Frog in a well

The books do warn about developing bad habits. I disagree, though, that they take as long to unlearn as they do to learn.

My experiments with less pressure, soft blowing, and other changes to my embouchure that permitted falls and slurs meant I basically lost my old embouchure. But that's okay; it wasn't right and it needed to be changed. Now I have the makings of a new embouchure and I'm practicing a lot this week to climb back to where I was before.

Well, sort of. For a few days there I couldn't play a line without burbling. Now the line is coming back, but with better tone and control, less fatigue, and more flexibility.



The bass is at a similar place. I had never practiced muting. I hadn't been walking fingers and my fretting hand was curled. But since I have so much less time on the bass (really, it is more I have a lot of time building fretting and plucking habits on other instruments) it is more a matter of learning some fundamentals of stroke and fret before I can actually practice in earnest.

Which means most of my practice time lately has not been tunes or parts. On the horn, for instance, I'm spending a significant time blowing into the mouthpiece...without the horn even connected to it.

(The image to the right is from when I cut into my Kala Ubass to change the pickup. Among the things I had to do this week was rub the strings -- original Road Toad Pahoehoe "gummi worm" strings -- with talcum powder to tack down the stick, and replace the battery. I used a LiPo from the Holocron project, which means I have the only bass in town that can only be recharged from a Jedi Holocron.)



Oh, yes. And I'm delving deeper into music theory. Let me put it this way; I'd gotten the idea into my head that a dominant seven was built on the seventh degree of a scale (it's actually a V chord with a flat 5th. More or less.) Okay, blame inconsistent shorthand in some of the material I was reading. There's a lot of places where Roman Numerals aren't used for chords; like describing a Gospel style ending cadence as a "2-5-1" (since Gospel rarely uses simple triads, preferring four fingers or more per chord, that 5 is almost inevitably a dominant 7.)

So I'm not actually slipping down any on this one. I'm just spending most of my keyboard time scribbling on staff paper and not tickling ivories...err...acrylics...