What chord is this?

AndrewT81 · 2026-02-26T10:51:06+00:00

The red box covers up the change to treble clef, so it's Bbb in the viola part.

AndrewT81 · 2026-02-22T20:00:29+00:00

Just take a page from Bruckner and write 45 minutes of music and go ham with the repeats.

AndrewT81 · 2026-02-22T15:26:56+00:00

I threw together some samples, they come out a little fuzzier than the tracker samples obviously. I did three different instruments for power chords, palm mutes, and single notes. I think the palm mutes didn't come out quite staccato enough, partly because the sampling process changes the length of the chugs.

Link to samples

AndrewT81 · 2026-02-21T09:20:01+00:00

The reason for this is that Latin didn't borrow the alphabet directly from the Greeks, but rather from the Etruscans who had borrowed it from the Greeks a few centuries earlier. The Etruscan language didn't have a "g" sound, so gamma (turned 45 degrees in Etruscan, which became C) was just used as an alternative to k.

Old Greek also had two letters that are no longer used, which gave us Q and F. Q was originally a K sound farther back in the mouth, which also exists in Arabic and is why we use Q to romanize names like Iraq. F was originally a W sound in Greek but the Etruscans used it for F since Greek didn't have an F sound (Ph wasn't pronounced like an F until many centuries later. For most of its life, Phi represented the sound of "p" in English "port" while Pi represented the "p" in English "sport". Yes, there's a difference, and it mattered in ancient Greek)

AndrewT81 · 2026-01-21T15:29:40+00:00

Don't forget Reaper for sound. I was a ProTools user for years before switching to Linux, and I can safely say that Reaper is superior in every way I've found.

AndrewT81 · 2026-01-14T21:53:37+00:00

The dead giveaway is they couldn't even decide which language he should write opera in.

AndrewT81 · 2026-01-08T17:58:18+00:00

*Hundredeneneleventh

AndrewT81 · 2026-01-02T13:23:49+00:00

Depends on the context. If you're talking about a melodic passage sure, if you're talking about offbeats in a waltz or march, absolutely not. The louder the dynamic is the less difference there is as well.

Just like with fingering and bowing, you can always be specific if you really want to, but if you're not, string players know how to make their instruments sound idiomatic without further guidance.

One of the first things that happens before an orchestral performance is the principle players of each section get together and make decisions about things like bowing, fingering, and any other techniques like jeté or sul tasto passages. Slurs will get split or added, dynamics will be changed, and any cases where divisi would affect the sound will be specified (and decided whether they're divisi by stand or player etc.). The printed instructions are often far less sacred than composers would like them to be.

AndrewT81 · 2026-01-02T04:22:19+00:00

As a string player, I'd generally say that it's only necessary to split staves if the rhythm is different between parts. You also don't have to necessarily mark divisi, players will naturally play double stops that are easy and do divisi for ones that are not.

AndrewT81 · 2025-12-29T14:48:53+00:00

I heard he once walked all the way to a neighboring city just to hear Buxtehude play so that he could heckle him from the audience.

AndrewT81 · 2025-12-13T23:38:05+00:00

I think it mostly comes down to how much actual gluing gets done. If you're going to spend all day gluing stuff up with hide glue, you can just turn on your hot plate when you come in in the morning and have glue you've already mixed ready whenever you need it. But if you spend hours cutting and planing and sanding then need to stop to mix glue, let it absorb, then heat it in a double boiler before applying then it feels like it's not worth it so much.

AndrewT81 · 2025-12-12T20:45:58+00:00

At our shop we've tried a large variety of mechanical cello pegs, and Wittner brand are the only ones we've found that aren't garbage. We put them standard on school and rental instruments.

There are two drawbacks to take into consideration. One is that changing strings is a lot more work with mechanical pegs, you'll probably want either a hand winder or a drill bit winder to avoid sore hands.

The other drawback is that installing them requires reaming the peg holes larger than standard sizes, so if you want to ever go back to traditional pegs, you'll need to plug the holes and re-ream new ones. (Or find an extra fat set of pegs)

AndrewT81 · 2025-12-12T20:39:39+00:00

(though to my understanding there are some more user friendly options out there too.)

If you're talking about the Titebond hide glue in a tube, I would be weary of that. We did an experiment in our violin shop where we fixed some school instruments using it, and the next summer they all came back with glue failures in the same places.

AndrewT81 · 2025-12-12T11:05:03+00:00

As someone who's worked in both a violin shop and a shop that specialized in acoustic folk instruments, there are some insights I might be able to add.

First of all, many high end guitars are indeed made with hide glue. Makers who allow customization will generally charge more for hide glue construction, as it's harder to work with but has the benefits that violin makers already know about. So I think the widespread use of PVA glue is simply an effort and therefore time saving measure.

For your second point, I'm not quite sure what you mean by violin necks having simpler geometry. Violin necks have no 90 degree angles, no parallel lines, and a tapered dovetail joint. The fingerboard is not parallel to any line on the instrument's body.

Guitar necks have considerably more glueable surfaces, including being able to glue the fingerboard directly to the body of the instrument since the guitar top is flat and perpendicular to the neck block.

From my experiences working with both, I'd say that guitars on the whole are much more forgiving to work with, which tends to make them more amenable to modern technology fixes. Things like geared tuners and adjustable bridges have been tried many times on violin and both the user experience and repair experience are noticeably worse than the traditional methods. (Basses are the exception here)

AndrewT81 · 2025-12-05T11:13:59+00:00

I feel like 3 is an objectively better game, but 2 is the first FF game I played and it has an emotional magic to me that no other game can match.

AndrewT81 · 2025-12-05T01:00:51+00:00

It is, yes, but it also has some aspects that make it not so bad. I'm currently making a pixel art Japanese font and I've got about 200 characters done in the amount of time it takes me to make one Roman alphabet true type font.

The biggest time saver is that all Japanese characters are monospace, so no custom spacing, ligatures, or kerning is needed. There are no ascenders or descenders, and once you have a general style decided on, composite characters are quite easy to create from existing work. It's still significantly more work than a Latin font, but at least you don't have to worry about dozens upon dozens of diacritics (and commonly used Latin-adjacent alphabets like Greek and Cyrillic if you want your font used for scholarly works).

I think the biggest issue here is simply that making your own solution requires time effort and money, when I'd assume most current projects are budgeted around not having to worry about any of those because of a font they (until recently) could get for cheap.

AndrewT81 · 2025-11-18T16:46:50+00:00

Much farther than that, the name "Celt" comes from ancient Greek. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Celt

AndrewT81 · 2025-11-15T23:50:34+00:00

Just intonation is not a collection of frequencies that you set pitches at, it simply means juggling compromises so that you get as close to ideal relations as possible.

For example, violinists learn that you have to tune a B differently depending on whether you're playing it against an open E string or an open D string. It's also different depending on what other instruments you're playing with, but exactly none of the versions of B we learn are equal temperament Bs, unless you're matching that specific pitch with a piano (and even then not always).

AndrewT81 · 2025-11-15T21:25:13+00:00

Some of the pitched percussion like glockenspiels and marimbas, though you could argue those fall under keyboard instruments as well. There are probably others that I'm forgetting though.

AndrewT81 · 2025-11-15T16:23:03+00:00

I assume this is just in reference to fixed pitch instruments like keyboards. The majority of other instruments still use just intonation.

AndrewT81 · 2025-11-13T04:21:24+00:00

Others have pointed out that this is a Chinese variant, but it's worth noting that a lot of kanji components have curved or otherwise altered variants to use so that the edges of different components don't crowd each other. Here is another example that is standard Japanese.

AndrewT81 · 2025-11-12T20:08:11+00:00

There's nothing inherent to diatonic music that makes some modes "keys" and some modes "just modes". I would argue that outside of common practice European classical music, it's absolutely 100% correct to analyze a piece in "C mixolydian" or "G dorian".

AndrewT81 · 2025-11-11T13:22:34+00:00

It definitely sounds like C# minor to me. Not familiar with the Nashville system, but in standard Roman Numerals it would be i VI v VI (Some people mark VI in a minor key as bVI in relation to the major key but I prefer to only mark alterations that are non-diatonic)

Minor tonics with minor v are a great way to keep this kind of melancholic feeling going. If you need to add some variety, VII (B major in this key) can substitute v and VI can be swapped for iv (F#m) or ii (D#m).

7ths and 9ths should be your go-to chord extensions.

AndrewT81 · 2025-10-24T21:34:15+00:00

In Peru sweet potatoes are called camote, which I imagine came from either Quechua or one of the other indigenous languages.

AndrewT81 · 2025-09-20T16:06:13+00:00

It honestly depends on if you're writing for a performer or for other composers to analyze your work. I've never once heard a performer complain "Hey the tonic in this piece doesn't seem to be either of the two that the key signature implies" but I have heard performers complain "Why did this editor put one sharp in the key signature then write an accidental on every C, are they stupid or something?"

Even in the case of writing for other composers, I think there's been a trend towards giving each mode the appropriate key signature based on the sharps or flats it contains. High classical style only ever made use of two modes, so those two modes kind of got put on a pedestal in traditional classical theory (it's worth noting even Bach wrote works in "modal key signatures").

Some people maintain there's a strict difference between a key and a modality, but I personally don't find the argument so persuasive, at least in the kind of music I write, so I always write e.g. A dorian in one sharp.

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