I devoted a few hours yesterday morning to studying the material for my new course, Fundamentals of Human Nutrition and Metabolism. The opening chapter is about the GI tract, that begins with the mouth and ends with the anus. The pre-recorded lectures and accompanying material went into the topic at quite a depth (which enzymes are released at which part of the tract, etc) and I wonder at what level of detail are the students required to remember. There will probably be a multiple choice questionnaire at the end of this section so I'll know soon. After the GI tract, there is material on metabolic pathways (I learnt this material 45 years ago, and since man has existed for several hundred thousand years, I doubt that there will be much new material here) then other systems within the body are discussed. And this is the first unit! I had wanted to continue studying today but that didn't work out. I do intend to spend several hours a day studying during the Succot holiday in another two weeks; also the swimming pool will soon be closed so that gives me a few more hours a week to devote to the studying.
Last night at band rehearsal, I introduced the Stagg guitar. This was my first chance to hear the guitar through an amplifier and so check out the pickups and the various combinations of sounds available. A guitar with two pickups normally has three available combinations, namely neck pickup, neck and bridge, and finally bridge pickup. As the bridge pickup on the Stagg can either be in humbucker mode or single coil mode, there are five possible combinations of pickups. That said, the only good sound comes from the bridge pickup as humbucker; the single coil variant sounds almost the same but less 'full' so there's not much point in using this option. The neck pickup is very muffled and doesn't sound particularly good; it's for when I want to play but not be heard. The tone control goes from a good sound to a very muffled sound, so it looks like I won't be touching the controls very much. Playing the guitar was very easy although at one stage my left hand started hurting; this might be because of the semi-circular neck. I discovered at one stage that the guitar suffers from a mild case of 'neck dive'; having the guitar higher up on my chest should mitigate this. The Stagg weighs 2.7 kg whereas the Washburn is a kilo heavier.
As usual, I had to compete with the wall of sound from the other guitarist, so I couldn't really hear the tonal possibilities of the guitar; was I drowned out simply because of volume or because of the tone? Yesterday morning I had sent to everyone a link to a YouTube video that explains the job of each instrument and how they should play in order to create a good composite sound where everyone leaves room for everyone else. I'm fairly certain that I am the only one who watched this; obviously the others hadn't taken the hint.
It seems almost certain that we won't be playing a show in two weeks' time; this is primarily because the female singer wants to rest her voice (she complained several times during our rehearsals last week) and secondarily because intergrating the keyboard player is going far slower than we had originally reckoned. Had it not been for him, I think we could have already added four new tunes to our original set.
There's another new tune (for us, of course) that we are working on but it's very difficult, being a Greek-influenced tune in 7/8. We spent about half an hour working only on the introduction, so it's far from clear yet whether we will continue with this. Everyone is supposed to listen to it during the coming week so that we will have a better idea of how it is supposed to be. Maybe our mistake is beginning with drums and not with guitar; the drums are supposed to give the rhythm to everyone else.
| Title | Tags | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| 199 | The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo | Literature, Steig Larsson | |
| 977 | Obligatory monthly grandfather picture | Grandfather | |
| 1072 | Interface for importing XML files into Priority | Priority tips | |
| 1168 | Maartin Allcock, 1957-2018 | Obituary, Fairport Convention |
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