Anxiety dreams of a Bassist

Wow, Freud would run screaming from this morning's little oddball moment. I suspect I'd stopped breathing again (last night was pretty rough) and from what I remember the dream had points in it where my left hand had been replaced with a transplant, which kept going numb and powerless until I took time to flex and work on it.

At one point, very lucidly, I was thinking this would stop me playing permanently, and I started remembering how to play Donna Lee in my head. After this, the fingers (previously looking pale and lifeless, and unable to clasp at their tips as if broken halfway down) came back to life and appeared to be fine again.

I woke up gasping, as usual - not a function of the dream, more me not breathing. Yipe.

Creative acts with paint

Horrible, horrible helmet:



Plus Altern-8 style painter:



Equals primed helmet,



Then ORANGE.



And finally, shiny shiny.



Much better.

The benefits of daily metronome practice... strength.

It's weird how quickly you start to get strength and definition into your playing when you're regimented in your practice, even if you can only get 45 minutes of bass aerobics and a quick play along to some Madeon (his stuff's so good i tend to slap all the way through it, trying to embellish the excellent bass that's there already).

My right thumb has that self-guiding feel you get when something is starting to really "work", you know?

Also - found a bunch of guys on Diaspora who are running a collaborative music project, a lot of them are using soundcloud for it, so what the hell, I'll stick some low end noise on there!

Stashing parts for fixing stuff later - planning for the apocalypse

Well, maybe not the apocalypse. I've been stashing some parts for the car, mainly suspension bushes and other "consumables", while they're plentiful and cheap, as I want to keep the car for 8-10 years if possible (it should last that long, I reckon). I've now decided to do the same for my iPhone 3GS: I've got about £70 of spares and tools from http://www.AppleiPodParts.com/ including a complete OEM re-case (including the silver front bezel and internal attached parts) and a new OEM battery. These will now get stashed for use in approx. 2 years to recondition the phone completely when things start to wear out. I'll probably pick up a new digitiser / front button panel at some point as well - about another £30 or so. That should hopefully ensure a long and useful life for the iPhone. I daresay iOS for it will be deadended somewhere in 5.X long before I stop using it ;-) Fix your own stuff: it's the only way!

And at last, BlogPress came back up... google apps account using a virgin email address?

Non-music post - on the iPhone / iPad I've used a tool called BlogPress in the past - pretty good multi-platform blogging tool. Not the cheapest, but it's got reasonable integration of pictures and, more crucially and interestingly, video. It's been unstable under iOS5 and the last straw was when it simply wouldn't log in any more. I stopped using it and have been waiting for an update which Apple were apparently slow to approve. Installed the update yesterday (I'm sneezing and coughing my way through the first - and I hope only - cold of 2012) and couldn't get it to work - logging in seemed impossible... Turns out my google apps account wasn't keen to let me log in with my email address: this may well be an argument with my virgin net account, as they're the same, and Virgin have moved to using google mail. If I log in using an application specific password (google thing to allow one-step auth when your account has 2-step enabled) against the **username** I've associated with the account instead of the email address, everything works! I suspect there are other "clashes" like this out there... anyway, it's all good. I'm back into blog territory. I think I've even got twitter to log in...

New year, old music...

Here's some FunkyBass recorded live in Oxford's Bridge club, circa 2005/2006: from the Janeiro / Tempa Tempa era. Great track, this - Jake Carter wrote it, it's a classic. Jake can now be found online at http://www.jake-carter.com/. Do Your Thing - TempaTempa by Andy Basexperience Watt