Blues for S

I'm currently in one of those periods when I can't really concentrate on anything; I think it's due to the fact that Israel is in the high holiday period. We work a day, have four days off, work three days, have four days off, work three days, have two days off. I have all this time in which I could do anything but I don't seem to do much. This blog entry itself is going to be a bit of a hodge-podge in itself.

Last Friday, my trusted slow cooker developed a leak - I became aware of this when I smelt something burning. It turns out that there was a huge crack down one side, through which were leaking the juices of the chicken pieces I was cooking. The leaked juices were heated by the heating element and burnt, hence the smell. Whilst the food that I was cooking in the pot turned out ok (slightly underdone by my standards), I realised that there was no option but to throw the pot away. I have bought a new one but have yet to use it.

We had our first rain on Sunday evening; all day had been humid and by mid-afternoon I wasn't feeling too well. The weather as usual has been affecting me and I've been coughing much more in the past few days. I am considering resuming acupuncture treatments, this time in the hope of improving my immune system. Apparently, people who have had whooping cough are more susceptible to simple colds and chills, and have stronger reactions. That's not very good news for me.

I did a certain amount of programming - playing around with adding items to the system menu and discovering how I can sum a column in a query's result set without either iterating through the result set or using a separate query. I needed this technique in a few places in my programs but discovered that it didn't always work - it seemed impossible to sum a column which is in itself a calculated column. The answer to that is here.

Of course, I devoted some time to studying: I have completed my first pass through the 'Introduction to Business Research 1' text and have now started the second pass.

About the only thing that I did in the past week of which I am proud is that I managed to record a new instrumental! I was fiddling around on the guitar, playing a slightly unusual chord - F#m7add11; this name sounds weird but it's a simple guitar chord, played (from the bottom) x44200 - an F#m chord with the top two strings left open. Picking this chord in a simple arpeggio, combined with the effects setting on my amp (a small amount of phasing), produced an interesting sound. I started playing around with possible chord sequences and melody lines and evolved an interesting piece which seemed partially derived from a 12 bar blues sequence (although I doubt that anyone would guess this). I then went to the computer, sequenced the guitar arpeggio (with a certain amount of randomness) and continued from there - bass, drums and tune. I found an excellent guitar patch in Reason, which really 'makes' the track.

The piece itself is slightly strange as 'verses' 1, 2 and 5 differ from 'verses' 3 and 4 in their length (3 and 4 are elongated) and chord sequence (1,2 and 5 have a Em6 chord leading to C#9, whereas 3 and 4 have C#9, D9, C#9), although I don't know how many listeners will pick up on this. As befitting a jazzy-ish piece, the 'tune' undergoes a certain amount of development, along with changes in the instrumentation.

I had been listening to Miles Davis'  'Kind of blue' a few weeks ago and I think that some of that seminal recording's influence had rubbed off on me, for the main instrument in my piece is a muted trumpet. Of course, the 'playing' is somewhat stilted and nowhere near as fluent as Davis and his sidemen.

The piece is called 'Blues for S' and can be found at my SoundClick page. I hope that you'll listen and enjoy it.