cruft posted:

It's probably safe to assume that any random person thinks leasing something in perpetuity sucks balls compared to owning something.

And buddy, have I got good news for you about what General Motors is planning. Where "good" here means "terrible".

Disco Pope posted:

A theory question, but more of a thought while in the bathroom at work.

Are power chords actually chords or are they technically double stops?

Ottó Károlyi[9] writes that, "Two or more notes sounded simultaneously are known as a chord," though, since instances of any given note in different octaves may be taken as the same note, it is more precise for the purposes of analysis to speak of distinct pitch classes. Furthermore, as three notes are needed to define any common chord, three is often taken as the minimum number of notes that form a definite chord.[10] Hence, Andrew Surmani, for example, states, "When three or more notes are sounded together, the combination is called a chord."[11] George T. Jones agrees: "Two tones sounding together are usually termed an interval, while three or more tones are called a chord."[12] According to Monath, "a chord is a combination of three or more tones sounded simultaneously", and the distances between the tones are called intervals.[13] However, sonorities of two pitches, or even single-note melodies, are commonly heard as implying chords.[14] A simple example of two notes being interpreted as a chord is when the root and third are played but the fifth is omitted. In the key of C major, if the music stops on the two notes G and B, most listeners hear this as a G major chord.

Since a chord may be understood as such even when all its notes are not simultaneously audible, there has been some academic discussion regarding the point at which a group of notes may be called a chord. Jean-Jacques Nattiez explains that, "We can encounter 'pure chords' in a musical work", such as in the "Promenade" of Modest Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition but, "often, we must go from a textual given to a more abstract representation of the chords being used", as in Claude Debussy's Premičre arabesque.[8]

Disco Pope posted:

A theory question, but more of a thought while in the bathroom at work.

Are power chords actually chords or are they technically double stops?

cruft posted:

I thought I was in the electronics thread and was about to correct your spelling until I got very confused.

Earwicker posted:

i usually practice piano about 1-2 hours, but broken into two sessions at different types of day

xzzy posted:

Commission a three string krappy punkrod and tune it to a power chord, play everything you need with one finger.

quote:

Guitars modified in this way use heavy-gauge strings for a heavier sound and are normally tuned in Drop D, though the Presidents play half a step lower in C#. For a basitar, the strings are placed in the D and G positions. Chris uses a .60 gauge string tuned to C# and a .36 tuned to G#. On a guitbass, the strings are placed in the A, D, and G positions. .54 gauge tuned to C#, .42 to G#, and a .32 gauge tuned to C#.

xzzy posted:

Commission a three string krappy punkrod and tune it to a power chord, play everything you need with one finger.

cruft posted:

Isn't this the exact technique used by the guitarist from The Presidents Of The United States Of America?

Xiahou Dun posted:

Plus there are instruments that have courses of strings instead of just one string per note : like the mandolin is tuned like a violin as GDAE by default, but since it's 8 strings in 4 courses of 2 it's actually GGDDAAEE.

Earwicker posted:

there's also a variant of the mandola where the paired strings are tuned an octave apart. it sounds really cool.

quote:

Why is four [strings] the standard and not six? As the lowest-pitched member of the guitar family, the instrument should have had six strings from the beginning. The only reason it had four was because Leo Fender was thinking in application terms of an upright bass, but he built it along guitar lines because that was his training. The logical conception for the bass guitar encompasses six strings.

Mister Speaker posted:

I will also say - and maybe this is heretical - I don't really 'get', or like, five-string basses. Maybe I've just never heard one through a proper amp setup but it seems to me that enormous low B string doesn't really sound like anything good at all. It's too low for the fundamental to really come through (believe me, I like sub bass, it's just not there) so all you get is attack and this unpleasant metallic harmonic series. I've argued this at length with my jazz guy friend who loves it. I think it sounds like dogshit. Unless you've got some creative use of distortion going on, I probably don't want to hear your five-string bass.

Jazz Marimba posted:

all of them, they’re all famous guitarists

but that doesn’t mean they’re each playing unique parts, or even all playing at the same time—notice how a lot of the time willie nelson just isn’t playing, and two of the other singers are playing the same chords with the same voicings

cruft posted:

At least one of the performers surely knows what's up. Maybe Willie Nelson. Others might too, and they're still strumming just so they don't feel like a doofus standing around on stage. Backup singers have my respect, I'd feel way to vulnerable if I weren't behind an instrument.

E: and stand-up comics. Terrifying.

xzzy posted:

Is there a current hotness for routing midi on Windows these days? I got a situation where an app (midinous) creates a midi port on startup and I want to send its midi through my external interface (an iconnectivity product) to hardware devices. I cannot convince my interface's config app to recognize the existence of midinous' port and this is sending me down the road of finding a software router.

However, everything google is suggesting looks like it was last updated in 2005 and looks sketchy as hell. Which prompts me to ask how people are doing this these days, or if they're doing it at all.