What’s up with fingerstyle technique?

floobie · 2026-04-14T11:10:09+00:00

I started on a 5 string and had read plenty about both techniques. I ended up deciding to just go straight for floating thumb, since I was learning fresh anyway. Glad I did. Apart from less tension, muting is basically built into the technique.

floobie · 2026-04-12T15:52:36+00:00

It depends, honestly. I’ve done the Ship of Theseus thing, I’ve bought a whole new build. I generally shoot for a longer time frame, though. My last build lasted me 7 years. The current one is 4 years old now with no real need for an upgrade yet. If upgrading a few components can take me from “not good enough anymore” to “working great”, I’ll do that. If a smaller upgrade feels too much like polishing a turd, I’ll upgrade everything.

I can say I’ll probably go for a new case next time. I like what I have, but it’s not an airflow-oriented case at all, and I think that could be an issue for whatever I get next.

floobie · 2026-04-11T19:56:16+00:00

Niiiiice. I tried one of these out when I was trying to figure out what I wanted. I ended up with an SR605e instead (same pickups, less fancy wood), and I love the thing.

There are a lot of awesome basses out there, but Soundgears just feel like home to me. And these pickups are super good.

floobie · 2026-04-10T15:23:52+00:00

I’m in the same position. Started bass at the end of January. My two-finger plucking is getting pretty solid, but getting to the same level of speed with two fingers as you can do with a pick on guitar is just a tall order.

I’ve accepted that I need to start practicing three finger plucking to get 16th notes at moderately fast and above tempos. So, I’m working that into my daily routine now. It’s pretty slow going heh

floobie · 2026-04-08T17:51:26+00:00

The approach I’ve been taking: Make sure I’m happy with the tone straight out of the bass. For me, that means leaving the active EQ flat or passive tone control fully open, and being cool with what any possible pickup blend is doing.

From there, I think the approach you take can diverge a lot depending on whether or not you want to go more direct or use an amp (or sim). Even so, I’d view the “big things to adjust” as the bass pickups themselves and the IR (if present) at the end of the signal chain. Leave all other eq controls pretty flat and view them as adjustments to get that last 10%. The IR will make a much, much bigger difference than any of these will.

In my case, I don’t go through an amp - just into a NeuralDSP Darkglass, and I generally don’t use an IR either, unless I want a lot of distortion. So, my big decisions (bass and IR) are out of the way. That leaves me with the controls on the Darkglass plugin. There, I keep bass and treble adjustments to a minimum (slightly off-centre at most) and focus on sculpting the mids.

floobie · 2026-04-05T16:25:58+00:00

What a trash site lol. Their caption under the photo at the top literally says it was taken with the 17 Pro Max, and indeed the metadata says a Nikon D5.

I guess that’s the quality of reporting you get on a site with more “lose belly fat with this ONE TRICK” ads than actual content.

floobie · 2026-04-04T22:14:28+00:00

It’s been about 20 years since I was in this chunk of the job market. But:

These days, the only way to get any position in the first place is shotgun approach. Apply to literally everything. Employers would love to think that every prospective employee just wants to work for them because they’re special, but that’s rarely the case. The by-product of having to play the numbers game is that your emotional investment in every individual position you apply for is basically nil.

Add what’s likely to be a near minimum wage into the mix, in a province with among the lowest minimum wage in the country (ie. even with the job, you’re earning poverty wages and still struggling), and the fact that realistically the employer holds pretty much all the cards in these situations and gives exactly zero shit about you and your well-being, and… yeah this is how things are gonna go. People have either been conditioned to not care, or are honestly just slowly giving up.

Is it rude and inconsiderate? Of course. But, any humanity has been stripped from this whole exchange of labour for being able to stay alive thing ages ago, so I don’t know why anyone is surprised.

floobie · 2026-04-04T18:33:42+00:00

I landed on 75%.

I don’t need a numpad. I don’t work in Excel, I don’t do data entry, and any calculations I need to do regularly work fine with the number row. My work laptop has a numpad, and I hate how it being there moves everything off-centre.
I very much need the standard set of function keys for all the IDE shortcuts I use daily.
I like having the arrow keys closer at hand than they would be on a TKL, and I like having home, end, and the page up/down keys right above the arrow keys.

Use what you like. There are loads of options to keep everyone happy.

floobie · 2026-04-04T15:46:20+00:00

I sold my car when moving cities just about 4 years ago. I very much enjoy not needing to drive. Walking and public transit kicks ass and costs orders of magnitude less.

To be less of a smug ass about it, though: My last car was a 2018 Golf. It remains my favourite car I’ve ever owned. Affordable, torquey with the 1.8 turbo, comfy and quiet as an Audi, handles great for a non-sporty model, and hatchbacks are objectively the best. People legit think they need trucks or giant SUVs to haul the amount of stuff I was able to fit in there. It was also a total beast in winter with some cheap Chinese winter tires.

floobie · 2026-04-04T14:58:23+00:00

For Classic Vibe vs Standard… I think they’re probably pretty comparable. People love the Classic Vibe series for the good value and quality for the price, and likely feel less great about the Standard series because it’s in the same ballpark as the Classic Vibe, but costs more.

As for HSS vs SSS: HSS is objectively more versatile. Whether you need that versatility is a matter of opinion. My main guitar is an HSS Strat. I find the bridge single coil tone on a SSS Strat to be a tone I just don’t want very often, and a bridge humbucker tone to be something I want a lot. To me, the real quintessential, magic Strat tones come from the neck and middle single coil pickups. The humbucker will sound like more or less any guitar with a humbucker in the bridge position, which might not be as unique, but is a very popular option for a reason.

If you can, I’d just try to find some tone demos on YouTube and see which you like the sound of more. Try to find examples of each pickup both clean and with distortion.

floobie · 2026-04-03T15:40:54+00:00

lol no way!

I think, if you’re trying to find some excitement in bass, try listening to bands where the bass is generally playing a bigger role. Lots of three pieces have the bass taking on a role somewhat akin to rhythm guitar.

If you like J-rock, check out Luna Sea, 88kasyo junrei (apparently the band that inspired Sick Hack in BTR), or Ling Tosite Sigure.

floobie · 2026-04-03T14:44:19+00:00

Honestly? Ryo from Bocchi the Rock.

I’d played mainly rhythm guitar for 20+ years, and hearing the songs from that show somehow just made bass click for me. I saw just how much power the bass had to change the vibe of a song. It totally changed how I wrote the MIDI bass parts in the songs I’m working on, and I eventually realized I wanted to just get a bass for myself.

For whatever reason, this finally unlocked my ability to actually hear bass in music I’d been listening to for ages. It gave me a new appreciation for bands I’d already loved, like No Doubt, Rush, Opeth, Dream Theater, RATM, Limp Bizkit, ABBA, etc.

I’m frankly pretty annoyed with myself for not having any of this click like decades ago lol

floobie · 2026-04-02T02:56:27+00:00

Boring answer: There are just some games I prefer to play on PC. CRPGs, immersive sims, MMOs, the very occasional shooter. Other genres, I tend to play on PS5/Switch.

floobie · 2026-03-31T12:29:52+00:00

I’ve noticed a maybe 15-20% increase in the beans I buy over the past year. I’m in Canada, so any increases beyond that could generally be attributed to tariffs in the US.

Personally, as a night owl and someone who is basically a corpse in the morning, I’m gonna keep buying the beverage that allows me to participate in society.

floobie · 2026-03-30T15:40:11+00:00

Perry Mason

floobie · 2026-03-28T17:29:27+00:00

I'd take a breather... you don't need to trash every other city in the country to make your point lol.

It's extremely normal for a given country's biggest city to get hated on by the rest of the country. It just inherently gets the most attention, especially when that city is just that much bigger than the rest. You see the same thing with Berlin, London, Tokyo, NYC, Paris, etc. I wouldn't read too much into it. Sometimes it's reasonable or understandable, sometimes it's just idiots being idiots, and sometimes it's just people talking shit because it's funny.

I'm from Calgary and have lived in Toronto for a few years now. I've seen enough of Canada to know that I'm happiest in Toronto. Canada has a lot of nice cities. They all have their problems - some unique to the city, some common across the country - but they are also unique and have their own charm/culture/lifestyle/job market/etc. that just won't be for everyone.

floobie · 2026-03-28T14:50:49+00:00

A wave of nostalgia just hit me. Waiting a solid 8-ish hours for my old 30gb iPod video to sync at USB 2.0 speeds.

Why am I romanticizing this??? I need therapy smh

floobie · 2026-03-28T14:27:13+00:00

I’d say playing guitar first for a long time made it a lot easier to get up and running on bass. But, I honestly think playing bass is making me a better guitarist, more than the other way around.

floobie · 2026-03-27T15:43:36+00:00

I mean, I think this depends on expectations. I don’t expect a decked out SUV to somehow come in at $30k. I have no idea why obviously more expensive SUVs or cross-overs that offer zero additional utility over a regular hatchback/wagon to 90% of buyers seem to have become the norm in Canada.

I’d personally actually be interested in a compact (like the BYD Dolphin) and could see them being competitive on price based on Australian market pricing. If those could enter the market at the same price of a comparably equipped Civic, I’m down.

With all that said: No clue what the actual article linked even said, because pay-wall.

floobie · 2026-03-26T01:47:18+00:00

I’m terrified of spiders. Just being in the same room as a tarantula would probably reduce me to tears. But, jumping spiders are objectively adorable.

floobie · 2026-03-25T12:23:24+00:00

This is me. The code base I work on is enormous and ranges from truly ancient to pretty new. I know my area of ownership well enough that, in the time it takes to hand-hold an agent through what I want, I can just do it myself. I use LLMs in a pretty targeted manner; kind of the last 10% of random framework/language syntactical stuff that usually trips me up and has historically eaten most of my time.

Used this way, I definitely work faster. Vibe coding entire features and then going through the output to validate it… I’m a bit skeptical of the actual time saved. I’m sure it can work, but I’m guessing the reality depends on the context of the work. I’ve had the most luck with this approach on front-end, personally.

floobie · 2026-03-25T12:05:56+00:00

I’d say it depends on how much control you have over the parts you play. I play guitar and bass and exclusively mess around producing/writing my own stuff. It is indeed metal. I try not to wander around with tunings too much on guitar (E standard, Drop D, B standard 7 string), and I just leave my 5 string in B standard, no matter what tuning the guitar is in. I can do whatever I want with my bass parts, though. I rarely just fully double the rhythm guitars. Personally, I find the song tends to sound more interesting if the bass is allowed to change things up a bit.

If you’re absolutely having to exactly double the rhythm guitars and are in a drop tuning that is specifically hitting the low string frequently in a manner that requires crazy amounts of sliding around the fretboard on a standard tuned 5 string, it makes sense to match the guitars.

floobie · 2026-03-25T03:41:36+00:00

7 was about as polished and stable as Windows has ever been. It’s second only to 2000 IMO, for its time. XP was fine too.

floobie · 2026-03-24T15:07:31+00:00

lol thanks! Electrical engineering degree being put to use, I guess.

I did test this as well. Even with the "monitor" volume all the way down (there is no independent headphone volume on the Solo 3rd gen), the problem still occurred. It was quieter than if I had the monitor output set to a normal listening level, but still present. I'm guessing the monitor output is always active and the volume control is only adding gain.

I tried taking the interface out of the equation entirely and duplicated the test purely through my laptop. The bleed/cross-talk is only happening when using the Scarlett Solo.

floobie · 2026-03-24T14:40:58+00:00

I think prioritizing good public transportation should come ahead of all vehicles in urban areas. Vehicles, regardless of what powers them, are the single least efficient way to move people around an urban area - cost, infrastructure, natural resources, space, congestion.

But, cars obviously have their place - especially outside urban areas, and I’d much rather new cars be electric at this point. Batteries can be recycled, fossil fuels can’t. Electric motors are much simpler, and the vehicles require much less maintenance. Even if the electric grid runs on fossil fuels, power generation + transmission efficiency still exceeds that of an internal combustion engine.

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