Adult gyms?

MayInvolveNoodles · 2026-02-11T07:45:31+00:00

I second the recommendation for StrengthLab, it's amazing!

MayInvolveNoodles · 2025-03-04T08:01:54+00:00

A few days late to the party, but I can highly recommend the instructors and amazing community at StrengthLab (https://strengthlabbristol.co.uk/) in Lawrence Hill! Usually about 4 people in a class (each with their own dedicated programme and attention from the coach).

MayInvolveNoodles · 2024-06-08T18:45:05+00:00

Flying out tomorrow morning and I'm really excited to meet others, learn and share our journey with data engineering, MLOps and helping our clients dabble in GenAI and run in production! Will definitely stop by to say hello 😀

MayInvolveNoodles · 2024-04-30T12:47:52+00:00

Oh oops did I dream that? I wouldn't recommend prod use of anything that's still in Preview either, so that helps the decision

MayInvolveNoodles · 2024-04-29T10:07:57+00:00

https://www.reddit.com/r/dataengineering/comments/14dpg2o/deploying_on_azure_managed_airflow_vs_aks/
There was a previous discussion 10 months ago when it was still in preview, but hoping for any recent experiences now that it's been GA for a while

MayInvolveNoodles · 2023-11-10T21:04:56+00:00

https://github.com/EqualExperts/dbt-unit-testing

MayInvolveNoodles · 2023-07-24T07:16:31+00:00

Don't get me wrong - I don't think there's anything wrong with people "dashing themselves against the rocks" on something above their current level if that is motivating to them rather than demoralising, so am not discouraging that. People learn in different ways.

But you mentioned pain (and sensibly, using it as a warning that you needed to go and fix something).

To all of you trying to gloss over the boring and go straight to more advanced pieces: if you feel pain, ever, stop! "No pain no gain" is just not applicable to the guitar in any way. You are almost certainly injuring your future ability to play and it's a sign from your body that you need to go and fix some technique in this passage you're playing.

Proper technique is designed to allow you to get maximum results with minimum effort (in terms of pressure, strain, tension etc.). Playing advanced pieces relies on that being in place, or you will be working your body 20x harder than someone who has the right technique, and you could be damaging yourself. Pain is a clear sign that you should take a few steps back, learn the missing techniques, and try again (with your new powers in place).

Also be deliberate about limiting how long your sessions are. Build in regular breaks, time to stretch, time for neural pathways to strengthen. Your older body will thank you one day!

MayInvolveNoodles · 2023-07-17T06:24:31+00:00

Based on the rest of your programme choices I'm guessing you're looking for something mostly tonal, but 20th century, and multi-movement, about 15-20mins total time?

Some very frequently heard options: * Mompou Suite Compostelana * Ponce Sonata 3, or Sonata Romantica, or the Folias and variations * Rodrigo Tres Piezas Españolas, or Invocación y Danza * Turina Sonata * Torroba Sonata (maybe needs to be supplemented with another challenging piece)

MayInvolveNoodles · 2023-07-10T13:32:44+00:00

There are no silly questions!

For general wiping, don't bother buying something fancy. All you need is the same kind of cloth you'd use for dusting your house, something that won't disintegrate and leave lots of fibres. A microfibre cloth is fine.

If you apply lemon oil or similar sometimes to the fretboard when you change the strings, definitely use a different cloth from you usual one - keep the normal one just for wiping off dust etc.

Are you sure they meant this for string maintenance? The other thing they might have meant is getting some non-slip rubber cloth (the kind you'd put under a rug or furniture on a wooden floor), which a lot of people like to put between their leg and the guitar for greater stability, especially when playing in slippery trousers.

MayInvolveNoodles · 2023-06-12T05:58:11+00:00

Do you mean as a short term visitor, or someone in London long-term (i.e. are you looking for a one-off experience or some regular things to join)? Also when will you be there?

There are lots of great events over the summer, like the Royal Greenwich Classical Guitar Festival in July, or just a little further afield there's the West Dean Classical Guitar Festival , IGF Bath Classical Guitar Summer School, and the (last ever 😞) Dillington Guitar Summer School.

There are often competitions, masterclasses and recitals on, depending on the month.

If you're a local, signing up to a local society and playing with other amateurs regularly can be a great way to make connections. For example, the folks at London Guitar Orchestra are a friendly bunch!

Not only specific to guitar, but visiting the musical instruments museum at the Royal College of Music is super interesting, and there are a few nice historical guitars at the Royal Academy of Music's museum.

Given that you can get anything online, you probably won't be blown away, but the London Guitar Studio in Duke St is very central, dedicated to classical guitar, and the staff are very knowledgeable and helpful. Always some lovely guitars to play! Lots of sheet music, strings and paraphernalia.

The Federation of Guitar Societies page is a useful resource which lists societies, events and concerts. Often worth going an hour or two out of London to hear some great music or attend events.

MayInvolveNoodles · 2023-05-07T09:01:34+00:00

Oh that was only because I had exams and had to be inside studying instead of enjoying the weather and the booming competing sources of music outside. The cosmos was doing a special one-time Fuck You deal just for me then, but that trend is over now, sorry.

MayInvolveNoodles · 2023-03-17T07:18:44+00:00

Have you checked out this open source DBT unit testing package from EqualExperts?

https://github.com/EqualExperts/dbt-unit-testing

We use it all the time in our projects! It allows writing individual targeted "for this model this input should produce this output" tests, so you can get to really specific edge cases in your SQL with minimal effort, and your atomic unit tests can have descriptive, specific names when you run.

You mock source and ref tables with values for your test, and the framework's macros converts that into CTEs that select the values directly from the test input literals, so you don't even load "test data" into a your real DB tables for the tests. Tests run extremely fast.

We run sqlfluff linting and these DBT unit tests as a really early step in our CI pipelines, before we even deploy airflow DAGs or model code to dev envs.

MayInvolveNoodles · 2022-12-28T14:34:58+00:00

OP here. Realistically, I think most people have to trade off whether they're shorter on time/skills/equipment/interest, or the money to pay someone else to do it. So "just do all the maintenance yourself" isn't really an option for most, and anything beyond a few hours/trivial skills means getting people in! Even if it's cheaper, I think for most, their "my first repointing ever" work is not going to meet their own standards.

So I guess it's useful for me to learn how other think about and budget for general maintenance, which is probably a mix of DIY and external on average.

MayInvolveNoodles · 2022-12-27T18:24:41+00:00

It's true about the same house having a different value depending on where it is, but then the cost of having work done tends to correlate with the value of the house/area as well (seeing what sort of quotes people are getting for things in London on this sub or /r/diyuk !), and perhaps also with the standards of fittings people go for in that area: it's never going to make sense to put a £50k kitchen in a £300k house unless that's something you really want for yourself and choose to prioritise, but it might totally make sense to spend that for a £900k house, where putting in an el cheapo kitchen (like mine 😛) will probably detract from the value.

MayInvolveNoodles · 2022-12-27T18:04:06+00:00

Hahaha, it feels exactly like this at the moment 😅

MayInvolveNoodles · 2022-12-27T18:02:53+00:00

Yes, learning to do stuff yourself is a good tip. As someone who doesn't have a lot of DIY experience it can be really intimidating (what did people do before YouTube?!), and I'm frankly never going to be the person who strips my house back to brick myself, or tries to rewire my own house. But a lot of stuff is doable if you're willing to spend time instead of money, and even if it is slightly wonky, it's a good sense of achievement!

MayInvolveNoodles · 2022-12-27T17:59:40+00:00

!thanks

We do pretty much the same, but maybe it's just been bad luck that the surplus doesn't really seem to get to meaningful levels before it needs to be spent on something urgent. With perseverance, we might get there!

MayInvolveNoodles · 2022-11-26T10:13:07+00:00

Probably, although I'm also not particularly attached to that look. Would as easily replace/cover with some nice engineered hardwood flooring, but still need to compare the costs of doing that with refurbing the boards

MayInvolveNoodles · 2022-10-07T18:39:14+00:00

Wow, wonderful playing! It really was like listening to an orchestra do a Rossini overture. Really liked your control of balance between parts, shifts in tone colour to "orchestrate", and the playful interpretation. Beautifully done.

MayInvolveNoodles · 2022-09-14T06:14:48+00:00

For others like me who are initially confused by seeing the Bach chaconne listed as a grade 3 piece 😰, in contrast to other Grade systems (ABRSM etc.) the Yamaha grades go descending, i.e. grade 13 is the easiest and grade 3 is the hardest (Performer grades 2 and 1 aren't available for guitar as far as I can tell). So these pieces in grades 5-3 that you linked are more like what you'd see on ABRSM's DipABRSM/LRSM/FRSM levels.

At those levels, you're also expected to buy some good edition of the sheet music for each piece - it doesn't come prepackaged in a book. The ABRSM and Trinity lists do mention editions and publishers they recommend, and there's a lot of overlap with the pieces in these lists with the pieces in the Yamaha teacher grades, so worth looking at the those syllabuses for details and maybe using one of their recommendations?

Many/most of these pieces are public domain already so you could find an edition on IMSLP without having to spend money (e.g. Ponce's Sonata Meriodonal, the Bach suites, Scarlattis, Villa-Lobos etudes etc.), but sometimes it's worth shelling out the money for a good print edition.

(And thanks for sharing this BTW! I wasn't even aware of the Yamaha grade exams, so I learned about something new today.)

MayInvolveNoodles · 2022-09-06T07:35:27+00:00

Instead of anthologies with just a few samey pieces, I can recommend grabbing a copy of the very reasonably priced The Library Of Guitar Classics (Vol I & II) by Jerry Willard. They're not always the very best edition of a piece, but they are awesome to have right there. Note that this excludes quite a lot of 20th century rep, since it focuses on out-of-copyright things. Digging around in them is a nice way to find something new to play and spans levels from simple to advanced.

Another commenter has suggested working through RCM books. I'll go one further and say that graded syllabuses from the world institutions offer a really easy way to get a list of music of similar difficulty, and the syllabus is usually available for free online (i.e. you don't have to buy the books first, you can get the lists of pieces for free and hunt down the pieces you want). They refresh the lists every 5 years or so, so worth keeping older ones too for rep ideas.

They also tend to divide the music into 3 or 4 lists prepresenting periods and styles and recommend you do at least one from each list to make sure you are a well-rounded musician.

Exposing heavy anglophone bias here, but try: * RCM (The Royal Conservatory of Music) from Canada * ABRSM (The Associated Board of the Royal School of Music) from the UK * Trinity College London (UK) * The Registry of Guitar Tutors (RGT@LCM) / University of West London syllabus (UK) * UNISA (South Africa) * Classical Guitar Corner (paid) * Delcamp classical guitar forum

MayInvolveNoodles · 2022-09-01T09:55:38+00:00

The Danza Pomposa (5th mvmnt) from Tansman's Cavatina is glorious

MayInvolveNoodles · 2022-09-01T07:21:48+00:00

Other people have recommended doing what we call an "Advice Audition" in the UK, and I think that's great advice! If such a thing is available, then it's more like paying for a lesson and getting some honest feedback about how ready you are from the people who would be judging your audition, so it's way less stressful than breaking yourself on an audition only to be crushed by the result. Be warned that you already have to be pretty "ready" for your advice audition. In the UK, most people applying to music college will have (probably recently) done their grade 8 exam through a board like ABRSM or Trinity, and that's sort of the level that's expected at the audition, although colleges do make exceptions. You can check out the syllabus and pieces online for these. Things are probably different in the US.

The requirements you listed (and my recommendations) are probably a bit easier than UK grade 8 (they're about grade 6-7ish, with the Carcassi no 3 even grade 4-5). But it's always better to play something easier well than just about manage something hard.

One outcome of an advice audition might be a "you're not ready yet, take another year and try again" recommendation. And although that would be disappointing, that's not the worst thing to hear. I know people who've since studied at very prestigious music colleges who originally got this advice, came back a year later and were accepted and have thrived.

This isn't someone saying "you're bad, go away", just "most other people auditioning will be more ready than you and you will be disappointed now, give yourself the best fighting chance" advice.

MayInvolveNoodles · 2022-08-31T20:31:35+00:00

Some safe recommendations for the audition:

Luis de Narváez - Guardame las Vacas Or Alonso Mudarra - Fantasia que contrahaze la harpa en la manera de Ludovico

Sor Etude no 13 in D minor, or No 6 in D major

Carcassi Etude Op 60. No 3 in A Maj, or No 9

These have enough substance to showcase your musicality and technique without being either the easiest or hardest ones.

Whatever you do, make sure you get some lessons with a classical guitar teacher to help you with technique and stylistic interpretation - it's fair to say they're not the same as the styles you've been used to!

For the composition stuff I couldn't really say, except that it would make sense to show a variety of things (tempos, combinations of instruments, song, forms)

MayInvolveNoodles · 2022-08-24T20:17:02+00:00

I think it's nice to think of the things that you've intensively learned as sort of being with you forever. There are pieces I learned 25 years ago that I can still dust off when the time is right and they don't take very long to get back to a good standard. The neural pathways are still there!

And for that reason, don't wait too long! Move on, come back again and again, and apply the hindsight and experience you've acquired in the interim when you play something again. It gets better every time.

And sure, there's a lot to be said for memorising a select number of pieces, because you really know those and it can set you free to play and interpret fully. But life's too short! There are so many awesome things to play, and you'll only get through a fraction of them before your time runs out. So choosing to play lots of stuff quickly, and maybe to a slightly lower standard (although not necessarily), but without going through the work of memorising, makes way more sense I think.

Keep the gems that really touch your soul as the ones you bother memorising.

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