And, a very happy Friday, the 12th of April to all.
I woke up at the regular time of around 1:30 PM, when the sun reaches its zenith here. I am pretty much convinced that, after living outdoors for 12 years, I am woken by the dimming of light that begins at that point, and the approaching nightfall that it portends.
When I used to drink, the darkening sky became like a siren song, luring me towards the bottle. I had to have x amount of alcohol in my bloodstream before nightfall, or suffer the consequences, I thought.
Last night, I got to the Lilly Pad at around 11 PM.
The problem of finding a milk crate to sit on persisted for a second straight night as there were no crates, milk or other, sitting outside the Quartermaster.
This meant that I had to find a box, and then stuff that box full of random pieces of cardboard, so that when I flipped it over and sat on it, I only sank in a few inches and it lasted until the middle of some song when I leaned forward to hit a certain harmonica note and...
"Sorry, my shit collapsed!," I said after stopping in the middle of that song, to a couple who had sat on Lilly's stoop and were listening, after glancing at them to gauge whether or not that particular language would be appreciated by them.
They were hip hop enough looking so I uttered it.
"Ya gotta get yourself a good box; it's crucial!," said the guy.
I was able to reconstruct the box so that it would buoy me high enough off the ground to be effective -the whole purpose of the thing is to keep my legs from cramping up like they started to do when I sat Indian style, giving me soreness in the muscles right behind the areas where my jeans pockets are on each leg.
This is a hard habit to break, sitting too low to the ground.
After years of expecting the neck of the guitar to be in the same relative position, a height increase of only a couple inches is something I become conscious of.
Another problem is the brace that holds the harmonica bumping against the top of the guitar body. I have to sit more upright than I am used to in order to prevent that.
This is a "neuro-physiological" conundrum, to use a term that hasn't found its way from the lips of motivational speakers like Tony Robbins into the database of Blogger's spell checker ( hence the annoying red squiggly line under it in front of me). It has to do with the attitude that comes with different postures.
For example, the maidens at a wedding who are poised to try to catch the thrown bouquet of flowers, will be standing with their feet slightly splayed, knees slightly bent, on the balls of their feet, eyes alert and ready to respond to the slightest nuances in the trajectory of the object of their desire, one that's procurement will signify that its possessor will be then next one of the group in line for a wedding gown, ring and a bouquet of her own to toss.
How this relates to me is that, when I do sit more upright so that the harmonica brace does not thump against the guitar body, it makes me feel like I am dying to be noticed, like I was on a bus in a seat three quarters of the way back and I see my traveling companion getting on, and so I would sit as upright as possible, and maybe wave a hand. "I got us a seat!"
Just stretching myself upwards a few inches puts me in that frame of mind, as if I am trying to say "Hey, look at me," or that I am trying to convey that I am a morally upright man of rectitude who has a great deal of pride and sits like that to show it.
I mean, I smoke a lot of pot, work less than 3 hours a day and my farts smell like peanut butter in the morning a lot, so that is a travesty, and makes me feel like a fraud. The tourists, for the most part, won't realize that I am trying to keep the harmonica from thumping; they will just think: "Who does he think he is, the queen of England?"
There is a whole school of thought perpetuated by the "standing up" buskers, that expounds that standing up will put the busker at eye level with the tourists making it easier to make eye contact and easier to bring body movement into play, right up to the degree of dancing and swaying while she plays. This posture has been recommended by such artists as Craig Nelson, blog reader, and others, and is still subject to debate.
If I was doing songs like "Sweet Caroline," or "Louie, Louie (We've gotta go now)" then sitting down might be counterproductive -how are we going to go, when we haven't even stood up yet, type of thing- but, I believe a do a lot of sitting down material. Certainly "Sitting At The Dock Of The Bay," lends itself to sitting. But not Indian style, because of the cramped muscles.
So, the solution might be to eventually get some kind of light, portable, folding seat made out of aluminum tubing and canvas, which would fix me at a consistent height, and might be easy to tote by throwing it over one shoulder, and would give me an additional element of bullet deflecting protection in the tubing along with the paintball stopping capacity of the canvas.
The seat, I could also adorn with "New Orleans," appurtenances (read: anything shiny) so that I would score style points wherever I went with it. I might even leave it at the Lilly Pad if and when I go off to take a 15 minute break between sets, to kind of hold the spot for me.
The dawn of the era of amplification is about to arrive for me, and the seat could certainly be toted in whatever little trailer I wind up using to pull the amplifier, the rechargeable battery, etc. behind my bike.
It has just become louder in general at the Lilly Pad over the past few years. A lot of this is due to the pedicab drivers trending towards equipping their rickshaws with mobile stereo systems, to "advertise" their services.
I have known that I could follow the example of other buskers who have pretty much consistently reported a 4-fold increase in busking proceeds after they became twice as loud, through amplification.
That is a topic for a whole other blog post, one which is probably already in my archives, consuming its share of the 24 megabytes.
My plan would be to get a small amplifier that I could conceal in my backpack, with maybe just the speaker plate exposed, to go with a microphone that I could clip onto the harmonica harness -maybe even a Bluetooth one, to eliminate one more wire.
Then, by setting the amp at a low volume with the reverb and echo effects maxed out, I could use it to not so much to make me louder than the level at which I have been tolerated by the residents of the block the past 7 years, but to add effects to it, making me sound better, and maybe just a bit louder, when the pedicabs park by Lafitt's Blacksmith Shop Tavern, and I reach over and rotate a knob a quarter turn or so...
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| Oh, the data I spend on you readers... |
When I used to drink, the darkening sky became like a siren song, luring me towards the bottle. I had to have x amount of alcohol in my bloodstream before nightfall, or suffer the consequences, I thought.
Last night, I got to the Lilly Pad at around 11 PM.
The problem of finding a milk crate to sit on persisted for a second straight night as there were no crates, milk or other, sitting outside the Quartermaster.
This meant that I had to find a box, and then stuff that box full of random pieces of cardboard, so that when I flipped it over and sat on it, I only sank in a few inches and it lasted until the middle of some song when I leaned forward to hit a certain harmonica note and...
"Sorry, my shit collapsed!," I said after stopping in the middle of that song, to a couple who had sat on Lilly's stoop and were listening, after glancing at them to gauge whether or not that particular language would be appreciated by them.
They were hip hop enough looking so I uttered it.
"Ya gotta get yourself a good box; it's crucial!," said the guy.
I was able to reconstruct the box so that it would buoy me high enough off the ground to be effective -the whole purpose of the thing is to keep my legs from cramping up like they started to do when I sat Indian style, giving me soreness in the muscles right behind the areas where my jeans pockets are on each leg.
This is a hard habit to break, sitting too low to the ground.
After years of expecting the neck of the guitar to be in the same relative position, a height increase of only a couple inches is something I become conscious of.
Another problem is the brace that holds the harmonica bumping against the top of the guitar body. I have to sit more upright than I am used to in order to prevent that.
This is a "neuro-physiological" conundrum, to use a term that hasn't found its way from the lips of motivational speakers like Tony Robbins into the database of Blogger's spell checker ( hence the annoying red squiggly line under it in front of me). It has to do with the attitude that comes with different postures.
For example, the maidens at a wedding who are poised to try to catch the thrown bouquet of flowers, will be standing with their feet slightly splayed, knees slightly bent, on the balls of their feet, eyes alert and ready to respond to the slightest nuances in the trajectory of the object of their desire, one that's procurement will signify that its possessor will be then next one of the group in line for a wedding gown, ring and a bouquet of her own to toss.
How this relates to me is that, when I do sit more upright so that the harmonica brace does not thump against the guitar body, it makes me feel like I am dying to be noticed, like I was on a bus in a seat three quarters of the way back and I see my traveling companion getting on, and so I would sit as upright as possible, and maybe wave a hand. "I got us a seat!"
Just stretching myself upwards a few inches puts me in that frame of mind, as if I am trying to say "Hey, look at me," or that I am trying to convey that I am a morally upright man of rectitude who has a great deal of pride and sits like that to show it.
I mean, I smoke a lot of pot, work less than 3 hours a day and my farts smell like peanut butter in the morning a lot, so that is a travesty, and makes me feel like a fraud. The tourists, for the most part, won't realize that I am trying to keep the harmonica from thumping; they will just think: "Who does he think he is, the queen of England?"
There is a whole school of thought perpetuated by the "standing up" buskers, that expounds that standing up will put the busker at eye level with the tourists making it easier to make eye contact and easier to bring body movement into play, right up to the degree of dancing and swaying while she plays. This posture has been recommended by such artists as Craig Nelson, blog reader, and others, and is still subject to debate.
If I was doing songs like "Sweet Caroline," or "Louie, Louie (We've gotta go now)" then sitting down might be counterproductive -how are we going to go, when we haven't even stood up yet, type of thing- but, I believe a do a lot of sitting down material. Certainly "Sitting At The Dock Of The Bay," lends itself to sitting. But not Indian style, because of the cramped muscles.
So, the solution might be to eventually get some kind of light, portable, folding seat made out of aluminum tubing and canvas, which would fix me at a consistent height, and might be easy to tote by throwing it over one shoulder, and would give me an additional element of bullet deflecting protection in the tubing along with the paintball stopping capacity of the canvas.
The seat, I could also adorn with "New Orleans," appurtenances (read: anything shiny) so that I would score style points wherever I went with it. I might even leave it at the Lilly Pad if and when I go off to take a 15 minute break between sets, to kind of hold the spot for me.
The dawn of the era of amplification is about to arrive for me, and the seat could certainly be toted in whatever little trailer I wind up using to pull the amplifier, the rechargeable battery, etc. behind my bike.
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| Even the dog skeezers have taken it up a notch! |
It has just become louder in general at the Lilly Pad over the past few years. A lot of this is due to the pedicab drivers trending towards equipping their rickshaws with mobile stereo systems, to "advertise" their services.
I have known that I could follow the example of other buskers who have pretty much consistently reported a 4-fold increase in busking proceeds after they became twice as loud, through amplification.
That is a topic for a whole other blog post, one which is probably already in my archives, consuming its share of the 24 megabytes.
My plan would be to get a small amplifier that I could conceal in my backpack, with maybe just the speaker plate exposed, to go with a microphone that I could clip onto the harmonica harness -maybe even a Bluetooth one, to eliminate one more wire.
Then, by setting the amp at a low volume with the reverb and echo effects maxed out, I could use it to not so much to make me louder than the level at which I have been tolerated by the residents of the block the past 7 years, but to add effects to it, making me sound better, and maybe just a bit louder, when the pedicabs park by Lafitt's Blacksmith Shop Tavern, and I reach over and rotate a knob a quarter turn or so...
With my trumpet I was loud enough as long as there wasn't a drummer around. With ukulele and singing I'd need to get the standard setup: A Roland Street Cube amp of some type, with 2 inputs, battery powered, then a Shure SM58 mic, mic stand, cables... It'd be quite a load.
ReplyDeleteI didn't seem to have trouble being heard on the "silver" flute, or on my PVC flute I'd made, and it seems that in the hands of a competent player, a shakuhachi can hold its own just fine. Tons of stuff I won't have to buy!
But yeah you may want to look into getting a bike trailer then you can carry all the stuff much more easily than on your back. It makes a huge difference! 2nd best would be some kind of panniers or baskets.
The pedi-cab drivers here also have "sound systems" and yes, they're annoying. Hell, people just ride bicycles around with music booming, the jerks.
Hey have you checked into your social security account? The minimum that you could start collecting at age 62 is about $750 a month. That would be a ton of money compared to what you're getting now.
ReplyDeleteI think the both of us are just marking time until we're social security age.