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Sospiri

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Everything posted by Sospiri

  1. I was always told that empty vessels make the most noise!
  2. Paul, Elmer has hit the nail on the head. Get your fingering correct until it becomes second nature. If you get into bad fingering habits you will really struggle to play many runs and phrases. Once you have got into the habit of bad fingering, you will find it very difficult to get out of it. It's the same with typing on say a QWERTY keyboard. Using two or three fingers, you will get up to a certain speed and no further. Maybe typing is not a strict analogy, because it will only mean that you will type much more slowly. When performing on a musical keyboard, a speed and accuracy block puts you at one helluva disadvantage.
  3. i do a lot of genealogical research for people scattered around the globe, and also UK-based military research. I also belong to a local history forum for the city where I was born and occasionally do more research for my adopted home town. It really is a case of keeping your brain active. But get in a little physical exercise as well otherwise other medical problems result from sitting for too long. At 84 I can no longer perform due to Dupuytrens Syndrome and arthritis, but I keep an active interest in jazz and classical music by listening.
  4. If you've ever done military service then you will know that you can't beat marching to a pipe band. If you've ever listened to British drummer Tony Oxley, (and even Bill Evans offered him the drumseat but he felt he didn't want to be on the road for 10 months), you will have heard an ex-pipe band drummer. Excellent. Opera is just the classical music version of a musical, such as Oklahoma, but if you don't like either, don't worry about it - plenty do like it. Yoko Ono - pass, I've never listened to her, should I have done?
  5. Real avant garde (free) can be really enjoyable and a challenge from the players' point of view, especially when you're working with at least one outstanding player. But for a listening audience not so much because they are not really so much part of the process. From the listener's point of view it requires a lot of concentration to get much out it.
  6. The subject raised by the OP doesn't need a thread. To even attempt to discuss it in depth requires a whole damned forum! Everyone goes through an enormous number of mental moods, continually, and there are times when most musicians will want to listen to the different types of music that they have encountered in their lives so far. The non-musician is different and somewhat more limited in the stuff he wants to listen to. Some of us have played avant-garde jazz, and with at least one fine musician, it can be an enjoyable and challenging experience. But to the average person it's like putting a galvanised iron bucket on thrir head and hiiting it with a lump hammer - when the Hell is it going to stop???!!! Many non-muesicians come to the same conclusion with classical music, modern jazz, and probably bottom of the list, opera. Some people just cannot stand opera or choral music, even though by and large they can at least tolerate the more conventional and popular classical music. I listen to the lot with the possible exception of vocal pop music, simply because it generally bores me silly - there's not enough there to hold my interest for more than two or three minutes, but I certainly don't decry those who wish to or even get deeply involved in it, anymore that I expect those same persons to enjoy a Bach invention, a Puccini opera or an Edwardian operetta. So, classical music is far from dead, though its development over the last 60 or 70 years has been largely falling on deaf ears outside music colleges. And to a certain extent I blame those very people in music colleges for producing a lot of unmemorable, tuneless rubbish that doesn't attempt to engage with the audience be they musicians or not. Rant over.
  7. Happy Birthday Joe, and I hope it was darned good one!
  8. Some Scots have a very heavy accent. My son-in-law comes from and lives in Dundee, and I can hardly understand a word he says!
  9. A Very Happy Birthday, Paul, but you're a mere youngster - nowt to worry about yet!
  10. Probably more to do with the inability to gig in this pandemic and being prevented from going out and doing anything to replace that activity. It's definitely got a lot worse over the last year. Add to that the fact that all are getting older and having a good moan is a privilege that comes with age. Of course, no one cares or takes any notice except you lot. Ha ha!
  11. Nothing squared is nothing minus nothing
  12. At 84 next week I can't get too violent with the exercise! However, I do at least 10 lengths of my gardem (60 yards) and quite often 20 every afternoon at quick march pace, otherwise it is a pretty sedentary lifestyle. Just make sure I get up and walk around the house every half hour. But at least on a large Greek island we are pretty free of Covid. Stay safe everyone.
  13. I thank my lucky stars that some here haven't run out of MUSICAL ideas. Jim, Linwood, Al - where are you?
  14. Happy New Year to everyone from Crete, Greece, wherever you may be and in whatever timezone you are in. May it be a Peaceful and Successful Year for all of you. May the gigs be safe and come flowing in. It's been far too long. Finally my thanks to the MPN team for making this a joyful and at times extremely funny community to which to belong.
  15. In rural areas always include your telephone number as the second line of your name & address. It's essential here in Greece with lack of street names and house numbers. It is then difficult for them to say it was not possible to contact you.
  16. Thanks, Nursers, just me and the bass player battling the Grim Reaper now - ha ha. The male vocalist fled to France & I found him on FaceBook, but he doesn't respond. Maybe he found out about the aftershave! Mike, cheers for that, but I wasn't unduly worried. I guessed he was somewhat short on the humour side!
  17. Deldor, you have private messaging turned off on your profile settings and in replying to your personal question I do not wish to take this Off Topic.
  18. In my early days I did a four & a half year hotel residency in a quartet plus a male vocalist, who just loved himself so much, as did the old dears in the audience. In four & a half years the band gets pretty bored, so naturally a few pranks ensued. We had a small bandroom with a wardrobe for our band jackets, and a shelf which had just one item - the vocalist's large bottle of aftershave, Every night before he went on stage he would plaster this stuff all over his face. The band always arrived before the vocalist, and one night the bass player emptied half the aftershave away and peed in the bottle to make up the discrepancy. For months afterwards the vocalist still put this stuff on his face without sussing that it was 50% pee. But it gave us a few sniggers. At the same place one of the hotel bosses was an American and his mother was an ex-singer at the Grand Met. Every year when she came to visit, she would do a recital of arias for the guests one afternoon. Because her repertoire was Wagner & stuff with which I was totally unfamiliar, she used one of the classical pianists in the town. I used to leave a couple of fake books lying on the strings of the grand piano as I didn't want them to get stolen. Without the band's knowledge, she came to do her party piece one afternoon and because she never used a microphone, the pianist never opened the lid of the piano. She anounces her first aria and the pianist starts his introduction with a mixture of notes and thump, thud, thump of the strings upon which the fake books were lying. I would have loved to have been in the audience for that one. Instead the band were hauled into the office for yet another lecture about practical jokes, to which the management took exception. Same hotel again, the vocalist and the bass-player (otheriwise known as the Ram of ) were always chatting up the young female guests & taking them out to a club for a bit of numpty after the gig. The night porter, who hated the band for some unknown reason, used to lock the main hotel doors at midnight, but when said miscreants came back they always used the fire escape and let their girls in through an always unlocked fire door. On this particular week these girls, what you Americans would call jail bait as one was only 14 years old and the other a year or so older, were accompanied only by their grandmother (chaperone). The grandmother would retire to her room at around 10:00pm, so the girls could sneak in unnoticed at 3:00am. However, on the night in question, the grandmother had not slept well, had got up in the middle of the night, found the girls missing, and had reported the fact to the dreaded night porter. The miscreants & girls climbed the fire escape, found the door locked with said grandmother and night porter staring at them through the glass door! The following morning, the band were again summoned to appear in the office. The place was effectively run by an old-style Jewish mama, who put the fear of God into the staff, but whose antics we were by now familiar with, and the lecture ended with "I don't care who you screw, but make sure it can in no way reflect on this establishment - drop them in the road and do not drive into the hotel car park!". I reckon she had seen a bit of life as at one time she & her husband used to own a salt beef shop in the East End of London. In another band, the string bass player was generally the butt of the pranks and, as he was always the last back on stage after the interval, we'd kick off the number and he'd find his strings detuned and on another occasion find his fretboard discretely coated with tomato sauce. Happy days!
  19. Here in Greece we've just had our very tight lockdown extended until 7 January, so count your blessings! Rules are clear and enforced - you're only allowed out with a mask to supermarkets, doctor/pharmacist or for exercise, and a curfew 9:00pm until 5:00am. Is that jingle bells I hear? Nah!
  20. No problems here in Greece this morning, Dave, it's now a real pleasure to flip between threads.
  21. It lasts two or three days at most here in Greece.
  22. The short answer is yes! More instruments + all the other gadgets to make it a really professional orchestra. Here's the difference from the Spitfire website:- Created as a universal starting point for composers and music creators of every level, BBC Symphony Orchestra now comes in three editions: Discover, Core and Professional. Professional is the definitive, comprehensive collection for writing professional, world-class orchestral music, featuring 55 different instruments recorded on world-class Millennia preamps, including groups and soloists, and 418 techniques, including 33 legatos, for each melodic instrument â as well as a staggering 20 signals.
  23. Whilst it means a lot to the performer and maybe the other musicians around him, will Joe Public notice any salient difference between the real thing - a tonewheel Hammond and a Leslie - and a clone and a Vent? I suspect the answer to that is "no". So the older and less fit amongst the members here will opt for the most portable scenario when gigging. Let the young ones cart all that heavy gear around !!
  24. I haven't shaved for 45 years. Seems a pretty pointless operation when it just grows again, and wastes at least ten minutes of your day. Haircut, about three or max four times a year, just to stop me walking on it!
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