There are 393 million firearms in private hands in the US. According to the CDC in 2020 (the most recent year with data) there were 45,222 gun related deaths in the US (homicide, suicide, accidents where the number of people properly killed (to save lives) is not called it). Therefore 0.00115% of the nation's privately owned firearms wer…
There are 393 million firearms in private hands in the US. According to the CDC in 2020 (the most recent year with data) there were 45,222 gun related deaths in the US (homicide, suicide, accidents where the number of people properly killed (to save lives) is not called it). Therefore 0.00115% of the nation's privately owned firearms were involved if you generously assume that each death was with a different firearm. I don't see that as a case for firearms being a cause, they are tools. It is purposefully under reported when a gun is used to save lives which leads to what I think is the biggest impediment to reasonable gun control - mistrust of the anti-gun people with their end justifies any means mentality.
Let me add another statistic: 42% of Americans own guns at all, which means that those 393 million firearms are distributed among 140 million people, the vast majority of whom own one or two guns.
Completing that thought, some people own absolutely enormous numbers of firearms. Perhaps you've seen that photo of the family with over 400 assorted black military-style rifles and handguns on display in the back yard.
I want people like that completely disarmed.
More: suicide is about 2/3 of gun deaths. Problem is that firearm suicide is successful about 90% of the time while other forms are about 10%. People take a bottle of pills and just puke and awaken in the hospital just flying and with a headache. They cut their wrists and just cripple their hands.
There is no arguing that most gun owners aren't problems, they just own a gun to feel safer. But then, the tiny percentage who break into houses require us all to have locks and worry every time we're out of the house.
And gun advocates won't concede a thing; blind people who are mentally unstable need to be allowed to own guns.
With mass shootings coming almost daily now, and only bound to get worse, we need to start somewhere and it's a pity we didn't start back when there were fewer guns than people.
People who hunt/hunted often have more than one firearm for different purposes, not the same as collecting. I wonder if the super gun collectors have a form of MIAS (musical instrument acquisition syndrome). It would be better and just as useless to have fifty guitars or ukuleles.
I have a friend who bought two each AR15 & M1As (non-military versions of the M16 & M14). He asked me over to teach him how to field strip them to clean them. He was not a veteran and had no training with them. Politically left leaning and not a nut. He just wanted to have them as an investment. He could sell them for far more than he paid for them today. To his credit, he had a high-quality gun safe.
Some people buy gold and silver for the collapse. One of my daughters says that lead will be the barter currency for the new millennium. Ammunition is very scalable right down to a single round of .22 LR. There are people who store large amounts of ammunition more for that reason than thinking of a shoot-um-up.
I have a dozen hardware synthesizers. OK, I went a little nuts. I was warned about Gearlust.
I have three classical guitars and a mandolin. I'm struggling to get the motivation to get practicing again. I used to be quite good and I get a lot better in an hour of playing.
But I wasn't talking about a hunter with a second piece for rodents, you know who I'm talking about; the guys with racks of assault rifles, the guy who bought five more handguns because Obama won some legislative victory (not related to guns), the ones who wear three guns around the house and five when they leave it. These people are crazy, and they are obsessed.
I'm talking about the people who can't imagine any solution to the growing menace of firearms that doesn't involve everyone being more armed, the ones who really believe in that polite society, the ones who take Xmas pictures of everyone in the family holding an assault rifle.
I don't need to tell you how good music is for your head. I hope you pick up one of those guitars and create something new on a synthesizer for you sound cloud.
Playing from sheet music, which I now do almost all the time I play classical guitar, has an established benefit in deferring senility. Last I read the connection was not understood, but it uses so many different parts of the brain in coordination that speculation comes easily.
Cellist Pablo Casals was playing gifted interpretations of Bach which involved reading figured bass; numerical notations beneath single notes
B
6
would be a G chord, B being the third, and the other note, D, not needed because any one who can read figured bass knows this stuff. But it isn't just chords, the musician is expected to work in themes and transitions from the body of the piece.
It takes really deep understanding and fast thinking to play from figured bass, most Baroque musicians fill it in before they perform.
Casals was doing superb live interpretations of figured bass at age 96.
I was into Baroque music for years before I started listening to later classical music and I won't say I could play figured bass but I understood it well enough to read it and tell what chords it was specifying.
Usually figured bass was for the "continuo," which was the name for a bass viol (a bowed instrument like a cello but with frets) and a harpsichord; it was not until Bach's Brandenburg #5 that the harpsichord got a lead role. The pair of instruments were like what bebop would call the rhythm section. They were an accompaniment, and the two musicians were expected to be able to improvise within the piece, playing music that was not written out, only hinted at.
The musicians did this all the time, not like modern classical musicians who might do Baroque only sometimes.
When I was a child my mother sent me to summer with country relatives. One summer it was with an aunt who was a piano teacher. At the end of summer, I played in church from the Baptist (Broadman) Hymnal. I went back home to no piano and forgot it. I cannot sight read on any instrument that I play now, ruined by tablature or chord charts.
I play with people who use songbooks with notation and need to work on learning it since I am often limited to playing chords without that ability. For songs with long strings of chords with 3 Major & 3 minor chords with two different chords in each measure at the speeds they play it would be easier to play the melody. I need to work on that since one of my reasons for music is to exercise my brain now that I've retired from my thinking job. The task is complicated by my playing instruments with different tunings, so the notes are in different places on the fretboard. I need to do it even though it is contrary to my goal of being able to play anything I hear or have in my head without paper.
I used sheet music to learn a piece, classical or rock, many years before I could play live from the sheet music. I think it started with playing some studies by Fernando Sor, Classical Era Spanish composer, pieces that fit under the fingers in mostly low positions, Suddenly I could play from the music at performance speed, and then I could play pieces I was trying for the first time at close to performance speed.
I still use sheet music mostly to learn the pieces, though I almost always rearrange them. The guitarist who inspired me to play, Julian Bream, used too many open strings in his arrangements, whereas I try not to mix fretted and open strings in a scale run unless I need to so I can jump to a distant position.
I can read tabs but I'm used to music notation now.
Banjo (old-time) got me partial to open strings. I often play in G & D so DADGBE & DGDGBE are tempting guitar tunings (more open string chords) but while I'm learning I'm sticking to EADGBE.
I've never experimented with alternate tunings. About half of classical pieces tune to bass string to D instead of E but whichever tuning I'm using there are passages where the other would be momentarily more convenient. Now on my Yepes 10-string I always have both.
Jimmy Page (Led Zeppelin) tunes his electric to DADGAD, dad-gad, which is why so many bands covering LZ songs don't sound quite right. Joni Mitchell almost never uses the standard tuning.
One piece I really want to learn uses E♭ A D G B♭ E♮ and it's extremely difficult already because of the tempo, but WOW do I want to learn it:
Drop D (DADGBE) is probably the most common, and easiest, altered tuning since nothing changes for strings 1-5. Power chord on the 6-4 and interesting bass runs on the 6.
Celtic (DADGAD) is a power chord player's delight and more open ringing tonic and dominant strings when playing in the people's key of D. A bit awkward for other chords.
Open G (DGDGBD) is basically the most common banjo tuning so a banjo player could play a guitar without knowing how to play a guitar. I'm resisting that urge because I want to be an actual guitarist.
As for the piece that you linked, I don't even dream of playing something like that. Good grief!
There are 393 million firearms in private hands in the US. According to the CDC in 2020 (the most recent year with data) there were 45,222 gun related deaths in the US (homicide, suicide, accidents where the number of people properly killed (to save lives) is not called it). Therefore 0.00115% of the nation's privately owned firearms were involved if you generously assume that each death was with a different firearm. I don't see that as a case for firearms being a cause, they are tools. It is purposefully under reported when a gun is used to save lives which leads to what I think is the biggest impediment to reasonable gun control - mistrust of the anti-gun people with their end justifies any means mentality.
Let me add another statistic: 42% of Americans own guns at all, which means that those 393 million firearms are distributed among 140 million people, the vast majority of whom own one or two guns.
Completing that thought, some people own absolutely enormous numbers of firearms. Perhaps you've seen that photo of the family with over 400 assorted black military-style rifles and handguns on display in the back yard.
I want people like that completely disarmed.
More: suicide is about 2/3 of gun deaths. Problem is that firearm suicide is successful about 90% of the time while other forms are about 10%. People take a bottle of pills and just puke and awaken in the hospital just flying and with a headache. They cut their wrists and just cripple their hands.
There is no arguing that most gun owners aren't problems, they just own a gun to feel safer. But then, the tiny percentage who break into houses require us all to have locks and worry every time we're out of the house.
And gun advocates won't concede a thing; blind people who are mentally unstable need to be allowed to own guns.
With mass shootings coming almost daily now, and only bound to get worse, we need to start somewhere and it's a pity we didn't start back when there were fewer guns than people.
People who hunt/hunted often have more than one firearm for different purposes, not the same as collecting. I wonder if the super gun collectors have a form of MIAS (musical instrument acquisition syndrome). It would be better and just as useless to have fifty guitars or ukuleles.
I have a friend who bought two each AR15 & M1As (non-military versions of the M16 & M14). He asked me over to teach him how to field strip them to clean them. He was not a veteran and had no training with them. Politically left leaning and not a nut. He just wanted to have them as an investment. He could sell them for far more than he paid for them today. To his credit, he had a high-quality gun safe.
Some people buy gold and silver for the collapse. One of my daughters says that lead will be the barter currency for the new millennium. Ammunition is very scalable right down to a single round of .22 LR. There are people who store large amounts of ammunition more for that reason than thinking of a shoot-um-up.
I have a dozen hardware synthesizers. OK, I went a little nuts. I was warned about Gearlust.
I have three classical guitars and a mandolin. I'm struggling to get the motivation to get practicing again. I used to be quite good and I get a lot better in an hour of playing.
But I wasn't talking about a hunter with a second piece for rodents, you know who I'm talking about; the guys with racks of assault rifles, the guy who bought five more handguns because Obama won some legislative victory (not related to guns), the ones who wear three guns around the house and five when they leave it. These people are crazy, and they are obsessed.
I'm talking about the people who can't imagine any solution to the growing menace of firearms that doesn't involve everyone being more armed, the ones who really believe in that polite society, the ones who take Xmas pictures of everyone in the family holding an assault rifle.
You know as well as I that this is sick.
I don't need to tell you how good music is for your head. I hope you pick up one of those guitars and create something new on a synthesizer for you sound cloud.
But wait! There's more!
Playing from sheet music, which I now do almost all the time I play classical guitar, has an established benefit in deferring senility. Last I read the connection was not understood, but it uses so many different parts of the brain in coordination that speculation comes easily.
Cellist Pablo Casals was playing gifted interpretations of Bach which involved reading figured bass; numerical notations beneath single notes
B
6
would be a G chord, B being the third, and the other note, D, not needed because any one who can read figured bass knows this stuff. But it isn't just chords, the musician is expected to work in themes and transitions from the body of the piece.
It takes really deep understanding and fast thinking to play from figured bass, most Baroque musicians fill it in before they perform.
Casals was doing superb live interpretations of figured bass at age 96.
I was into Baroque music for years before I started listening to later classical music and I won't say I could play figured bass but I understood it well enough to read it and tell what chords it was specifying.
Usually figured bass was for the "continuo," which was the name for a bass viol (a bowed instrument like a cello but with frets) and a harpsichord; it was not until Bach's Brandenburg #5 that the harpsichord got a lead role. The pair of instruments were like what bebop would call the rhythm section. They were an accompaniment, and the two musicians were expected to be able to improvise within the piece, playing music that was not written out, only hinted at.
The musicians did this all the time, not like modern classical musicians who might do Baroque only sometimes.
When I was a child my mother sent me to summer with country relatives. One summer it was with an aunt who was a piano teacher. At the end of summer, I played in church from the Baptist (Broadman) Hymnal. I went back home to no piano and forgot it. I cannot sight read on any instrument that I play now, ruined by tablature or chord charts.
I play with people who use songbooks with notation and need to work on learning it since I am often limited to playing chords without that ability. For songs with long strings of chords with 3 Major & 3 minor chords with two different chords in each measure at the speeds they play it would be easier to play the melody. I need to work on that since one of my reasons for music is to exercise my brain now that I've retired from my thinking job. The task is complicated by my playing instruments with different tunings, so the notes are in different places on the fretboard. I need to do it even though it is contrary to my goal of being able to play anything I hear or have in my head without paper.
I just looked up figured bass. Good grief!
I used sheet music to learn a piece, classical or rock, many years before I could play live from the sheet music. I think it started with playing some studies by Fernando Sor, Classical Era Spanish composer, pieces that fit under the fingers in mostly low positions, Suddenly I could play from the music at performance speed, and then I could play pieces I was trying for the first time at close to performance speed.
I still use sheet music mostly to learn the pieces, though I almost always rearrange them. The guitarist who inspired me to play, Julian Bream, used too many open strings in his arrangements, whereas I try not to mix fretted and open strings in a scale run unless I need to so I can jump to a distant position.
I can read tabs but I'm used to music notation now.
Banjo (old-time) got me partial to open strings. I often play in G & D so DADGBE & DGDGBE are tempting guitar tunings (more open string chords) but while I'm learning I'm sticking to EADGBE.
I've never experimented with alternate tunings. About half of classical pieces tune to bass string to D instead of E but whichever tuning I'm using there are passages where the other would be momentarily more convenient. Now on my Yepes 10-string I always have both.
Jimmy Page (Led Zeppelin) tunes his electric to DADGAD, dad-gad, which is why so many bands covering LZ songs don't sound quite right. Joni Mitchell almost never uses the standard tuning.
One piece I really want to learn uses E♭ A D G B♭ E♮ and it's extremely difficult already because of the tempo, but WOW do I want to learn it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-kI2dnAAZhA
I would need to get totally serious again, practicing hours every day.
Drop D (DADGBE) is probably the most common, and easiest, altered tuning since nothing changes for strings 1-5. Power chord on the 6-4 and interesting bass runs on the 6.
Celtic (DADGAD) is a power chord player's delight and more open ringing tonic and dominant strings when playing in the people's key of D. A bit awkward for other chords.
Open G (DGDGBD) is basically the most common banjo tuning so a banjo player could play a guitar without knowing how to play a guitar. I'm resisting that urge because I want to be an actual guitarist.
As for the piece that you linked, I don't even dream of playing something like that. Good grief!
https://www.scales-chords.com/chord-namer/piano?notes=D%23;A;A%23;D;F;G;A%23&key=&bass=D%23
Wow the Wikipedia entry on figured bass is excellent! That has everything I ever knew about it in one screen.
I contribute money annually. It's good for many things not politicized. As always, if it can be politicized, not so much.