It suddenly dawned on me today that, although I have churned out dozens and dozens of meta-analytical writing pieces over the past few months, I don't think I've ever stopped and given a clear answer to the question "So what's going on in your life?" In my oh-so-humble opinion, writing of this nature can become somewhat boring in medium to large doses, but one could certainly argue that a pinch of simple life updates here and there could be helpful for both me and the reader.
A while back, I started a sub-quest to improve my right/left independence using a series of exercises on my roommate's bass. There are 3600 exercises total, of which I have completed 2520 as of a few minutes ago. The other spreadsheet-assisted task I had set out for myself was to expand my knowledge of subdivisions and polyrhythms, and to hopefully get to the point where I can produce any arbitrary two-voice polyrhythm on command without having studied it before. I have made some strides forward, particularly with septuplets and 7-against-4 polyrhythms. Progress has not been as fast as I had hoped, but I think that's mainly because I've been focusing on finishing up the independence exercises. Switching back and forth from one mechanical exercise to another just gets a bit tedious, and I never want my practicing to become a chore.
In terms of actual musical content, I've finished writing material for a concept album. Naturally, there are a handful of passages that are fiendishly difficult to play cleanly (for me, anyway). I'm hoping to be able to play the harder stuff live in the near future, particularly a potential gig in March, which would be my first real solo gig--open mic nights don't count, as far as I'm concerned. Also, I've been trying my hand at memorizing the massive list in Weird Al's "Hardware Store." It's easily the most ridiculous tongue-twister I've ever heard, with more than 120 words and 250 syllables being spat out in a mere 30 seconds. I figured that with all the effort that musicians put into making their hands quick and precise, why not do the same with my voice?
You may have noticed that the past few weeks have featured sub-par practice totals. Two reasons for this: the first is that I've got myself a lovely ladyfriend whom I find extremely difficult to walk away from. I did not find her in a catalog, I promise. I know I spend a lot of time in my room by myself, but I'm not that desperate! Anywho, the other reason is that I've gotten so far ahead of my required pace that at this point I only need to practice 14 hours per week in order to finish on time, which should be easy.
My second-to-last semester of college is now in full swing. I'm taking three math courses and a photography class, the latter of which is "pure motherfuckin' magic", as Shaggy 2 Dope would say. I spent most of today designing the set for a friend's theater production back home, and in a few weeks I'll start working on the lighting design for the next dance production here at school. And of course, as all this wonderful shenaniganry unfolds, I'll be cranking out pretentious analyses of my experiences right here, week after week. Be safe out there, brothers and sisters.
----
Week 31 total: 18 hours
Grand total: 712 hours
Required pace: 596 hours (+116)
Sunday, January 29, 2012
Sunday, January 22, 2012
How About Pistachios?
"Here, you're going to be on the shelling subcommittee," I said to Ninja Queen as I handed her the bag. "One of two things will happen here: either this curry will be reasonably tasty, or it will be terrible and we learn a valuable lesson. Either outcome is excellent," I mused aloud. She continued to separate the nuts from the shells in silence.
----
In high school, my Calculus teacher Mr. J always wore a latex glove in class. Not gloves; glove, singular. He claimed that writing with chalk for extended periods of time would cause his hand to dry out. He seemed to be of the opinion that the discomfort of having dried out skin was worse than the awkwardness of bringing one latex glove to school every day.
Last week I was hired to record a series of instructional math videos for eHow.com. Sadly, the topics that I was asked to record were so nonsensical and boneheaded that I actually got worse at math just by doing it. Topic names like "How to Divide a Trig Function" suggest that not only are the administrators completely inept when it comes to math, but they may in fact be chimps. There are only two reasons why I am grateful for submitting myself to the whim of the chimps: one is that I get paid to do it, and the other is that I gained an appreciation for why Mr. J loved that glove. By the end of the long day of recording, during which I almost always had a piece of chalk in my hand, my hand had gotten so dried out that the skin on my index finger cracked and started bleeding.
This is why most of last week's practice hours had to be completed with a band-aid around my picking finger. This, of course, severely limited the number of things that I could work on. At some point I got so bored that I thought to myself, "Here, make music out of this," and began tapping two ugly, dissonant chords using my non-lacerated fingers. After a few minutes, I started to hear something that resembled a melody. By the end of the week, it had evolved into a complex, funky tapping piece with a splash of Spanish flavor. I have a feeling that it will stick with me for a while, as I find myself thinking about it even after I've stopped playing.
----
"You know," I continued, "I think having that attitude is the key factor in being able to teach oneself how to cook: the willingness to create and eat things that might be terrible. Last year I cooked some meals that were just awful." She looked over at me and smiled. "I would keep making this beef with peperoncini thing, always saying 'How can I improve this? How can I improve this?', until eventually I realized that it was just nasty, plain and simple... but I'm glad I tried to make it work. I learned a lot doing that."
----
Week 30 total: 18.5 hours
Grand total: 694 hours
Required pace: 577 hours (+117)
----
In high school, my Calculus teacher Mr. J always wore a latex glove in class. Not gloves; glove, singular. He claimed that writing with chalk for extended periods of time would cause his hand to dry out. He seemed to be of the opinion that the discomfort of having dried out skin was worse than the awkwardness of bringing one latex glove to school every day.
Last week I was hired to record a series of instructional math videos for eHow.com. Sadly, the topics that I was asked to record were so nonsensical and boneheaded that I actually got worse at math just by doing it. Topic names like "How to Divide a Trig Function" suggest that not only are the administrators completely inept when it comes to math, but they may in fact be chimps. There are only two reasons why I am grateful for submitting myself to the whim of the chimps: one is that I get paid to do it, and the other is that I gained an appreciation for why Mr. J loved that glove. By the end of the long day of recording, during which I almost always had a piece of chalk in my hand, my hand had gotten so dried out that the skin on my index finger cracked and started bleeding.
This is why most of last week's practice hours had to be completed with a band-aid around my picking finger. This, of course, severely limited the number of things that I could work on. At some point I got so bored that I thought to myself, "Here, make music out of this," and began tapping two ugly, dissonant chords using my non-lacerated fingers. After a few minutes, I started to hear something that resembled a melody. By the end of the week, it had evolved into a complex, funky tapping piece with a splash of Spanish flavor. I have a feeling that it will stick with me for a while, as I find myself thinking about it even after I've stopped playing.
----
"You know," I continued, "I think having that attitude is the key factor in being able to teach oneself how to cook: the willingness to create and eat things that might be terrible. Last year I cooked some meals that were just awful." She looked over at me and smiled. "I would keep making this beef with peperoncini thing, always saying 'How can I improve this? How can I improve this?', until eventually I realized that it was just nasty, plain and simple... but I'm glad I tried to make it work. I learned a lot doing that."
----
Week 30 total: 18.5 hours
Grand total: 694 hours
Required pace: 577 hours (+117)
Monday, January 16, 2012
The Clay Room
She looked up at me with those deep, beautiful blue eyes and said, "So do you want this to be a serious thing?"
"To be honest, I hadn't really put much thought into it," I replied. "Do you want it to be a serious thing?"
"I don't want it to be a joke and I don't want it to be just for fun," she said.
"Well, I never joke around and I never have fun!" I laughed, but I knew exactly what she meant.
----
I have lived my whole life in a room made entirely of clay. For months and weeks and hours I would work the clay into fantastic shapes, with no motivation other than the sheer joy of what I was doing. There are a handful of objects which, upon their completion, I told myself would be permanent. Others I would stretch and shape while thinking to myself "Wouldn't it be nice to have a piece of clay that looked like this?", only to forget within a few weeks that it was there at all.
From time to time people would walk by my room and stare at the mess that I had made. They would find little bits and pieces of clay that I had tinkered with and exclaim "Ah, very interesting!", but they never stayed for very long. One by one did they enter, one by one did they leave. I thought "Maybe if I work hard enough, someone will stay." And so I worked. The fruits of my labors were plenty and ripe, but still all they earned were passing smiles, a wave hello, a wave goodbye.
"I don't care what they think as long as I'm happy," I said, frustrated, to no one in particular. But I looked around at the bits and pieces of unrelated, unorganized, unremarkable art and realized that it wasn't good enough for me. What I really wanted was a room with an identity, not just a collection of trinkets. So I shut the door, sealing myself inside. I slaved away for months and weeks and hours, molding and folding and rolling and pushing and pulling and scratching and scoring and marching towards that image, that clear vision of the room that I wanted. I would yank old toys from their perches and press them into the walls, confidently bellowing "I don't need this anymore!" I would spend hours refining the most subtle details, knowing that no one would ever see them, no one would ever notice, no one would ever care, but knowing all the same that they would never be finished until they echoed perfectly the idea I had in my head.
Some of the raw, childlike joy dried up, leaving the clay hard beneath my fingers, but in its place came a much stronger sense of pride and satisfaction with what I created.
There came a day when I set about carving a new window to the world in a yet-untouched expanse of wall. Through it I saw a group of women dancing. I found myself watching just one of them. She was not the most sultry or the most flexible or the most energetic, and yet with a single elegant flick of her wrist, she conveyed a depth of passion and creativity that was unmatched by any of her wriggling, jiggling sisters.
I called out to her and invited her into my room. Slowly and methodically I lead her around the cavern, stopping briefly at each artifact that I had deemed essential to the understanding of the whole. After some time, she turned to me and said "I understand what you're doing here. Can I stay?"
----
After a few moments of contemplation, I met her gaze again.
"Yes."
----
Week 29 total: 16.5 hours
Grand total: 675.5 hours
Required pace: 557.5 hours (+118)
"To be honest, I hadn't really put much thought into it," I replied. "Do you want it to be a serious thing?"
"I don't want it to be a joke and I don't want it to be just for fun," she said.
"Well, I never joke around and I never have fun!" I laughed, but I knew exactly what she meant.
----
I have lived my whole life in a room made entirely of clay. For months and weeks and hours I would work the clay into fantastic shapes, with no motivation other than the sheer joy of what I was doing. There are a handful of objects which, upon their completion, I told myself would be permanent. Others I would stretch and shape while thinking to myself "Wouldn't it be nice to have a piece of clay that looked like this?", only to forget within a few weeks that it was there at all.
From time to time people would walk by my room and stare at the mess that I had made. They would find little bits and pieces of clay that I had tinkered with and exclaim "Ah, very interesting!", but they never stayed for very long. One by one did they enter, one by one did they leave. I thought "Maybe if I work hard enough, someone will stay." And so I worked. The fruits of my labors were plenty and ripe, but still all they earned were passing smiles, a wave hello, a wave goodbye.
"I don't care what they think as long as I'm happy," I said, frustrated, to no one in particular. But I looked around at the bits and pieces of unrelated, unorganized, unremarkable art and realized that it wasn't good enough for me. What I really wanted was a room with an identity, not just a collection of trinkets. So I shut the door, sealing myself inside. I slaved away for months and weeks and hours, molding and folding and rolling and pushing and pulling and scratching and scoring and marching towards that image, that clear vision of the room that I wanted. I would yank old toys from their perches and press them into the walls, confidently bellowing "I don't need this anymore!" I would spend hours refining the most subtle details, knowing that no one would ever see them, no one would ever notice, no one would ever care, but knowing all the same that they would never be finished until they echoed perfectly the idea I had in my head.
Some of the raw, childlike joy dried up, leaving the clay hard beneath my fingers, but in its place came a much stronger sense of pride and satisfaction with what I created.
There came a day when I set about carving a new window to the world in a yet-untouched expanse of wall. Through it I saw a group of women dancing. I found myself watching just one of them. She was not the most sultry or the most flexible or the most energetic, and yet with a single elegant flick of her wrist, she conveyed a depth of passion and creativity that was unmatched by any of her wriggling, jiggling sisters.
I called out to her and invited her into my room. Slowly and methodically I lead her around the cavern, stopping briefly at each artifact that I had deemed essential to the understanding of the whole. After some time, she turned to me and said "I understand what you're doing here. Can I stay?"
----
After a few moments of contemplation, I met her gaze again.
"Yes."
----
Week 29 total: 16.5 hours
Grand total: 675.5 hours
Required pace: 557.5 hours (+118)
Sunday, January 8, 2012
A New Function
I have found that this model works even when the difficult aspect of a passage is coordination rather than speed or precision. Last semester I learned Pain of Salvation's "Fandango", in which the guitar parts are reasonably easy, the vocals are comfortably within my range, but many of the guitar and vocal rhythms simply don't match up at all. I had thought that if I wanted to perform both parts simultaneously, I would have to take a different approach to the challenge, but that wasn't necessary. I simply broke the song into chunks, started working on each chunk at a tempo that was much slower than the original song, and gradually built up speed as I normally do.
I had come to think that this was the only pattern that would be necessarily to reach all of my technical goals, but my efforts to master arbitrary subdivisions over the past few weeks has opened my eyes to a very different type of practicing. Playing 5 evenly-spaced notes in a given amount of time is not particularly difficult once you've already figured out the appropriate speed at which to play them, and the same is true of playing 7 evenly-spaced notes, or 10, or 11, or whatever. The difficulty comes from trying to seamlessly switch between these subdivisions.
Unlike the various other challenges I've attempted, this one simply does not get easier as one decreases the tempo. Switching between 5 and 7 subdivisions of a beat is just as hard to do at 40 beats per minute as it is at 80. So now what? After some pondering, I've come to realize that the ability to switch between subdivisions is not modeled by a logistic function, but instead by an exponential decay function like the blue one below.
----
Week 28 total: 26 hours
Grand total: 659 hours
Required pace: 538.5 hours (+120.5)
Tuesday, January 3, 2012
Abstraction
Over the years, there have been a handful of times when I've thought to myself "Wow, there's no way I'll ever learn something more complex than this." It happens not just in music, but in a variety of disciplines. I distinctly remember having that feeling while taking Calculus in high school. Oh sure, you can always learn another trick for integrating functions, but at the conceptual level, I couldn't imagine any math that would be more involved than Calculus -- until I took Differential Equations and Real Analysis, by which point integration seemed childishly easy.
The other clear memory I have of this sort is when I started learning about unusual time signatures. I was blown away when I first heard a piece of music written in 5/4 time, and blown even further away when I tried to learn "The Test That Stumped Them All" by Dream Theater and "Dedication" by Pain of Salvation, both of which I gave up on due to their frequent meter changes which seemed impossible to comprehend. This, of course, was years ago, and by now I've grown so comfortable with odd times and shifting meters that they appear in almost all of my songs.
It is only after this happened a few times that I was able to recognize the pattern and append "This is the most challenging concept I will ever encounter" with "...but I've said that before and I was wrong, so I'm probably wrong now." However, recognition of a pattern is not nearly as exciting as the ability to make use of it. Instead of gradually drifting towards the next level of complexity as I've always done, I now find myself wanting to dive right into it, and over the past week I've done exactly that.
----
A few months ago, I started making an effort to expand my understanding of rhythm to include quintuplets by learning Dream Theater's "Erotomania" and writing my own rhythmic labyrinth called "Broken Hourglass". As I grew more and more comfortable with quintuplets, I caught myself thinking those usual thoughts of "Well, this must surely be the most abstract rhythmic idea I will ever learn."
More recently, however, I saw that this was the perfect opportunity to charge headfirst into the realms of complexity. Instead of piecing together an arsenal of unusual subdivisions over weeks and months, I'm now trying to train myself to be able to accurately divide a beat into any number of subdivisions on command. The vast majority of last week's practice hours were spent listening to a metronome, rapidly switching between various numbers of subdivisions to try to wrap my head around this abstract concept. I even wrote a program on my calculator to produce random sets of integers just to keep myself guessing.
The eventual goal is to become as comfortable with arbitrary subdivisions as I already am with arbitrary time signatures. Assuming I can do that, the next goal will be to master two-way polyrhythms with arbitrary numbers, rather than just using the various combinations of 3, 4, 5, and 6 that I've come to love. From there, I will work towards mastering arbitrary polyrhythms with any number of voices, each using any number of subdivisions. After having realized how often we fool ourselves into thinking we've reached our limits, I am confident that I will eventually be able to conquer any rhythmic concept I can dream up. Only time will tell if this confidence has been misplaced.
----
Week 27 total: 20 hours
Grand total: 633 hours
Required pace: 519 hours (+114)
The other clear memory I have of this sort is when I started learning about unusual time signatures. I was blown away when I first heard a piece of music written in 5/4 time, and blown even further away when I tried to learn "The Test That Stumped Them All" by Dream Theater and "Dedication" by Pain of Salvation, both of which I gave up on due to their frequent meter changes which seemed impossible to comprehend. This, of course, was years ago, and by now I've grown so comfortable with odd times and shifting meters that they appear in almost all of my songs.
It is only after this happened a few times that I was able to recognize the pattern and append "This is the most challenging concept I will ever encounter" with "...but I've said that before and I was wrong, so I'm probably wrong now." However, recognition of a pattern is not nearly as exciting as the ability to make use of it. Instead of gradually drifting towards the next level of complexity as I've always done, I now find myself wanting to dive right into it, and over the past week I've done exactly that.
----
A few months ago, I started making an effort to expand my understanding of rhythm to include quintuplets by learning Dream Theater's "Erotomania" and writing my own rhythmic labyrinth called "Broken Hourglass". As I grew more and more comfortable with quintuplets, I caught myself thinking those usual thoughts of "Well, this must surely be the most abstract rhythmic idea I will ever learn."
More recently, however, I saw that this was the perfect opportunity to charge headfirst into the realms of complexity. Instead of piecing together an arsenal of unusual subdivisions over weeks and months, I'm now trying to train myself to be able to accurately divide a beat into any number of subdivisions on command. The vast majority of last week's practice hours were spent listening to a metronome, rapidly switching between various numbers of subdivisions to try to wrap my head around this abstract concept. I even wrote a program on my calculator to produce random sets of integers just to keep myself guessing.
The eventual goal is to become as comfortable with arbitrary subdivisions as I already am with arbitrary time signatures. Assuming I can do that, the next goal will be to master two-way polyrhythms with arbitrary numbers, rather than just using the various combinations of 3, 4, 5, and 6 that I've come to love. From there, I will work towards mastering arbitrary polyrhythms with any number of voices, each using any number of subdivisions. After having realized how often we fool ourselves into thinking we've reached our limits, I am confident that I will eventually be able to conquer any rhythmic concept I can dream up. Only time will tell if this confidence has been misplaced.
----
Week 27 total: 20 hours
Grand total: 633 hours
Required pace: 519 hours (+114)
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