Bizarreness
Jun. 7th, 2005 09:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shermaramaOne day, one day I'll be in a band that hits an ideal working combination.
Amrit's left. She's an excellent lead guitarist and probably the best musician, in terms of understanding chords and sounds and making things out of them, I've ever worked with, as well as being great at organising, getting gigs and generally being a laugh. Why does that sound like a reference? Because I really hope she's going to carry on at it and get somewhere with it. On Saturday when it all landed I spent several hours having to try very hard to stop myself talking her out of it, but I can see the reasons why, I suppose, and trying to reverse a decision like that is never a good idea.
Still, I have a sort of faith in Jodie's luck. The first practice as a three piece was interesting. Some of the songs came out well from the extra room, though others make it clear that we really do need the other guitar and Time Waster was just horrible, a haunted song, where we could all *hear* a guitar that couldn't possibly be there. It made it clearer that Amrit always had been pulling things in a slightly different direction, too, but I think that's a bonus, I think this is how music should be made, by real people with their own approaches. But I think we'll get someone else soon enough and go off in another slightly different direction and that'll be good too.
This has been sitting waiting to go in here since Saturday and hadn't because of the giant pincer robot. This is a team project as part of my degree, that one that doesn't get mentioned much in here because I said it would be a music journal but I'm in the mood for ranting about it. I've been throwing myself into it pretty heavily for the last few days to try and get it done, for once in a team project we pretty much all have; the end result is looking like an excellent design exercise but one that's only halfway to being built. We can justify all the design choices well and we've got designed circuits and features for a really kickarse beastie but despite a lot of work the failsafe circuits really aren't working and I can't figure out why and so I've just had to cut them all out and the cut-off end stops for the worm drive don't seem to be working as expected either so they might have to go and, all the time I've spent wrestling with those means that it's not going to have the casing it should and indeed hardly any casing at all and the missing screw for the wheel mounting has proved irreplacable (it's a left-hand thread and a funny size) and so one wheel is likely to be ropey. The speed controllers have even started playing up for reasons we can't fathom. Worst of all, we're expected to hand a report about it in at the same time as demonstrating it, with a presentation, and the odds on that are pretty low. It's not like we haven't put a lot of effort into it but it's just not quite going right so what is there to write up? I come here and rant pointlessly instead because there's too much left to be done that just can't now be done before tomorrow. And I don't mean there's a lot and I'm getting spooked at it or something, because I don't do that, I'm a stubborn bastard and I know the only way to reduce an awful heap of work is to bloody well get on with it, I mean there are just too many things that cannot be done, like fixing the electrics because we finally had to make some fixings permanent today and the whole electrics can no longer be removed and carried around separately and I can think of no sensible way of getting a giant pincer robot home on a bicycle. No, it can't follow me because its electrics aren't working properly and anyway, it only does about 10mph and its front support bits aren't really built for the real world, only nice flat floors.
Sod it. In the meantime a very nice man has just come and delivered my guitar. I'm going to go avoid robot-related mope by getting aggravated at how fiddly guitar strings are instead. One more hurdle on the band front means one more reason to be able to do the whole bloody thing myself.
Amrit's left. She's an excellent lead guitarist and probably the best musician, in terms of understanding chords and sounds and making things out of them, I've ever worked with, as well as being great at organising, getting gigs and generally being a laugh. Why does that sound like a reference? Because I really hope she's going to carry on at it and get somewhere with it. On Saturday when it all landed I spent several hours having to try very hard to stop myself talking her out of it, but I can see the reasons why, I suppose, and trying to reverse a decision like that is never a good idea.
Still, I have a sort of faith in Jodie's luck. The first practice as a three piece was interesting. Some of the songs came out well from the extra room, though others make it clear that we really do need the other guitar and Time Waster was just horrible, a haunted song, where we could all *hear* a guitar that couldn't possibly be there. It made it clearer that Amrit always had been pulling things in a slightly different direction, too, but I think that's a bonus, I think this is how music should be made, by real people with their own approaches. But I think we'll get someone else soon enough and go off in another slightly different direction and that'll be good too.
This has been sitting waiting to go in here since Saturday and hadn't because of the giant pincer robot. This is a team project as part of my degree, that one that doesn't get mentioned much in here because I said it would be a music journal but I'm in the mood for ranting about it. I've been throwing myself into it pretty heavily for the last few days to try and get it done, for once in a team project we pretty much all have; the end result is looking like an excellent design exercise but one that's only halfway to being built. We can justify all the design choices well and we've got designed circuits and features for a really kickarse beastie but despite a lot of work the failsafe circuits really aren't working and I can't figure out why and so I've just had to cut them all out and the cut-off end stops for the worm drive don't seem to be working as expected either so they might have to go and, all the time I've spent wrestling with those means that it's not going to have the casing it should and indeed hardly any casing at all and the missing screw for the wheel mounting has proved irreplacable (it's a left-hand thread and a funny size) and so one wheel is likely to be ropey. The speed controllers have even started playing up for reasons we can't fathom. Worst of all, we're expected to hand a report about it in at the same time as demonstrating it, with a presentation, and the odds on that are pretty low. It's not like we haven't put a lot of effort into it but it's just not quite going right so what is there to write up? I come here and rant pointlessly instead because there's too much left to be done that just can't now be done before tomorrow. And I don't mean there's a lot and I'm getting spooked at it or something, because I don't do that, I'm a stubborn bastard and I know the only way to reduce an awful heap of work is to bloody well get on with it, I mean there are just too many things that cannot be done, like fixing the electrics because we finally had to make some fixings permanent today and the whole electrics can no longer be removed and carried around separately and I can think of no sensible way of getting a giant pincer robot home on a bicycle. No, it can't follow me because its electrics aren't working properly and anyway, it only does about 10mph and its front support bits aren't really built for the real world, only nice flat floors.
Sod it. In the meantime a very nice man has just come and delivered my guitar. I'm going to go avoid robot-related mope by getting aggravated at how fiddly guitar strings are instead. One more hurdle on the band front means one more reason to be able to do the whole bloody thing myself.