Ramblings on Such geek. Wow.

Goldenhorse - Wake Up Brother bass tab

Sat, 19 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +1300

I know Goldenhorse didn’t get particularly huge, but I always really enjoyed their work. Wake Up Brother is one of those ones that really feels like an achievable song for a small band - it’s got solid, driving bass; a groovy bright guitar line; and requires quite a dynamic singer to pull it off.

Some friends and I are planning to add it to our band’s repertoire, but the bassline is a bit too complex for us to transcribe properly. And the song wasn’t particularly well-known, so there’s really only one public bass tab, and it wasn’t really comprehensive enough… So I turned to Fiverr!

There are a bunch of folks there who will transcribe bass tab - but one of them stuck out to me, so I decided to work with georgex0006.

I was super impressed with his speed and quality of work. I never could have nailed the bassline as well as he did, and providing a playalong video as well is 100% awesome.

I’m sharing the bass tab and playalong here, with his permission. If you need someone to do some bass tab for you, please give him your support!

Tab & score PDF Version here
Playalong MP4 Version here

And for my personal use (and yours, if you own the album), I purchased a .FLAC of the track which is stored here. However if you don’t already own it, please pay for it yourself first, or listen to it on YouTube where they can deal with copyright issues.

Your mate Eric, and his journey through depression

Thu, 08 Oct 2020 00:00:00 +1300

A couple of months ago, the team at my day job asked me to write something for Mental Health Awareness Week, so today I’m sharing some of my personal experiences around depression. It’s one of my longer articles, but the key message I want you to hear is: If you’re struggling, speak with someone. Seriously, just lean over to your mate now and say “Hey, did you see that article from Eric today?” – that’s all it takes to start a conversation, and believe me: sharing your feelings is a solid way to start getting on top of them.

The year was 2011, maybe February, about 10pm… the kids were in bed, school lunches packed, teeth brushed. It was a normal part of a normal bedtime routine for the whole household. I don’t particularly recall anything happening… but I remember looking at my wife and saying, “Shit… I think I’m depressed”. In the morning I phoned my doc (that was the hardest part) who started me on Fluoxetine - the medication that supported me throughout my recovery. Making that phone call the first step in a long journey, but it cemented my realisation that I was struggling, and that I needed help.

The New Zealand Mental Health Foundation says that one in six New Zealand adults have been diagnosed with a common mental disorder (depression, anxiety, bipolar) at some time in their lives. And behind every diagnosis, there are a host of other staunch people who have struggled and pushed to battle through it silently, sometimes with heart-breaking results. (Rest easy, Deano 💔). According to the World Health Organization (via health.govt.nz), mental illness accounts for 15% of the total burden of disease in the developed world, with depression set to become the second leading cause of disability in the world by *checks watch* … 2020.

Realising I was depressed came as quite a shock to me. I’ve always been the dude who has a smile on his face, laughs at every opportunity, and gets super enthusiastic about super niche things. I was running a reasonably successful business at the time, really enjoyed my work and my colleagues, had a thriving family… It didn’t make a whole lot of sense to me. Things were looking good!

In retrospect, all of that was true, but it’s only part of the picture. I was exhausted, working at least 60 hours a week, I rarely had real (uninterrupted) time to spend with my family, and there was a huge mental burden knowing that 16 individual lives were reliant on the income that the company created… a company which, though financially “fine”, was never financially “flourishing”. I’d lost touch with friends, stopped exercising, and wasn’t engaging in anything I truly loved. Things were not looking good.

Depression was not what I expected. People talk about the “black dog” of depression, and I guess I expected it to be “feeling sad all the time”. I rarely felt sad; I just felt numb and disengaged, and it felt like my head was full of mud. Instead of heading off on my mountain bike or making plans for after work, I’d rather sit on the couch and scroll through social media until bedtime arrived. But when I did end up in a social situation, I could easily engage and laugh and chat – enough that nobody suspected how I was feeling. Years later, when I was sharing my experiences with a friend, I described it as “the shine had gone off everything”. Disinterested, disengaged, foggy-brained, and no motivation to change any of it. (big note: this is how I felt it, but folks experience depression differently)

What helped me through? Firstly, medication. Antidepressants usually take a full two weeks to kick in, but before long I realised that the general foggy/muddiness of my brain was starting to lift. I could mentally take things in again, and I was a little less detached… enough that I could turn up somewhere voluntarily. Once I was able to actively engage a little, I started exercising a bit. We all know that exercise is a strong antidepressant, but I needed help in order to do that. And the third thing that helped – once I’d been on meds and exercising for a couple months, I had the capacity to visit friends, share stories, and make regular commitments. My mate Russell and I would catch up every Friday at 5pm, cook dinner for our combined families, and then spend hours talking, playing guitar, singing, and just generally enjoying friendship. That connectedness is what I finally needed to recover from depression.

Important note: Everyone is different, and that difference is rarely more pronounced than in mental health. For example, the medication that worked for me may not work for everyone, and medication often doesn’t work alone. Friends of mine have tried three or four different types of antidepressants before finding one that helped, and counselling often plays a critical role in recovery.

Connectedness with community and friends is one of our most powerful contributors to happiness and that sense of fulfilment we yearn for. Humans are very social creatures, and it’s essential to our wellbeing to engage and bring value to our social circle. We all need to put time into our friendships, our community, and our passions – neglecting these can bring a much greater cost than we expect, and it’s hard to dig yourself out once you’re in that hole. In fact – your friends and community are critical to pulling you out, which is why opening up and talking about it is so important. We can’t help if we don’t know.

To finish up this article, I thought I’d share a couple of resources. I went through my depression at the same time as Hyperbole-and-a-Half author Allie, who has a comical story here. A less-silly comic was drawn up by artist Colleen Butters here, which I also recommend. Lost Connections by Johann Hari is an excellent book, bringing together research from the last fifty years, with a focus on social connectivity. And if someone reaches out to you for support, there are some resources on how best to help at the Mental Health Foundation

Oh, getting back to the beginning of the story. Of course, my wife replied “Yeah, duh, I’ve been trying to tell you that for months.” ¯\_(ツ)\_/¯

Kate Bush - Army Dreamers guitar tab

Sun, 30 Aug 2020 00:00:00 +1200

Some friends and I have been working on our own version of Army Dreamers, by Kate Bush. The original version is replete with instruments, including a prominent Mandolin, some background violins, a synth of some sort, and even the sound of a rifle being racked. Since we’re two guitarists, a bassist, and a singer, there’s quite a bit of arranging to do to make it work.

Although there’s plenty of tab around for the mandolin part, that’s only a few notes, with the violin part kicking in immediately afterwards. I wanted to cover both.

There are four separate phases in it, which I’ve made up some unimaginative names for:

The slide phrase
The downwards walk
The upwards walk
The violin phrase

The bar structure runs like this:

Slide phrase + violin phrase
Downwards walk + violin phrase
Slide phrase + violin phrase
Upwards walk + violin phrase

That structure is then repeated for the entire song. As you can see, the violin phrase is actually dominant, being played at the end of every bar.

:::text
 The slide phrase The violin phrase Downwards walk phrase Violin phrase again
e|--17/14-14----17/9-9-----9h10p9------------------10----9----10--------------9h10p9----------------|
B|----------------------------------10--------------------------------7----------------10-----------|
G|---------------------------------------9--------------------------------------------------9-------|
D|-------------------------------------------9--------------------------------------------------9---|
A|--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------|
E|--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------|



 The slide phrase The violin phrase The upwards walk phrase Violin phrase again 
e|--17/14-14----17/9-9-----9h10p9----------------------------7----9-----------9h10p9----------------|
B|----------------------------------10-------------7----8------------------------------10-----------|
G|---------------------------------------9--------------------------------------------------9-------|
D|-------------------------------------------9--------------------------------------------------9---|
A|--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------|
E|--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------|

My mountain

Sat, 06 Jun 2020 00:00:00 +1200

I got a tattoo a couple years ago, which is a sketch outline of Mount Tongariro and Mount Ngauruhoe, in the Central Plateau of New Zealand.

The photo that the tattoo, which the tattoo was based on, was just the result of a Google search. I’ve tried to find it many times since I actually got the tattoo - at very least just so I could give credit to the photographer. However, to no avail.

The other day I happily found a copy of the photo, and went to Google’s Reverse Image Search to figure out where it had come from! The answer is…

… nowhere. Whoever posted the image way-back-when appears to have taken the photo down. The Mighty Goog can’t find it anywhere.

So, here we are I guess. I’m uploading the photo here so I don’t lose it again. If you took this photo, or if you know who did, please contact me!

Welcome to the Internet

Sat, 15 Oct 2016 00:00:00 +1300

Well, I’m finally here.

I’ve never really run a blog before… I did write a bunch of stuff back when I ran Gravity Computing; it just was never really “bloggy”. That content has now been moved to Efficient Software, but I’ll probably copy my parts back over here when time permits.

I really have no intention of running a blog, but I do come across interesting and challenging problems all the time, which I’d like to share with people who are, apparently, just like you.

I’ve got a couple things saved up that I want to post about in the next few days, but heck this site could languish for months at a time – so feel free to add it to your reader, I definitely won’t fill your feed.