... their life spans were totally almost half of ours.
The people who wore these hair dyes were typically of the upper classes. The upper classes might well live to something even we would recognize as an advanced age.
Pepi II is thought to have ruled for 94 years. Ramses II lived to see his 90th birthday and his heir was in his 60s when he took the throne, ruling for about another 20 years.
Do not confuse life expectency with ages that might well be fairly commonly attainable. A huge chunk of the the lower life expectency is due to high infant mortality and death during childbirth, scewing the statistics. If one made it to the 21st year; and didn't work on pyramids and such, one's life outlook was held to be something around the classic age of man; four score and ten. That's why it's the classic age.
It was more meant as a vent against all of the "my city sucks" posts I seem to see.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean. . .
Oddly enough when my city was in its heyday of being a joke city is when I learned to love it. It was, very simply, the unchallenged geekiest place on Earth. Even the blue collar workers were geeky in their own way (motorheads, model train buffs, electronics hobbeists, etc.).
The place could have been (and for all I know was) the very model for Eureka! We actually used to have city employees whose job was to return cars to the absent minded geeks who had wandered off and forgotten them during the day, including, occasionally, in the middle of the street with the motor running.
But the money dried up and the Teslas and Bethes followed the money. The Crack Hos flowed into the vacuum . . . and there ya go. The place really does kinda suck now. So badly that, as I noted a little while ago, the major geek employer goes to rather great lengths on its employment opportunities webpage to not mention that they are actually here, noting instead all the great places that "here" is next to.
Such is life.
I'm no party animal either though; so when I look for other places I might like to go they all turn out to be places where the money has also left, or never had any money in the first place; and it's easier to stay put than to move just to end up in the same condition.
He figured that it was all just a matter of having a good protestant work ethic, and drawing 10 hours a day for 5-10 years. (the lazy were punished by failure, of course).
Didn't work for me.
You were "taught" wrong by someone who was taught wrong.
I only had a handful of violin lessons as a child because my "teacher" was an elderly German who believed in the "Weekly Beatings Method" of instruction. I quit; and taught myself. I didn't say it was simply necessary to labor. I said that labor must be properly applied.
. ..if one is talented, one will enjoy the drudgery work required to build the skill to virtuosity.
Ahhhhhhhh! No. You have it exactly backwards. If you enjoy the drudgery work, you will build the skill to virtuosity. This is why I do not teach those who are being forced to study by an outside force (say, a parent). Most of what is considered "talent" is simply the end result of doing what it is you like to do. Not liking something is not the same thing as being innately incapable of it, it's just that you won't learn is all, 'cause you don't really want to.
Okay, I don't suck at drawing that bad - obviously I had to be good to a certain degree, because the art program I was in was reputed to be very hard to get into. I guess I was a pickier critic of my work than was the review board.
This a psychological problem, not an issue of "talent." You don't need more talent. You need counseling.:)
. ..because it's not enjoyable. ..
Bingo! If you found it enjoyable you could not fail to reach the goal. ..after about 10 years of hard work. You likely won't even know what your actual limits are going be before about 5 years of hard work.
Please don't take this wrong, because it's of no nevermind to me. I don't even know you and don't care about what you do to make yourself happy, but your "problem" seems to be that you don't much like work, so you follow the path of least resistence, but you mistake this for having something to do with what sort of end goal you might achieve. People do, for various reasons, procede at different paces. Some have a hard beginning, but breeze through the middle patch, while others start easy and then "plateau" at the middle patch. Both have the same talent. Both, if they stick it out, will achieve the same goal, but the former is more likely to quit than the latter simply because the latter is protecting an investment, not because he's more "talented."
Most of my work as a teacher really has nothing to do with teaching. People are perfectly capable of learning things on their own (with suitable aids); and in fact, when it comes to issues of motor skills can only learn things on their own. I find my primary job is that of motivating.
I guess it's just hard for people with talent to imagine what it's like to not have it.
I can't see that I have any particular talent for music. Certainly not actually for the physical act of playing instruments. I have a lifelong battle with neurological disorders and arthritis (as a seconday symptom of genetic disease).
I simply enjoy the process of expanding my skill set (which is a goaless goal, since nearly every day I can reach that simple goal, thus I am never really disapointed in not reaching some goal "way out there." Keep your goals close at hand, where you can grab them).
I cannot draw worth crap. In part this is due to my neurolgical disorders, which limit the ultimate goal I can reach, but mostly it's simply because I do not draw. If I ever turn my focus in that direction I will learn, and I will learn to do it rather well.
The only "talent" I can see that I have is simply liking to do shit. Lot's of shit. And the more shit you do, the better you become at doing shit.
It's nothing more than the way you learned to walk and talk and wipe your own
Unfortunately I haven't found many composers and arrangers calling for penny whistles.
Play what you want on what you want. I play the Mozart horn concertos on keyless flute. Of course if you are playing at the behest of someone the piper plays what the piper is paid to play.
That has nothing to do with my suggestion, which was about learning, not performing.
If you don't mind the expense try getting a hornpipe. There's actually a fair amount of late baroque early classical music that was orginally scored for that. They generally have the clarinets play it nowadays. Very few people actually pay much attention to what the composer/arranger originally had in mind, although they may well make a certain amount of noise about doing so. Noise is not practice.
If brass, piano, and woodwind players of former centuries complained about it being too hard, you can certainly bet the majority of today's players would as well.
Only the piano players complained (and brass players still don't have anything that can be truely considered termperament; valves just change the fundamental pitch). When (which wasn't until the mid/late 1800s) they "won" they forced everyone else to follow suit. You'll find that's when all the modern keybedecked woodwinds also arose.
Keys do solve various "problems" (which are mostly a matter mostly of 19th century classical music fashion), but being about playing in different keys isn't really one of the primary ones. It's mostly about timbre and volume.
You are putting the cart before the horse. You see a lack of keys as a problem because you see the keys as the source of notes. Thus to get more notes you think you need more keys. Holes are the source of notes; and most of your holes only have to exist because you have keys. If you take away the keys you still have these things called "fingers" which are actually much more versatile than keys.
The "Concert" flute of the early 1800s only had four to six keys, and two of those were merely to extend the range beyond what fingers could easily reach. Only the remaining two to four keys were what was deemed necessary to easily produce a chromatic scale.
You can't even play music of the period on modern instruments the way the composer intended them to be heard, because you cannot produce the quality of tone that he chose many of the notes specifically for. Modern woodwinds are designed not primarily to be chromatic, but to be bland.That is what your keys are for.
So maybe you don't like the 12 tone scale, but if you play more than one scale in one song you are in BIG trouble if you don't use the system that J.S. Bach introduced.....
Not if I'm not playing an acoustic piano I'm not.
how do you deal with that?
Through the simple expediant of varying my pitch so that it sounds right. Most instruments other than pianos can do this (and most modern digital pianos can as well). Go listen to a "fixed pitch" harmonica player wailing the blues. Go listen to Hendrix, Stevie Ray, Miles, Bird. ..
These boys are almost never playing the "correct" pitch.
Now go listen to Kenny G (just for educational purposes. I'm not trying to drive you to suicide or anything like that). That souless, whiteboy sound is the result of playing to the tuner. You can have it.
But "Aaaaaaaah!" I hear you cry. There are piano players with soul as well. Yes, there are, although they are far more rare (there is a reason blues players like guitar and harp; and a reason the Irish like fiddles). I was talking to Earl Hines about this once. He had an interesting technique; and soul.
He told me it was actually rather simple. He learned how to play in road/whorehouses where the pianos were always broken and out of tune. He had to learn to how to play and sound good on any piano in any state of mal-mainetenence. He could do things with and to a piano that most players don't even know are possible.
In short, he played it "wrong."
BTW, most fiddles _had_ frets on them before the days of old Johan Sebastian, if I'm not mistaken. (i might be, I may play fretless bass & upright but I'm no expert)
You are wrong. The violin arose about two centuries before the birth of JS and even before that mostpartially fretted (it actually evolved from the guitar, not the fiddle family, by guitar players who wanted to emulate the sound of the fiddle) and those frets were applied on a temporary basis by the player. He could change the intonation given by the frets and was not considered a decent player until he could play fretless above the fret range.
All that medieval stuff that never leaves the one key. ..
I'm not even sure I understand this statement.
the same goes for Irish music . . . But after two songs I always think the rest just sounds the same. Don't take it personal, I have the same problem with most Salsa.
I'd guess you've only heard modern players. They have a tendency to "overlike" reels, which is really a kind of "white boy" Irish music they adopted from the "Big Island."
I have the same problem with disco though. All these forms of music have one thing in common; and in common with early rock music as well (which our parents (or maybe it was the great grandparents of the average Slashdotter) thought was just all "noise" that sounded "the same").
They're dance music. In dance music the steady beat is king, not the melody.
Go listen to some Irish airs.
I guess you'd say I don't understand the music.
Although you may well understand them even less, since they not only do away with "Western" intonation, but "Western" rhythm as well. I put western in scare quotes because Ireland is actually the western most European nation and it's music is an amalgam of European traditional music. There's very little around now that is more western than Irish music.
When we say "western" music what we really mean is modern European classical music and its descendents, which is just a subgenre, not the whole, but the "art" music people have been on a two century long binge to make their genre the only "right" one.
On my fretted bass I have always been struggling to get the frets to match the notes they should play, this is more a physical problem. ..
Exactly! Your fretted bass is trying to defy both the physics and psychology
Twelve-tone equal temperament may not be the last system of intonation a musician should learn, but it should be the first.
My experience is that it is generally best to start noobs with "Do Re Mi."
If, in the process, you can impart to them what Do, Re and Mi are they have knowledge that they can build on for the rest of their lives. Otherwise all they learn is some particular fingering by rote.
In my previous round on this topic I was criticised for claiming that anyone can learn to play a musical instrument extremely well, that it was a matter of training in skills, not a matter innate "talent."
Someone responded with the observation that there are some people who can pick up an instrument they've never seen before and play it within a few minutes. Well, as it happens, I am one of those people.
Therefore I know something that perhaps people who do not have this "talent" do not know. This ability is purely psycological. It comes from an intellectual understanding of the properties of sound production, music and certain innate properties of all musical instruments.
My mom once won a bet on this. She and my step dad were in the Ecudoran Andes and came across a street peddler hawking Quenas (an end blown flute; and particularly hard to play). Neither he nor she could get so much as a squeak out of the thing. My mom avered that I would be able to play it in short order. My step dad demured and the bet was on.
When it was presented to me I could tell how it was to be played by looking at it (I'd never played an end blown flute before, but I understood the principle of its sound production and scale layout), blew it a few times to get the mechanics of tone production down, then played Haste to the Wedding on it. I didn't play it great, but I did play it.
If you learn concepts you can later apply them anywhere.
The problem is that it is actually relatively easy to learn something, anything, no matter whether that thing is correct or not, but damnably hard to unlearn something. If you learn things by pure rote, this is a "right" note, this is a "wrong" note, this a "right" fingering, this is "wrong" fingering, that will color the way you perceive everything after that.
Now the core of my claim that anyone can learn to play is that it is a simple rote process. Just patterning, as any dog is capable of, but that does not imply that learning music is only patterning. You can learn to understand what you are doing and why you are doing it at the same time. The two are not mutually exclusive.
You string snobs love to complain about equal temperment.
Actually, I'd have to claim guitar as my primary instrument with my classical training almost entirely focused on piano (I had a handful of violin and flute lessons as a child). I do love my fiddle though, perhaps because I'd have to claim my primary musical "talent" is as a singer, not as an instrumentalist, and fiddle is the most "vocal" of the instruments.
Those of us who play woodwind instruments are very thankful western music evolved beyond just temperment years ago. Without it we would either be constrained to play in fewer keys or require ~20 more fingers to cover the exploding number of toneholes just temperment would require.
Get the hence and buy a penny whistle. Under ten bucks in a brick and mortar. Learn to play the chromatic scale on it by combinations of alternate fingerings, partial holing and breath control. Learn what you lost by relying on mechanical devices, rather than on the skill of the player.
The fact of the matter is that you do not need a single key to play a chromatic scale.
Yeah, they make life easier. You can always have a few instruments instead of one. Not a terrible financial burden, since much of the cost of you instrument is for the keywork itself. You can get a set of 6 penny whistles online for under 30 bucks.
Put a reed on a whistle and you've got yourself a keyless clarinet (you can actually buy six hole, keyless clarinets).
While you're in the store aquiring you penny whistle walk over to the keyboard department and have a look at the modern, high end digital pianos. You'll find they have presets for various temperaments (some even have the ability to individually tune keys as well) and pitch bending wheels for microtonal control.
Ironically while string players are going through the process of forgetting their craft there is a whole new gereration of "piano" players that are in serious danger of rediscovering the joys of total control of pitch (the ultimate irony will be when the modern generation of string players start bitching at the keyboard players for not having perfect intonation).
Because they haven't learned. You learn things by doing.
I'm lucky I hear anything higher than 10,000 Hz anymore
You are speaking here of range, not pitch sense. The two are unrelated.
Ironic that you cite "folk music". What you call "folk music" plainly has it's origins and style in actual folk music, taken over by virtuosos.
I did not cite "folk music." I cited field recordings of actual traditional muscians who learned to play music before the advent of such recording. Myself I'm just old enough that in my youth I was able to hear, live, a few people who learned to play in the late 19th century.
After one of my concerts a year or so ago a gentleman came up to me and said, "Incredible! I didn't even know anyone still played like that." Some of us who learned traditional music traditionally still do.
To hear one of the starker contrasts between traditional music and virtuoso "folk" music listen to a modern recording of of Scotish "traditional" music and an older recording of Cape Breton music (which is very close to what Scottish music sounded like before the virtuosos "improved" it).
Nothing wrong with virtuosos, mind you.
But not everyone can be one. Most people don't even have the ability to appreciate one when they hear it.
This gets back to some statements I made a couple of weeks ago (and took a fair amount of heat over), that anyone who does not have any actual physical or neurological disability can learn to play within a few percent of the abililty of a virtuoso, i.e., not so well that an "expert" cannot hear the difference, but so well that the average listener cannot tell the difference.
All it takes is a certain amount of properly applied dedication, over the course of about a decade.
A story is told that after a concert a woman once walked up to Isaac Stern and said, "I'd give my life to be able to play like you."
Stern replied, "Madam, that's exactly what I did."
Just because something sucks for you, doesn't mean everyone in the town is miserable...
I was just riffing on Twain, Fields and Smirnoff.
As Smirnoff says he doesn't mean any harm by knocking on Cleveland, it's just that every country has a city that it makes jokes about an in America it's Cleveland. In Russia they have a city they make jokes about too; it's . ..Cleveland.
I come from a city that has been hailed in the national news as the "Cockroach Capital of the World" and has been a standing joke city for about a century. I don't get particularly bent over it, even though, well, most of it is true.
Tuning software/gadets I'm against. I've known lots of people that learnt with them and I think they harm not help.
Tuners are going to be the death of string playing, particularly with regards to traditional and baroque music.
I've started to see electric fiddles with frets on them. People, there's a bloody damned good reason that violins don't have frets on them in the first place; and it isn't just to annoy you.
It's so you can play the right pitch, whatever that pitch is; and it often isn't the one that the tuner tells you it is.
Learn to hear intervals, not notes; and learn to tune by fifths. Then go out and get yourself a shitload of the oldest recordings of solo Irish and Old Time fiddle music you can find and learn to hear the microtones.
This may rankle at first, but that's only because your ear has already been corrupted by the tuner/equal tempered piano. There's a whole lot more, even in western music, than the over rigidly defined 12 notes of the equal tempered chromatic scale.
Like consonant intervals that are actually consonant and not merely almost consonant. When I've been playing solo violin for a few hours and then move to piano the piano actally hurts my musical ear. It takes some time to be able to not hear it as slightly out of tune.
This doesn't, of course, mean that you shouldn't learn to play along with a piano and match its musical tones, but you should be aware of the fact that when you do so you are making a compromise with the music.
And the best way to learn to play along with a piano is to play along with a piano, not using a tuner. In fact you should learn to play along with several different pianos, as in practice they'll actually all be in slightly different states of tune and you should be able to hear that and adjust for it.
I am much happier thinking that astronomers are in a hole somewhere in the middle of the night staring into the sky adding to the human body of knowledge, then sitting in a giant auditorium fighting over meaningless bullshit. ..
You're new here in science, aren't you?
Just pick a god damm definition.
Big Ass Round Thing! Big Ass Round Thing! Big Ass Round Thing!
Come on people, let's show these Bozos the power of the Web. Send letters, emails, customized party poppers, whatever; and let 'em know we want our Big Ass Round Things.
I hate hearing such business-evolved terms such as "real estate"
Real estate is not a business evolved term, in fact it's rather the opposite. It's a fuedalism evolved term.
"Real" means "royal" and "estate" means "status"; real estate is that property, status; held by royal grant, one's condition under the power of the king.
If you don't like the term applied to the moon; go complain to the King of the Moon.
Clinton also fired cruise missiles at Ossama. He missed, but he tried.
In fact, it was Clinton who declared him public enemy number one and set up the special "Get Ossama" bureau that under Bush . ..ummmmmmmmm, let him through, failed to get him in response and has been shut down.
But I'm sure that after the US moves to "liberate" France from the French, sparking World War Last, people will forget all that.
Most predictions I've heard as far as the future of computing goes point to us eventually moving to solely imbedded solutions. Powerful cellphones, smart washing machines,. ..
fly-by-wire flying cars, etc.
KFG
Re:Stripped down version of Firefox
on
Marketing Mozilla
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· Score: 1
Anyone else wishing someone would create a stripped down version of Firefox optimized for speed, without all the crud?
And go round and round and round in the circle game.
They could call it something like Phoenix, or even Firebird, to distinguish it from Firefox.
How about combining the two this time and calling it Phord; that might throw Pontiac off the scent.
It's so much better when a nation has the right to be sick and obese.
Well, perhaps I've grown a bit out of touch; and I understand that Kerala is relatively well off compared to much of India with only 25% of the populace below the poverty level, relative to what is considered the poverty level in India, but I was unware that an excess of calories in the diet had suddenly become a systemic problem in India.
Slashdot Mirror
. . .raman-i-am.
I just call him "Noodle" for short.
KFG
. . .three score and ten, not four score and ten.
Of course. I haven't got a clue why I typed "four." Probably channeling Lincoln or something.
KFG
... their life spans were totally almost half of ours.
The people who wore these hair dyes were typically of the upper classes. The upper classes might well live to something even we would recognize as an advanced age.
Pepi II is thought to have ruled for 94 years. Ramses II lived to see his 90th birthday and his heir was in his 60s when he took the throne, ruling for about another 20 years.
Do not confuse life expectency with ages that might well be fairly commonly attainable. A huge chunk of the the lower life expectency is due to high infant mortality and death during childbirth, scewing the statistics. If one made it to the 21st year; and didn't work on pyramids and such, one's life outlook was held to be something around the classic age of man; four score and ten. That's why it's the classic age.
KFG
As long as they are learning, your job is done.
You are, sadly, correct, but that is only because they are lecturing when what they should be doing it teaching.
KFG
. . .if I wanted this shit I'd be visited www.sycophanticapplefanboy.com.
You lying bastard. You got me all excited for a minute, but it turns out you just made the place up.
die.die.die
KFG
It was more meant as a vent against all of the "my city sucks" posts I seem to see.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean. . .
Oddly enough when my city was in its heyday of being a joke city is when I learned to love it. It was, very simply, the unchallenged geekiest place on Earth. Even the blue collar workers were geeky in their own way (motorheads, model train buffs, electronics hobbeists, etc.).
The place could have been (and for all I know was) the very model for Eureka! We actually used to have city employees whose job was to return cars to the absent minded geeks who had wandered off and forgotten them during the day, including, occasionally, in the middle of the street with the motor running.
But the money dried up and the Teslas and Bethes followed the money. The Crack Hos flowed into the vacuum . . . and there ya go. The place really does kinda suck now. So badly that, as I noted a little while ago, the major geek employer goes to rather great lengths on its employment opportunities webpage to not mention that they are actually here, noting instead all the great places that "here" is next to.
Such is life.
I'm no party animal either though; so when I look for other places I might like to go they all turn out to be places where the money has also left, or never had any money in the first place; and it's easier to stay put than to move just to end up in the same condition.
KFG
He figured that it was all just a matter of having a good protestant work ethic, and drawing 10 hours a day for 5-10 years.
.if one is talented, one will enjoy the drudgery work required to build the skill to virtuosity.
:)
.because it's not enjoyable. . .
.after about 10 years of hard work. You likely won't even know what your actual limits are going be before about 5 years of hard work.
(the lazy were punished by failure, of course).
Didn't work for me.
You were "taught" wrong by someone who was taught wrong.
I only had a handful of violin lessons as a child because my "teacher" was an elderly German who believed in the "Weekly Beatings Method" of instruction. I quit; and taught myself. I didn't say it was simply necessary to labor. I said that labor must be properly applied.
. .
Ahhhhhhhh! No. You have it exactly backwards. If you enjoy the drudgery work, you will build the skill to virtuosity. This is why I do not teach those who are being forced to study by an outside force (say, a parent). Most of what is considered "talent" is simply the end result of doing what it is you like to do. Not liking something is not the same thing as being innately incapable of it, it's just that you won't learn is all, 'cause you don't really want to.
Okay, I don't suck at drawing that bad - obviously I had to be good to a certain degree, because the art program I was in was reputed to be very hard to get into. I guess I was a pickier critic of my work than was the review board.
This a psychological problem, not an issue of "talent." You don't need more talent. You need counseling.
. .
Bingo! If you found it enjoyable you could not fail to reach the goal. .
Please don't take this wrong, because it's of no nevermind to me. I don't even know you and don't care about what you do to make yourself happy, but your "problem" seems to be that you don't much like work, so you follow the path of least resistence, but you mistake this for having something to do with what sort of end goal you might achieve. People do, for various reasons, procede at different paces. Some have a hard beginning, but breeze through the middle patch, while others start easy and then "plateau" at the middle patch. Both have the same talent. Both, if they stick it out, will achieve the same goal, but the former is more likely to quit than the latter simply because the latter is protecting an investment, not because he's more "talented."
Most of my work as a teacher really has nothing to do with teaching. People are perfectly capable of learning things on their own (with suitable aids); and in fact, when it comes to issues of motor skills can only learn things on their own. I find my primary job is that of motivating.
I guess it's just hard for people with talent to imagine what it's like to not have it.
I can't see that I have any particular talent for music. Certainly not actually for the physical act of playing instruments. I have a lifelong battle with neurological disorders and arthritis (as a seconday symptom of genetic disease).
I simply enjoy the process of expanding my skill set (which is a goaless goal, since nearly every day I can reach that simple goal, thus I am never really disapointed in not reaching some goal "way out there." Keep your goals close at hand, where you can grab them).
I cannot draw worth crap. In part this is due to my neurolgical disorders, which limit the ultimate goal I can reach, but mostly it's simply because I do not draw. If I ever turn my focus in that direction I will learn, and I will learn to do it rather well.
The only "talent" I can see that I have is simply liking to do shit. Lot's of shit. And the more shit you do, the better you become at doing shit.
It's nothing more than the way you learned to walk and talk and wipe your own
Unfortunately I haven't found many composers and arrangers calling for penny whistles.
Play what you want on what you want. I play the Mozart horn concertos on keyless flute. Of course if you are playing at the behest of someone the piper plays what the piper is paid to play.
That has nothing to do with my suggestion, which was about learning, not performing.
If you don't mind the expense try getting a hornpipe. There's actually a fair amount of late baroque early classical music that was orginally scored for that. They generally have the clarinets play it nowadays. Very few people actually pay much attention to what the composer/arranger originally had in mind, although they may well make a certain amount of noise about doing so. Noise is not practice.
If brass, piano, and woodwind players of former centuries complained about it being too hard, you can certainly bet the majority of today's players would as well.
Only the piano players complained (and brass players still don't have anything that can be truely considered termperament; valves just change the fundamental pitch). When (which wasn't until the mid/late 1800s) they "won" they forced everyone else to follow suit. You'll find that's when all the modern keybedecked woodwinds also arose.
Keys do solve various "problems" (which are mostly a matter mostly of 19th century classical music fashion), but being about playing in different keys isn't really one of the primary ones. It's mostly about timbre and volume.
You are putting the cart before the horse. You see a lack of keys as a problem because you see the keys as the source of notes. Thus to get more notes you think you need more keys. Holes are the source of notes; and most of your holes only have to exist because you have keys. If you take away the keys you still have these things called "fingers" which are actually much more versatile than keys.
The "Concert" flute of the early 1800s only had four to six keys, and two of those were merely to extend the range beyond what fingers could easily reach. Only the remaining two to four keys were what was deemed necessary to easily produce a chromatic scale.
You can't even play music of the period on modern instruments the way the composer intended them to be heard, because you cannot produce the quality of tone that he chose many of the notes specifically for. Modern woodwinds are designed not primarily to be chromatic, but to be bland. That is what your keys are for.
KFG
So maybe you don't like the 12 tone scale, but if you play more than one scale in one song you are in BIG trouble if you don't use the system that J.S. Bach introduced.....
.
.
.
Not if I'm not playing an acoustic piano I'm not.
how do you deal with that?
Through the simple expediant of varying my pitch so that it sounds right. Most instruments other than pianos can do this (and most modern digital pianos can as well). Go listen to a "fixed pitch" harmonica player wailing the blues. Go listen to Hendrix, Stevie Ray, Miles, Bird. .
These boys are almost never playing the "correct" pitch.
Now go listen to Kenny G (just for educational purposes. I'm not trying to drive you to suicide or anything like that). That souless, whiteboy sound is the result of playing to the tuner. You can have it.
But "Aaaaaaaah!" I hear you cry. There are piano players with soul as well. Yes, there are, although they are far more rare (there is a reason blues players like guitar and harp; and a reason the Irish like fiddles). I was talking to Earl Hines about this once. He had an interesting technique; and soul.
He told me it was actually rather simple. He learned how to play in road/whorehouses where the pianos were always broken and out of tune. He had to learn to how to play and sound good on any piano in any state of mal-mainetenence. He could do things with and to a piano that most players don't even know are possible.
In short, he played it "wrong."
BTW, most fiddles _had_ frets on them before the days of old Johan Sebastian, if I'm not mistaken. (i might be, I may play fretless bass & upright but I'm no expert)
You are wrong. The violin arose about two centuries before the birth of JS and even before that mostpartially fretted (it actually evolved from the guitar, not the fiddle family, by guitar players who wanted to emulate the sound of the fiddle) and those frets were applied on a temporary basis by the player. He could change the intonation given by the frets and was not considered a decent player until he could play fretless above the fret range.
All that medieval stuff that never leaves the one key. .
I'm not even sure I understand this statement.
the same goes for Irish music . . . But after two songs I always think the rest just sounds the same. Don't take it personal, I have the same problem with most Salsa.
I'd guess you've only heard modern players. They have a tendency to "overlike" reels, which is really a kind of "white boy" Irish music they adopted from the "Big Island."
I have the same problem with disco though. All these forms of music have one thing in common; and in common with early rock music as well (which our parents (or maybe it was the great grandparents of the average Slashdotter) thought was just all "noise" that sounded "the same").
They're dance music. In dance music the steady beat is king, not the melody.
Go listen to some Irish airs.
I guess you'd say I don't understand the music.
Although you may well understand them even less, since they not only do away with "Western" intonation, but "Western" rhythm as well. I put western in scare quotes because Ireland is actually the western most European nation and it's music is an amalgam of European traditional music. There's very little around now that is more western than Irish music.
When we say "western" music what we really mean is modern European classical music and its descendents, which is just a subgenre, not the whole, but the "art" music people have been on a two century long binge to make their genre the only "right" one.
On my fretted bass I have always been struggling to get the frets to match the notes they should play, this is more a physical problem. .
Exactly! Your fretted bass is trying to defy both the physics and psychology
Twelve-tone equal temperament may not be the last system of intonation a musician should learn, but it should be the first.
My experience is that it is generally best to start noobs with "Do Re Mi."
If, in the process, you can impart to them what Do, Re and Mi are they have knowledge that they can build on for the rest of their lives. Otherwise all they learn is some particular fingering by rote.
In my previous round on this topic I was criticised for claiming that anyone can learn to play a musical instrument extremely well, that it was a matter of training in skills, not a matter innate "talent."
Someone responded with the observation that there are some people who can pick up an instrument they've never seen before and play it within a few minutes. Well, as it happens, I am one of those people.
Therefore I know something that perhaps people who do not have this "talent" do not know. This ability is purely psycological. It comes from an intellectual understanding of the properties of sound production, music and certain innate properties of all musical instruments.
My mom once won a bet on this. She and my step dad were in the Ecudoran Andes and came across a street peddler hawking Quenas (an end blown flute; and particularly hard to play). Neither he nor she could get so much as a squeak out of the thing. My mom avered that I would be able to play it in short order. My step dad demured and the bet was on.
When it was presented to me I could tell how it was to be played by looking at it (I'd never played an end blown flute before, but I understood the principle of its sound production and scale layout), blew it a few times to get the mechanics of tone production down, then played Haste to the Wedding on it. I didn't play it great, but I did play it.
If you learn concepts you can later apply them anywhere.
The problem is that it is actually relatively easy to learn something, anything, no matter whether that thing is correct or not, but damnably hard to unlearn something. If you learn things by pure rote, this is a "right" note, this is a "wrong" note, this a "right" fingering, this is "wrong" fingering, that will color the way you perceive everything after that.
Now the core of my claim that anyone can learn to play is that it is a simple rote process. Just patterning, as any dog is capable of, but that does not imply that learning music is only patterning. You can learn to understand what you are doing and why you are doing it at the same time. The two are not mutually exclusive.
KFG
You string snobs love to complain about equal temperment.
Actually, I'd have to claim guitar as my primary instrument with my classical training almost entirely focused on piano (I had a handful of violin and flute lessons as a child). I do love my fiddle though, perhaps because I'd have to claim my primary musical "talent" is as a singer, not as an instrumentalist, and fiddle is the most "vocal" of the instruments.
Those of us who play woodwind instruments are very thankful western music evolved beyond just temperment years ago. Without it we would either be constrained to play in fewer keys or require ~20 more fingers to cover the exploding number of toneholes just temperment would require.
Get the hence and buy a penny whistle. Under ten bucks in a brick and mortar. Learn to play the chromatic scale on it by combinations of alternate fingerings, partial holing and breath control. Learn what you lost by relying on mechanical devices, rather than on the skill of the player.
The fact of the matter is that you do not need a single key to play a chromatic scale.
Yeah, they make life easier. You can always have a few instruments instead of one. Not a terrible financial burden, since much of the cost of you instrument is for the keywork itself. You can get a set of 6 penny whistles online for under 30 bucks.
Put a reed on a whistle and you've got yourself a keyless clarinet (you can actually buy six hole, keyless clarinets).
While you're in the store aquiring you penny whistle walk over to the keyboard department and have a look at the modern, high end digital pianos. You'll find they have presets for various temperaments (some even have the ability to individually tune keys as well) and pitch bending wheels for microtonal control.
Ironically while string players are going through the process of forgetting their craft there is a whole new gereration of "piano" players that are in serious danger of rediscovering the joys of total control of pitch (the ultimate irony will be when the modern generation of string players start bitching at the keyboard players for not having perfect intonation).
Why not learn how to join them?
KFG
frankly, just plain can't hear that shit.
Because they haven't learned. You learn things by doing.
I'm lucky I hear anything higher than 10,000 Hz anymore
You are speaking here of range, not pitch sense. The two are unrelated.
Ironic that you cite "folk music". What you call "folk music" plainly has it's origins and style in actual folk music, taken over by virtuosos.
I did not cite "folk music." I cited field recordings of actual traditional muscians who learned to play music before the advent of such recording. Myself I'm just old enough that in my youth I was able to hear, live, a few people who learned to play in the late 19th century.
After one of my concerts a year or so ago a gentleman came up to me and said, "Incredible! I didn't even know anyone still played like that." Some of us who learned traditional music traditionally still do.
To hear one of the starker contrasts between traditional music and virtuoso "folk" music listen to a modern recording of of Scotish "traditional" music and an older recording of Cape Breton music (which is very close to what Scottish music sounded like before the virtuosos "improved" it).
Nothing wrong with virtuosos, mind you.
But not everyone can be one.
Most people don't even have the ability to appreciate one when they hear it.
This gets back to some statements I made a couple of weeks ago (and took a fair amount of heat over), that anyone who does not have any actual physical or neurological disability can learn to play within a few percent of the abililty of a virtuoso, i.e., not so well that an "expert" cannot hear the difference, but so well that the average listener cannot tell the difference.
All it takes is a certain amount of properly applied dedication, over the course of about a decade.
A story is told that after a concert a woman once walked up to Isaac Stern and said, "I'd give my life to be able to play like you."
Stern replied, "Madam, that's exactly what I did."
There is a lesson to be learned in that reply.
KFG
Just because something sucks for you, doesn't mean everyone in the town is miserable...
.Cleveland.
I was just riffing on Twain, Fields and Smirnoff.
As Smirnoff says he doesn't mean any harm by knocking on Cleveland, it's just that every country has a city that it makes jokes about an in America it's Cleveland. In Russia they have a city they make jokes about too; it's . .
I come from a city that has been hailed in the national news as the "Cockroach Capital of the World" and has been a standing joke city for about a century. I don't get particularly bent over it, even though, well, most of it is true.
KFG
Tuning software/gadets I'm against. I've known lots of people that learnt with them and I think they harm not help.
Tuners are going to be the death of string playing, particularly with regards to traditional and baroque music.
I've started to see electric fiddles with frets on them. People, there's a bloody damned good reason that violins don't have frets on them in the first place; and it isn't just to annoy you.
It's so you can play the right pitch, whatever that pitch is; and it often isn't the one that the tuner tells you it is.
Learn to hear intervals, not notes; and learn to tune by fifths. Then go out and get yourself a shitload of the oldest recordings of solo Irish and Old Time fiddle music you can find and learn to hear the microtones.
This may rankle at first, but that's only because your ear has already been corrupted by the tuner/equal tempered piano. There's a whole lot more, even in western music, than the over rigidly defined 12 notes of the equal tempered chromatic scale.
Like consonant intervals that are actually consonant and not merely almost consonant. When I've been playing solo violin for a few hours and then move to piano the piano actally hurts my musical ear. It takes some time to be able to not hear it as slightly out of tune.
This doesn't, of course, mean that you shouldn't learn to play along with a piano and match its musical tones, but you should be aware of the fact that when you do so you are making a compromise with the music.
And the best way to learn to play along with a piano is to play along with a piano, not using a tuner. In fact you should learn to play along with several different pianos, as in practice they'll actually all be in slightly different states of tune and you should be able to hear that and adjust for it.
Music is sound and thus about hearing.
KFG
Nothing wrong with Piss^H^Httsburg, I spent a year there one weekend, although, on the whole, I'd rather be dead than do it again.
I believe their city motto is: "Hey, give us a break. At least we're not Cleveland."
KFG
If you aren't going to teach kids the things that science agrees is correct, then what exactly _are_ you going to teach them?
Propaganda, same as always.
KFG
I am much happier thinking that astronomers are in a hole somewhere in the middle of the night staring into the sky adding to the human body of knowledge, then sitting in a giant auditorium fighting over meaningless bullshit. . .
You're new here in science, aren't you?
Just pick a god damm definition.
Big Ass Round Thing! Big Ass Round Thing! Big Ass Round Thing!
Come on people, let's show these Bozos the power of the Web. Send letters, emails, customized party poppers, whatever; and let 'em know we want our Big Ass Round Things.
KFG
emacs has all of these features that you are asking for:
But hang on to vi, because you'll still need a decent text editor.
KFG
Nothing is larger then humanity.
You misspelled blattodea.
KFG
I hate hearing such business-evolved terms such as "real estate"
Real estate is not a business evolved term, in fact it's rather the opposite. It's a fuedalism evolved term.
"Real" means "royal" and "estate" means "status"; real estate is that property, status; held by royal grant, one's condition under the power of the king.
If you don't like the term applied to the moon; go complain to the King of the Moon.
KFG
Clinton also fired cruise missiles at Ossama. He missed, but he tried.
.ummmmmmmmm, let him through, failed to get him in response and has been shut down.
In fact, it was Clinton who declared him public enemy number one and set up the special "Get Ossama" bureau that under Bush . .
But I'm sure that after the US moves to "liberate" France from the French, sparking World War Last, people will forget all that.
KFG
Most predictions I've heard as far as the future of computing goes point to us eventually moving to solely imbedded solutions. Powerful cellphones, smart washing machines,. . .
fly-by-wire flying cars, etc.
KFG
Anyone else wishing someone would create a stripped down version of Firefox optimized for speed, without all the crud?
And go round and round and round in the circle game.
They could call it something like Phoenix, or even Firebird, to distinguish it from Firefox.
How about combining the two this time and calling it Phord; that might throw Pontiac off the scent.
KFG
Perhaps we just need a -1 I Don't Get It mod. Then they at least have the opportunity to be honest about it.
KFG
It's so much better when a nation has the right to be sick and obese.
Well, perhaps I've grown a bit out of touch; and I understand that Kerala is relatively well off compared to much of India with only 25% of the populace below the poverty level, relative to what is considered the poverty level in India, but I was unware that an excess of calories in the diet had suddenly become a systemic problem in India.
KFG