daviddaviddavid

I'm a gigging jazz drummer and just cause you mentioned "with the back seats down", I gotta say: I always wish there was a car that was optimized / defaulted to having the back seats down. But in a pinch, on those rare occasions where you actually have more than two people in your car, you could pop some seats up.

Every car I get (currently have an Hyundai Elantra GT), I end up with the back seats down 75% of the time, and it just looks crappy. If the default mode was back-seats-down, with no big seams or gaps or unlevel parts, I'd be in heaven.

I think the key here is that you only deliberately practice things that you really, really want. Things that you want so bad that you obsess over them and you wake up realizing you've been dreaming about them. I quit a comfortable software job to take about 9 months off to devote to piano recently. Every free moment I get, I'm throwing myself in the waters. It's really hard to push through the painful points of learning stuff if you're not obsessed.

Hey thanks, it is very hands on and focused more on performance than composition. It covers comping, soloing, playing in different substyles, pretty much everything if you take both courses. Sometimes the units fly by too quickly and you need to note to yourself to revisit a topic and apply it in all 12 keys or apply it to a bunch of Real Book tunes.

I knew I'd pay for recommending a paid course but it's really great and the price is a steal given that Berklee Online courses are around $1500 and private lessons w someone of this teacher's calibre might be $100/hr. I'm not affiliated w the teacher/college at all other than being a student.

"mostly just okay, and certainly not great"

The guy cowrote Principia Mathematica AND won the Nobel prize in literature. He pretty much destroyed Frege's life's work in a witty little personal letter that could've fit on a napkin. He's one of those rare thinkers that did so much that if he only did a tenth of what he actually did he'd still be considered great.

Good lord, I play every day and didn't know this was even a thing. I usually quit as soon as I hit Genius. I clearly need to level up!

Thanks! I love it so much. The one thing that annoys me is that it rejects anything that it considers to be domain knowledge or some such criteria. For example, today you'd think you could use 'potto', which is a cool animal in the loris family. But nope, Spelling Bee seemingly rejects it because it considers it to be specialized zoological knowledge or something. BS.

EDIT: Removed spoiler.

For anyone that plays Wordle on NYT Games site, there is another anagramming game called Spelling Bee in which the notion of a pangram is featured prominently. Basically, you get a set of letters from which to build anagrams (one privileged letter must appear in all your anagrams). Pangrams are considered to be any anagram which makes use of all the given letters and it will flash the word 'Pangram' on the screen when you get them, to give you a minor nerdy dopamine hit.

I am addicted to the game and get pissed at myself if I don't get to the top scoring tier every day.

EDIT: Removed spoilers for future readers.

One bit of complexity that lots of tools like this seem to always punt on is the fact that most chords (at least in jazz) are typically played rootless and inverted and with lots of 'upper extensions'. It would be nice if a tool really did a deep dive in actual chord voicings that one would play in the real world (i.e. in a context where the bass player is covering the root and therefore it is best left out of the chord).

As an example of something that is very systematic (easy to put in an app), a rootless C maj 7 is equivalent to an E min 7. A rootless C min 7 is equivalent to an Eb maj 7. etc.

It is a pretty tough leap to learn rootless jazz piano comping when almost everything out there (except for the old-school dead tree books) only ever shows rooted voicings.

This reminded me of my favorite Mary Oliver poem:

  Entering the Kingdom
  by Mary Oliver
  
  The crows see me.   
  They stretch their glossy necks      
  In the tallest branches    
  Of green trees. I am      
  Possibly dangerous, I am    
  Entering the kingdom.
  
  The dream of my life   
  Is to lie down by a slow river    
  And stare at the light in the trees–      
  To learn something by being nothing    
  A little while but the rich    
  Lens of attention.
  
  But the crows puff their feathers and cry   
  Between me and the sun,    
  And I should go now.      
  They know me for what I am.    
  No dreamer,      
  No eater of leaves.

I like the action on the Privias (and the similar CDP360s, which I played recently). My only complaint about the action is that if you're playing at low/practice volumes, you tend to hear a lot of mechanical plastic sound as the keys spring back up. I'm a big fan of Roland's actions. I'd check out the FP30. I also used to practice on a Yamaha P125B and they are great.

Though not a move into a completely different product area, it's been interesting to see them step up their digital piano game. For a long time it seemed like Casio had a reputation for not making serious keyboards that you could gig on. But they have been churning out really nice keyboards recently - most notably, the Privia line. The ones I've played have a really nice feeling action, pro-level sounds and they're visually quite slick.