> There is also no E#. It just doesn't exist. Get used to it. Those are the 12 notes.
Technically not true. There is an E#, it's called F. If you are playing in F# major[1], the scale has an E# in it.
> Musicians never play notes one at a time. They always use chords.
Most lead guitar parts are not chords. Typically playing in a band context will create a chord from multiple instruments, but that isn't always the case.
This guy has also obviously never met the strange and rare creature known as a 'bass player'.
And that's without mentioning oddities like most varieties of bagpipes or the hurdy-gurdy, where a constant drone is present. It doesn't exactly form chords with the other notes, but it's still more than one note being played at a time!
Source: I am a bass player
Singers who are not overtone singers (pretty much everyone).
What kind of weird musician is this person limited to?
[1]: Yes, it's an opinion. Yes, it's an informed opinion, and implying in one way or another that I just must Not Get It will not faze me. I do Get It, and that's why I find it distasteful.
Then, I took a class on electronic music composition. For my own project in the spirit of the avant garde, I wanted to challenge myself to write something "musical" without resorting to the traditional concepts of pitch-based melody and harmony or quantized rhythm. It turns out, there are many other levers you can play with to create the effect of an musical arc. Not to pat myself on the back, but I think the end result is evocative in a similar sense as tonal music. If I had the time, I would do more.
Check it out here, if you like: https://soundcloud.com/acjohnson/wanderers
I have neither the time nor the desire to fully explain my point in an HN post, but I would note that the music community itself has been asking questions in this direction in the last decade or so, if you want to follow up on it, as the academic music community asks themselves exactly how they got to where they are now, so disconnected from the rest of the world at large and so utterly irrelevant to almost anything musically occurring today. (Not just pop music; that is structurally inevitably insipid, really, so who cares, but irrelevant to anything other than their own very little world.)
I learned this by asking a friend in the CouchSurfing meetup who brings a guitar or a roll-out piano. And as I say, I can't play any instrument myself.
Maybe if I want to learn, I should choose an instrument that uses single notes, it might be easier.
Regarding singing though, my ex-girlfriend told me to sing more quietly in church because it sounds so bad.
It's not just limited to bass/lead guitarists either - finger style acoustic guitarists don't play just chords. OK, often the fingerings are chord patterns, or arpeggiated chords, but that's not always the case. Checkout the title track from Bensusan's album, "Intuite", that is mostly just a single note melody: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=di1qQsGcaIc (it would appear the ending is cut off this track here, but it gives you the idea).
I'd say the easiest / most immediately rewarding way is to pick up a guitar or similar (banjo / uke / banjolele / mandolin etc) and learn a few chords. Although people who can do that aren't exactly in demand so there's a case for learning the onde martineau or glass harmonica or something - that way if you get decent at it you can actually get paid to do it.
Whoa... Plus, they're identical only in equal temprament
What kind of weird statement even is that? What about the first few notes of Fur Elise?
> There is a chord called "C major", but it's totally different to the note called "C".
... the E and G of the C major chord are prominent overtones of the note.
depends on the instrument. A pure sine wave at the frequency of C does not have any overtone.
I meant to add more to my top comment. I think the author does fairly well at their mission despite potential nit picks like that. It is really cool to see somebody learning and being excited about putting all the pieces together. The beautiful thing about music is you can go deeper and deeper as much as you want, and there are various competing ideas about what it is and how to talk about. Programming has a similar kind of depth to it.
Down with E exceptionalism.
> A machine learning program is also called a "neural net".
A neural net is just one example of a machine learning model.
It would probably blow the authors mind to know that some scales have sharps and flats, including the ones
sorry
It was not an "accidental"
The dude's mind is going to be blown when he learns about double sharps and flats.
When I looked it up, I saw that it's just another name for G.
https://www.basicmusictheory.com/a-double-flat-note
The fact that the same thing has 2 names, but then the same name (e.g. C) can mean 3 different things (note, chord, key) really confuses me. I'm a beginner (can't play any instrument), so this is just about trying to cover the basics and generate a machine learning dataset. If I weren't so confused already, I might try to learn an instrument. It seems to be really time-consuming to practice though, and I'd need a teacher to listen and correct my mistakes. I wouldn't notice when I get it wrong if I try to teach myself.
As for which whistle to buy, get one in the key of D. A Walton's little black should be about $6, one of their slightly better brass whistles around $11, and a Generation nickel D is about $12. If you really want to splurge Susato makes a very nice high D for $50 (their Kildare S series), but it's quite loud and more for if you are playing before an audience. The most expensive whistles around are probably Burke's, at $230 for a high D. So even if you end up collecting Burke whistles obsessively and getting one in every key he makes you'll still be out less money than buying some high-end guitars!
The one disadvantage is that they're diatonic instruments. That means you can play in one key, and only one key, without cross-fingering the whistle.
For tuning, I recommend either an electronic tuner or the program Flutini[2], assuming you get a tunable whistle (the cheap ones aren't and it probably won't matter much).
[1] https://thesession.org/ [2] http://www.novasession.org/Flutini/
That said, Abb isn't another name for G - it's a distinct thing which, when played on typical musical instruments, is played the same way as a G. Basically note names to note frequencies is a many-to-one mapping.
If you want to understand the hairy details start by googling just vs equal temperament. But I went down that rabbit hole, and it hasn't made my procedural music any better, so I wouldn't really recommend it.
- A pitch standard, like A440, which anchors one arbitrarily chosen note to a specific frequency.
- A tuning system, which defines the frequency ratios between notes.
Almost all modern music assumes _A440_ and _12-tone equal temperament_. In 12TET, adjacent flats and sharps map to the same frequency. It's said that they are _enharmonic_. But there are many other systems where this isn't true. In _just intonation_, notes are defined by simple frequency ratios, and there is no enharmonicity at all. Every number of sharps and flats map to different frequencies.
For string or wind instruments playing without keyboards, there is no temperament. Each note represents a range of possible pitches, and what pitch you choose depends on the notes around it. For example, if you are repeating or holding a note, you don't want it to change pitch. But if the harmony around that note is changing, it may be in tune at one point in time, then out of tune at a later one. String quartet playing involves a great deal of working out compromises about what pitch each note should have.
Knowing a little about how instruments work and learning some music theory can help tremendously, but you can actually just start poking around in a MIDI roll or tracker and go a long way.
Unless you're really into a specific instrument, starting off with any modestly priced keyboard with pressure sensitivity and MIDI out (USB-based if it's modern) will let you have fun with synths and sampled instruments you'd probably never be able to afford.
If you really want to learn a physical instrument that's easy to pick up, you can get a $20 plastic ocarina and find lots of tutorials on YouTube.
Indeed, those lines are dramatically oversimplifying, but it makes the comments section more exciting and the article shorter.
Perhaps it'll scare off people who were planning to do machine learning audio analysis. But at least they'll get an idea of how complicated it can be.