Interesting Representation of Jesus (Updated)

While doing a Google image search of "Jesus" to get wallpaper for my iPhone (Hey, it's the "Jesus Phone" right?), I came across this image.



I'd link to the site, but it didn't explain any more than this: The image was made from The Shroud of Turin. It is quite striking to me, and I've read more than one book about the Shroud, in addition to many, many articles.

Anyway, I think it looks quite inspiring on my "Jesus Phone."



UPDATE: Here is Chist Pantocrator, the sixth century representation of Jesus that Dr. Shield mentioned in comments.



This was also based on the Shroud of Turin, and any student of western civ ought to be familiar with it... which begs the question, of course, that if carbon fourteen dating places the Shroud in the middle ages, how does Christ Pantocrator even exist with a much earlier date of nearly a thousand years? I'm smart, but I'm not the sharpest tool in the shed, and the first thing I thought when those carbon fourteen results came back was, "Well, duh. The Shroud barely survived a fire at about that time, so of course it's infused with carbon from around that date." Simplistic, as there are other factors involved, like the patches of cloth from the repair after that fire, but really.

Much practicing and house hunting going on, so posting will continue to be once a week or so, and, well, trivial I guess.

Nothing trivial about this, however.



Never seen this sectacular redhead before, but the set dates from 2005, so she's not exactly new. Yes, her hair is really that red. All of it. LOL!

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The Difference Between Practicing and Performing

Lot of developments here, so this will probably be a long, long post.

One of the things I have trouble getting into the heads of my students is the difference between practicing and performing. When you perform, it's just a matter of recitation - going through the set that you've developed - while practicing is preparation for that. So, as a result, just reciting your set in your bedroom is not enough to prepare for a performance, you rather have to concentrate on certain things when you practice in order to be well prepared.

One of the main things is repetition. When you perform, you just play your tunes as they are written to be performed, but when you practice, you have to do more than that. Some pieces I can keep comfortably under my fingers by just playing them regularly - I'm thinking of the figuration preludes I've written here - but others I have to put a little extra effort into - that would be the more intricate polyphonic and homophonic stuff.

What I have discovered over the years, through admittedly anecdotal trial and error, is that prime number repetitions work the best. Now, I'm not attributing any magical properties to prime number repetitions, rather I have come to the conclusion that because prime numbers are only divisible by one and themselves, they form a single unit larger group. Since the human mind is an example of bi-fold symmetry, it tries to divide everything by twos, fives, and tens. Everyone knows how to multiply by two, five and ten almost instinctively, but sevens and threes are a different matter (Remember the IIII ancient by-five counting system you learned as a kid?).

The least of these "magical" prime numbers is three. Most musical repetition schemes are based on two (The only even prime number), and if you exceed this, it puts your mind and your memory into a whole different state.

Let's say you have an antiquated Baroque era sectional binary piece in your set with the form of A, A, B, B. If when practicing you play it A, A, A, B, B, B you'll be doing your memory much more good than if you play it as you'd perform it. Aside from the single additional repetition of each section, you are also having to concentrate more to change the form. Just knowing this can make for more effective and efficient set maintenance practice.

Now, let's say you have a thoroughly modern piece in your set with the form, A, A', B, A, A', B, A". You are already playing the A sections five times, a prime above two, but you only hit the B's twice. If you just got through the piece like this; A, A', B, A, A', B, A, A', B, A" you will have hit the A's seven times and the B's three. This is a very efficient memory reinforcer, and a great strategy for set maintenance.

For major biggie pieces, like the crowd pleasers in my set, I'll go ahead and play them three times through in their entirety, and for the super special pieces in my set, like the tap tech pieces, I'll play them a full eleven times. Admittedly, all of that repetition above seven is to maintain the calluses on my right hand i and m fingers, but eleven seems to work much better than ten. Humorously - or not - when I went to thirteen reps, I started to get some overuse syndrome symptoms. Don't think I'll go for seventeen just yet. LOL!

So, try the additional repeat scheme in your practicing for set maintenance, and stick to the prime numbers and see how it works out for you.

*****

I mentioned previously that I have gotten into a scale practice regimen for the first time in years, and that this activity made me rethink my nail shape and length: They have gotten both shorter and flatter on the tips (The i and m have gotten shorter and flatter, while the a and c have stayed round, but are shorter).



This has been one time I'm glad I use glue-on acrylic nails. Experimenting with nail shape and length is a lot easier if you can just put on another set when you screw up versus having to let your mistakes grow out. As you can see, the index and middle fingers are quite short and relatively flat, while the ring and pinky are a bit longer and rounded: I think of them as two pairs, and the ring and middle fingers don't play the scalar passages, and they are at an angle that requires a bit more length.



From the other side, you can see that the index and middle barely show, while the ring and pinky carry a bit more length. The shorter i and m make scale playing much more smooth - no string snap or nail hang-up - while the longer a and c allow me to reach more distant strings easier when I'm playing arpeggios and whatnot.

*****

As you can see from the top photo, I've gotten the eleven-string fretted Reynolds-Godin Glissentar out, and am playing that again. To be honest, I haven't even picked it up in well over a year. What happened is, when I started radically altering my nail shape, I wondered how the new nails would work on it. Since I'm sending it off to Jim Kozel to have a RMC Polydrive installed in it this winter, I thought I should re-familiarize myself with it anyway. Good idea! The shorter nails make all the difference in getting the string courses to ring evenly, and the extra effort involved in playing it - think playing two guitars at once - are giving me added left arm forearm strength. Playing it a bunch now will hasten my being able to add the guitar into my set when I get it back from Jim next spring, and my other two guitars feel like butter after a set go-through with it.

Since the Reynolds Glissentar is so hard to play - some of the hard chords in my figuration preludes were dull thuds the first time through, and my left forearm would cramp up after thirty minutes with it - I have been playing it in between the other two guitars: Godin, Reynolds, Parker, Renolds &c.

The first time through, I just played my set as I'd perform it (Or tried to!), and then I've been adding repeats of the crowd pleasers, the tap tech pieces &c. each additional time. I've been through my set three times with it now, and am progressing quite quickly. I'm psyched!

Here it is, then, The Holy Trinity:


The Father, The Son, and The Holy Spirit. LOL!

*****

No houses on the horizon, so I'm here in Alpine for the time being. Kind of a bummer, because now that I'm into the idea of moving, I'd like to "git 'er done" if you know what I mean.



New model to me, but I'm digging the red eyebrows. Too bad about the eye makeup; I'm sure the lashes are red too.

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Computer Catastrophe (Updated)

Sorry for the break, but my heretofore trusty Mac Mini froze up the other day, and nothing would fix it but wiping the disk clean and reinstalling everything. Unfortunately, I lost all of my iLife apps - iPhoto, iMovie, iDVD, and Garage Band - and they were not on the disks the Mini came with (?!), so I had to finally order a disk set of those apps. I lost a HUGE iPhoto library... for... ever, but all of the good stuff was backed up on my SmugMug account, so really no great loss, and I managed to recover my vast iTunes library off of my 30GB video iPod using TinkerTool (whew). All of my other vital stuff is on a 250 GB external drive, so I got off pretty easy, considering. The disk checked out OK and repairing the permissions didn't help, so I'm not sure what the problem was.

UPDATE: I'm still having the Mini freeze on me (But not terminally, as was the case before), and I found out what the problem was when I stumbled across this thread in which a Mini user had the same kinds of freezes after installing new RAM. So, I ran the Hardware Test disk, and guess what? Yup, I have developed some bad memory addresses. I've been wanting to upgrade because I only have 512 MB anyway, but the Mini is a MAJOR PITA to get into. Well, I also found an online tutorial for that, so I'm going to order 1 GB worth of fresh RAM and get with the program (ProTools gives me memory warnings all the time, so I've needed to do this for a while now).

Anyway, no more posting until iLife gets here next week because I have nothing to manipulate photos with. Believe it, or not, I've never even opened up any of the other iLife apps - I know nothing about Garage Band other than that it has a silly name and takes up disk space - so I basically just paid $79.00 for iPhoto!

Why Apple includes iTunes with OS X but not iPhoto is beyond me, as it seems just as necessary, but whatever.

I'm planning to get a digital video camera to make YouTube clips of me performing anyway, so I suppose I'll need iMovie soon enough, and I have two other computers that need the iLife apps, so I guess I ought to have a disk of them. Reinstalling ProTools LE 7 was actually worth while, as I got an entirely new point upgrade, from 7.0.2 to 7.1.0 out of the deal for free (I actually ended up with two ProTools LE 7 disks when I bought the Digi 002 earlier this year), so that was nice.

Oh, I also ordered the all-new version of Encore, v5.0.3, and my initial impressions are very favorable (I ordered a disk, but they also gave me an instant download of the full version, which was very cool). It pretty much works as before, but it looks like an OS X native app now instead of something ported in from OS 9, and the on screen display is WYSIWYG! Far more attractive. The old maximum file size feature bug is now fixed, though I haven't tested that out yet. First thing I'll do is try to combine all four movements of Sonata One into a single file so that they play seamlessly as I intended.

Finally, since this post will push the last Sonata One post off the bottom of the page - and this is post 401 for MMM since May, 2005 - I put a sidebar section with links to all four of those posts in the blog template.



It's a rerun, but one of my favorites.

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Progressing as a Guitarist: Two Steps Forward, One Step Back

OK, so that was overly simplistic.

It has been an interesting adventure, picking up the guitar four years ago at forty-six, after not touching one for the previous four years. In the beginning, I learned very rapidly - or rather, I relearned - and in a mere two years, I had relearned almost all of my previous repertoire, and recovered circa 80% of my technique. After that, however, things became more of an effort.

More likely, I have to say that I took many steps forward, and then I'd have a revelation that made me rethink everything, necessitating that I step back a few paces and restart the process. Then, there were plateaus - frustrating in the extreme - but even during those times I knew I was progressing, even if it was just adding new pieces to my set.

Of course, I've also rebuilt a performing career during that time, and all of the gigs I've done have gotten me back into the game. Many years ago, I was an extremely nervous and self-conscious performer, and today - at the dinner club and piano bar gigs, at least - I'm so relaxed I can daydream and people watch during most of my set. Virtually all of that progress was simply due to the fact that I got busy and performed several times every week. Like I say to my students, If you want to get good at playing in your bedroom, then play in your bedroom; but if you want to get good at performing, then you have to perform a lot, and in many, many differing circumstances.

Well, the scale practice routine I recently started has been an unexpected double-sided blessing-curse. As I got into it, I had to rethink my right hand angle of attack, and more importantly, my fingernail shape and length: The i and m nails got a LOT shorter, and much less pointed as well. Of course, this made me rethink the p (Thumb) as well, and it got shorter too, and also more angled toward the inside of my hand.

The immediate result of this was that I started dropping a lot of notes in some of the pieces in my set. My nails were so much shorter and flatter on the tips that I was simply missing the strings. It was so bad I had to drop some pieces from my set for a while!

Well, a few weeks later, I've tightened things back up, and my tone - a product of nail attack and release - is much better, and I've gotten to a whole new level. Painful at first, but the end result has been the biggest technical leap I've made in well over a year.

So, as you progress, expect these setback-breakthroughs. Initially they might seem depressing, but it is the overall goal that you'll be closer to in the end.

FOOTNOTE: The house deal fell through because the seller was overly proud of the work he'd done to the place, and he wouldn't come down enough on his - way too high - asking price. Too bad, as I loved the place, but in addition to being a perfectionist, I'm also a cheapskate (Perhaps that's why I'm terminally single?). I understand markets, and I don't have a perfect 800 credit rating for nothing. LOL!



That's one of the most perfect redheads I've ever seen. No freckles, so I'm betting she never sees the sun (She's Russian, so that might figure). Her hair is actually redder than that, but she dresses it with something that dulls it a few shades - sacrilege. I only know this because the rest of her hair... er... never mind. LOL!

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Musing Musical Monk Mulls Move

How's that for alliteration?

For the past year, I've been thinking about leaving Alpine. I don't really want to leave - I absolutely love it out here - but several factors are weighing on my mind. For one thing, my mom turns 80 on New Year's Day, and I'm the only family she has, so I ought to be closer to her, and secondly, I'm well connected out here and all the way to Tucson now musically, so I will still be out here enough playing gigs. Finally, I need a bigger market - San Antonio is my home town and there are 2.3M people there these days - so logic and necessity have both conspired to prompt me into action. This is no small deal, as I positively hate moving... but I've been here five years, and that seems to be the maximum time I spend in any one place, going by the pattern of my life.

Well, being that I've been a housing inspector for both FEMA and HUD in past years, lets just say that I have impossibly high standards for a house. I've been looking for a while, and have turned down a house or two because they weren't "perfect" - I know an amazingly detailed inspector in San Antonio who I have working for me - and I must admit that I figured that my standards would delay the process for a year or more.

Well, God has a sense of humor. It's - needless to say with the credit crisis - a buyers market today, and guess what just came up for listing? A small house just a couple of miles from mom's place that belonged to a building contractor! He's been in the place seven or eight years - the house is 25 years old - and it's a tricked out hot rod for such a small house. I'm talking 1,400 square feet, three bedrooms, two baths, corner lot (Mom's place is well over 2K square feet).

Super clean looking from the front.



New roof, fresh paint, nice landscape work.

The contractor-owner redid every room in the house: dining area.



Living room.



Kitchen.



Master bath (Hall bath has a tub and is completely tiled in bright white: I probably won't set foot in it for fear of smudging something. LOL!).



So, this is the ultimate bachelor pad for me. Perfect in every detail, redone by a meticulous independent contractor like I used to be... so, I put an offer in on it. Oh, the back yard has a covered section of the patio with ceiling fans (!) and an open stone section with a permanently installed gas grill. YESSSSSS!

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Keeping Scale Practice in Proper Perspective (Updated)

As regular readers know, I'm not a big fan of practicing scales, and I think too much emphasis is put on scales by some teachers and performers. Sure, learning scales is an important part of the process of learning the idiom of the guitar and developing basic technique, but they can be overdone, and much time can be wasted by practicing them too much.

Perhaps it is inevitable that going through a phase of playing scales "too much" will be a part of most guitarist's learning and evolution process, but if this phase is overly long, scales can become a retrograde force that actually inhibits musical development. This is exactly what happened to me when I was at Berklee back in the early '80's. My goal was to be able to play single lines very fast, picking every note using alternate-picking plectrum technique. A few years earlier, Al Di Meola had come out with the Elegant Gypsy album, and it completely wiped me out how fast and clean his lines were. So, I spent hours and hours and hours, day after day after day, week after week after week, month after month after month, year after year after year... practicing scales and non-scalar finger independence exercises trying to achieve that kind of velocity. I got pretty close, too, but I continued in this scale addiction long after I had developed plenty good single-line technique, when my time would have been much better spent working on learning other aspects of music.

The bottom line with this is, by the way, genetic potential: You either have the genetic makeup to play blazingly fast, or you do not. I've studied quite a bit about this, but I don't want to get bogged down in an esoteric physiological discussion here, so let it suffice to say that there are many factors involved, including individual ratios of fast-twitch to slow-twitch muscle fiber, how thick or thin the myelin sheaths around the nerves are, and how an individual's particular genetic expression has them handling neurotransmitters. It is exactly analogous to being a world class sprinter: No matter how hard most individuals train - they can follow an Olympian's regimen exactly - they simply lack the genetic potential to compete at that level. Same with playing scales fast; most guitarists simply lack the proper genetic expression to keep up with Al Di Meola, Paco de Lucia, Pepe Romero or whomever. Through many years of over-practice, I was able to get close to Di Meola speed, but I could never get that last little bit of super-extraordinary velocity... because I don't have the proper genetic makeup.

Knowing this stark fact of reality can save a guitarist literally years of fruitless labor. If you have gone through an extended period of scale over-practice, have listened to your teacher's advice, have gleaned every last little tip you can from interviews of and articles by your favorite speed demons, and you still can't get to that level of velocity, don't sweat it. Far from being alone, you are in the vast majority. Stop wasting your time, stop beating your head against the genetic velocity wall, and get on with discovering what you can do better than anyone else, and become the musician you were meant to be.

My favorite quotation about this speed-obsession phenomenon comes from Winton Marsalis:

"The ultimate expression of technique is not velocity, it is nuance."

That's it exactly. What makes a virtuoso in his fifties or sixties - well past physiological prime - so vastly superior to a young prodigy is nuance.

As a direct result of that earlier series of changes I went through while at Berklee, when I switched to playing using classical right hand technique at age 29, my period of being addicted to scales was years behind me, I actually had a distaste for them, and I didn't want to repeat my previous scale-addicted phase at all. It is probably no surprise then, that my linear playing using classical right hand technique has always been pretty lame... OK, very lame.

When I decided to go the solo guitarist route again four years ago - instead of just composing - I even decided to not play scales at all, relying instead on a metronome slow-play regimen to get the music tight. And, that worked fantastically well... until I started playing pieces with extended single line passages and composing my series of twenty-four Lineal Studies.

The problem, then, is one of perspective: Achieving a balance that will allow one to maximize technical potential, while not getting obsessive to the point that other areas of one's musicianship suffer. I can't tell you what will work best for you, as that is something you'll just have to discover for yourself. But for me, just adding a hour of scale free-practice (no metronome) into my routine has worked quite well as a start.

What I do is, I play all seven of the in-position two-octave mode forms (versus position-shifting forms such as the Segovia scales) from the twelfth or thirteenth fret - depending upon whether the mode form spans four frets or five - down to open position and back up. I do this four times: Once with rest-stroke starting with the i finger, free-stroke starting with i, rest-stroke starting with m, and finally free-stroke starting with m.

Instead of calculating the form's name by the position of the index finger (1) - where the form spans two octaves and a third - as is the usual practice, I calculate it from where the pinky (4) is, which gives an even two octaves. I do this so that there is only one note played on the low E string, which can't be a rest-stroke (Segovia created his position-shifting forms to deal with this issue, but in-position forms are better for improvisation, obviously).

Going through all seven of the mode forms - Ionian, Dorian, Phrygian, Lydian, Mixolydian, Aeolian, and Locrian - in this way takes about an hour, and I just treat that as one of my two or three daily practice sessions. This means that as I cycle through the 64 pieces currently in my set, I end up doing scales every other day. This is plenty often for my regular set-maintenance practice routine.

*****

UPDATE 09/21/08: Since I originally posted this, I have reversed the order of the mode forms, starting out in open position and playing them to the very top of the fingerboard. Since I play only cutaway guitars now, and the Godin has 19 frets, the Reynolds fretted Glissentar has 22, and the RMC Parker Nylon Fly has 24, this makes the sessions 1.5 to 2 hours each, which is in keeping with the time range of my repertoire maintenance practice sessions. The original idea was to gently stretch the hand out while warming up, but that meant I only played the open position forms once each pass. This way, I begin and end with the open forms, and I'm getting comfortable in every position on my three guitars. I figured that since I had done a lot of scale practice when I was young, the left hand would outpace the right in development speed, and this has been the case. However, since I have four years of practicing and performing under my belt this time, the right hand is progressing quite quickly too. I'm actually looking forward to my wintertime metronome practice regimen, when I can play these super-slow and really tighten them up. Yeah, yeah; I should have done this earlier. Live and learn, live and learn.

*****

When I get into my winter metronome slow-play regimen, I'll add one of the mode forms at the beginning, and each of the others successively in between the categories of pieces as I go, which means I'll hit them all several times from the beginning of December to the end of February. By that time, my linear playing ought to be tight and smooth, if not particularly fast, and as the Lineal Studies start to come together for me - it was problems with those that lead to my deciding to add scales back into my regular routine - I ought to be achieving some decent velocity again.

So, I hope my experiences here are helpful: You don't want to go overboard with scales, but you don't want to throw the baby out with the bath water either. LOL!

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09/11/01 Plus Seven Years

Seven years ago this morning, I awoke at my condo in Adelphi, MD - an inside-the-Beltway suburb of Washington, D.C. - to go to work a mere three miles south in Hayattsville. It was one of those impossibly crisp, cool, preview-of-fall days wherein there was not a cloud from horizon to horizon and the sky was unusually deeply blue.

I rode "Leviathan" - my then-new 2001 BMW K1200LT motorcycle - to work that morning. Even a three mile commute on that thing was a riotous joy to me then, so I arrived to work smiling from ear to ear and in an excellent mood.

Things were fairly slow at work that morning - I alternated between being a Case Reviewer and a Field Inspector for FEMA back in those days - so I grabbed a cup of coffee, booted up my computer, and began working the cases in the queues.

It wasn't very long - I don't think I'd finished my first cup of coffee yet - before someone said that an airplane had hit one of the World Trade Center towers. The guy didn't sound overly alarmed or breathless, so my first thought was that it was a small private aircraft, and so I just kept working.

Within a very short time, however, someone said it was an airliner, and that one of the WTC towers was ablaze. For some reason I still can't comprehend, I wasn't freaked out by this news either, and I was still working when someone yelled - actually yelled - that a second airliner had hit the other WTC tower. Probably needless to say, this got my full and complete attention, and I had a bottomless pit feeling in my gut.

I can't remember clearly the exact chain of events after that, but I got down to the employee lunch room, where they had CNN on the TV, just in time to see the first tower collapse. I couldn't watch any more of it.

Back in the mid to late 80's, I lived in Hoboken, NJ and worked in Manhattan. I was in a rock band, did some studio work, and during the summer I worked as a bicycle messenger to keep in shape and make some extra cash. Several clients of the outfit I rode for were in the WTC towers, so I'd been up and down them many times. On nice, clear days, which were few and far between in the Summer, I'd take a break on the observation deck to enjoy the spectacular view. Additionally, whenever I went to the towers, I'd walk between them just to look up and capture the vanishing point effect. It was so awesome it made me laugh every time.



The photo doesn't do it justice, but it is the closest I could find.

While sitting back in my cubicle in shock, yet a third call came out that an airplane had hit the Pentagon. Though the Pentagon was several miles across town, because I had a south facing window, all I had to do to confirm this was to look over my left shoulder: There it was, a rising black semi-mushroom cloud against the now fierce looking blue sky.

Everything after that point was a blur, but because we were federal employees the powers that be sent us home around lunch time. I distinctly remember how ironic I thought it was that my mood on the ride home couldn't possibly have been more opposite of that on the ride in.

I spent the rest of the day on the internet and watching TV - I have cable piped into my computer, so I can watch TV in a small window on my monitor as I surf - just trying to absorb it all and make some kind of sense out of it. It was just the beginning of a very long process.

For the next eighteen months, on and off, I reviewed cases from the 09/11 terror attacks, and some of them were heartbreaking in the extreme. I was never sent to New York to do field work, and I was actually thankful for that. Personally, I have no problem with death and destruction that is brought about by natural disasters, as harsh as that might sound, but working those 09/11 cases was positively spirit-crushing. I was happy to be sent out to other disasters, and assigned to work other case files.

Some FEMA people were on the scene almost immediately, of course, and one of them emailed me this picture jut a couple of days later.



I couldn't believe that this was all that was left of those towers I'd been in so many times, and I couldn't believe that over 2,700 people died that day.

My idea to return to Texas and resume being a musician dates from precisely this time. Whether or not I'd ever have to work a terrorist attack again, working 09/11 cases made me lose my stomach for the job. It was only ever an accidental mini-career that arose from a part-time job I took as a DMA candidate while at UNT anyway, but I know for certain I'm thankful for the experience, as strange as that might sound. I can't explain, so I won't even try.

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