A few musical notes

Felt inspired and full of energy...
...an hour before work ended for the day. It's that last hour that's the killer (why I'm moving towards a 35-hour week instead).  I miss ten hour days. Ten is no harder than 8, but it gives you either more pay or a longer weekend.



Put in 20-30 minutes on the fiddle today. Still working on that coordination -- rather, the sequence. According to a study I read, takes 20-40 milliseconds for a string to "speak" from when the bow is applied. You need, however, to be on the correct string and have the fingers in the right position before that happens. And the problem is, starting the bow is a shorter motion than moving the finger or, worse, moving to bow to a different string. The study didn't go into that, but looking at the graph the former is in the range of hundreds of milliseconds, and the latter I'm betting is much longer than that. Like a finger on the piano keyboard, these are ballistic motions; you need to start them well before they are required to be complete.

So you can't just start them both at the same time. You do that, you get squeaks and squeals. You have to anticipate by a fraction of a second. Of course I'm making it harder (much harder) on myself by not using a detache bowing, but trying to do this within the change of direction.



Over the weekend dreamed up a possible motif for my proposed Tomb Raider: Legacy OST (original sound track). Made a quick recording in Reaper off the keyboard (yay! Got some more use out of the Behringer!) Assuming I get that far, I will be doing at least the Nathan McCree motif on my Clarke pennywhistle. But will it take me long enough to get around to it that I'll be able to do a fiddle part as well? Unlikely, either way.



On the way back from the grocery store sung "My Dog Has Fleas" (aka the open-string pitches of standard/soprano ukulele tuning.) And when I got in, a quick check on the uke showed I was right on pitch with all of them. So I think I may have absolute pitch. Far from perfect, however (again, I have indirect evidence I'm only sensitive to 30 cents or more for absolute. Relative, the tuner tells me I'm sensitive to within the limits of the display). I'm still using the Snark every time I practice on the fiddle; it clips right to the headstock so it is easy to look and see if you are on pitch.



Also over the weekend, I borrowed back the Morrow Project CBR and Medkit long enough to stick new batteries in them and to try to do a short video demonstration of the electronics. It did not go well. I couldn't get the display to show up properly on the laptop's built-in camera, and I was awful; rambling, disjointed, uncoordinated. I supposed I could play around with recording a new narrative and doing a bunch of edits to splice the new material together with some better pictures, in-progress construction pictures, etc. But that's a lot of work and my channel has nearly no hits.

Otherwise, I have a buyer in Germany for a couple more M40's, I'm waiting on a new MOSFET for the Holocron (plus four pounds of obsidian flakes), I'm three to five hundred words away from completing the next fanfic chapter, and I got as far as taping a fresh sheet of paper to my drafting board for new Holocron art.