The Official Good Ideas Thread™
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@HardwareGeek A lot of the stockers are cross-trained as cashiers, at least at Walmart. Worked there, was that. I mostly handled the garden center, though.
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@Benjamin-Hall My son worked at Safeway for a while, but never rose high enough in the pecking order to be trained as a cashier.
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@HardwareGeek said in The Official Good Ideas Thread™:
@Benjamin-Hall My son worked at Safeway for a while, but never rose high enough in the pecking order to be trained as a cashier.
That's the difference between the unionized ones and the non-unionized ones. Walmart, they shifted me around a few times (including putting me on night-shift stocking at the end, which was a pay boost).
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@Zecc said in The Official Good Ideas Thread™:
@Tsaukpaetra I like this guy. For those who skipped the outro:
This probably isn't going to be a coherent outro. It's 8 in the morning, I haven't exactly slept yet.
You know what is coherent? A really out of place rhetorical question that's used to segue into a spons— Skillshare! is today's sponsor!
I'm going to pretend you haven't heard this from 30 other YouTubers: Skillshare is an awesome online learning community with over 25000 courses and tutorials.
Have you ever wanted to learn about photography, graphic design, general productivity...
No? Join the fucking club. That shit sounds boring as fuck. But they've got it.I wonder if he'll still get paid for that.
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@r10pez10 I still have an (almost decade-old) HP workstation in the z series. Those workstations are great. They and the xw series are some of the best products HP has ever had.
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@Tsaukpaetra One of my uncle has a exactly this kind of disease, and he had such a spoon/fork for a while. Unfortunately his tremors have become too much even for those now...
If you ever see a trade show for disabled people, or a shop specialising in that, there are tons of such gadgets, addressing all kind of tiny things that seem trivial when you can do it, but becomes a chore when you have the "right" handicap. I recently saw one of these, they're great if you cannot hold something between thumb and other fingers:
Although the spoon that moves by itself is one level above the rest, it looks more magic than just clever!
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@remi said in The Official Good Ideas Thread™:
I recently saw one of these, they're great if you cannot hold something between thumb and other fingers:
Unless you live in the UK, where it's almost certainly classified as a banned assault weapon.
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@HardwareGeek it does look like something a Soul Calibur character would use.
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Add = specifier to f-strings.
f'{expr=}'
expands to the text of the expression, an equal sign, then the repr of the evaluated expression. So:x = 3 print(f'{x*9 + 15=}')
Would print
x*9 + 15=42
.A perhaps simpler to understand example:
# Old way print(f'x = {x}; y={y}') # New way print(f'{x = }; {y=}')
This is something I always feel slightly annoyed by every time I add logging someplace.
.Net are you listening?
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@Zecc said in The Official Good Ideas Thread™:
f-strings
What is this magic of which you speak? We're still on 3.3.
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@HardwareGeek said in The Official Good Ideas Thread™:
@Zecc said in The Official Good Ideas Thread™:
f-strings
What is this magic of which you speak? We're still on 3.3.
2.7 anyone?
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@Tsaukpaetra Well, yes, but if I explicitly ask for python 3, I get 3.3.
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@Zecc Big deal, I've been expanding f-strings while programming for years.
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@hungrier G-strings are more interesting.
On violins, of course. What were you thinking of?
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@HardwareGeek said in The Official Good Ideas Thread™:
On violins, of course. What were you thinking of?
Guitars, of course.
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@HardwareGeek I once wrote a symphony in C# tuning, but all my strings got garbage collected
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@mott555 said in The Official Good Ideas Thread™:
@HardwareGeek said in The Official Good Ideas Thread™:
On violins, of course. What were you thinking of?
Guitars, of course.
I don't even know, without looking it up, what pitches guitar strings are tuned to. It looks like they're tuned in fourths, except for the odd third between the G and B; ok, that's maybe not so hard to remember, but more complicated than violins (and violas and cellos), where everything is perfect fifths. (Double basses are fourths, for some reason.)
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@HardwareGeek I'm not that well-versed on music theory and I mostly play by ear, but I recall thinking violins (and the like) as well as banjos were tuned "backwards" the couple of times I tried them. Guitars are E-A-D-G-B-E, basses are E-A-D-G (same thing an octave lower, minus two strings).
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@Applied-Mediocrity said in The Official Good Ideas Thread™:
@HardwareGeek I once wrote a symphony in C# tuning, but all my strings got garbage collected
I wrote a song in F#, but I had functional difficulties with it. C worked well, but the song called for playing on the 23rd fret and my guitar only has 21 frets. I didn't immediately notice anything wrong but two of the drummer's drums quit working. Then I tried J# and both my music teacher and Sun Microsystems kicked me out.
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@mott555 I can understand why you'd think of that as "backwards". A fifth is the inversion of a fourth, and vice versa. E-A-D-G — intervals of a fourth. Violins are G-D-A-E — intervals of a fifth. (Violas and cellos are both C-G-D-A — also intervals of a fifth; cello an octave lower. Basses I
don't remember, but I thinkjust looked up; it's the same as a bass guitar. They're often told to play the cello part an octave lower, but they don't have the low C, although either an extra string or an extension to get that extra major third are fairly common.)
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@mott555 You tried to use C++ but the guitar morphed into a gun and shot you in the foot.
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@pie_flavor said in The Official Good Ideas Thread™:
@mott555 You tried to use C++ but the guitar morphed into a gun and shot you in the foot.
Real programmers teach a bunch of managed greenhorns:
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@HardwareGeek said in The Official Good Ideas Thread™:
They're often told to play the cello part an octave lower, but they don't have the low C, although either an extra string or an extension to get that extra major third are fairly common.
Always used to transpose up by an octave the parts that went too low for the bass I played. (Extra strings are rare. Extensions are more common. I had neither.) The main tricky bit is that because the strings are tuned in fourths, note combinations that are easy on a cello can be devilishly difficult on a bass, especially when double stopping or playing at speed.
OTOH, if you play a bass at the same pitches as a cello, you get a quite strange sound due to the totally different harmonics. Fun to do too, as it really makes the cellists wonder WTF is going on.
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@dkf said in The Official Good Ideas Thread™:
Extra strings are rare. Extensions are more common.
I've seen basses with extra strings, but yes, I've seen far more with extensions.
I had neither.
My music notation software color-codes notes outside the normal range of an instrument yellow for "this note takes professional-level skill to play" or red for "hey, dumbass, there's no way a piccolo can play two octaves below middle C". Bass notes from the E♭ down to the C are considered professional range.
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@HardwareGeek said in The Official Good Ideas Thread™:
Bass notes from the E♭ down to the C are considered professional range.
They're possible for anyone, but with a conventional bass require that you transpose an octave up (not that difficult if you're only playing a single note at that point and the music isn't too fast). It's not a big deal for most music; it's only if you've got a bass solo that goes that low that you really can't fake it, and that's fairly rare.
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@dkf said in The Official Good Ideas Thread™:
They're possible for anyone, but with a conventional bass require that you transpose an octave up
I think it serves more as a warning to the composer/orchestrator/arranger that not everyone can play those notes (in this case due to lack of suitable instrument rather than lack of skill) and think whether he/she really wants to write it in that octave.
if you've got a bass solo that goes that low that you really can't fake it, and that's fairly rare.
You might like a section of something I've written (which will probably never be performed) with three basses playing pizzicato, kind of jazzy, and off the top of my head, I think the lowest one lands on the low E♭. Fakeable, though, as the last chord is a full orchestra hit, so if the bass is an octave up, it wouldn't be too noticeable.
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@mott555 said in The Official Good Ideas Thread™:
@HardwareGeek I'm not that well-versed on music theory and I mostly play by ear, but I recall thinking violins (and the like) as well as banjos were tuned "backwards" the couple of times I tried them. Guitars are E-A-D-G-B-E, basses are E-A-D-G (same thing an octave lower, minus two strings).
And just to make things interesting, guitars themselves are tuned an octave lower than the notation is written. Even people who play guitar often don't know this.
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@da-Doctah said in The Official Good Ideas Thread™:
Even people who play guitar often don't know this.
I play guitar and I don't know how to read sheet music, so I'll have to take your word for it.
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@mott555 I may be wrong, but I'm rather under the impression that few rock/pop/whatever guitarists do. Other than classical guitar, little guitar music is written in standard notation.
Transposing instruments are quite common. Acoustic basses also play an octave lower than written. Piccolos play an octave higher. Glockenspiels play two octaves higher. Trumpets and clarinets play (usually) a major second lower, although A clarinets play a minor third lower, and Baroque trumpets may transpose by almost any amount. French horns play a perfect fifth lower. IIRC, bass clarinets play a ninth (octave plus a second) lower. There are others, but I can't think of them off the top of my head.
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@mott555 said in The Official Good Ideas Thread™:
@Applied-Mediocrity said in The Official Good Ideas Thread™:
@HardwareGeek I once wrote a symphony in C# tuning, but all my strings got garbage collected
I wrote a song in F#, but I had functional difficulties with it. C worked well, but the song called for playing on the 23rd fret and my guitar only has 21 frets. I didn't immediately notice anything wrong but two of the drummer's drums quit working. Then I tried J# and both my music teacher and Sun Microsystems kicked me out.
Can someone ELI5 what this means? My understanding of singing a song in a different key does change the pitch.
But why not just say sing/play x notes higher/lower?
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@Karla said in The Official Good Ideas Thread™:
Can someone ELI5 what this means?
Does it help if you remember that F#, C and J# all are (or were) programming languages?
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@Karla It's just a sequence of bad jokes. And there is no note J# (it's A - G).
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@mott555 said in The Official Good Ideas Thread™:
there is no note J# (it's A - G).
I'm sorry, did you just assume my scales?
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@Zecc said in The Official Good Ideas Thread™:
@mott555 said in The Official Good Ideas Thread™:
there is no note J# (it's A - G).
I'm sorry, did you just assume my scales?
Oh come on! Upboating because the downboat itself is funny. It wasn't that bad.
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@mott555 said in The Official Good Ideas Thread™:
@Karla It's just a sequence of bad jokes. And there is no note J# (it's A - G).
Regardless of the jokes, I would still like to understand. What makes a song whatever key.
I know the notes. I have a basic understanding of sheet music.
I've taken vocal lessons and have some of my own of songs I like to perform for karaoke (my goal was to take lessons to get to the point of "recognizable and not painful").
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@Karla said in The Official Good Ideas Thread™:
What makes a song whatever key.
Almost all music has a main harmonic chord. Some only has the one, which is a boring, but it's pretty common for popular music songs to use about three chords, usually ones based at the tonic, at the fifth and at the fourth. The notes can be transposed about and so on, and the melody might be using many more notes, but the supporting band members will be sticking mainly to those notes. More sophisticated music tends to use more chords in its harmonies (I'm excluding the cases where the composer just transposed everything up by a semitone or tone but otherwise added no musical ideas at all; those show a profound lack of imagination, it's the musical equivalent of suddenly just changing the font family half way through a boring document).
The three core components of music are:
- melody, i.e., the tune
- harmony, which is the set of notes that sound good with the tune, and
- rhythm, i.e., the beat, the bounce.
When music tries to jettison these, it quite rapidly becomes stuff you don't want to listen to, either because it is boring or because it's outright noise. (Death Metal notwithstanding.) 20th century classical music spent a lot of effort on trying to do away with each of them, and basically failed; while inharmonious music can be tolerated for a short while for effect, you really don't want to listen to it for all that long (and music without melody or rhythm tends to be Just So Dull. IMHO anyway).
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@dkf said in The Official Good Ideas Thread™:
transposed everything up by a semitone or tone but otherwise added no musical ideas at all; those show a profound lack of imagination, it's the musical equivalent of suddenly just changing the font family half way through a boring document
I see. Well, I've got this weird hobby of mine - pulling up and down instrumental tracks by a semitone or two (no resampling, proper transpose) so it is, but doesn't entirely sound the same
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@mott555 said in The Official Good Ideas Thread™:
@Karla It's just a sequence of bad jokes. And there is no note J# (it's A - G).
Unless you're German, in which case it's A - H. Germans call B♭ B and B♮ H. That is the way many composers have written pieces titled "Fantasia on the name BACH" or similar.
Or the numerous languages in which the notes are named Do, Re, Mi, ... Ti.
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@Karla said in The Official Good Ideas Thread™:
What makes a song whatever key.
I know the notes. I have a basic understanding of sheet music.
I've taken vocal lessons
Based on this, I'm going to assume you know what a scale is. Take the notes of the melody; there a couple of things to look at to figure out what key it is. One is to look at what notes the melody starts and ends on. The melody usually ends on the tonic; starting on the tonic or the third is common. Another is finding a scale that contains all or most of the notes of the melody without requiring accidentals. The key of that scale is the key of the song and the key that the songwriter will base the harmony on (see @dkf's post). Finally, if you have sheet music, the written key signature is a dead giveaway (almost).
Let's say all the notes of the melody have no sharps or flats; that's an indication of C major. (It could also be A minor if it's a sad song, especially if the last note of the melody is an A.) I would expect the song to start and end with a C major (or A minor) chord. If not, either the songwriter is being clever* or incompetent.
If it's too high or low to sing comfortably in the key it's written in, you might sing it higher or lower. If, for example, it's too low and you want to sing it two steps higher, all the Cs become Es, etc., and the C major chords become E major chords; it's now in the key of E.
* One of the ways in which a songwriter might be clever is by using a modal scale. This is a type of scale (and corresponding harmony) that was common in older (medieval) music and is occasionally used today. If you take, say, the notes of the C major scale but start on G instead of C, that's the G Mixolydian mode, but it's likely to be called "in the key of C" because the key signature looks like C major.
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@HardwareGeek Thank you and @dkf
It is strange to me that there are so many rules that make a song.
I've written lyrics to a song once (and probably never again--completely out of my area of expertise) and my voice coach helped put it to music.
She did tell me something about it not having X so it is somewhat boring.
I guess my ear is as uncultured as my pallet.
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@HardwareGeek said in The Official Good Ideas Thread™:
It could also be A minor if it's a sad song
Or if it's heavy metal. Except for a few exceptions by bands like Iron Maiden and Stryper, almost all heavy metal (even the happy, upbeat stuff) is in a minor scale. Major scales sound so wrong to me as a result. (Well, the major scale sounds wrong. There are other, lesser-used major scales that don't sound so bad, but I don't know their names--they're all something Greek, if I recall correctly.)
This guy did an experiment and transposed Metallica's first album into major scales. It went from one of the awesomest metal albums of all time into sounding like junk pop-punk, just by changing scale...
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@Karla said in The Official Good Ideas Thread™:
I guess my ear is as uncultured as my pallet.
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@mott555 said in The Official Good Ideas Thread™:
There are other, lesser-used major scales that don't sound so bad, but I don't know their names--they're all something Greek, if I recall correctly.
Those would be the modal scales I mentioned, Ionian (normal major scale), Dorian, Phrygian, Lydian, Mixolydian, Aeolian (natural minor) and Locrian. It is, perhaps, worth noting that the modern use (and naming) of these modes differs from either the ancient Greek scales and harmonies or the medieval church modes. The names derive from ethnic groups that (presumably) used those scales (the ancient Greek versions of them) in their music.
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@HardwareGeek said in The Official Good Ideas Thread™:
@mott555 said in The Official Good Ideas Thread™:
There are other, lesser-used major scales that don't sound so bad, but I don't know their names--they're all something Greek, if I recall correctly.
Those would be the modal scales I mentioned, Ionian (normal major scale), Dorian, Phrygian, Lydian, Mixolydian, Aeolian (natural minor) and Locrian. It is, perhaps, worth noting that the modern use (and naming) of these modes differs from either the ancient Greek scales and harmonies or the medieval church modes. The names derive from ethnic groups that (presumably) used those scales (the ancient Greek versions of them) in their music.
Of these, only Ionian, Lydian and Mixolydian are considered "major" scales (because the chords based on their tonics are major). The others, save Locrian, are "minor" scales.
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@da-Doctah said in The Official Good Ideas Thread™:
The others, save Locrian, are "minor" scales.
Whose tonic chord is diminished. So, the seven modal scales consist of three major, three minor, and one diminished.
BTW, thanks. Your post filled a bit of theory that I was probably vaguely aware of, but which had never quite clicked, that a scale is major or minor based on the character of its tonic triad.
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I feel like I just read something about cricket.
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@da-Doctah said in The Official Good Ideas Thread™:
Locrian
I do know this one off the top of my head, at least as it applies to guitar. It's a fun one. It makes thrash metal riffs sound very progressive and weird.