Music

Sun Jul 11 21:35:39 IST 2021

• I bought a keyboard around a week ago
• following “Fundamentals of Music Theory” by University of Edinburgh on Coursera
• also learning via a lot of online resources
  • a notable one being Zebra-keys
• I played the keyboard for a couple of years when I was around 10 years old but never discovered music as a whole along with it.
  • starting as a beginner this time and current goal is to get the basics right and approach an instructor when I need customized guidance
• practicing around 30 mins on weekdays and around an hour on the weekends.
• even practicing something mediocre feels better than listening to something great.
  • opinions about this were initially addressed here
• this serves as a stream regarding whatever I learn and find interesting over the years
• Along with the basics of music theory, I’ve been focusing on getting comfortable with the arrangement and the structural relations of the keyboard as a whole
  • one may memorize where a C falls and continue calculating other notes from there on-wards but that quickly becomes a bottle neck and so I’ve been practicing caching all the keys and their relative positions directly in my mind by playing a randomly asked note. I’m also learning sheet music along the way and still rely upon landmark notes and abbreviations so those relations are what I intend to imprint collectively in my senses
    • A typical relation set would be:
      • a particular note(textual)
      • relative position of that note on the keyboard
      • its staff notation
      • the optimal fingering depending upon the context
      • how the note sounds on a particular octave
    • one could use a random note generator like the one in python below to deliberately index into these senses

import time
import random
import art

notes = ['A','B','C','D','E','F','G']

try:
    while(1):
        print()
        print(art.text2art(random.choice(notes),font='block'))
        print()
        time.sleep(1)

except KeyboardInterrupt:
    print("Terminating process")

• this first log is an accumulation of thoughts over the past 4 days and hence longer than the expected future log