all gets abstracted away.
Fun fact about this post and the last one, I worked on the outline of these while hanging outside in a park, I didn't take any pictures so here's an artistic rendition of what it was like.

A crude drawing of rotbrain sitting on a park bench in the sun, please laugh.

22/10/24

(Originally titled: "We're so back")

Hi! Been a while, huh? Let's pick back up where we left off, journaling and playing bass.

I'm still journaling, I now integrated the calendar/habit-tracking system I used to have, here's how it works.
For the current month, I have a double page spread. A line for each day, where I write an event or an appointment I have to go to, then what habits I did that day. After that I have a space for stuff scheduled in the next months, and a memo on the habits I'm tracking.


Usually, people have a column for each habit, however that would take up too much space on the page, and so I have a unique system (at least I think it is, I haven't seen anyone else do this) where I use a compound symbol. Each habit is a line of the symbol for the day, and they combine to make a full symbol.


The habits I track are ridiculously easy to do, for example "Write one sentence", "Transcribe 1 measure of music by ear", even my bass practice routine is heavily simplified. I usually do more than the minimum (expect learning by ear, that shit is tough).
I heavily toned down my standards for what a good practice routine should be, last post I said that it should be around an hour, but even then that's too much for the days where I feel like shit, and it had a lot of steps (Physical warmup, scales, practice known song, learn new song, bla-bla-bla...).
I pretty much simplified it to two steps, practice a known song or exercise, and work on a new song (by ear). If I were to really just do the bare minimum of these two things, it should take about 10 minutes, but when I'm having fun and I'm engaged, I can play for up to an hour.
At the end I write about the day's practice session in my journal.


By the way, I'm not ampless anymore! I got a used Hartke HD25 combo amp for under 100 Munies. It's way bigger, heavier, and louder than I expected. Posts on Reddit and Talkbass exaggerating how quiet 25 Watts are had me thinking I was about to get a tiny little baby amp, however the pain I felt in my arms from having to carry it all the way back home says otherwise. I'm still sore.
I finally got cables, and it feels so good to hear myself clearly, I still need to have the volume dialed all the way down or else I'll get noise complaints. It feels very weird to have the sound actually bounce around the walls of my room, and the bass be more or less prominent based on where I'm standing.


I got way more to talk about, but this post is already long enough, and I don't want to bludgeon you with more information, the next post should come soon. Cya!

06/10/24

(Originally titled: "My *new* journal and playing bass without an amp")

Recently, my mom found a mostly empty journal in some drawer and gave it to me after ripping a couple pages out.
I'm currently taking a more freeform approach to writing this time around, my old journals were really structured with calendars and habit-tracking systems, I'm not sure that really did much at the time since I was in a rough place and checking squares wasn't enough to help me.
I would also painstakingly make sure every letter was as clean as humanly possible, and that got incredibly tiring.
Right now I don't care for structure or readability, I'm just scribbling things down.

As of late, I started playing my bass more frequently, but I have a bit of a problem.
I used to have a Vox Amplug, however my nephew accidentally broke it, and I got nothing to repair it with so I'm pretty much screwed until I buy an actual amp this time around.
At the moment, in order to actually hear myself play a bit, I'm using pick closer to the bridge in order to get more treble, although I gotta be careful to not play too hard since that would actually mess with my technique.

I want to write down the basslines and stuff that I come up with, so I harvested blank sheet music from my old middle-school music books because the lines in my journal are way too large, even if I split them horizontally in half.

Transcribing everything in pure staff notation takes a lot of time tho, it takes up a lot of space, and it's not really worth it for parts that loop or that follow the same structure throughout a song.
So I'm gonna have to figure out ways to make things shorter, but what needs to be done is gonna depend on a case-by-case basis:
* If I'm just chugging 8th notes on the root of each chord, I'm gonna just write "chug 8th notes on root" and the chord progression.
* If it has a slightly more complex rhythm that still loops and I have to play the fifth or the octave, I'll write the rhythm and which interval to play.
* If it's some crazy prog with changing time-signatures and stuff, then it'll make more sense to transcribe it in its entierity.

I want to get back into the habit of journaling and playing/practicing bass everyday. Getting into the habit of writing has always been fairly simple for me, but it's getting into a bass practice routine that's far more complicated.
In my mind, a good practice routine should be simple and short enough to do everyday (no more than an hour), but still be substantial enough to make progress and improve at a good pace (Also, it should be actually fun to go through, and not be a chore).
I'm gonna have to look back in my old journals to remember what my old routine used to be, figure out what worked and what didn't.