Blog ideas, thoughts on discipline and tenacity

I could critique a song or album every day (this is Linda's idea for a blog, so maybe I won't steal it but I hope she'll do it; maybe she and I should do it together but I bet she won't go for that).

I could discuss music I'm working on and my daily journey toward better playing. This would be broad, including what I learn about instruments in general and piano tuning in particular.

I could discuss books I've read recently.

I wonder whether I have the tenacity and am willing to make the time to write about anything on a regular basis. I get so busy doing things and trying to do them better that I doubt I can make myself a lot time to write about anything.

I'm writing this on an oldish laptop that I bought in 2003. For a laptop, that's old. But I think it still has a lot of useful life left in it. It's a Mac G4 powerbook (aluminum) running OS 10.3.8, one version before Apple killed Classic and went to support for universal binaries. I still occasionally use some Classic apps like sonicWORX PowerBundle (which incidentally has a really nice multiband compressor). I also use a few Pro Tools plug-ins that I haven't upgraded to version 7.3.x (which I run on my iMac), and to be able to use those plug-ins I need version 6.4 which runs on my laptop. I'm not sure 6.4 will run under 10.3.9 or later so I don't upgrade.

I raced motorcycles for nine years.

I started playing piano when I was six and I still play quite a bit.

I started learning to tune pianos in 1986 when I got so frustrated with the horrible basement piano in a dorm where I was staying that I knew nothing I could do to it would make it worse. I was right -- I didn't make it worse -- but tuning turned out to be a lot more complicated than I expected it to be. By now I've gotten pretty good at it (though I'm slow) but it wasn't as simple as I thought it might be.

I like photography and I used to do it a lot but I'm not very good at it these days. The bar's been raised quite a bit by ubiquitous digital cameras.

Yesterday was my brother's birthday. He turned 42. I'm almost two years older than he is; my birthday is in about a month.

Music I've been stealing lately: "Solid Jack" as played by Larry Goldings on his Sweet Science album. "Sonoma Slide" as played by Richard Dworsky on PHC a couple of weeks ago. Both those guys have very distinctive playing styles and although they focus on genres where I play, too, almost their entire vocabularies are disjoint from mine when it comes to improvisation. I learn a ton when I copy their solos.