TheBig3

No ones going to comment on my flow chart?

I'm kinda pissed guys, i spent a good half hour on that thing.

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rnrloser_IX

its pretty sweet, now i'm kinda in your boat. I'm trying to pick up the flute, it sucks to hold.

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TheBig3

Cool.

What made you pick that up?

I'm finding that learned a few instruments at once is much better than one because I get pissed at one but keep practicing with something else.

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TheBig3

More questions from a man on a journey...

1. If I write music down onto staff sheets, should I be keeping measures the same size? I've got a waltz where I'm putting down a dotted-half-notes and so I'm closing the measure earlier than the one preceding it with three quart notes (obviously this is in 3/4 time). I'm wondering if anyone's picked up some **** habits from doing this.

2. Aside from the mind-numbing practice of scale runs, anyone have a good way to beat it into your head that notes are sharped in certain keys? I've just been playing a song in A major to learn that scale.

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TheBig3

What grammar nazi made the title capital letters?

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Guybrush

Das war ich

Sieg heil!

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rnrloser_IX

Right now I'm a senior in highschool and in order to graduate, we have to do a senior project. I'm going to do a music project with this girl who sings plays piano and flute. So in order to speed up the writing process, I'm going to learn how to play some basic flute stuff to get concepts put down and then she will be able to really spice things up.

Also, like 3 days ago, I was with me ex-band mate and I look on his floor and I see this tiny little gig bag. I asked him what it was and he told me it was a ukulele. So I grab it out, tuned it the best I can, and we started walking around town and I was just playing it turning heads. In the "experimental" uke tuning I wrote 1 song for my project. I'm telling this because I picked it up with zero experience, figured out about 10 chord shapes with variations, and also how non chord notes mesh together inbetween strings. Unfortunately, it turns out two of the strings were tuned wrong, so after re-tuning to the correct tuning, I'm just looking at a chord chart and playing along with songs.

The whole shortening measures, I don't know if its technically incorrect, but I play concert/jazz band and I've seen shortened/elongated measures, besides, if you're writing it for yourself, then it doesn't really matter as much, especially when you're trying to conserve lined paper.

The second question, do you mean like which notes are sharp in the key of say G? Here: How To Tell What Major Key A Song Is In Quickly & Easily This might offer some assistance.

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TheBig3

Thanks, man. And welcome.

What I meant with the second question was, what ways do you guys, or did you guys employ to memorize what is sharp/flat/otherwise.

As for the Uke. I am discovering that the layout of a guitar just hasn't been for me, but I like learning a few instruments at once and I know that anything in the lute family is the soup of the day when it comes to playing with other people. I don't know if I'm ready to pick up bass instead or do something wild like Mandolin/Uke/whatever.

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rnrloser_IX

I'd pick whatever is fun for you. The uke thing kinda just happened, absolutely no intentions on it. We just thought it would be funny and I ended figuring out a bunch of stuff on it as we walked.

I whipped out some of my past concert band music and measure sizes do change, usually to accommodate the amount that is written in a measure. E.G. A measure in 4/4 with a whole rest would be much smaller than a measure carrying 16 16th notes for a melody because the 16th notes require much more space to write in.

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Astronomer

Do you mean, knowing which notes are sharped and flatted in different keys? I generally know this by memory, but before I did I went by the Cycle of Fifths when I practiced all my scales/ block chords/ arpeggios, etc.



It's a good little chart for remembering theory, and the order of C, G, D, A, E, B, F#, C#, Ab, Eb, Bb, F, C is seriously permanently imbedded in my brain. It's also a good chart to use in showing which minor scales correspond to their sister major scales. Have you been using this chart at all? If you have then good idea.

As for the hour a day, I don't really consider an hour a day a long time to be playing an instrument each day. If I play my bass for just an hour, it's seriously not enough! All up I probably play for a couple of hours a day.

That being said, when I was in primary school and taking classical piano lessons my teacher said I had to practice at least an hour a day, like it was some magical key amount of practice time to learn an instrument or something. To master piano though, I think it took me years. And I still have so much to learn.

But everybody is different. You can't really ask, will I be competent at playing this instrument in 2 months? Because some people pick up instruments really quickly and some people don't. It really depends and I don't think there is a solid answer to that.

I can totally relate to your frustration though, and I experience it on a regular basis. I just want to be 'good' at particular instruments instantaneously and feel shit because I just feel like I am rubbish.

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