that was time consuming and frustrating but i'm satisfied. and it needed it, anyways.

the heads should be fine for a while, but i need to prioritize it because the g is really, really bad..

i know better than to fuck with my action.

but i fucked with my action.

i'm going to have to replace the heads on this thing eventually. it'll be good for the instrument; they're stock epiphone heads and they don't hold a tuning well. for now, i actually had to reseat the g head to get the thing up past an f. but it took me a while to figure out what the problem was...

...and i fucked with my action instead.

so, that's what i've accomplished today. fixing the action.

well, i guess i've added a few parts to the song, too, while i've been at it.

it doesn't help that i'm picky about action and was haphazard about fucking with it. brain freeze.

scare on the tuning head. well, i guess it's good to adjust your action once in a while anyways....

and, the other fun part of punk guitar playing: changing broken guitar strings.

you don't do that nearly as often playing jazz and blues. in truth, i actually like my strings just a tad bit rusty, so it's a piss-off but it happens....

actually, i need the g about an eighth down, too, so it's tune with the b.

i suspect this tuning may be used in some melodic hardcore, actually. it's very brian baker.

actually, nevermind. i just realized the dissonance i'm looking for is actually relative and relies on the b string being roughly an eighth tone flat. leaving the low e string at roughly a quarter tone flat allows the entire song to be played on one guitar. so, that's the tuning, if anybody is keeping track.

(note that the terminology refers to a whole tone. so, when i say an eighth tone flat i mean 1/4 of the way from b to b flat and when i say a quarter tone flat i mean 1/2 the way from e to eb.)

yeah. i'm just going to tune by ear to separately produce each section, and glue it all together. it'll sound "out of tune" to some people, but the physics are a little too complex to make such a simplistic statement - it's going to be staggered by quartertones and eighthtones throughout, but that's only "out of tune" relative to the obsolete theory that is still entrenched in western academic thought. it's going to be pretty much impossible to reproduce live without multiple guitarists and a set of techs with perfect pitch, but so be it. it's not in the plans, anyways.

so, this is going to be rather tonally complex. good luck transcribing it....

there's only one popular rock band that i'm aware of that made excellent use of microtones in an otherwise tonal context: alice in chains. you can hear it in more avant stuff like swans or sonic youth, but it's not in the same pop context.

specifically, it's the vocal harmonies, which were often just off. again: people think it sounds out of tune and either like it because of that or cringe because of that. tbh, i don't think either staley or cantrell really realized what they were doing, for the precise reason that their new singer hits the notes perfectly. that is, william duvall is a more proficient singer, but, by being a more technically perfect singer, he loses the aspect of the band that initially made them so interesting. i kind of wish some music theory guru would sit cantrell down and explain it to him, but it's also not the same thing to train somebody to pick up a level of chemistry that came through intuition.

i *do* think staley had an intuition for hitting the notes in between, though. like, when staley and cantrell harmonized, staley would often be off by a microtone and would consistently hit the point out of tune because it sounded more "right" to him. in order for that to work the way it does, he has to be accidentally producing perfect overtones. that's why what they had was so special: he was intuitively producing something that exists outside of western music theory, without really realizing he was doing it.

this isn't going to sound like an alice in chains song, but that's the only popular rock band i'm aware of that played with these ideas within the context of popular rock music, accidentally or not.

yeah, this is what i was worried about: i've seen a few baby roaches (a few mm in length) this morning. the eggs must have been underneath the counter or something - somewhere i can't get to. but they're all dead. the residues seem to have got 'em.

they usually hatch in the fall, so this is actually a bit early. maybe it's the weather. the fucking polar vortex is back and it's getting us some cool nights in the low teens.

the fact that i'm not seeing any adults suggests to me that any oothecae that were left have been stranded, in terms of a nesting population. and the fact that they're coming out for food and getting poisoned suggests that they have to. something i noticed before the centipedes left is that they were moving back to the kitchen, indicating they sensed food (ie roaches) there. a few of them were also killed by the poison (although i've seen several in the back room so the population there is doing fine).

if anything, the early hatch is probably beneficial to me as it gets rid of them while the residues are still there. i think i'm still winning. i was never certain if they were coming in from out of the apartment or coming up from under the floors; i was fairly sure of the former, but it meant i had to stop them before they started leaving eggs under the cabinets. i do think they were mostly coming in from outside, but i didn't get to them before at least a few eggs got laid.

now, i simply don't know how many eggs are under there....and have to hope the poison holds out long enough to get them before they breed another time....

if i start noticing a larger population, the next step will be finding out what hole in the floor they're coming up and steel wooling it.

i can't hope to bait them because the truth is that the whole neighbourhood is infested. they'll come back. i just have to block entry.

i'm not happy about spraying again, either. the pesticide i'm using is supposed to have extremely low mammal toxicity, i did the research and it's supposed to be safe for humans in non-ridiculous direct dosages (meaning don't drink it), but i'm a little concerned that it might have something to do with my sore neck.