Brief Update
Jul. 11th, 2012 06:44 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
catsittingstillFamily is here. Having a good time. Went hiking yesterday at Cumberland Gap National Historic Park. It rained on us. It turns out hiking under an umbrella is a reasonably pleasant way to handle this, and furthermore even a fairly large and cumbersome umbrella can be tilted and maneuvered in such a way as to pass between the trees surrounding the trail while still keeping the bearer mostly dry. I will take an umbrella more often in the future.
Didn't actually do much practicing yesterday--did okay the day before--will try to do better today. Practicing in the rumpus room with the door closed seems to work reasonably well with not disturbing my brother sleeping on the couch in the living room, so great on that.
Peter caught a major fluffle with A and Am in the songbook pdfs which I will try to set right in the next day or two. Because of the way the notes fall on the mando strings I routinely make my A chords with just the a and e notes, leaving out the c or c# that would define whether the chord is major or minor. These kinds of chords are called power chords. This leaves my melodies free to dodge whichever direction seems to make more sense at the time. If I'm in the key of D minor, sharping the c means sharping the leading tone (the pitch right below the tonic) which often sounds cool, and gets done a lot in regular music. For some reason this go-round I wrote a *lot* of songs in D minor (probably having to do with a combination of my vocal range and which chords are easy and sound cool on the octave mando.) That means there are about eight songs I had to go through and test true A versus true Am and see which ones were right where. (I only learned a playable true A a few days ago, while practicing a new song where it seemed to matter. It's harder than my usual power A, so I probably won't be using it regularly but I can at least do it now, which makes checking what I wrote easier, so bonus.)
Anyway--got to run. Kudos to Peter for the catch.
Didn't actually do much practicing yesterday--did okay the day before--will try to do better today. Practicing in the rumpus room with the door closed seems to work reasonably well with not disturbing my brother sleeping on the couch in the living room, so great on that.
Peter caught a major fluffle with A and Am in the songbook pdfs which I will try to set right in the next day or two. Because of the way the notes fall on the mando strings I routinely make my A chords with just the a and e notes, leaving out the c or c# that would define whether the chord is major or minor. These kinds of chords are called power chords. This leaves my melodies free to dodge whichever direction seems to make more sense at the time. If I'm in the key of D minor, sharping the c means sharping the leading tone (the pitch right below the tonic) which often sounds cool, and gets done a lot in regular music. For some reason this go-round I wrote a *lot* of songs in D minor (probably having to do with a combination of my vocal range and which chords are easy and sound cool on the octave mando.) That means there are about eight songs I had to go through and test true A versus true Am and see which ones were right where. (I only learned a playable true A a few days ago, while practicing a new song where it seemed to matter. It's harder than my usual power A, so I probably won't be using it regularly but I can at least do it now, which makes checking what I wrote easier, so bonus.)
Anyway--got to run. Kudos to Peter for the catch.
