hello internet quick coffee break i've been playing double bass all day and I honestly I have massive muscles well massive in you know in terms of an elderly lady um I'm quite impressed with them actually just as good as weight training I would say and much more pleasurable um anyway it's been um a real day of trying to work out positions because like all string instruments you can play the notes at diff on different parts of the instrument um and that's a bit different to a pianos you know the the notes on the piano yes you can go up higher octaves but you can only play the same note in the same area so it's different to a stringed instrument stringed instruments there are you know four four or five maybe even more I'm not sure places that you can play exactly the same set of notes and they will sound the same well is they you know they'll sound they'll sound different in terms of sort of things like cotton wool and density and things like that the exciting undercurrents and the weird stuff the creative stuff but essentially they'll sound the same just all strings are different and all positions are slightly different they all have their nuances you see what I mean but anyway I've been that has taken me about 3 days just trying to work out whereabouts on this double bass which is massive am I going to play said notes in the orchestra which area do I sound okay in which area do I sound rubbish in um etc etc there's loads of sort of um variables it's really difficult really difficult and then even when I play along to it I play in different places so you know in a way it sort of depends on the mood but but now it's time now that I've laid down the the positions in the fingering it's actually time to do the 60 times routine now we've done this before at the music school really is a sort of experiment um but it really worked now if I play the whole thing through 60 times with the backing that is going to take me like all three pieces about 24 hours so I'm not going to do that um I don't know if it take that probably you know hours and hours i mean you know a day's work minimum and that's if I play at speed so the what I'm going to do is I'm going to do it bar by bar so the 60 60 60 bar by bar or line by line depending i mean the thing with the double bass and the orchestra you don't get a lot to do there's not that many fiddly bits so if you're just playing two notes say in a bar over and over again that's kind of boring um so I'm going to I'm going to race through them line by line so if I just look here we've got 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 10 lines to a page right so if I if I play each line 60 times that's 600 lines isn't it now if I did them all in I don't know really fast just to get because this is about finger placement as much as anything i can do I'm going to do them again slowly or with the music the backing track which is when I can focus on other strings this is just the muscle memory I'm working at okay the thing with practicing is it's it's good to have a goal so right this practice I'm really going to work on being do you see what I mean but you know if you do everything all at once it's going to take you a very long time and you're going to get in a pickle so the way I do it is right I'm going to get up to speed on the hand positions and you know understanding what's easiest for my little hands as they're flying around um etc etc so that's the thing I'm going to do really really fast so I will time it actually I might um actually I wonder if I can I'm going to pause this and go and time a line okay so around about 12 seconds per line right that's how long it just took me so 12 seconds um per line times 60 well if we do the whole page that's what should I say 10 so that's 120 seconds to do a whole page once so times that by 60 that's what 60 600 I don't know 680 something like that how did I get to that no 80 80 about an hour and a half 60 70 89 about an hour and a half I think i don't know if that's right my math is shoddy um about an hour and a half to do one page line by line now I don't think that's very long actually um should we say two hours let's say two hours just in case my maths was up up the river without a paddle which it probably was um so I've got 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 I think eight pages so if they each take an hour and a half that's a day's work to do them all but I'm not going to do them all in one day because my hands will fall off um because this is working quite quickly i'll be you know speeding through and I may not even use the bow i may pitato because it's quicker um it will annoy the neighbors less if I do that and then I can pick the bow up when it's time to um you know put it with the music so so that takes say that takes me to wed weddings day um I mean this is a really good way to if you're if you've got a brain like I have which is a little bit all over the place and I can get very overwhelmed with things so setting a target um for something to in a way that organizes my procedure do you see what I mean um otherwise I'll just faf about and I'll have a go at that line and I go at that line and you know that's ne not going to do at all so if I spent a wedd um perfecting the muscle memory in the left hand this is the left hand right cuz don't forget we've got to use two hands when we're bowing i mean obviously you do with pit scott as well but you'll it's quite easy i find that very easy so left hand muscle memory getting those positions set in brain stone as it were and then after Wednesday I can start looking at the scales that I'm using because I think it's B flat F major B flat major I think um A major and I think E major so there are four scales that I should probably work on as well and arpeggios so I'll do those like Thursday Friday Saturday or I can introduce those as a bit of a break a bit of a a tonic after I've done my page like a treat to myself because because you know where you are with a scale my friends and you know where you are with an arpeggio although dealing with arpeggios in fourth strings is just bizarre and I funny enough actually I've been on AI a lot of today i've been asking AI all sorts of things about my learning curve and about you know bassy stuff and it's the only string instrument that that uses fourths um and I thought why why did they do that so I looked it up and it's due to the size um if it was fifths it wouldn't work basically because it's too big so they have to do fourths and I thought well that's quite interesting actually isn't it when you start to think about that anyway thinking about AI my friends there is not a single thing that I do that AI will not be able to do or can do now so it can paint it can create art it can make film i was looking at animation films yesterday for my um my musical it can write music um I'm not talking about whether it's very good i'm just talking about it can do it so I was thinking well is there any point really in me you know doing anything anymore in terms of teaching and um you know I was going to set up this art school um and I just think not really so I've I've sort of stepped back from things and I'm just working out now well what what can you do in in a world where machines do everything for you um well you can still collect so you know I can still provide tools and an accessible format which you know that requires a sort of human skill um to humanize it because things do need humanizing and music especially needs humanizing but you know I was sitting there thinking it's a bit like Jesus really and and almost like you know before Christ and after Christ you know this sort of massive in in um impact um and and people will I think reference AI before AI and after AI i think it it's going to be such a gamecher that people will in the future in 50 years time they will say oh yeah well that was before AI B AI you know they might even have a pneummonic for it I don't know um but anyway um I was sort of thinking about that and I was thinking about you know my tattoo show wanted to do live tattooing and live arts and I just thought well no because they are they are making characters already that can do stuff like that and then I thought even they'll even tattoo us machines will tattoo us soon you'll be able to walk into a place they'll they'll put a a thing against your skin to make it taut um you can put your design in a slot and it'll tattoo it on your leg because of course they're going to be able to do that because they can they can use robotics for surgeries so you know it's a bit like a surgery isn't it um absolutely incredible i thought "Wow." Yeah um I'm not sure if I'd trust a machine because if it went wrong and it had a needle right through your leg oh god imagine um however that you know I'm sure that's that's going to come and I'm I'm pretty sure it will happen in the next 20 years so I thought well the only thing I can really do I can write my own life you know that's all we can do isn't it we can't write books anymore because machines are writing all the books as well ai is getting very good I believe at writing books um I come up with titles i've written a couple of AI books um and they were bloody hard work but presumably they're not anymore this is when AI first came out and I was interested in what AI could do with my own words and how it would you know edit them I guess um but it was very boring really boring and it wasn't very good at fiction but it's quite good at children's fiction um and I've written quite a bit of children's fiction i thought well that's that's something else that I you know that's been completely and utterly taken over um I don't think AI per se can take your own life from you though and your own feelings and I was looking at my you know a beach comb and I was looking at all my my stuff that I found that I I love the stuff I find on the beach and AI can copy that it can make a three-dimensional copy of it but it wouldn't have that history in it would it and the only thing that gives it that history or gives kudos to that history is really me or the person who touches it um an AI can't do that a only you can have that feeling and however you get that feeling you might be able to get that feeling if you you know go into a museum and you see a three-dimensional fossil and you think "Oh wow that's amazing." You know it's not the real thing but does it matter to you you know it depends um and certainly in teaching and I've been a teacher for you know many many years in different ways all mothers are teachers let's face it but I've been a a music teacher and you know the machines can do that now and they will be interactive you'll be able to say or the machine will say to you you need to work on this bar and so it it'll play it with you and you'll just have to play it over and over again um or you will you'll choose to i don't think it'll pin you down and make you play it um so the the finding pleasure in your own life is all that's left isn't it after AI takes work away from you all that's left after work is pleasure um and that I think I might focus on a bit of that and and try and work out because we're so conditioned to work we're so from birth you know you work you you have some time off to have some kids and then you go back to work that's life that's what you do so I'm thinking about this i haven't come up with a solution yet but I'm thinking about this i'll be thinking about it for a few days as I practice wrote wrote practice wrote learn my music for orchestra
