Today I made a practice CD for my band, Flat Rabbit. Using the World Wide Woodshed‘s Slow Gold program, I was able to transpose three of the songs from the key of E flat up a half step to E, which will be convenient because it means that we can practice along with the CD without having to detune our instruments. In a live setting, we would just play the songs a half step up anyway, so it makes sense to practice them as we would play them. The songs lost some quality and gained some delay artifacts in the transposition, but they will still suit the purpose well.
Category Archives: Music
Morrowind Creativity
The most creative thing I did today involved playing Morrowind. My character contracted a disease in a remote area after fighting several undead creatures which had drained his strength and endurance. The disease (called “the Blight”) further drained him until he had no strength or endurance left at all. (In this game, Strength and Endurance are physical attributes of the character. Both attributes had values of zero.)
The challenge before me was to get my character back up to full strength and get the disease cured, but since his strength was sapped, he couldn’t carry anything with him. Part of his quest involved returning a couple of items to a guild master in another town, so he had to be able to carry things to complete the quest. However, in order for him to be able to move at all, he had to take off all the armor and possessions that he carried, leaving him defenseless against creatures in the wilderness. Fortunately, in Morrowind, gold evidently weighs nothing, so he was at least able to carry money.
After stripping to his loin cloth and picking up his gold, he ran through the wilderness to the nearest town. In several places along the way, he encountered creatures that tried to attack him, but he was able to get by the creatures without being injured too much more. When he arrived at the town, he spoke with several locals who were a bit offended by his lack of dress. Through those conversations, he learned that there was no healer in town and no place to purchase healing potions. Fortunately, the town was coastal, so he was able to book passage on a ship to another, larger town.
In the larger town, he found a healer and purchased potions to cure the Blight, restore his strength and restore his endurance. With the few gold coins he had left, he bought a knife and some clothes, took the ship back to the small coastal town, and ran back through the wilderness to gather his things. He then ran back to the small town, took the ship back to the larger town, and was able to use other transport to get back to the guild master and complete his quest. That was the closest this character has come to death and still avoided it.
Of course, I could have just loaded a previously saved game and completed the quest again, but that wouldn’t have been creative, now would it?
(I also went to see my friend John play with his band, Better Than Nothing, and that was fun. I couldn’t stay late enough to see the whole show, unfortunately.)
Don’t Fret
I spent several hours today organizing a collection of song lyrics and chords that I can use to practice Flat Rabbit songs. I found a font on the web that consists almost entirely of guitar chord diagrams, so I’m putting together a notebook with all of our songs in one place, complete with lyrics, chords and blocking. I also practiced identifying fretboard notes on my handheld computer, using FretTrainer free software for Palm OS. (It’s nice to be able to sit in bed and practice guitar without bothering anyone else!)
Airborne Explorer
Played music with Brad the Drummer at his house for a while, but closed it off early. Unfortunately, on the way home I saw where someone had driven a Ford Explorer into the crowd at a car show I like to attend occasionally. (There was a Denver Post story that used to link here, but the story is no longer on the Post website.) Rumor has it that he did it on purpose, being drunk and upset that he was asked to leave the car show. Original estimates placed his vehicle at 90 mph, but the news article says 60 mph. Either way, it was enough to get the Explorer airborne over the landscaping before it landed on several classic cars, injuring eight people.
I haven’t slept well since.
It bothers me that the thought to do something like this even occurred the driver of the Explorer. No matter how drunk or pissed off he was, it shouldn’t even be conceivable to drive an SUV into a crowd of people at a high rate of speed. It’s amazing to me that no one was killed, though one man was pinned under the vehicle and in critical condition when taken to the hospital. (According to the above story, he pulled through and is stable, thank God.)
It also bothers me that the passenger in the vehicle has still not been apprehended, according to the Post story. How hard can it be for the police to get the driver to tell them the name of his passenger? Or perhaps he has been apprehended by now, but the news has been overshadowed by the nearly 100,000 acres of wildfires burning in nine different places in Colorado as I write this.
I can’t help but wonder whether the events of September 11th influenced, however slight, the mindset of the driver. If we had not been inundated with visuals of commercial airliners crashing into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center, would he have even thought of using his car as an airborne weapon?
That sounds alarmist to me, and I don’t intend that to be the case. I’m just trying to make sense out of something that makes no sense at all to me.
Silent Treatment
Yesterday’s sour mood produced a new poem, “Silent Treatment.” This evening, I went to a jam at Hiccups with Brad the Drummer and played a few songs with him and the house band. Brad got some comments on his excellent drumming, and a few people said I did a good job, as well. Next time, I’m taking my own amp, though. I didn’t feel comfortable messing with the rig that I was using, so my Strat sounded thin and too quiet.