The Arcane Chronicles

I spent some time making diagrams in SVG for cowboy chords, triads and scales on single strings - then I thought I might as well put them on my site

When I try to plan out how to create a plan of how to systematically teach guitar from first principles - it gets overwhelming - and nothing is produced.

I wonder if I should just create short videos as I think of them,

Quick topics to get them out - practice making the videos.

Also make longer lessons that are specific to "how to learn X",

They don't have to necessarily block each other.

Second big thought of the day.

This comes not only from practicing some problem solving/coding problems and prepping for systems design interviews, but also planning and thinking about music composition, songwriting, painting, and animation.

Start in big-simple "idea chunks" - an overall high-level structure - that can be easily tweaked.

"Do the hard things when/where they are easy" - my paraphrase of Laozi

If you have detail ideas or have some detail inspiration - don't throw them away - but also don't go into the rabbit warren after them. Quickly capture them and save them for when it's time to start digging in.

At each stage - what really drives things are questions.

- What is the expected load?

- What could this title mean?

- What is the genral shape and color of this area of darkness?

- How do we want this character to end up?

At at the first or pre-stage - you must start with the question of what is the point of this design - so that this can be a beacon to keep you on track in all levels.

Starting with a structure can help one from getting overwhelmed with details from different parts - before it is time to deal with them. Encaspulate things into a class. Focus of chorus details after you know where the chorus goes. Detail that eye in the panting after you have the general shape and colour of the whole face already in place. Do your inbetween well after you have your breakdowns done. Do you your cleanups and prettifying way after you finishing your tweening.

Start broad and general - draw them.

Tweak what needs to be tweaked.

When that level is decided - go into the next level of each. If working alone - you can do this like either a breadth-first-traversal or a depth-first-traversal. If working with a team - then one can delegate each "branch" to different team members. Although in animation and music - it's often the layers/levels that are assigned to different teams/members.

I had some big thoughts / epiphanies, but I'm afraid if I dump them all out at once it won't b eof much use to anyone. But then again - this is a 'blog' or 'web log'. Not quite like a daily journal though... but I can still jot down some of the thoughts I had.

Two big thoughts I had - one music related and the other a genral theory of design/problem solving.

First, the music only one, I'll put the other in another entry.

This is based on thinking about how to teach someone guitar from 0. What to teach them first? There are a lot of "dependencies" to play your first song. So what about playing along with others? What is the absolute minimum required?

Thinking about the question of what is the absolute minimum required for playing along with others brought me to think about "first" principles. What is music? At its most basic - it is the art of sound in time. Which of these whould be taught first?

I would propose that it is time and rhythm. You can play a perfect chord - but if it is out of time - then it can disrupt the jam. But if you play a muted scratchy sound on the guitar in rhythm - then you can actually play along with others as soon as you got the beat. Then you can slowly add your chords when you learn them - play the right chords when you can - then go back to scratchy for when you don't know the other chords. Also you can start with air guitar to get the rhythm/beat going before doing the scratchy.

I'm considering making a YouTube video along these lines - calling them Lessons for D

They can be shorts.

Lesson 0 -> Air Guitar (pure time)

Lesson 1 -> scratching beats (time plus 'abstract' sound)

Lesson 2 -> tuning

Lesson 3-n -> 'cowboy' chords

Lesson n+1 -> how 'cowboy' chords are made of chord notes / triad inversions

This is just a rough outline...

I changed the colours on my piano-roll images so that they will be easier to read/see.

I put some time today into storing my countdown events in a CSV and then auto-loading and sorting them before rendering them on my page.

The hoops I jump through to avoid hosting costs :shhh:

I'll be using my blog updater to control the publishing flow - instead of manually going into each directeory and running the various commands.

Now git commit and push as well as running the template renderer will all be handled from the Rust Application

As of December of last year, I have been living in Dublin, Ireland.

This is actually the second time that my wife and I have lived in Dublin. This time with the intention of living in Ireland for the long term.

I'm looking forward to reconnecting with old friends as well as connecting with the music and Gaeilge scenes here.

Slán agus Grá agus Ceol agus Teanga

As the Celtic New Year approaches I am coming to a place of "rebirth"

On the day - I am getting a tattoo dedicated to music and language (written in Irish, in Ogham)

At the end of that day, I'll be shutting down my WizardOfArc server.

And I'll be in full swing preparing for my move back to Ireland.

Thre will be changes after the move,. I don't know what they'll look like, but they will happen.

Keep an eye out.

Oiche shamhna shona dhaoibh!

WizardOfArc

The Augmented triad is a fascinating chord. It provides an opportunity to "teleport" to different keys will small semi-tone changes to a chord.

This post is very short as I plan on diagramming it out in a Grimoire "Spell"

keep and eye out for that!

It's been a while since I have written anything here. There has been a wee update.

I have changed the 'dynamically' rendered pages from client run vanilla js to precompiling it locally using Rust code and Tera templating. Tera being a Jinja/Django like templating system written in rust. So now I update the templates or data files in my other Repo then run my builder and it updates the static pages on github pages.

The silly things I do to get around paying for hosting.

Shhh...

The songwriting room is a safe and sacred space. No one has to know who sang what, or who played what, or even how badly things were sang or played. What matters is making the song. Performanace and records are different animals than songwriting altogether. In the songwriting room the person who is normally the drummer can hop over to the keys and the singer can jump on drums - whatever it takes to get the song germinated.

Later, folks can get back onto their "regular" instruments to hash out arrangements and practice for performance - you don't have to play things in the arrangement in which they are written.

Also, as an added bonus - and if you want to change things up - you can switch who plays what if it feels good to everyone . It might be fun for the audience.

But back to the main point. You can bare your soul in the songwriting room - no one outside that room needs to know who said or sang what or how.

Athough we love them, the little black dots of "standard" notation can be a barrier to sharing information or tips about music composition. If you can read it already - you have a lot of information automatically bundled in, but knowing how to read standard notation shouldn't be a prerequisite to learning how to write sounds. Especially since the most common instrument nowdays is the Midi piano roll.

The midi piano roll is a grid system - x-axis is time divided into the subdivisions and the y-axis is the pitch space in semitones. This is very intuitive and is closer to a moree scientific view of music. It also can be a bridge between tab and standard notatation.

Going forward, I'm going to try using these "music-grid" images to explain musical concepts and composition tips.

So, due to some numbness in my left hand, which is likely from my guitars and basses adding strain to my neck and shoulders, I'm going to pivot to using the more "Ergonomic" Instruments like Drums, Keys, and Voice.

This will have a period of frustration as I am not as fluid on keys and drums as I am on guitar or bass - but I gotta do what I gotta do. Hopefully it will open up a different world of sounds for me.

I've decided to get back into working with LilyPond

LilyPond is a music engraving program that compiles text based files into notation and midi. It's heavily inspired by and built on LaTeX. It is very progammery but it has the power to have human readable code and work with version control

I'm looking forward to getting better at using all my musical tools.

Here's the hot take and TL;DR - they are the same thing.

The bottom voice of your chord progression is your Cantus Firmus and the other notes of the chords are the "pre-installed" other voices already set as one to one counterpoint against The Cantus Firmus. Writing a melody to the chord progression is just adding a new line in florid counterpoint.

Bottom line: Chord Theory is kind of a short-hand or hack for counterpoint.

What are your thoughts?

I am a bit of a Nerd but an artistically motivated one.

I used to be horrible at mathematics until I figured out how it related to drawing and codes - I was obessed with secret codes. After I found that relationship between math and art - I was hooked - and I ended up getting my Bachelors in Mathematics.

Same with programming - I get obsessed with writing programs if it can make my life easier in art and music - hence my programming to help with this blog.

So here I am trying to add support for writing blog entries as simple text files. The idea here is that this will allow to also write in ways where I can correct my spelling and other errors before submitting. Have a function for adding a Post inline and via a file allows for greator flexibility.

I may use this approach for creating Wizard Of Aarc's Grimoire. My collection of tips, reflections, and epiphanies for all things music and music related. Whether or not the blog becomes the Grimoire is another question altogether.

How does this look?