I’ve spent most of today sitting in various locations around Kingsmill Hospital, accompanying a friend whose husband was in for an operation. I did manage to finish off a couple of books that I’ve had on the go for a while, a bit of sketching and this photo of the airy and colourful foyer.
I thought there was some nice architecture round the place and thumbs up also for the staff. We only encountered a fraction of those that work there but those we did interact with were friendly and helpful. Although the NHS has its struggles it has some excellent people working for it.
For today’s Green Gym session, I joined the small group working on constructing a new set of steps on a slope leading up to the top edge of Morley Quarry (on the edge of Shepshed). The previous steps had got pretty rotten and had been taken out so we were rebuilding. I’ve appreciated steps on plenty of steep walks before so I was glad of an opportunity to see how it is done.
The answer is plenty of hard work but perhaps I’ll get a chance to pop back there in a month or two and see how the results are holding up.
This coming Sunday and also next Monday, brass players up and down the land will be using their instruments for ceremonial use, ushering in the two-minute silence with The Last Post and concluding it with Reveille (also known as Rouse). Traditionally it is played on a bugle but it will theoretically work on any brass instrument as the notes used in both are the five main partials created by using the mouthpiece without using any valves to adjust the pitch.
I had the notion that I might volunteer to play this if needed at our new church as I haven’t come across a resident brass player. I looked up the notes on the simple but informative Last Post MIDI file page and typed the scores into Musescore so I could transpose them into the Eb tuba version of the partials I am used to.
To be honest, I think I’ll keep quiet on the volunteering front this year. Tuba, which I’m most familiar with, sounds sonorous but rather low. I also dug out the marching band euphonium, also based on an Eb fundamental but an octave higher. The pitch is better but it looks like a ridiculously oversized trumpet and, although I was pleased to find that I can get all the notes, the different embouchure required means I wouldn’t be confident of getting them under pressure and I can feel myself getting tired even halfway through The Last Post. I’ve also got a trumpet but I think that would multiply the challenge I face playing the euphonium (small instrument – more air resistance).
I’ll keep the score on my stand this week. Even though discretion advises me that I’m not quite ready to offer up respectable versions in public, the two pieces will be an excellent and seasonally appropriate opportunity to refine my technique and, one of these years, perhaps I will be ready.
We’ve got a collection of sewing needles and today I asked Jane to dig out the big ones. The reason was that I wanted to repair a plant cover I knocked together last year. The original was a square of wooden planks with two blue plastic hoops and horticultural fleece on the sides and over the top. However, a couple of months ago, I noticed that the top cover had got ripped in some of the high winds and today I finally finished off my planned fix, sewing in some reinforcing gussets made of rolled-up fleece with garden twine.
That is now installed back at the allotment protecting a late planting out of cabbage plants. I wanted to get them out earlier but it took longer than expected for them to bulk up a bit – hopefully they won’t get wiped out by slugs the same way September’s Pak Choi did. I don’t know what this winter’s weather will bring but I won’t be surprised if we get some high winds that will effectively test the measure of my work.
One of the things I’ve made this weekend was tomato ketchup, as part of my attempt to keep up with the harvest. Homemake ketchup is great but it doesn’t tend to come out the rich red we are used to with the commercial products but a slightly pallid orange instead.
It turned out though that I had the ideal solution to hand – beetroot powder. Produced from dehydrating an earlier crop of beetroots, I have mainly used it when baking bread but a little bit went a long way into transforming the ketchup into a very satisfying colour. And as far as I can tell from the first samples, it still tastes much more like tomato than beetroot.
I ended up taking my Squier Jaguar electric bass to today’s sing around – such a pleasingly easy instrument to play. Although it is tuned the same as the upright bass, I can pull off tunes on the electric bass without breaking a sweat that would be hard to impossible for me on the upright or other instruments.
My first contribution was a fairly laid-back, jazzy version of Black Night (originally Deep Purple) and, when my turn came round again, I went for Ain’t She Sweet, a 1920’s tune that I normally do on the ukulele but it also flows well on bass. After the break, I’d been contemplating a few options but, with someone else picking a song that mentioned rain (the hopefully unprophetic Madman Across the Water by Elton John) I hit the session with a lesser-known jazz standard, Here’s that Rainy Day Again.
We were a bit down on numbers so I ended up getting a fourth number, for which I picked another jazz tune, I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free. I’d performed that one at the ‘Mini Monocle’ (formerly ‘Cask Bah Rocks’) on Wednesday evening. Although not a simple tune, it falls under the fingers very easily on a regular bass. I did it a few weeks ago on upright but it was a strong point to finish todays offerings on electric bass too.
Last week we cooked a dish of lamb meatballs in quince halves and it was a bit on the sour side. We probably didn’t needed extra quince cooked with the onion round the base and, even then, it might have been too much. Possibly the original recipe used the fruit of the western Cydonia oblonga quince rather than the oriental ones from the Chaenomeles family? The ornamental ones, gifted by a friend, is what we have though so how to make use of them?
I decided to try dehydrating them and creating a powder, like I’ve done with beetroot and other things in the past. That got to the grinding stage tonight and the result was a muted orange yellow powder with a distinctly sharp tang. However, you can easily control how much you put on. I used a frugal measure on the pork shoulder steaks we had for dinner and it was just a subtle nuance of flavour.
I reckon I could push up the quantity without reaching the sourness we had last week but, for now, I’ve got another batch started. The fruit won’t last forever in raw form and this is one way to help it stretch out without adding lots of sugar to make jellies and cheeses.
I find that a reliable way to warm up on a cool day is to undertake a DIY job involving either water or electricity. There is a certain amount of nervous energy that comes with channelling either of those because there is always the potential for things to go horribly wrong! Today I did both, in the form of fitting a new wireless thermostat to our boiler, so I am feeling nice and toasty inside although I am pleased to report that it all seems to have gone pretty smoothly.
The old thermostat (Honeywell CM-927) was intermittently losing parts of the LCD display. It seemed to be operational but there was too much risk that it would fail completely in the depths of winter. Originally I had planned for our boiler engineer to fit a new thermostat but she suggested that it was well within the competence of careful DIY skills. The CM-927 unit is now obsolete so I picked up a similar Honeywell T3R instead and I decided to do the swap this morning.
I proceeded at a careful pace and it actually all went very smoothly. The main hitches were figuring out which breaker on our consumer unit would isolate the boiler and spotting that whoever put the previous one in wrapped both the boiler control wires in the same brown insulation coating. That wasn’t very helpful, particularly because it matched the brown used for the live mains feed, but I used some electricians tape in different colours to differentiate them before I took everything apart. The new system fired up with no problems and, as promised, automatically paired with the wireless thermostat. I’m hoping there won’t be any further cause to mention boiler thermostats for a good time to come though.
Jane was assisting someone at a hospital appointment in Nottingham yesterday and I was acting as chauffeur. Parking is pretty bad at QMC so the plan was that I would go and find somewhere else in the city I could put the car and it just so happened that I found a place near Alfreton Road, which is home of The Music Inn, a long-established music shop.
As I browsed around, my eye was caught by an Ozark resonator bass. I’ve got a resonator guitar, which has a metal body with an integrated speaker cone to acoustically amplify the sound and I’d heard of bass versions before but this was the first time I’d seen one. Of course I tried it out and I found it to have a powerful, punchy tone. I reckon that, unlike most acoustic bass guitars, it probably could keep up in a small session without needing to be plugged in.
On the downside, the metal body means it is very heavy although I was surprised to find that it still suffered from a tendency for neck dive. It was also without an upper strap button so to wear it standing would mean tying the top end of the strap round the headstock, which I find less comfortable that a body-mounted attachment at that end. Most importantly as reasons for not buying it though were not really needing it and certainly not having proper room to accommodate it!
So, no new bass for me but hopefully it will fall into good hands.
On a recent episode of the SBL podcast, the question was asked whether In-Ear monitors are the way of the future and if that means there is no more need for bass amps? Like most SBL podcasts, the title is a bit misleading but I guess that’s how you get the views. They mainly talk about the pros and cons of IEMs but my take on the ‘death’ of the bass amp is an unequivocal no.
It’s not that I don’t like working with IEM systems but, to date, I’ve only had the opportunity to use them a mere handful of times despite continuing decades of frequent musical activity. The sound you can get from a well set up system is like listening to an album, the level is controllable and you can also feed in things like click tracks and a mic for the band leader to comment on what is coming up. However, at the grassroots level I play at, the infrastructure isn’t there. Even when places like churches move to digital desks and have more aux mixes than musicians on the stage, there are still all sorts of additional things that need to be put in place. Some churches use them (playing for a conference at Emmanuel in Loughborough earlier this month was my first ever IEM-only ‘gig’) but most don’t and the benefits when everything works right have to be weighed against the problems if it doesn’t (and the fact that low budgets and mainly volunteers playing and running sound increase the chance of the latter happening too often for comfort).
I’ve got two bass outings this week – a concert band rehearsal tonight and an open mic in town tomorrow. IEMs wouldn’t work for either. In the first setting, I’m using a smallish amp because, unlike a tuba, the electric bass is far too quiet on its own and everyone else needs to hear it through the air. For the second, I’ll get on stage, plug in and then it is pretty much time to start. The sound check amounts to checking a signal is coming through and both performers and audience are hearing the same sound in the room.
I’m glad that the days seem to have passed when I might need to own an amp too large to carry with one hand but I’m not convinced I’ll either see the time when there is no point owning an amp at all.
