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I want to show you something amazing. This video is in two parts. Here is the first one. It's a great performance of The Sinister Minister by Bela Fleck and the Flecktones. Note especially the flute and banjo parts, they're very good.

But that video is just the warm up. The real amazing part of this song is Victor Wooten's bass solo, which lasts for most of the second video. And I want to call a bit of attention to something that happens early on in the solo:

Victor breaks a string.

Well, people break strings all the time on stage, right? But I watched this video about 10 or 15 times without noticing it. Wooten's performance is so good, it's hard to imagine that he is actually missing a string for most of his solo. Even after someone pointed it out to me, I still missed the spot where he broke the string, several times.

Here is a handy timeline. I bolded the important bits.

1:29 We can clearly see that he has all four strings.

2:24 This is some amazing slap bass.

2:39 I love the chord strum here!

2:47 He breaks the string and pauses. But the pause feels dramatic. It doesn't feel like there's anything wrong, it feels like he meant to stop there for emphasis.

2:49 He breaks into a simpler low key groove to give himself time to think.

2:56 Fast hand flick to move the string out of the way.

3:05 He's keeping it simple but varying it it up a bit. Clearly still thinking about what to do next. Remember this solo is a big deal, it's supposed to end on a super intense note before the rest of the band all comes back in. This is the last song in the set, he can't just trail off and end the song.

3:12 Back to the groove. Still thinking. Not only does he have to improvise his way through the rest of the solo, he has to play a quite distinctive main bass line when his solo is done... while missing the G string. More on this later.

3:21 Still thinking... Let's see how gets out of this.

3:50 I love how you can see the string just hanging there.

4:48 He tries to yank the string off but can't

5:05 String flying in the breeze

5:19 Ever so slightly reminiscent of "Play That Funky Music"

5:30 So amazing.

6:00 What the hell is going on here.

6:20 This rhythm stuff is amazing, he's fretting the notes on the neck to get the right chords when he bangs the strings.

6:30 Notice that he starts slapping all the strings with no fretting. It's great but kind of cacophonous and musically dissonant. There is a pause as Futureman steps in to cover for what happens next. Hard to tell with the camera angle but Victor probably gave some look or signal that brought him over.

6:37 Finally gets the string off and hands it to a fan in front

6:41 This is critical! We see him retuning his bass! In particular we see him tuning the E string. He's probably tuning it up a whole step to F#. This would give him an inverted D chord if he slaps all the strings at once without fretting them. Remember when he's done with the solo he needs to get back to the regular sinister minister bass line... but he doesn't need the E string for that. He does need the G string which he broke, but when he finishes his solo and starts up the main bass line you can see he improvises by playing way higher on the neck to get the notes he needs on the D string. Of course he then has to ether be extremely fast to move up and down the neck to get the notes he needs on the A string or he has to transpose the rest of the bass line to his re-tuned E and A string. I think he does a little of both but I get ahead of myself. (There's also a possibility he re-tunes more than one string here. That invalidates some of what I said above but makes any transposing he has to do later more impressive.)

7:05 We see the results of retuning here as he slaps all the strings and it sounds so good compared to the cacophony earlier. Note that the rest of the solo is rhythmic, not melodic.

8:52 Back to the main groove.

And that, my friends, is a professional at work.

Putting all of this together, I was strongly reminded of David Foster Wallace's essay on Roger Federer, specifically Federer's ability to see several steps ahead in the game and maneuver his opponents without them realizing it:

Federer is able to see, or create, gaps and angles for winners that no one else can envision, and television’s perspective is perfect for viewing and reviewing these Federer Moments. What’s harder to appreciate on TV is that these spectacular-looking angles and winners are not coming from nowhere — they’re often set up several shots ahead, and depend as much on Federer’s manipulation of opponents’ positions as they do on the pace or placement of the coup de grâce.

If you want an MP3 of this performance, it's freely available on archive.org. The original song is also not to be missed; it was released in 1990 on their self titled album Bela Fleck and the Flecktones.

I love Adafruit. I especially love their little 1.8 inch TFT screen that you can hook up directly to an Arduino. It comes with a library, but one thing the library is missing is a method for generating arbitrary colors. The colors are in an odd packed 16 bit binary format, with 5 bits for red, 6 bits for green, and 5 bits for blue. They give you a few color constants to start out with, but I wanted arbitrary colors. So I re-familiarized myself with C's bit operators, wrote some code, and now you don't have to.

The first function assumes you're passing a value from 0 to 255. The second function lets you specify the mapping, so if you wanted to create a color based on values read from the analog pins, you could do that by specifying 0 and 1023 as the minimum and maximum values.

Sorry for the lack of formatting, I can't get the formatting to look right. It should cut and paste just fine.

uint16_t makeColor(int r, int g, int b)
{
return makeColor(r, g, b, 0, 255);
}

uint16_t makeColor(int r, int g, int b, int minimum, int maximum)
{
int red = map(r, minimum, maximum, 0, 32);
int green = map(g, minimum, maximum, 0, 64);
int blue = map(b, minimum, maximum, 0, 32);

uint16_t color = 0;

color = color | red;
color = color << 6;
color = color | green;
color = color << 5;
color = color | blue;

return color;
}