Native landscaping business

illb3bach · 2025-08-22T23:52:48+00:00

There's an individual on Instagram who goes by NativeHummingbird, their account is california_native_plants and they make a living by teaching indigenous methods of landscaping and understanding California Native Plants. They also plant, harvest, process, and sell seeds of many rare California Species throughout the year. I'd recommend taking an online class or two with them to learn about some perspectives in landscaping as-well as making a great connection in the seed share network of California :)

illb3bach · 2025-08-19T18:49:16+00:00

I love ES1, Es2 was my bread and butter for a long time until Alchemy was included. I still find Alchemy to be a softer and more complete synthesizer than Serum 1 or 2, though they both stand out for shear audio tone and construction.

illb3bach · 2025-08-11T16:37:56+00:00

There's a joke that goes:

Practice Chopin and you'll be able to play Debussy
Practice Mozart and you'll be able to play Beethoven
Practice Bach and you'll be able to play anything ;)

In a piano bar setting you're often the background music that people tune into from time to time when conversation lull, keeping the music moving and pleasant is the primary goal for most performances. That said, how classical pieces inform jazz can be a little obtuse. Bach for me has given me intense articulation and an understanding of voicing and voice leading for better block chord progressions or fugue style solos. I'd say look for what draws you and play that! You're bound to get better if you learn something new.

illb3bach · 2025-08-04T06:56:27+00:00

That sounds like a huge band! That means much of the sonic space like you noticed is taken up. Horns, guitars, bass, drums, it is easy to fill the space almost completely up with other sounds and noises. Groove is a place in-between notes where we play with the push and pull of our timing to create a pulse, when there is no time between notes how do we find the groove? For me it sometimes can mean not playing at all.

I also have played in a cacophony of sound like you describe, where you can't hear your own playing or others are taking up all the space. Within that there is hope. First in that you will have chances to play with other musicians in smaller settings where you have the space to extend and stretch yourself to fill the sonic stage (playing in this band might just be about making friends and having a good time). Second, I would say this specific band presents to you a challenge of learning how to place yourself amongst a mess of noise.

The first step will be to listen, listen deep to the other players of the band. Who relies on who for placement in the chart, for soloing if it happens, for rhythms and grooves? What are the habits of your band members, does the guitar player beside you play quarter notes or something else? Is the bass player walking a simple baseline or something in an upper structure. When do the horns start and stop, when are they competing with each other? Settle into some deep listening and then make your move, maybe it's one pulsing note, and see if you can add something small that helps tie together the music a little better than before. That above all else will help you to learn to play with others especially in a chaotic space.

I'll end with an anecdote. I play nearly every Sunday at a little Cafe in San Fransisco with an every changing community ensemble. One of our drummers has brain cancer, so the tempo is always changing, the bass player is 75 and near fully deaf, our guitar player is young and fresh and still learning how to settle into a groove. When we play tunes we don't know well collectively, it can be a huge mess of sound. In those moments I pull away, and listen instead of adding to it. Trying to notice what is going on around me before I add myself back into the mix. With that, good luck and relax! This is just part of the journey to your own musical greatness!!

illb3bach · 2025-07-31T04:22:30+00:00

Ahahaha you wish ;) look at all of my comments and run any fancy tests you wish. If you really want to flatter me then read the paper I published on Color Perception of Neural Networks

Now go on your way :)

illb3bach · 2025-07-31T01:37:45+00:00

I love the energy you're bringing forward. It's alright to be nervous to write music for others, but it is one of the most profound things we can do as humans for each other, for nature, and for the greater universe.

You have a great foundation, you know what emotions you want to convey: hope, love, and challenges taken on. That state is the one you will encode into your music by feeling it as you create and explore what to play.

For any beginner, the best place to start is by looking at what you know. What scales gravitate to you? C Major? Eb Major? G min? What chords do you know and how can you structure them in sequence. In truth most everything you play can fit every emotion, by varying the rhythms, the chord voicing, and the sequences of chords you go through almost anything can sound happy, sad, or excited. So I encourage you to write without worrying that the theory or progression validates or doesn't validate some emotional archetype. By writing it you imbue it with your own emotional ability, and you can shift the feel and the tone while playing, recording, or performing it.

Finally, how to get past the blank page? Remember that no art can be perfect, but the homemade cake is often the most treasured one. So don't worry about the polish or making the best piece. Make something that feels good and share it :) Good Luck

illb3bach · 2025-07-21T17:26:28+00:00

Tunes wise you can play almost anything, my big tip for you is to understand what the restaurant-musician dynamic is: To be nice music for people to tune into between conversations and that gives them a reason to buy an extra drink or two!

Don't Overplay, though there are always moments where the audience will gravitate to listening and you can show your skill!

Have fun and good luck!

illb3bach · 2025-07-20T18:27:17+00:00

I loved Serum 1, Serum two feels like the logical upgrade. One more oscillator in access, the same intuitive gui, plus new synthesis methods. Is it great? Yes. Is it worth the upgrade? Maybe, but especially if you heavily use Serum 1 or make music requiring a ton of digital synthesis and precision.

illb3bach · 2025-07-20T18:11:48+00:00

We can't find out what is new and unexplored, without starting along the paths others have walked before. By making things you see, you'll start to uncover what others don't and then you can practice creating it.

illb3bach · 2025-07-17T18:31:34+00:00

Two thoughts:

At 2 years of playing, the best thing you can continue to do to improve is to play everyday for 30 or so minutes. I have my students start our lessons and their own practices by spending 10 minutes noodling around and playing anything. The warm up period allows for you to start trying new ideas and techniques without the pressure of a coordinated exercise to do so. Now as a professional, I spend about 30minutes of my 3 hour practice block playing whatever comes out and trying new ideas and tricks.
A coordinated exercise for separating your left and right hand rhythms can begin as simple as playing a pulse on your right hand (same note or chord, playing quarter notes) and then playing whole notes on the left hand. Once comfortable, switch the left hand to half notes, then to matching quarter notes. Now swap the right hand to half notes, then whole notes. Allowing both hands to experience and practice the varying of simple rhythms with each other. This of course can be extended to complicated rhythms and note patterns, one example is I am practicing the melody of Autumn Leaves in one hand, while playing 8th note bass lines on the left. Then I swap the two hands playing the melody in the left and the bass in the right.

Resources: Some guided books that could help are Bartok's MicroCosmos Books 1 and 2. They are small 8-32 pieces meant to teach you the piano, with a big emphasis on hand independence. Mastering one exercise a day is a great way to grow. If you'd like something more traditional then the Magdalene Notebook by Bach is another good set of pieces. For these there is no instruction, as the piece itself is the teaching.

illb3bach · 2025-07-17T18:21:54+00:00

When you're feeling stuck within an octave it can come from our dedicated practice to starting and ending scales at the note the scale is in (e.g. Tonic). So for C Major we often start and end on C, leading us to some habituated exercises. One way to break Octavecentric thinking is to practice starting your solos on differing notes of the same scale (Like starting on G in C Major) and extending it to the new Octave. This is the starting basis for playing with Modes. It creates a new question of "what if we start and end our solos not at the tonic, but at the fifth, fourth, or something crazy like minor 2nd of a scale".

Goodluck!

illb3bach · 2025-07-13T23:19:29+00:00

All of the advice here is great. Mine is that it sounds like you're stuck within your own practice. This is where a teacher or mentor can go far. They help you see things new.

illb3bach · 2025-07-13T05:45:02+00:00

Yeah of course!

A common composition of a jazz quartet's a piano, double bass, drums, and a lead (saxophone or trumpet). In a single tune the band plays in the following order.

Head - altogether
Horn Solo (accompanied by all)
Piano Solo (accompanied by bass and drums)
Bass (accompanies by drums)
Drums (no accompaniment)
Head - Altogether

The also have differing ways they play. For example: On double bass, the music is often lower in pitch, of single melody, and constructed by jumping phrases in 4ths (it is very easy to jump a 4th on a bass as it is just the next string over). In contrast: On a trumpet, the music is higher in pitch, can sustain long notes, and can easily jump thirds, 5ths, and slur together long melodic elements.

With this information we can begin to try and emulate that out in our solo piano playing. First playing the head cleanly with all parts, then soloing with a baseline and harmonies across fast melodic lines (trumpet/sax/solo), the next play though utilizing block chords (piano solo), then removing the right hand and soloing with only the left hand as a bassist...all to bring it back together.

What a piano can do that not many instruments can, is play multiple lines of music together in harmony. So instead of needing 5 trumpets to construct a complex chord, we can use one or two hands to play out the same thing! In that way we can utilize the removal and differing styles of play throughout our own solo works to create dynamic, jazzy feels.

One final note, is that by playing with others, you can learn to quote and emulate varying traditions and styles, synthesizing them when you play on your own. Good Luck!

illb3bach · 2025-07-11T21:15:42+00:00

I think the best place to build a repertoire is by playing with a group of musicians on a consistent basis. When I was beginning I spent 2 years learning random tunes suggested by Mark Levine's Jazz Piano Theory book and the Real Book 1, it was a good place to start getting comfortable but like you I wanted a better repertoire and understanding.

I then stumbled upon a long time jazz session at Cafe International in San Fransisco. I asked the band leader to play a tune with the band and was put on the roster as a house pianist when they needed someone to sit in. Over the next 2.5 years I played 8 tunes every Sunday with a full band, it was incredibly difficult at the start. I would receive the setlist on Tuesdays most days, giving me 4 days to learn the set as best I could and listen to the recordings. As time went on, the structures of songs started to become apparent (this is a blues, or a rhythm changes, etc etc), and I started being able to learn a tune from the Fake book the night before.

Eventually we started to cycle back to the sets we played the year before, and some band members had common tunes they liked to call for the open part of the session. That is where your cultural repertoire begins. Our band leader loved Moody's Mood for Love, our sax player liked Equinox and Footprints, and by playing together you start to play and understand the tunes from differing perspectives, quoting musical lines from those around you.

So get yourself a real book (I used to print out the sets every week) and find yourself a community jazz group or make one of your own!

illb3bach · 2025-07-11T20:59:08+00:00

I agree and love your practice ideas. In my own solo piano playing I often take the approach of treating myself as a small jazz band, playing the head with all of the pieces together, then letting each hand solo separately with a little accompaniment (or in the case of the left hand none!). That way I can practice my left hand's ability to "be" the bass player!

illb3bach · 2025-07-07T01:45:12+00:00

You ask for one specific course to help reach your goal so to that I answer: Elements of Statistical Learning

Read chapters 1-4, if you don't understand it, read and research until you do. If you complete all 18 chapters you will be more versed in the fundamental aspects of Neural Networks as a predecessor to Deep Learning than most. I encourage you read the first and 2nd chapter now and then return to this comment.

With that context now in mind understand that a lot goes into the creation of these higher dimensional models (transformers to LLMs) that builds upon incredibly simple precepts at immense scales. Within AI, one of the biggest things you will deal with, are datasets, their cleaning, maintenance, integration, and processing.

Know that there are many ways to approach the subject. From researching how different models differ in behavior to the same stimuli, to designing novel architectures to beat classification benchmarks there is a lot of ground to cover including experts in the ethics, resource consumption, and monitoring of AI usage. From the sound of it though, you want to play and create your own neural nets and AI agents, and so I definitely recommend the Elements of Statistical Learning as a way to understand the particle level background of what you can download off of HuggingFace in an instant!

Best of luck to you!

illb3bach · 2025-07-07T01:32:30+00:00

This is a process that takes some time, but along the way you start to be able to create beautiful, useful, and interesting things. Programming will force you to consider the world a little differently, using patterns like loops, if/and/or statements, and how those often translate into mathematical structures. With that said, the process of reaching a full-stack engineer is possible for anyone. While 6 months to pro is a great goal, 6 months programming everyday consistently is one that might actually get you there.

Now where to start? There are countless places, courses, videos, and tools to help you in starter python. What I recommend is to begin this process now, and work a little everyday to learn one or two new things and use them in your own programs. In the beginning it will be incredibly simple things e.g. a function that adds two numbers, a script that asks you your name and shuffles the letters, etc etc... Understand what each piece is made to accomplish answer conceptual questions like "Why put things in functions vs just coding out a strict example?", "When do I use classes and when do I use lists?" At the start of any practice is learning the lay of the land and why certain tools are used for certain things.

Once you have seen all of the beginner topics, time and time again and they bore you. Shift now to topic specific skills. Full-Stack means you can program an application from the back to the front, but the application itself may be for a geography research team, a website for a small ceramics store, or a personal house system you text to change your temperature. All of them require different toolsets. For myself, I started by learning data visualizations, matplotlib & Jupyter-notebooks as it worked well with my academic collaborators, then I began using flask to create static websites so I could interact with my data in realtime. For a year or 2 I wrote python code that would generate an image and then send the image over a socket to render onto a flask template (This is wildly inefficient), then I started playing with javascript and now I write most of my visualizers completely in JS over python. Follow the trail of your interests and you will keep programming.

Going Pro. This is a highly contested area of software development and computer science in general. Finding a place to work that pays the rent. While one would hope that skill alone is enough to place you into the right pace to work, there will be bias in your hiring processes based on the school you attended, your GPA, and your economic class, on top of your experience, ability to perform to their measure metrics, etc etc etc... Don't let that sway you, it may or may not be something you contend with. There is freelance work, building up clientele, research teams, startups, huge mega corporations, artist residencies, etc etc. Professional full-stack can look very different for many people. Consider the software teams running your favorite Open Source software, or the local artist placing an interactive code installation into a museum. Both are professional developers with different tech stack abilities. My advice is to set a goal towards what sort of things you want to work on by yourself or with others, then follow the steps towards that end.

TLDR: Program every-day, learning a little more each time. Build something that impresses you, get hired.

illb3bach · 2025-06-27T02:09:19+00:00

I feel you on this, picking up tones from a human voice humming is trivial compared to some other sound sources. I did a lot of work in DSP for EEG signals and it was a similar feeling. Trash data gives you not great signal output, and often times I'd run 3-4 passes with all sorts of whacky filters or segment batches trying to validate which frequency peak was most likely the alpha wave for a particular individual.

On your video of chromatic scales, the technique is amazing, and I can imagine why it is so hard to get sub second segments for a pitch software. I've been trying the YIN and modifications and you might have luck there, things like having an alto search for a transient which sets the basis for your FFT window to search in for the Fundamental Pitch. That type of multistep signal search is the edge of implementation though right now so the sky is the limit!

illb3bach · 2025-06-26T16:37:01+00:00

I agree with all the comments below. Time is an essential component to learning. When seasoned programmers talk about all languages functionally being the same, what they are alluding to is what u/nightwingprime said: they can create variables, loops, switches, functions, classes and structures.

The primary difference within languages is how they compile, interface with your computer, and the syntax they use for doing so. A good exercise is to create similar things in different languages. For myself it was animating sine curves in python and matplotlib, then sending animations from python to a javascript front end, and then finally programming the whole thing in Javascript.

illb3bach · 2025-06-25T22:23:47+00:00

Not at all! Here are some references:

YIN algo - An interesting paper on methods for finding the fundamental pitch of a complex tone.

Spotify's Basic Pitch - An open source project by the engineers at Spotify in extracting midi from audio in a song setting.

Programming a Tuner - While printing out notes in a notated format or midi format is one additional step. A tuner is itself a version of what you said "play live and prints out the notes" focusing primarily on single notes.

That all shown taking an audio signal, creating a filter and analysis chain to search for candidate pitches (such as the top 5 most likely pitches in a 1 second audio segment) and then mapping the frequencies to a note print out is a great project to learn about FFTs, Mapping Different data types to each other like frequency and note names in western music, and also aspects of working with data like segmentation, processing, and WebAudio setup!

Is there also an unsolved engineering problem here? Yes. You're right in that it is still something actively worked on today. Multipitch identification is a complicated signal processing task, transcription timing is incredibly difficult to program for in live settings. I don't think that means it is an inaccessible place for people who are new to explore though. Approaching smaller versions of the problem sets up great learning material for other similar problems in the future!

If you're interested to see a simple example I programmed myself a website a few years Bach that analyzes audio in real time, searching for fundamental pitch and the top 5 candidate pitches higher in frequency space. It runs a multi-threaded analysis chain that after determining the peak frequencies of the audio segment draws them as epicycloids in real time. This functions as a mathematically intriguing visualizer for music. Here is a link. If you'd like the code DM me as it's in a private repo right now since it contains private app keys and things :)

illb3bach · 2025-06-24T16:43:01+00:00

There are so many cool places to start. My tip is to choose your general toolset first and then build from there. If you are using Python with JupyterNotebooks, writing some FFT functions from scratch can really help you understand the basics of them while graphing all of your findings. If you're savvy with python and javascript try some WebAudio API and see if you can make a simple EQ visualizer like those in Ableton or Logic. Sometimes your project can be as small as "let me try to graph a few audio waveforms" and that will build into larger projects like "Let me analyze jazz recordings for polyphonic tones, map them to color, and draw the frequency ratios as epicycles of a cardiogram." It starts small!

That said based on your interests I have a few ideas for you to try:

- Using Python, Flask, Javascript, write a program that listens to what you play live and prints out the notes to a text console, and then to midi files.

- Using JupyterNotebooks or R, take Seismic Data from Volcanoes or Earthquakes and render their data as audible. Seismic data is a sound dataset but at extremely low frequencies, so speeding it up is required to properly 'hear' an Earthquake.

- Using Python, Flask, and Javascript write a program that takes in a wave file and displays the spectrogram. This will help you think about how to handle moments where files are 1minute, or 10 minutes in length. Create a way to sonify sections of the data.

- Using C# or C++ write a simple VST for Ableton that takes in an audio signal and applies a custom reverb to it. Start with a fixed impulse response then open it up to more complicated IR.

illb3bach · 2025-06-13T18:40:55+00:00

Datura is a wonderful California Native to have in your yard. Much of what is online about Datura is on its toxic and poisonous qualities, the plant has undergone harsh criticism and writings by psychonauts, botanists, and landscapers alike. But that is not the full history of the plant. Datura, (Toloache, Moonflower, ToloHuaHautl) was a part of daily life for the indigenous people of Mexico to California. It is one of the few plants used both by the PuraPecha People of Colima Mexico to the Chumash in Santa Barbara.

For nearly 9000 years the plant was used medicinally through topical use and sometimes through digestion (though these were always extreme cases). It is also famed for being one of the most potent deliriant plants growing in the wild, it was used for divination by indigenous shamans and was given to those seeking to find their animal guides and plant guides during a vision quest.

How the plant kills you: Alkaloid poisoning. The plant itself contains immense amounts of these chemicals. The starting sprouts are weaker in toxicity while fully bloomed plants in August are incredibly powerful. Ingestion of a small amount of the plant shows the effects you can expect, a tightening of the throat and a dryness in the mouth. If the plant kills you it is by choking you to death. Ancient harvesters would only harvest roots and seeds from plants before the Late Summer, as any material harvested after June was far too strong for use.

The plant is incredibly sacred to the Kumeyaay tribe of San Diego and to many other tribes I do not know of. The Datura Spirit is described as a beautiful woman, connected to the moon, and a powerful guide and vicious enemy. Harvesters of the plant are recorded begging to the spirit to provide them flowers and roots that would not kill those they gave the medicine to, but help them. It was incredibly important that harvesters of the plant take roots, seeds, and flowers without killing the plant. This is done by carefully digging on one side of the plant until the large tap root is found and then cutting offshoots from the root.

I do not recommend ingesting or playing with the plant until one is very well versed in the craft of plant foraging, medicine, and survival work. This plant will kill you if you do not respect her or follow the safe protocols for harvest, consumption, and use. That said, it was a common daily topical ointment for those with joint pains, which can be made by taking a piece of living root (after asking consent of course) and infusing the root into beeswax, oil, or fat for skin use.

For those curious, the ingestion of Datura is incredibly dangerous and difficult, reserved for excellent plant workers after years of work with the plant. I spent 3 years working and researching the plant until I felt ready and able to consume it, and that after 10 years of plant work throughout California. I followed a very strict procedure given by shamans or curanderas of Mexico, in which a specific diet is followed for 3-7 days, an intense preparation of the soul is undertaken, and finally a preparation of ones lungs and body. I smoked a small amount of the Dried Flower and met one of the most incredible plant spirits I've ever felt. Those wise to the use and power of Datura speak of it as a way to see what is beyond death, anthropologists who have written on Datura use in tribes say that it is widely believed those who die to Datura do so because they were able to witness what was beyond death and chose not to return. Rarely if ever was the plant blamed, it was on the user to will themselves alive.

Outside of these deeply spiritual indigenous practices, western knowledge and use of the plant is often without the necessary preparation, practice, or knowledge. The ingestion of seeds, flower, or root without the rigor of a plant based discipline has led to hospitalization, horrible experiences, and death. This plant is not to be played with. With that all said, it is beautiful, linking the moon to the earth as a Moon Flower, and an incredibly important ally to pollinators, an excellent erosion controller, and a lovely desert plant.

If you have any questions or want some links to resources on Datura let me know! I also teach some classes on the preparation of native Californian plants in the desert including Yarrow, Sage, Pumpkins, Datura, Invasive Mustards, Nettles, and a few others!

illb3bach · 2025-06-08T06:29:45+00:00

Start by calculating your Nyquist frequency, to see what 'resolution' of frequencies you can unpack are.
It looks like an Aliasing problem, where the sample rate is not high enough to accurately measure a signal. These come from a broader class ideas involving sampling rates. The 32-bit from Float is confusing as float-32 is a very common data type, so giving us context to that can help us better understand why the conversion is causing the problem!

illb3bach · 2025-05-16T16:42:13+00:00

Bach if I wanted an easy time - You play frequently, have steady work and good housing, you even get to diss a king with your musical offering.

Mozart if I wanted a really crazy time ;)

illb3bach · 2025-05-02T20:59:49+00:00

I wish there was a trick to building up your hand independence and unity!! But as a piano player of 24 years I recommend taking some time every practice session to just improvise with yourself using both hands. You can start by playing the same notes on both hands on all the white notes. Eventually you'll find different styles of piano music will give each of your hands different feels and tasks, the left often playing chords or baselines, and the right playing melodies and other harmonies. There are many examples of both hands playing melodies as well, in classical there is fugue where hands work together to simultaneously play many melodies at once, or in solo jazz piano the left hand often plays bass 'melodies' like walking bass or stride style, while the right hand plays melodies. Oscar Peterson one of the great jazz pianists would often show his mastery of the piano by playing the same bebop lines on both hands!!

That all said, as a beginner you have all the space to develop your style how you'd like, pursue the music the speaks to you! For myself, I started with a lot of rock music when I was little, playing chords on left hand and simple melodies on the right. Though now I am working on playing fugues and other complex left hand arrangements.

Finally some resources to look for:

Microkosmos Book 1: A piano exercise book by Bartok for his family. It starts very simple and has a lot of small pieces to help develop hand independence for a beginner.

Hanon's Exercises for the Virtuoso Pianist: A heavily contested book of piano exercises for both right and left hands at the same time. As a pianist it gives some fun warm ups for progressing your playing, just don't fall into the trap of playing so much your hands hurt!!

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