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El_Sasho
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Name: El
Country: United States
State: Michigan
Birthday: 1/20/1984
Gender: Female
Interests: Bonding with friends, bonding with glue... killing my bonsai. I"m getting really good at that.
Expertise: Bass, Slacking, Catnaps
Occupation: Student
Industry: Entertainment
Message: message me
Member Since:
9/9/2001
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| Dear reader from France,My footprints module says I have a reader from France. Hello, France-origin reader!
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| How many times will I attest to my continued survival?This is going to be a silly post, because I'm in a silly mood.
First off, I have a new laptop. (Whoohoo!) I'm past the crazy-new stage of it being new, but I'm still in the honeymoon new phase of new computer ownership. It was a graduation present from my folks. Also, it was a means of them getting me to come online more often so that we can videochat. The sad thing is, it has a better microphone than my cellphone does, so I use it to talk to them nowadays. As a result, I can use my videochat capable computer to take stupid goddamn pictures. My roommates and I have had a lot of fun getting in a slightly altered state of mind and using the photobooth filters to take a lot of really, really dumb pictures of ourselves, that could probably be used to bar us from most jobs involving the general public.
But I recently bought something even more exciting (this statement is actually a lie); I got my very own German bow.
You see, there are two kinds of bows for the bass. Up until now, I've played French bow, which looks like this:
I've had this bow since I was in tenth grade, and it cost almost half of what this computer did. It's a wonderful piece of craftsmanship; made by Germans, it has a little bit of extra length, which makes those long goddamn orchestral passages a little bit easier, and gives more room for expression in the solo repetoire. I love it to pieces. I got it when there was this crazy new idea of making octagonal shafts.
There's two downsides to the French bow; the first being that most of the energy you put in to it comes from the muscles on the top side of your arm, and the second being that you hold it sort of, but not exactly, like you would a violin bow. The first picture is the French bow:
and the following being the violin bow:
Bassists don't like to be equated with being 'just big, angry violinists," so some people use the alternative, the German bow. I've always been uncomfortable with it, because deep in my musician soul, I'm still a reformed violinist. However, I have my very first student, and since he plays German bow, I've got to knuckle down and figure out how to teach him to use it, which means I should probably have a clue myself. So I popped into Shar, and bought the cheapest one they had.
I'm not going to lie. They had a bright red fiberglass German bow, with the hair dyed red. It was wonderful, and terrifying to behold. I nearly bought it, but a friend of mine was working there at the time, and she stopped me. Remember, folks: Friends Don't Let Friends Buy Fiberglass.
So, while in my bass case there is a reasonably expensive piece of handicraft, I'm currently learning to play with this weird new toy. Behold the difference:
There's a much wider space between shaft and string in the German bow, and it tends to be a tad longer. There's a longer knob, so that your hand doesn't slip off when you play, and because of the way you hold it, most of the power comes from the back of the arm, and thus, you can get some serious shoulder into it. The length and the power make it ideal or orchestral work, but some of the fancy techniques become a right pain in the ass. Honestly, the one thing I like about it right now is that when you hold it, you have this hand position that is an uncomfortable blend of flipping someone off, and the Shocker.
(You use your index and middle fingers for control, and your pinkie for getting hand cramps.)
Since these are two different bows, and I'm really good at one and really suck at the other, it's not surprising that the sound I can get from them is vastly different, even on the same instrument. Along with this laptop, I recieved a fancy microphone, which I recently bought a fancy microphone stand for, so in theory I should be posting some recordings in the near future, with the possibility of deeply humiliating comparisons of my abilities on French vs. German bow.
In other news, I made a hat this winter that I saw in a music video. I like it, but my mom thinks (rightfully) that it makes me look silly.
That is all.
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| Lucky meI'm halfway between being able to vote drink and being able to rent cars.
Happy Democrat day, all y'all.
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| Another one of those collegiate gemsI hate it a whole damn lot when a professor gets on a soap box at the beginning of the year about how we're all in college and we should be able to write college level papers and use a spell check and proofread things before we submit them and write in complete sentances and be useful, literate members of society... and then doesn't bother to do any of these things themself.
A special treat from my biology professor:
"You will lose 5 points on this assignment if the above information is filled in correctly. "
Just call me JoJo the Rabid Lemur, then.
(I found this much more entertaining than a blow-by-blow run-through of the last exam, which clearly has never seen the light of spell-check. I don't know what language allows alolows, but I'm pretty sure it's not English.)
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