my ukulele progress

[bbkobabe]

For me, when it comes to playing "sloppy" that means getting loose with my strumming. I've had so many times when I started playing a bit loose and astounded myself with the "happy accidents" that ensued. This usually happens as I'm having a couple of beers. Sounds terrible in equal measure I'm sure, but every once in a while I hit on something really special!

Perhaps I'm wrong, Ripock, but you appear from your writings here to be a person who values form and discipline. I admire what you do, and I try to emulate this from time to time by, say, really dig into the circle of fifths. I'd like to think I'm inspired to be more knowledgeable and informed at what I'm doing. But what I'm finding is: I just can't seem to keep my interest fixed to it. I can't keep it up!

I'm more about expressing the emotions of a song and playing and singing beautifully at the same time. I guess I'm more in love with my voice than my playing ability and my musical understanding. Back when I was a bass player I used to always say "I'm unencumbered with any musical knowledge" like it was a good thing. But since I could play along with almost any song I've ever heard and sing harmony like an angel, so people I.ve played with generally put up with me and I almost always been able to hold my own in any band or group I've joined.

I admire you, but I can't be like you... which I'm starting to find personally frustrating for some reason. We'll see if I can change my ways as I progress but so far I haven't been able to change my stripes... I still have an attitude that being 'expressive' trumps understanding what I'm doing. Anyhow, I just bought the Fret Board Roadmap book the other day so I guess I'll just keep trying to make it a priority. <sigh>

As for trout: I've been reading about your apprehension over cooking these trout you have for a few weeks now, which suggests to me that they are frozen... right?

From my experience, frozen trout will will simply never satisfy. Doesn't matter how you prepare them.

My dad is an absolute fishing fool, and trout fishing is his mania. He has never been without a boat of some kind, and he makes his vehicle purchasing descisions based on it's towing capacity. I've been trout fishing since before I could talk. Our idea of a family vacation was driving 400 miles and camping in the Sierra Nevada mountains... and fishing. We caught browns, brookies, rainbows, and cutthroats. We've hiked up above 10,000 feet to catch the elusive Golden trout. I could probably gut a trout with my eyes closed.

And I've prepared frozen trout too, and I've ordered them in restaurants. I've endured the dreaded trout almandine. I've gone to places that had giant tanks full of live trout where you can pick the one you want and have it prepared fresh. But the texture is just never right, and is more often inedible to the point of being gag reflex inducing. There aren't many things worse than bad trout.

There is just one way to get this right: Catch a trout from cold high mountain water, rip it's gills and guts out with your own two hands, and cook it on a grill over an open fire. Nothing else will do.

The most amazing trout I ate came from Wilber May lake high in the Sierra at almost 9000'... that we accidentally smoked. We had all caught out limits - just one of those days! - dragging a fly and a bubble across the surface of the lake. We ate as many as we could hold, and were so satisfied and tired afterwards that we went to bed forgetting to take the surplus fish off the grill. The fire had burned way down by then, and so they slowly smoked for about 7 hours.

We woke up and went "ooops!" and were about to throw they away when someone got the idea to try eating one first. So good! I can still recall exactly whet they tasted like, 40+ years later. Mmmmmm...

So... defrost a bit of that trout and see how your cat feels about it...

 

[ripock]

The trout are fresh...at least they aren't frozen when I buy them. They may have been frozen and then thawed by the grocer...I don't know. The rainbow trout just has weird meat. But it is cheap, so I'll try it out. My parents are in Oregon and we were always big trout fishermen...at least we were until the locusts from southern California invaded, bought up the riverside property, made fishing with bait illegal, and outlawed feeding the ducks in the park because they poop everywhere. I like smoked trout. My grandfather had a smokehouse and I ate a lot of smoked fish. Unfortunately his property is now gone and an outdoor strip mall now occupies the area where his house once stood. Needless to say, I never go back home; it is too depressing.

 

[bbkobabe]

Hmmm... maybe those trout are farmed? Cultured?

It's something about living in really cold high mountain water that makes trout what they are. And that makes the texture just right, I suspect. It doesn't keep for long and it doesn't travel well...

I hear you about how "progress" is really messing things up. And it not just the places we used to love when we were kids that used to be wild palces and now are parking lots.... It's entire ecosystems.

Up here on the North Coast of CA, it's all about crabbing and salmon fishing. Same in Oregon.

So this year, there are so few salmon waiting off the coast that the entire season might be cancelled. Numbers have been dropping for years but we've never seen anything like this. I've been predicting for years a total collapse of the fishery, and we might have just arrived there.

And the crab season keeps getting delayed to let the whales go by first. I know this is a good thing, but I'm sure it makes all the fisher-folks "crabby".

There are a lot of jobs on the balance...

And needless to say I'm ticked off I can't buy these things - from it's all about me angle - and of course the "things used to be better' lens I peer through...

Either way: Human stupidity knows no bound.

 

[ripock]

Trout update: the rainbow trout are thinner than the red trout and they require a little more work. They still have some fins that I have to remove for the sake of presentation. But they cost 1/3 the price of red trout. Here's what I did: I put them meat side down in a cast iron roasting pan and I just seasoned with olive oil, garlic, and tumeric-salt. I only had them in the oven for 15 minutes or so because they are so thin. They kind of poached themselves in the moisture they exuded and the skin on top puckered from the heat so that I was able to pull the skin off and have just meat. My wife said it was good. Happy wife, happy life.

 

[ripock]

There was a thread I cursorily browsed which seemed a bit vitriolic and fraught with the potential to offend. So I didn't even read it but I did see they were bandying about the term infantilize. I haven't seen the word outside of professional journals and it was interesting to see people using it. They were using with a different grammatical aspect and they were stretching the meaning. But that's how words evolve.

I was getting back to my roots, which is important for a Roots musician. I had been playing with a lot of more exotic scales, but I have to come back to my pentatonics and my harmonic minor. The harmonic minor is my favorite for personal reasons but also it is significant. for example the minor 2-5-1, the cornerstone of jazz, is harmonized from the harmonic minor.

But who cares about that? What I was doing was starting in the B phrygian dominant my favorite mode. It has so many half-step intervals that it is easy to make interesting melodies.

I was moving laterally moving within the phrygian and then I would move up to the C Lydian #2. Then I'd move farther up to the IOnian #5 because I was seeking the F# on the A string...for no particular reason. I got up there with a combination of diatonic and chromatic notes. So I am attempting to loosen up.

Then I would arpeggiate across the fretboard to get to the C on the G string. And that puts me back at the first mode.

 

[bbkobabe]

I use the word infantilize when referring to the process of socializing and domesticating cats.

We get a kitten, and we hold it... and pet it... talk to it it... and scratch it's little head... and feed it enough so that it is never truly hungry. Over time, this kitten becomes an overgrown cat-sized kitten rather than maturing into a true wild cat. Feral cats are thus actually more mature than these intentionally "domesti-cat-ed" little fur balls will ever be. And even though "house" cats will still show some native instinct when in the presence of a bird or a lizard, they have been denied their true cat nature - and never fully mature.

Some people seem to do this to their children, actually... but now I'm slogging into some muddy water as well, full of potential to offend.

 

[ripock]

I have most often seen it referring to 25 year old men wearing blue jeans and backwards baseball caps who still live with their parents. The guys have been infantilized by their parents extending their childhood. That's the context I've seen this word in...in discussions of the abstract concept of childhood and its ever-extending boundaries. I remember reading an argument saying that we need to stop infantilizing children and make them adults at about 14 years old with all the benefits and responsibilities that an adult has. That's a bit extreme, but I do see the point. I specifically remember on my 12th birthday my parents presented me with my social security card and I said what's this for? I soon found out when I was on a construction site picking up drywall of demo'd walls.

 

[ripock]

I was just playing a mellow 2-5-1 with an altered 5: B7b9. I was just grooving around and every once in a while when it seemed like I needed a re-set, I would go down the fretboard a bit and melodize in the D# super lokrian bb7 / B phrygian dominant. And that's just a fancy way of saying I was playing chords harmonized from the Harmonic Minor scale around frets 7-9 and then I played some notes of the Harmonic Minor around frets 4-7. But it sounds more impressive when you employ the sort of pseudo semi quasi Greek terminology

I forgot to mention that sometimes instead of going down to D# to melodize sometimes I would go up to the B on the 14th fret and primarily make a tune using the dominant shape of the E minor pentatonic or the B phrygian. That's the beauty of the linear tuning. I can play the B phrygian dominant on the 4th fret of the G string or the 11th fret of the C string or the 16th fret of the G string. On a soprano with 12 frets you can't even play it once. But that is by design. A soprano is a kazoo on steroids. It is meant to just provide some pitches derived from the lowest frets to support vocals. It wasn't designed to do what I do. My ukes are designed to approach as near as practical orchestral instruments. So it is just different tools for different applications. I'm not throwing aspersions at hammers because they cannot unscrew a phillips head screw from a board and I'm not blaming sopranos for not doing something they were not made to do.

 

[ripock]

I'm on full bud-alert. Time flies and I did this last year and I am trying it again. It is warm enough when I go out on my morning walk before work to just wear a sportscoat (with a waistcoat, of course) and no surcoat. It is warm enough for the desiduous trees to bring back the green. And I am watching all of them suspiciously. I want to know the day they bring the leaves. Last year they did it when I wasn't looking. One day they were barren and then all of a sudden leaves. I am going to try to catch them this year.

For music I have been focusing on my misfit mode, the F# Lokrian 13. Let me explain.

Starting in linear tuning, my fretboard has 10 modes of the harmonic minor, the 7 modes plus 3 at the next octave. I play these modes on the G, C, and E strings.

However in re-entrant tuning, where the G string is as useful as an appendix, I play the modes on the C, E, and A strings. If you're keeping score that is 20 modal shapes. But it isn't as unmanageable as it sounds because in the vast majority of the time the linear mode will bleed into the re-entrant mode.

Here's an illustration if you play the G Ionian #5 on the G, C, and E strings...that's all well and good. But if you play the same notes on the C and E strings and then add some notes from the A string, then you're playing the C Lydian #2.

This rule holds sway over the entire fretboard, except in one case: The linear A Dorian #11 does not bleed into the F# Lokrian 13. In fact the F# Lokrian 13 is between shapes that are around four frets higher on the fretboard.

So I feel bad for the re-entrant F# Lokrian 13. Not so much for the A Dorian #11 because, after all, it is Dorian. That is a rather well-known mode. But the poor Lokrian 13 receives no appreciation from me. At least, in its re-entrant form. The linear form of the F# Lokrian 13 bleeds into the re-entrant B Phyrgian Dominant, my favorite mode, so that Lokrian 13 gets a lot of play time.

I'm trying to give the re-entrant F# Lokrian some more centrality in my playing. It is rooted on that F# on the 6th fret, so you see it really gets lost in the shuffle. The really low shapes and the really high shapes get my attention because of where they are, but the middle forms get kind of obscured. It is kind of like in the geography of the United States, Los Angeles and New York are very visible, but no one remembers about Decorah, Iowa. Except for the museum of spam which is located there...or so I heard from a classmate of mine who was reckless enough to accept a teaching post at the college there. She was from Hawaii, so maybe the allure of spam was too strong.

 

[ploverwing]

Natty new avatar pic, riprock

 

[ripock]

I saw that Patty had a new one and I thought I'd follow suit.

 

[ripock]

I had decided on cultivating a meatier métier in the kitchen this week. I bought a pork roast, trout, and a flattened chicken (I don't know if it is splaycocked but it is flat). I know that isn't a lot of meat for an American household but it is a bit more than I am accustomed to. Unfortunately my carne-val is delayed because my wife vomited this morning. That was strange, but stranger still was the fact that she has a little bucket which she kept from a previous hospital visit for just these kinds of emergencies. Now that's what I call foresight. At her request I bought some chicken soup and oyster crackers...or so I thought. I dropped by the bourgie store since it was close to my barber and bought some $5 cans of chicken noodle soup but this evening I noticed if you rotate the can it actually says no chicken noodle soup. Why do people do that? Don't put tricky labels on something; just call it what it is.

It reminds me of my pet peeve: "solid" bamboo ukes. As if such a thing were possible. a bamboo uke is a laminate only the lamination is horizontal instead of vertical. I don't have a problem with bamboo. It makes nice window blinds and flooring with a lot of science, steam, hydraulic pressure, and goo. As a matter of fact I have had my eye on a $750 sportscoat at my tailor's shop made of bamboo. It is so soft. Just don't call it solid. Solid to me denotes a level of naturalness that bamboo lacks.

My Kamaka was thirsty. I keep two humidifers in its case and they were both bone dry. I have really neglected that instrument. I remedied that today because since I am focusing on the re-entrant F# Lokrian 13, the kamaka would serve well.

The first thing to notice about the F# Lokrian 13 is a lot of half-step intervals: F#-G, B-C, D#-E. It is possible to make some rather cool lines just bouncing between those dyads.

The F#-G dyad of the F# Lokrian 13 is also the 2nd and third degrees of the E Aiolian below it on the fretboard. So it is very easy to slide down to the first mode and really expand the sound.

The B on the 7th fret is the same as the B on the 11th fret. So it is easy to start the F# Lokrian 13 and then jump to the 11th fret and then move to some different modes like the phrygian dominant or mixolydian b6.

It is easy to get from the treble to the bass side of the neck using the F# dim7 arpeggio.

I played a 2-5-1 in F# (or should I consider it Gb? F# and Gb are of course enharmonic and each has 6 accidental notes. Gb has one offensive note, Cb, whereas F# has two, A# and E#. I normally think of it as F# because I like sharps more than flats)

 

[ripock]

One final note, as Beethoven used to say...I was sitting there being very pleased at how symmetrical the circle of fifths is. C at the top has no accidental notes. If you go one note to the right, G, it has one sharp in its scale. If you go one note to the left, F has one flat. Go two notes away from C and you have scales with two flats or two sharps. And so it goes until you get Db with 5 flats and B with 5 sharps. And when you get across from C you're at Gb with 6 flats or you can think of it as F# with 6 sharps. I really like the arrangement.

 

[ripock]

After a large saturday meal of pork roast, mashed potatoes, and green beans & mushrooms, I settled down to some F# Lokrian 13 jamming. The main things I did different tonight was shift my B's. Instead of hitting the B on the 7th fret, sometimes I would jump up to the B on the 19th and play I suppose is the D# Lokrian bb7, the D# dim7 arpeggio which runs from the D# on the A string over to the A on the G string. From that A I can get back into the F# Lokrian 13 in linear tuning. I also did a little pattern picking in-between. For some reason I was playing BΔ and E5.

 

[AZChris]

It reminds me of my pet peeve: "solid" bamboo ukes. As if such a thing were possible. a bamboo uke is a laminate only the lamination is horizontal instead of vertical.

I'm currently in a rural area of the Philippines where everything is bamboo. I am going to see if I can bring home a large diameter chunk about a foot long and see if I can build a solid bamboo uke just to be able to say "Oh yes there ARE solid bamboo ukes!". Not sure I can. The big pieces are needed for strength in the stuff they build. It's extremely sustainable for sure.

 

[ripock]

I am willing to recant. I am very opinionated but the opinion changes with the data. Let me know how it goes

 

[ripock]

I made a large farinata topped with 4 poached eggs which I overcooked. With green and red chili on top.

I practiced some percussion. I mainly use two forms. The thumbnail on the bout closest to me and fingertips dropped down to the right of the soundhole in a claw-formation. So I practiced the split-second timing needed to insert the beat within the progression. Also It is a challenge not to let the sound devolve into something twee like a bossa nova. There is one cool thing I wish I could do. I once saw someone using their fret board like a guiro. To accent the beat, she would run her fingernail down the fretboard between the strings. It is rather difficult to do and keep your rhythm; it just puts you hand so far out of position.

My goal tonight was to let the F# Lokrian 13 blend into the background a bit. I'm going to start playing things more freely but keep in mind the areas occupied by the F#--even the F# on the E string. I usually disregard the E string because you cannot play the scale from the E string unless you slide up the string like an abject tyro. However, who says you always have to play the whole scale?

I have to say it wasn't a success today. It was too new. Finding the hidden F# scales seemed a bit of an affectation and not natural. I'm going to attempt blending some more tomorrow.

 

[ripock]

bud watch is partially successful. There is one tree, a sycamore that has buds. All the other trees are barren. so spring hasn't quite sprung yet and things are a bit colder this morning as is evidenced by the fact that I saw a homeless man lying on the sidewalk to the leeward side of a parked car huddled over a fire he had created with a pile of rubbish.

 

[ripock]

I was blending my F# Lokrian 13 better. I was using them as a fall back for when I was improvising. They were somewhere I could turn in a time of melodic need.

For some reason I played chords a considerable amount today. I was fixated on this progression: Em6, D#m7, B7sus2, E13b11, Em7.

 

[ripock]

on bud watch. over 90 % of trees are barren but there seems to be a system of color. A few trees with black bark and pink flowers sprouted. Then the dogwoods with white flowers followed suit. Nothing else. It is pink then white, so far.