A long-winded thank you and short term farewell

All,

It's time for me to move on from my current position, and I didn't
want to vanish without saying goodbye (however temporary it may
be!), express some long overdue thank-yous, and maybe sneak two
cents in, while I'm at it. :-)

First and foremost, I want to express my gratitude to everyone here
who has made this list the valuable resourse that it is. When I
first stumbled on the list, my knowledge of alternate tunings was
limited to having read a couple of books (Partch and Helmholtz).
The amount of knowledge I have gained in the short time I've spent
with you all has been nothing short of a deluge.

I'd also like to personally thank Neil Haverstick, Johnny Reinhard,
Gary Morrison and Brian McLaren, who've all taken time to correspond,
sometimes at length, with me, sharing their knowledge, materials, and
music. It's all made a very big difference.

And an extra-special thanks to Paul Erlich, whos communications with
me have been quite an education, and an inspiration. When I first
contacted Paul, I had spent maybe a grand total of 15 minutes toying
with 22TET, and now it's where I expect to spend the bulk of my
xen-time for the near future.

In the tradition of the finest teachers, Paul never "gave me the
answers" [Paul -- I anxiously await reading your paper!!], but rather
pointed me in the right direction to enable me to figure out what I
needed on my own. Of course, I'm certain I've only scratched the
surface WRT 22tet, but I've also learned a more general, and valuable,
lesson from those exercises -- how to listen to a scale/tuning and
let it (and my inner ear) guide me, rather than try to force-fit
a theory, or even a set of expectations, from one system onto another.

For a musical beginner such as myself, this is probably the most
important thing I've learned (aside from keeping a beat, that is :-),
and something I know will be called on again and again as I continue
my explorations of the sonic universe. In that sense, aren't we
all "forever beginning"?


I'll be hanging around until the end of May, and from there it will be
a while until I have some means of receiving the list again, but you
can bet I'll be back. In the meantime, I'll be studying and
`practice, practice, practice'-ing as I work toward my goal of keepin'
it low, any way you tune it.

Thank you all for helping me become a beginner in more than one
system. My biggest hope is that I can in some way pass along the
gift to someone else down the road. I feel that somday, whether
it be 5 people in my living room, 20 in a coffee house, or a hundred
in a club (we're talking deep future, here :-), I will.

Until we meet again, keep it tuned -- any way you like it.

Steve, student of bass, xen and otherwise

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