social.noyu.me

why am I the jazz one. surely nobody sees Kanbaru Suruga and thinks “jazz”, and yet

I think I'm going to borrow or buy some kind of book that is an introduction to jazz harmony because I feel like this might be the only way we're actually going to get anywhere with trying to speak the language of music

sighing I finally caved

I don't know how I feel about owning the licensed version of a book that used to be samizdat

what I do know is I can see a path from owning this book to us actually having a meaningful grasp of harmony, and that we've wanted to buy it every time we've seen it in a store

look, I finally learned a chord progression!

geez I wish I'd done this three years ago

and here's that same chord progression on a guitar! (with a somewhat different voicing)

thumbed chords are so OP, look at how simple this is!

though I keep muting the third on that third-to-last/final chord gahhh (and now it is 4am so I will stop chasing the perfect take)

oh the transpose feature on our PSR-350 (the arranger keyboard in the earlier video) works for the auto-accompaniment chords too, that's pretty neat, that means I can trivially play the song in a different key if I want to. might be useful when comparing to guitar

geez opening The Real Book to the page for The Girl From Ipanema and spending two hours drilling the left-hand chords in auto-accompaniment mode has resulted in, for the first time in our 3.5 years of owning a keyboard, meaningfully being able to say there's a song we can play

needless to say our “learning strategy” all this time for music has been utter dogshit, but I guess lead sheets are what we needed to start getting somewhere; the left-hand chords are easier to read when written out by name, and we can play the right-hand melody uh… by ear