Monthly Archives: March 2024

Inspiration from Thor and Nahre Sol

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“It’s OK to fail. It would be good if young people were taught this instead of having to learn it later in life”

“Every little tiny thing that you do is a step towards scaling that wall, that was terrifying before”

We want to perform well, improvise freely, procrastinate less, publish content. But there are barriers. Confidence is something that you can learn to build over time. Sometimes experience takes care of this. “Whenever my self-confidence levels are low, two things happen: supreme performance anxiety and supreme SUPREME procrastination”

 

Grand Unified Theory of Heaviness

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Short answer — tritones and distortion

Longer answer — many opinions within the heavy metal community

The Unholy Trinity of Protometal — Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, Deep Purple (though nowadays people consider Led Zeppelin to be “classic rock”)

Heavy Metal music was written during the 60s to late 70s — “Much of the development after that, while being both heavy and metal, isn’t considered Heavy Metal” by musicians in the genre. Taxonomy!

Riff based featuring tritones, half steps, flat 9s, flat 6s, “and other dissonant and atonal gestures”

“Good riffs can sound heavy even if you play them acoustic” — not just a matter of tuning everything down. But, “though dissonance is the seed of heaviness, it’s not the whole story”

This is an especially good episode, I hope to come back to it and take more notes!

Chromatic Neighbor Embellishment

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Chromatic Neighbor Embellishment — Could be the title of a track on a Prog album?

embellishments — add color or sense of motion to main note

Neighbor motion — goes to one of the notes on either side, then comes back

chromatic neighbor motion — moves a semitone. Might not be in the key

Chromatic embellishments of cheerful major key melodies are part of the musical identity of Mario games

not just melody but also harmony and bass notes move like this

Note — these early games had limited polyphony because of sound board. Spells out a chord with root, 5th, and melody note is the 3rd of the chord. If revoiced, the interval between the top notes would be a third. Koji Kondo in interviews said he wanted to use interval of a 6th because it sounds fuller. So — three note spread voice chord, with root on the bottom — means the 3rd has to be on top.

Melody E, Eb, F, E is called Double Neighbor Embellishment; later there’s a chromatic passing note in a run

 

Marching forth

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Yes it’s March 5th already. But I have been Marching Forth.

I’ve been ordering parts for my new PC one item at a time, in case Amazon delivery had a problem. In the past I’ve ordered multiple items from Amazon, and if one of the group doesn’t arrive and everything else does, it’s complicated to clear up. As a result of the daily packages it’s been like the 12 days of Christmas around here. (On the 1st day of Christmas my true love gave to me, 64 gig of DDR5…)

I still haven’t ordered the storage — solid state drives (what types? my motherboard wants 2 different kinds), hard disk drive (“spinner disk”), external storage for backup? Part of me wants to get a NAS* “because then I could share projects between computers”. My computer tech suggests not buying things until it’s clear that I need them. Ok, yeah, but…having the fancier version makes me feel important, like I’m taking my work seriously, like my work IS important. It’s motivating and empowering. On the other hand, I don’t want to irritate my computer tech.

(*) There was a video recently where the narrator was explaining why he didn’t need an ass, there wasn’t really a situation where he would use an ass, he might get an ass later. At least, that’s what it sounded like he was saying. 😉 So the question is, do I need an ass now, or should I wait, maybe get an ass when they go on sale?

Meanwhile — the Morning Noodles —

I haven’t photographed and stored away the last 3 noodles. There have been Morning Disturbances that interfered with the Morning Noodles. For example, one morning I got a phone call from Matt the Concrete guy, could he come by in 20 min?

For all 3 of these days I’ve played experimental chords at the piano and have written down the chord spellings, but I did not finish filling up the pages. Today my other family members went out to eat and I had the house to myself for an hour. Instead of finishing the Noodle page, I played the prologue of my planet suite at full volume.

At some point I’m going to sit down with each page and translate the chord spellings into music notation. I guess that means right now I have 3 servings of leftover Noodles.

“It’s OK for you to try that”

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Like, most of the time when someone wants to go do something creatively, wants to do something where they want to try something, maybe wants to change career, they just need someone else to say, “Do it”.

That’s it! That’s all they need. They just need someone to say “It’s OK for you to try that. Go do it”.

So…if you’re waiting…stop it. Go do it. Seriously!

If I didn’t go do it, I wouldn’t be here. If I didn’t go do it, I wouldn’t have my own studio now. If I didn’t go do it, I wouldn’t know any of you.

So go do it. Stop waiting. Don’t wait. It’s not worth it.

 

Do the Thing that is Not Enough

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Any time your mind tells you “it won’t be good enough”, what is your mind actually trying to do? It’s trying to protect you from pain. Oh, I shouldn’t study for this test. Why? Because it won’t be enough. You won’t get an A.

But then you ask yourself, but wait, what is my mind trying to protect me from? It’s trying to protect me from a B. Because I want an A. Because if I get a B, or a C, or an F, and I TRIED for an A, I’m going to be so devastated. So your mind tells you it won’t be enough.
“It won’t be enough” is a trick that the mind plays to reduce your desire to act. So if you really want to fix your life, the most important thing to do is to do things that are not enough.
Every single one that I have taught to do things that are not enough has substantially improved their life.

If you can start doing the insufficient, your life will change.

“OMG exercising for 20 minutes is not going to be enough, so I might as well not do it.” You’re right, if you wanna get at whatever the fuck your goal is, you need to exercise for 90 minutes.
But do the thing that is not enough. See, that’s the problem, we all look for the thing that will work. We should start doing the things that won’t be enough. Because the real success comes not from the thing working or not working, the real success comes from the doing.