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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

help I'm now addicted to finding new chord voicings

its the weekend baby. youknow what that means. its time to drink precisely one glass of uncaffeinated coke and practice jazz

oh god I have been practicing this for 5 hours (and that is too long, and that's why I'm playing so badly. I really must kill the habit of chasing a “perfect take” with worn-out hands)

dunlop tortex .73mm is really comfy. not sure why I like it so much. friendly yellow triangle

if you're paying attention you may notice I'm playing the chords in a different inversion and different key than last time. this inversion is just easier to play, and I decided to change the key to match the recording of this song we're most familiar with; guitar makes that easy!

Kanbaru Suruga wakes up and apparently chooses to spend >1h practicing this almost immediately

starting to slow down, take frequent breaks and pay closer attention to what our fingers are doing

it seems the third and fourth chords here are quite difficult and in different ways

4456xx (thumb×2,index,pinky) is easy
6656xx (") is easy
6646xx (") is difficult, our thumb struggles to stretch that far away from our index finger; tempting to put more tension on it but then I have a tension problem!

and then 5656xx (thumb,ring,index,pinky) has this difficult balance, it's hard to both get the ring and pinky finger at the right angle to not mute the string played by the index finger and let it mute the high strings, so I end up paying better attention to our strumming

I can now play all the Girl from Ipanema chords! this is the first time we actually learn a full song's chords ^^;;;

𝄆Fmaj7(8879xx)→G7(10-10-9-10-x-x)→G-7(10-10-8-10-x-x)→Gb7b5 (8989xx)→Fmaj7→[1. Gb7b5→]𝄇Gbmaj7→B7 →F#-7→D7→G-7→Eb7→A-7→D7b9#11(554544)→G-7→C7b9#11

that's specifically the chord sequence from The Real Book, 6th edition, which I've turned into thumbed guitar chords, all inverted such that the fifth is on the lowest string. this is quite different to any guitar tab for this song we have seen so far. nonetheless, it is the song

@hikari 100% recognizable as said song, too!