Wulf's Webden

The Webden on WordPress

14 June 2025
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Tomorrow’s Tuba Test

Last week I just took my voice along to church to contribute to the worship band; this week, I’m taking the tuba. However, I’m not quite as accomplished on that as I am on bass so I’ve written out some simple parts for the songs we’re doing. Hopefully those will work and I’ll also find some ways to further develop the lines and build the skills that might in future let me rock up to sessions with a tuba as confidently as I can with a “string bass” of some kind.

13 June 2025
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Arm Unveiled

If you want to see what my recovering arm looks like, you can now see a photo on my Flickr account. Compared to what it looked like three weeks ago, it is amazing to me how well it is doing. Yes, I did take a photo on the day and, no, I’m not sharing that because it is on the gory side!

This afternoon I made my final in-person visit to the hospital and had the bandages and wrist splint removed. I think the most painful part of the whole process, including the original injury, was having the patch over the wound pulled from my arm. I’m not sure why anyone would volunteer for an epilation process but I’m going to have a hairless patch around the scar on my arm for the next few weeks. As I joked to the physiotherapist, if I’d have known what was coming, I would have shaved my arm before getting the chainsaw out (and, yes, if I had known what was coming, I’d have made the cut with a manual saw on a long pole and kept myself safely out of harm’s way!).

Everything is now uncovered and everything works. For the next few weeks I’ll be keeping the arm clean, moisturising and massaging the scarred area and gradually rebuilding its strength. I can even play bass again although I’ll be taking my rehabilitation to stringed instruments slowly and steadily as I don’t want to suffer a setback from reaching for a note that used to be easy while in the midst of playing music. Meanwhile, I’m enjoyed the pleasure of being able to touch type again, which makes writing blog posts a whole lot easier!

12 June 2025
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One Pound Only

I remember being disappointed a couple of years ago when I popped into my local Poundland store on the hunt for a cheesy Christmas jumper. I did find one that was suitable but it did cost me a tenner rather than a mere quid. To be fair, it has served me well for several occasions where I’ve needed such garb and, of course, I realise that even the raw materials would have cost over a quid. To be honest, even if I could have had it knitted for free, it was still probably cheaper than the consumer cost of the raw materials.

Perhaps because of this incident, my eyes were caught today by the story that the whole chain has itself just been sold for the princely sum of … £1. I don’t suppose many of the 16,000 or so staff are basking in the irony though. The cheap end of the retail market is a hard place to be for all sorts of reasons and that is a lot of people who will be feeling that acutely at the moment.

11 June 2025
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TubaBass Editions

I’m beginning to implement the idea I mentioned a couple of days ago, of creating dual tuba and string bass editions of my band parts using LilyPond tags. It seems to work reasonably well.

The advantage of trying something rather than just thinking about it, is that it also generates practical new ideas. In this case, since the main hassle is that I have to comment or uncomment various lines that aren’t directly part of the music, I’m wondering if I could do that with a tool like awk to detect some kind of flag and flip-flop the % comment marker that LilyPond responds to?

That way I could store all the information in one file and run a simple command to uncomment all the lines I want to keep and hide the ones that need to be concealed. I might not even need the comments in most cases – often I’m just changing a couple of words that could be represented by flags in the source file, with a temporary, customised script being generated with the appropriate replacements.

10 June 2025
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Songs of the Sea

In my role as band rep for the Charnwood Training Band, I recently put out a poll to the band of potential pieces and purchased a copy (with band funds) of the most popular choice – Songs of the Sea, arranged by Johnnie Vinson:

We’ve had a couple of weeks rehearsing with it and it is already sounding pretty good – a good fit for us, I think.

9 June 2025
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Two for One

Now that I’m playing more tuba, for a lot of the band pieces, it means it is ideal to have both a tuba score and a string bass score. I’m getting better at transposing up or down an octave at sight but there are points when I need to make a sudden shift. For example, the lowest note I can safely hit on my Eb tuba is G below the bass clef (G1) and even that tends to come out as an indistinct parp. Some of the music sounds better if I just read the string bass part without transposing but there I hit another problem – I can safely hit Bb3 and I’m working on stretching up to Eb4 but although many electric bass stay within that range, they can reach higher (C5, rarely, but F4 or thereabouts more often). What I want is an easy way to generate scores for both instruments with minimal additional work.

I’m using LilyPond for my concert band scores and it looks like the tags feature may do the trick for now. I need to try it in practice and see if it stretches far enough or feels annoying. For example, I’m not sure if I can use it to automatically switch the instrument name and my testing so far suggests I need to make sure that each snippet ends on the same pitch or subsequent notes will be too high or too low. If it doesn’t do what I need then I might have to resort to using something like Python to knock up a simple pre-processor that can generate either a string bass or tuba edition from a source file and a couple of parallel arrays (perhaps even stored in the same source).

Easy does it though and I will see how far I can get with a pure LilyPond approach first.

8 June 2025
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Symphonic Tuba

As part of my ongoing plan to make the most of not being able to play my bass guitar, I’ve taken my tuba along to tonight’s Charnwood Symphonic Wind Orchestra rehearsal… and survived. Actually, I did do okay and so it is likely to be tuba I’ll be taking along to the next rehearsal too and also our performance at the Queens Park Bandstand on Sunday 22 June (2pm). I’m looking forward to getting my hands on some bass strings again but, meanwhile, my tuba skills are building.

7 June 2025
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Plastic and Wood

One of my plans for the 3D printer was to use it to help with various woodworking tasks. I’ve finally managed to do that today by designing some brackets. The plan is that I can partially screw a bracket at one end of a wooden batten, use that to help measure the length from front to back of the polytunnel beds and, after cutting to that length use a second bracket at the front. The batten can then be used for tying on strings for the tomato plants to grow up.

With my left hand still not fully operational, the brackets help me perform an operation that would be harder without them. I’m also screwing quite near the ends of the battens but I’m hoping the design will help clamp the wood in place with pressure over a wider area and reduce the chance of the battens splitting. The latter still needs to be proven over time but, at least so far, so good.

6 June 2025
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Unstitched

I had my stiches out today, which was a fairly painless experience. I’d expected it to be one long thread but it turned out to be a series of small, independent loops, which got cut and removed with tweezers.

I’ve still got the same wrist splint and bandage style dressing on though. If all goes well, that should come off next Friday at what ought to be my final appointment at Nottingham City Hospital so they probably figured it wasn’t worth switching me to a moulded plastic cover.

Underneath, the arm doesn’t look that bad. I’ll still have a scar to remind me to be very careful with power tools but I’m probably not going to convince anyone that I went swimming with sharks (or, for that matter, possibly not even that I pruned myself with a chainsaw).

5 June 2025
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1.4 handed typing

Tomorrow I’ve got another appointment at the hospital when, hopefully, my stitches can come out and I’ll get move to a slightly less bulky version of the arm protection. Meanwhile, I’m increasingly looking forward not just to playing electric bass again but also getting back to two handed typing. One hand and a couple of fingers on the other hand is okay but, although that puts me at over 50% of the regular number of fingers, I still can’t manage anything like 50% of my regular speed.