Man, I'm disheartened - Update!

Ok, in my last post, I touched on how I'm frustrated by my lack of rhythm and my struggles with that 16th note exercise.

For those who missed that post, I've been trying to follow this music theory course. It's great but some of the exercises are kinda miserable. The one in question was that I had to identify the pattern of quick 16th notes. The idea is that it teaches your ear to pick out the notes and teach you a sense of how the music feels. 

That sounds awesome, right? Wellllll, it was a wall. You have to be perfect to progress and, for the life of me, I was consistently missing a single note. Alright, well, then I've just got to practice. That's kinda where I left the last post.


But after hours of trying, I kinda took a step back. Is hitting these 16th notes worth it? Do I have to learn how to hear that to make music? No. 

Granted, it might be really useful but I don't have to do that right now. 

So I stopped. I skipped that challenge and moved right along to the next lesson which is a heck of a lot more valuable (to me, at the moment).


Now, that that is out of my system, I'm just going to continue to cruise through the tutorial learning new tricks and trying them out in Sonic Pi. 

This is all to say, have fun and if your 16th note challenge feels good then press on, and good luck!

Stay tuned for more music content!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Very Sus chords in Sonic Pi

Bottom line: Use Suspended chords (aka sus) like Sus2 and Sus4 to add a bit of tension before releasing to a major or minor chord. So you've got a number of ways to play chords in Sonic Pi. You could use any of the following (I'm adding the sleeps in there so you can copy/paste into your Sonic Pi window) play_chord([60,62,67]) # provide the number which correspond notes (where middle C == 60) sleep 1 play chord(:C3, :major) # provide chord name sleep 1 play_chord([:C, :D, :G]) # provide the names of the notes you want to use  sleep 1  play 60 # play the notes individually without sleeps between them play 62 play 67 For the purposes of the rest of this post, I'll use the second form cause it's compact and we can see the numbers. ------------------------------------------------ Now, we've got major chords, and the music theory the notation is 1-3-5 (ie Base Note + 3 + 5). Similarly, we've got minor chords with the notations 1-2-5. In Sonic Pi l...
Read more

Sonic Pi and Play

Bottom-line: You aren't restricted to whole numbers when it comes to the play command; the microtones possible can yield some really fun results. --------------------------------------- Hello hello! The first thing you learn when starting Sonic Pi is the play command. I won't rehash the tutorial , if you aren't familiar with  play  check it out - it's solid. What I wanted to write about today was something I noticed when writing a post about chords .  When playing notes, you can provide the name of the note or the number that corresponds to that key on the keyboard. 60 is C, for example. What's 61? D? Nah, C#/D♭. 62 is D.   And that makes sense cause you're just moving up the keys on the keyboard.  But then it got me thinkin'....what about 60.5? Boom. It works. And this makes total sense too. After all, Sonic Pi is a programming language and why wouldn't it allow you to use all sorts of numbers for inputs? We can use 0.25 as a valid sleep  value, rig...
Read more

Rolling High Hat Trick with Sonic_Pi

Welcome, readers! I learned a neat trick for spicing up a high hat and a kick loop. Consider the following: live_loop :cymbal do     sample :drum_cymbal_closed, amp: amp_level     sleep 0.25 end    It's your standard loop. Now try modifying the velocity or amp of that cymbal: live_loop :cymbal do     amp_level = (ring 0.5, 1).tick     sample :drum_cymbal_closed, amp: amp_level     sleep 0.25 end  It's subtle but it gives a rolling feel to the sound. It's a really quick way to add some more flavor to the beat. Based on a conversation I had in the Sonic Pi forms , this is a way to streamline this too:  live_loop :cymbal do       sample :drum_cymbal_closed, amp: (ring 0.5, 1).tick       sleep 0.25 end You can put the ring inside the sample line. I'll explore rings more in a future post too so stay tuned! Thanks for reading! Let me know in the comments what you think and what you've been work...
Read more