Trans: Latin prefix implying "across" or "Beyond", often used in gender nonconforming situations – Scend: Archaic word describing a strong "surge" or "wave", originating with 15th century english sailors – Survival: 15th century english compound word describing an existence only worth transcending.

Category: Music Sketches

Early Morning Guitar Session. ala Laundry

Guitar Practice:

Laundry is best done early in the morning.  The resulting time between cycles lets me do all kinds of things- below is a short guitar “shred” song inspired by Jeff Beck’s most recent album, Loud Hailer- recorded in its entirety between washing and drying.   I recommend turning your volume down, modesty is not part if this song’s vocabulary.

-Jess

Music Sketches 3: Rethinking “Canon in D” “guitar” Discipline & Tone pt. 2

 

Here is a little LaTeX visualization I made to better convey the simpleness of learning, life and the world in the the internet.  In even plainer terms, we can see in order to learn something (ideally a hard skill set or task- soft and meta skills are iffy on the internet at best) we must spend a certain amount of time on the internet and a fair amount of time on task, with all both of these things getting larger in size as standards for quality and ambition of work go up.  In order for all this “work” to equal the desired learning, we divide the three factors (Time, Standards, Ambition) by the difficulty of the task at hand.

It is easy to set ambitions with great difficulty (in funtwo’s case, learn guitar to do a neoclassical shred of a pachelbel tune) but as the steps get broken down into smaller day-to-day and minute-by-minute gains in ability and knowledge, the difficulty factor must be incremental enough to be attainable, but difficult enough to be engaging.  Thus, this model can scale from the: 35 minutes (Time) on youtube (internet) learning guitar scales for sweeping techniques with good form and in complete scales (Standards) divided by the goal to maintain and enhance a current harmonic minor scale (Ambition) that has been the focus all week, which is incrementally more (difficult) than the “not sweeping the normal minor scale” that was last week’s project and success success… …To the 3-5 years of diligence it took funtwo to gain mastery of both guitar and the arrangement. 

So, moral of the story is you do not need “prerequisite understanding” that can only be bought for $20k at a university near you to master whatever it is you need to master (Though these institutions are good for lots of other things though, that IMHO do make the visit worth it).

Anyone can do anything if they understand the factors that go into high craft, artistry, and learning.

Music Sketches 2: Rethinking “Canon in D” “guitar” Discipline & Tone pt. 1

Between 300 and 400 years ago, this archaic string of melody, harmony, and straight forward rhythm came about.  I don’t read this kind of scribble, but I, like many others, have heard Pachelbel’s Canon in D.  Christmas tunes, 80’s orchestras, video games and more have ripped up this beautiful idea and tried to glue it back together.  Below is what I believe to be the most influential niche version, posing a striking composition highlighting the power of discipline and learning (read: Time, Standards, Challenge)  in lieu of the internet (read: all “hard skills”  are free and readily available in a computer-box near you)

This, to both my pair of ears and many pairs before me, is simply stunning.  The deft skill and accuracy, the angelic warbling tone….  This is an example of almost complete mastery AFAICT.  What granted Lim Jeong-hyun, generally referred to mononymously as funtwo, the ability to play at this level?  Like just about everything, it seems his track record on the internet plus his standards and time against the challenge of learning guitar equals…          …the above video. 

Observe the 75% “slow” speed (thanks youtube and guitarteacherdotcom for access to this stuff):

….Coming up next:  Unpacking discipline and learning through funtwo’s “guitar”

Music Sketches 1: Playing with rhythm, division, and jazzy chords

Piano and straight up 4/4 drums:

Here we have an interesting chord progression idea.   In the 4/4 groove, the piano plays the second chord on the “and” of 2… Very cool.   The pickup for the second chord starts on two, as I visualized in the midi roll diagram.

With a root of C (what I played it in), this could be called C minor to D flat, major 7, while at the end of the fourth bar the progression finishes on G7.

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