Electronics: Short-scale Stingray Bass

So here's an interesting analysis - what's actually happening with the "gain boost" (formerly "bass boost") push-push on the 2019 Music Man Stingray Short-scale? In playing with it at the store, I arrived at the conclusion that the best description for what it does is "in the down position, it's the 'sounds like a stingray' setting. In the up position, it's the "MORE." setting."

After playing around with it some more with my Ampeg BA-108v2 practice amp, I realized I've heard the effect before - I made a high-pass box to help with biamping between a bass rig and a guitar amp that cuts at 200hz. I believe my parts for that included an 8K resistor, but I don't know for sure... I just know I calculated what to throw together based on what's in my crap drawer. Anyway, I figured "there's probably an RC network in here and they probably set it up so that the down position does actually sound close to a standard two-band Stingray with the controls flat" I'm surprised to see something a bit more complicated than that on the circuit board, but we'll start with what I did get right - the RC network on the right side of the board. The components are marked RBST and CBST - presumably Resistor BooST and Capacitor BooST respectively, as they're attached to the push-push. The resistor is 15K, which if my memory from a while ago is correct, would filter below about 105Hz if connected to a .1uF cap. .047 puts it closer to 225Hz. (aside: 15K is quite a high load, which is why the output drops significantly when the circuit is engaged. Solid state preamps seem to be finicky about this and will give a huge difference in output volume, while tube preamps seem to be much more forgiving in dealing with the extra signal) The spec sheet for the instrument says that the tone pot uses a .1uF cap, which is marked out on the left side. There has to be a significant difference between the two values, otherwise in engaged mode with the tone knob turned down, all signal would go away (which is what happens if you use the strangle switch on a Bass VI along with the tone knob).

I haven't done any further reverse engineering as I'm not interested in taking apart a brand new instrument, but it does make me wonder if a similar tactic couldn't be applied to the Mustang PJ to get a "sounds like a P-bass" mode. I may experiment with this on an external breadboard just to see what happens; that could be a cool pedal project someday, though, as it doesn't particularly need to be inside the instrument to work correctly, and I'm not interested in changing out the JINSUNG marked pots in there, as they feel really good, while push-push and push-pull pots decidedly do not.

It also probably would have made a great restraining circuit for the DiMarzio Model P+J set I had in my short scale Jaguar bass, but those pickups ended up back in their box as I decided the push-push pots were too awful for me to continue using.

Hey uh... CTS? Yeah, CTS... you guys want to make some decent-feeling switching pots?

But I'm supposed to be using it

I tried singing in the car on the way to pick up wood pellets for the grill; that didn't go great, but at least I can move my voice around a little bit. I tried to issue a thanks and joke about being a dumbass for giving up on reading the note on the payment terminal after "Use pen to sign" and trying to tap "debit" with my finger. He was living in a different world; unimpressed, in an almost stereotypical "teenager working retail" detached state.

After that, I tried recording a demonstration of a new bass guitar; the talking went fine, but the recording was garbage. Probably about 5 minutes total speech there.

And that's been it - I've fired out a few "hey bud"s to my cat but otherwise haven't had anything to say for myself in about 7 hours. My voice is working fine, I'm just not using it.

I'm sure that's exactly what the therapist wanted me to do, right?

Strength: or, Storytelling

Twice now in the last two days, I've ended up telling the entire story of #natsmetastaticthyroidcancertreatment to people who apparently had no idea. Well, apparently: the first, yesterday, I thought I had mentioned something to Larry before, but apparently not... but today's audience was a pair of folk that definitely had absolutely no idea what they signed up for when they asked me how I was recovering from my cold. After spending about 25 minutes explaining the ins and outs of having had two different surgeons get all up in my neck, two people looked at me dumbfounded, as to how someone so previously unassuming could have had such a complicated (horrifying?) story to tell about why they were talking a little funny but better than last week.

So the question arises: am I a good storyteller?

I know I can write out a lot here, and I know I can just fill dead air with assembled facts about existence. I used to actually pride myself on being able to talk and talk without actually revealing anything about who I am and how I process the world. It was a skill that kept me from having to actually engage with new people when I started school here... as someone who was a pegged off-scale-high introvert, the easiest way to process "I'm in college" was to spew endless facts and never actually explain what relevance they had to me - to summon encyclopedic knowledge about my own experience as a substitute for sharing why it was my experience, and not someone else's. Part of going through therapy for being a basket case ahead of treatment for surgery involved reaching a level of comfort analyzing why being able to do pull-ups off the backboard at my friend's house is something I remember (a fleeting example of teenage athleticism), and why I'm so proud of the night at band camp I ended by trying desperately to pass out by locking my knees at attention (we all go through an anti-authority rebellious phase, and mine happened to last about half an hour one September night).

I guess I can thread beads together to make a necklace, is what I'm getting at.

The interesting thought comes in something I said the night before my surgery... "This isn't strength. This is autopilot." The thoughts are connected by the dawning horror I witnessed as three adults who seem to like me watched me explain the years of suffering I've endured at the hands of chance. I've been through a lot. When I dealt with my third neck surgery, it was less than a year after I had booked my right thyroid lobectomy, and just about 14 months after my first biopsy. It was old hat, basically... I had developed a tolerance to procedure and was ready as if no big deal were on the docket. Fast forward five years as I prepared to undergo number four and I found myself petrified in a way I hadn't been since I managed to get the inertia together to go for biopsy in 2013. My heart beat firm but shallow, I felt an absence of life in my face, and my thoughts were void of any recognizable emotion. I realized at some point it was because fight-or-flight hadn't set in, and that I was looking at instead a self-preservation emotion that boiled down to "maybe [surgery's] visual acuity is based on motion like t-rex" (yes, I know, not how it really worked). If I didn't move, none of this would catch up to me. Then 3:45am rolled around and it was time to load up and head up for funtime. Anyway, the scheduling was nothing - it wasn't real - while the actual trip to the hospital was the passage of millennia, the slow machination of water replacing everything I hold to be my own identity with what I'm supposed to do, with the automation of "fill out this form and show up at this place and hope you don't flip your shit before they put you under." It works... it's a working strategy, but probably not a healthy strategy. Maybe it is. Maybe it's healthy because it did get me in the door, because it did get me treatment for disease. I definitely can't recommend it as a treatment to other people. I don't perceive what I did in July as "strong" - it was, surely, in the sense that I could have just ignored it. I definitely wanted to ignore it. But when most people think strength, or what most people would think of what I did as strong, I would imagine they probably imagine a fearlessness, a machismo, an adulthood. I felt like a terrified child that night, and when I think back on it, I don't admire anything resembling strength, I admire my tenacity or perseverance. I admire the fact that I actually woke up with my alarms and got in the car.

I think what I identify the most with in my own experience is the wave of dread washing over a new audience. I don't want to call that good or bad - I don't want to diminish the accomplishment, and I think it's important to recognize and appreciate that I did actually go through with having more disease removed - but I know it's important to describe it as the way I dealt with this specific adversity. I'm not a stone... in many ways, I'm the terrified child my parents brought to the hospital with the mystery illnesses, or for one of the myriad head injuries I inflicted upon myself by approaching life brain-first.

If only it'd gotten me into therapy a little sooner...

Resolution of a Broken Voice

It was five weeks again. Almost to the day - about 9pm Tuesday of 4 weeks 6 days, but sitting in my living room and all of the sudden, I have a voice that popped right back in and hasn't gone away since.

This week led to a confirmation of suspected diagnosis: partial vocal cord paresis involving the right flap. I've been given a series of exercises to do to try to get things moving again normally. These involve MEOOOOWing across a range of frequencies, issuing a bunch of sharp or drawn out NYEEEEAH and childhood taunting "NAH NAHNAH NA NAAAA NEEEE." It's interesting. As it is returning now, my voice is lower than it used to be. It'll be interesting to see where it settles, but I have told the doctors - all of whom are upset with my apparently lack of speed in recovery - that I'm beyond thrilled to be able to talk at all.

Glossary, Pt 1

I make a lot of mistakes when trying to recall nouns for things. Recent examples:
My car's windshield being a "laundromat."
Hard-boiled egg being "hot air balloon"
Aircraft on landing approach: "wheels-bus"

I will probably expand on this over time, as I keep saying things badly.

Documentation of a broken voice

Part I: 2013
I do not have good notes from 2013, so after checking in with several people who had to spend a lot of time dealing with me, I have a clearer picture of how things happened. I woke up from surgery with the ability to push out three words at a time before completely running out of breath. The surgeon was mortified at how I sounded when I spoke to him over the phone. Over the course of five weeks, my voice did not apparently improve much at all; I had 'a few words' of barking and then apparently I got very good at loud whispers. When my voice returned, it was sudden and a more or less complete recovery, save for a lot of range.

Part II: Six intervening years
The only things I had to say after my range recovered from not being used at all for over a month was that if I talked and walked at the same time, I ran out of breath a lot. I have it on good authority from a speech therapist that this is a fairly common long-term impact people in my situation notice and report if they put the pieces together. It probably comes from one side of the larynx not coming in to the center and, in exertion, a wider aperture for speaking than one would normally have, and the subsequent more rapid loss of air.

Part III: 2019
IIIa: Pre-surgery, I was asked to participate in an evaluation to know how gentle the surgeon needed to be with my nerves. I had apparently made a full recovery; both flaps were flapping and moving all the way in to the center. Evidently, the left side was visibly more muscular than the right, likely from years of compensation. Both meeting in the center likely explains why the "talking while exercising" problem got better over the years. I was also informed that I am "very protective" of my vocal cords, as I don't tolerate being scoped very well at all. Fun fact to file away for 'weird things to be self-conscious about.'
IIIb: Immediately post-surgery, I had intermittent fits of voice. I have come to understand that this was the result of mucus I couldn't clear from my throat while I still lacked the ability to cough. As time went by and I could clear more and more, I arrived at the point where I could summon perhaps four or five words, then I'd need to take a breath, and after a while, my voice would die to a whisper. As time has progressed, this has actually gotten better... I still run out of air, but what I have of a voice has been getting steadily stronger (while still very weak) with the passage of time, and I tend to have more of it at the end of the day than I did last week or the week before. I am one day shy of five weeks out, with follow-ups for post-op and speech therapy next week. It's going to be a fascinating visit, as I will find out whether or not the sensations I feel and the hypothesis I've developed correspond to reality: I think the right side vocal cord is in a paralysis partially closed, and the reason I've been improving is that as the left starts to compensate, as it did last time, it's got less and less distance to cover. I also know that clearing the consequences of seasonal allergies causes the strength of my voice to collapse pretty quickly in the morning, but most mornings, I do wake up with a sound recognizably mine.

mothwalk: 9/2/2019

One of the nice things about living in an area that's reasonably forested for 2019 is the abundant supply of caterpillars we get in the fall. I've been sidelined from serious walks, but as I start to get to where I'm both bored enough to want to deal with the breathing complication and willing to tolerate the yoyoing humidity levels from day to day, the rewards are still out there waiting. I didn't take a picture of the one American giant millipede we saw, but here's the moth activity.

 A snowberry clearwing egg

 This stunning hairdo on a rosy maple moth caterpillar

 Bugguide is loading slowly, so I don't know what kind of sphingid this is. Or if it is one.

 I have no idea what these usually-fuzzy chaps are, but this one isn't skipping proleg day.

 A prowling geometer

Again, slow loading pages are preventing me from properly identifying this otherwise neat caterpillar.

I'll have to hit the books when I get home to see if I can figure out what these are, but seeing as how I haven't been able to play real-life pokemon like this in over a month, I actually want to know on a visceral level.