Scott Andrew - lo-fi acoustic pop superhero!

I was a little nervous we might have overdone it with the wine, having in the end brought five bottles to add to the five brought by various other guests. This turned out to be a good thing, though, as I’m pretty sure all ten were empty by the end of the evening. Sautéed green beans and shallots? Mashed yams? Pumpkin butter? I will tell you right now I do not, will not ever, deserve to have pumpkin butter.

Sitting upright in its stand next to my computer desk is a cheap, cheap, very cheap bass guitar I bought this past summer, a Squire P-Bass, which is a hybrid of the famous Fender Precision and Jazz models. It has a candy-shell blue, blue as a blue M&M, with a mahogany fretboard and still has the original strings. I keep it by the desk for those slow moments when the computer is booting up, or surfing in between pages on my ancient dialup connection. I don’t play anything in particular and I’m not very good, but I’m getting there. I finally figured out why it’s better to pop the strings with the index finger rather than the middle one (better hand position, better control), and how to cleanly thumb-slap the higher strings without too much incidental noise from the neighboring ones. My goal is to get that that muted, percussive slap-pop technique down cold. Think of Peter Gabriel’s Big Time, where Tony Levin’s grunting-pig bassline kicks in: bumpita-bup, buh dutta-dutta dah, buppa. I figure if I finally break down and get a cable modem or DSL connection, my finger technique will suffer, so I make do.