Weeknote 0009

  • Difficult week, this one. And difficult to write about, too. This is one of those occasions when working in the open is incompatible with things that are not for public consumption. So this weeknote’s a little light.
  • Went to the dentist on Saturday, for two fillings. Pretty traumatic. It takes a lot of focus for me to manage something like that. Following all that, I’ve had pretty bad toothache all week, which I’m hoping might just calm down in due course. I’ll give it another week or so.
  • James did a brave thing by straight-up sharing his mental health situation on LinkedIn. Chronic mental conditions (or indeed any condition) are heavily stigmatised, particularly in low- to mid-quality workplaces. From my own experience with bipolar and epilepsy, I know how hard it is to talk about. No, specifically, to get to the point where you feel like you can talk about it. It’s easy to talk about it. I’m talking about it now. But for years I didn’t, and I regret that. Let nobody who comes after us go through that. Let’s hear them boring on about their mental health until it’s so normalised that people are universally as sympathetic and supportive as when you graze your knee.

Bass notes

[In which Mo learns the bass guitar]

  • My little pedal set-up is making it easier to hear what I’m not getting right yet. Before, the tone knob and pickup switch didn’t do a great deal. But with a proper preamp it’s more balanced. I can now go from deep, blunt tones right up to bright and jangly ones. The latter is good for hearing all the bad fretting technique. I’m at a point where my technique is not universally bad. It’s unevenly bad: some fingers are weaker than others, and some frets aren’t falling precisely under them. It’s great to be able to hear that by tweaking the preamp to be as unforgiving as it gets.
  • I’ve managed to book the bass in to see a luthier at the end of this month, for a proper set-up. Now I’ve come to live with it a while, it’s clearly not in terrible shape. But it could use a pro’s skills and experience to set the string height and fix the intonation. I probably could do that basic stuff if I did my research, but a proper experienced guitar tech will get better results more quickly.