project

My friend Joe told me that country music is just “three chords and the truth”. He’s absolutely right, but the real truth is, there are only three chords. I will repeat that, because it is important to internalize, there are only three chords. You can play pretty much every song in pop music using all three, and some only need two! We call these chords the “two”, the “five” and the “one” (which we’ve already talked about in a previous post)....

Some chords are pretty easy to identify because, regardess of the context, they are used in the same way. The minor four is a good example of this: regardless of where it’s used, it is used to make things sound “sad” in a pretty typical way. Unfortunately, I can’t be specific about whether this is used as a substitute for a `two` or a `five` or a `one`. This is because the minor four can be used as a `two` sometimes, and used as a `five` at other times....

Music, especially pop music, has a fairly limited way of conveying emotions. This isn’t a jab at pop music, but in order for it to be popular, it has to be limited. If every song was completely unique, it would require a lot from the audience to interpret, and then it wouldn’t be popular. It’s easier to use standard conventions which musicians and audiences intuitively understand. It’s fairly easy to learn to identify these conventions, except “learning music” falls under the trap of being a common hobby....

Learning a bit of programming can be useful if you actually want to do it. Learning a bit of programming can be painful if you feel you ought to do it. What follows is my advice about approaching the learning of programming. This isn’t a programming tutorial. Learning programming is hard because it’s popular Learning programming, like playing guitar, is a popular hobby. Popular hobbies have large industries around them, trying to teach how you to do the hobby....