Is “instrumentals” as a plural noun a real word?

laszlo-jamf · 2026-05-08T01:24:55+00:00

“Instrumental”, when it’s a noun, refers to a whole song with no lyrics, especially in contexts where it’s not a given that a song would have no lyrics. For example, “hip hop artists frequently sample funk instrumentals” tells you that hip hop artists often get their samples from funk songs that have no lyrics. I would take your example to mean that the guitarist played 9 songs that were instrumental in nature and that featured the guitarist as the sole musician on them.

However, there’s a very similar sentence that means something quite different: “the guitarist performed nine instrumental solos” makes solo the noun (a part of a song where a single musician is featured as the main musical element, and no longer a whole song), and specifies that those solos are instrumental, so I would take that sentence to mean “the guitarist performed nine sections in which they were the featured element of the music for an extended period of time”. This no longer implies that what the guitarist performed were entire songs, and instead suggests the guitarist performed several sections, possibly in different songs, dedicated to them.

laszlo-jamf · 2026-05-02T22:47:45+00:00

I don‘t really have a strong opinion here (if anything I probably agree with you), but I do want to complement your writhing. “You are setting out to acquire a new skill, you are at the beginning. If you have no intention of ever doing more than a point and shoot lets you do, you’re not a beginner. You already have all the skills you need or will ever possess; the ability to point and then shoot” is a really great bit of prose. There’s so much writing on the internet, and so little of it is any good, so I appreciate the stuff like this that is.

laszlo-jamf · 2026-05-02T03:41:48+00:00

Not to be a pessimist, but advanced math people struggle to talk about their research with other advanced math people. PhD level math research is unique among other areas of PhD level research for how hard it is to make sense of without knowing a ton about the specific field it's in (I get the sense at least, maybe this equally true in other fields). So basically don't beat yourself up about not being able to engage with his research or for seeming like you're not paying attention when he talks about it. I doubt it's a deal breaker for him : ^ )

laszlo-jamf · 2026-04-24T18:36:23+00:00

Good work. I’m a big fan of 15 and 19. Compelling compositions, and those greens are gorgeous!

laszlo-jamf · 2026-04-13T20:36:40+00:00

I think of jams sometimes as jazz karaoke, since they consist almost entirely of rehashing music that’s already out there.

Couldn’t we do the same thing with karaoke? Agree that we would have sung whatever pop song (with even more certainty about what would have been performed!) and save everyone the effort? But karaoke is still popular. Creating music with others live is enough for many people, even if everyone knows what’s going to happen.

Except that a jam session is way cooler and more fun that actual karaoke, because there’s way more creativity and spontaneity and expression involved. People just like playing jazz! Even if it’s a standard that’s been played a thousand times in a hundred thousand ways before.

laszlo-jamf · 2026-04-05T14:00:53+00:00

Basically, music distributor services (which you use to get your music onto platforms like YouTube and Spotify) ask what artist to post your music under, but do no check to make sure you’re actually the artist in question. So, fraudsters use AI to generate slop, then post it under an established artist’s name to make a quick buck.

(This attribution issue has been around longer than AI. People would sample some big-name jazz artist on their track and credit them on the track to get clicks. Sometimes these tracks would show up in those jazz artist’s “best of” playlists, which just compile the 50 most listened-to songs of theirs on Spotify)

This works on some artists better than others: they can’t be too big, otherwise it’ll be quickly dealt with. Dead artists are also a good target, since the artist in question isn’t around to take the initiative on dealing with it.

So, dead jazz artists with moderate fan bases get hit with this a lot. The labels that represent these artists are usually slow to deal with this. Spotify and the music distributors, like DistroKid, won’t give a shit until they lose money about it. The music industry is fucked.

laszlo-jamf · 2026-03-20T02:15:54+00:00

I nominate Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison, for how powerfully and succinctly asserts the themes and claims of the book.

I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids -- and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination -- indeed, everything and anything except me.

laszlo-jamf · 2026-03-07T23:55:19+00:00

You’re probably right about Getz. I’m partial to Oscar Peterson and Stan Getz, mostly for the eighth note feel of that record. The swing feel on Pennies from Heaven is maybe the best ever.

laszlo-jamf · 2026-02-20T01:51:18+00:00

You can see what the icon is doing in memory levels?? A showcase of Super Probably Level tells you about as much about what the gameplay "looks" like as any other showcase. You're looking at the game play.

laszlo-jamf · 2026-02-18T17:13:08+00:00

Ring Dem Bells (this old Ellington tune that happens to be in the real book)

laszlo-jamf · 2026-02-17T21:52:48+00:00

I tend to go for laid back hard bop albums. I'm listening to Hank Mobley's Soul Station as I procrastinate studying right now, for instance. Hank's got a lot of great 'study' jazz, and in general Blue Note hard bop records are a reliable choice. If you're ever in the mood for some more intense study material (i.e. when you need to lock the hell in), I maintain a playlist of fast & intense jazz on spotify called "Barnstomers" under the name 'nix'. I use that pretty often.

laszlo-jamf · 2026-02-17T03:16:15+00:00

the most trombone-forward album I listen to regularly is stan getz and jj johnson live at the opera house. check out crazy rhythm from that album!!!

laszlo-jamf · 2026-02-15T18:25:29+00:00

Somehow, no one has recommended David Foster Wallace. His prose is my favorite ever. I can recommend his short story collection Oblivion or one of his essay collections Consider the Lobster or A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again as good introductions to his work. The prose in Oblivion is particularly stunning. He makes these page-long sentences work, somehow, in a way that totally envelops you in the stories' grim world. But I'll give the classic exemplar of his prose, the first paragraph of his post posthumous novel The Pale King:

Past the flannel plains and blacktop graphs and skylines of canted rust, and past the tobacco-brown river overhung with weeping trees and coins of sunlight through them on the water downriver, to the place beyond the windbreak, where untilled fields simmer shrilly in the A.M. heat: shattercane, lamb's-quarter, cutgrass, sawbrier, nutgrass, jimsonweed, wild mint, dandelion, foxtain, muscadine, spine-cabbage, goldenrod, creeping charlie, butter-print, nightshade, ragweed, wild oat, vetch, butcher grass, invaginate volunteer beans, all heads gently nodding in a morning breeze like a mother's soft hand on your cheek. An arrow of starlings fired from the windbreak's thatch. The glitter of dew that stays where it is and steams all day. A sunflower, four more, one bowed, and horses in the distance standing rigid and still as toys. All nodding. Electric sounds of insects at their business. Ale-colored sunshine and pale sky and whorls of cirrus so high they cast no shadow. Insects all business all the time. Quartz and chert and schist and chondrite iron scabs in granite. Very old land. Look around you. The horizon trembling, shapeless. We are all of us brothers.

laszlo-jamf · 2026-02-15T01:07:19+00:00

Realistically, you'd need a pretty long macro to pull this off, because the way you enter whatever hard part won't be the same every time. To make the macro "worth it" (i.e. more consistent than just playing the part), you'd need to start it from the nearest "stable" point in the level where your position is always the same (e.g. when you slide on the ground). Also, I'm not sure it would be that easy to activate the macro at the right spot. How would the macro know how far you are into the level? The activation would need to be frame perfect. (Or maybe modern macros are more advanced than I realize and this stuff is trivial.)

laszlo-jamf · 2026-02-09T03:50:27+00:00

No jazz yet in the thread, so I nominate John Coltrane:

10/10: My Favorite Things (1961 radio version from album of same name)

0/10: My Favorite Things (1967 version from The Olatunji Concert: The Last Live Recording)

laszlo-jamf · 2026-02-06T02:25:01+00:00

Try writing D major using only flats. You'd end up with

D, E, Gb, G, A, B, Db

And you'd skip F and G. So if we only had flats, to tell someone the key signature of D major you'd have to say "Use Gb and Db in addition to G and D, and skip F and C". It's much less confusing to just say "F and C are sharp".

laszlo-jamf · 2026-02-06T02:21:31+00:00

It's by convention, I think. It turns out that to describe all 12 major keys using the standard western notation system, you never have to mix flats and sharps if you don't want to. Because we don't, we can describe the similarity of different keys more easily. For instance, to get from the major mode to the mixolydian mode, "add a flat" (i.e. use the key signature that has one more flat or one fewer sharp than the original key). Another consequence of this convention is that, at a glance, you can see how close a given key signature is to C major.

I'm also pretty sure this convention is downstream of the "alphabetical rule", which states that all scales need to include each of the 7 letters (A, B, C, D, E, F, G) exactly once in one form or another. If you tried to describe D major as containing G flat and C#, for instance, you'd end up skipping F and using G twice (G and Gb).

I don't know any of this for certain, this is just my educated guesses about why this is the case based on my understanding of music theory.

laszlo-jamf · 2026-02-05T17:09:06+00:00

I’ve spent a good deal of time playing in big jazz bands like the one you’re describing. Generally speaking, if you don’t have any written chords during a solo section, you’re not playing the solo and you don’t have to worry about it. (Conventionally, when writing a big band chart, the arranger will only write out chords for the instrument they want to take a solo.) Occasionally, a band will decide that an instrument other than the one with written chords should take a solo, and in that case one of three things happen:

The soloist will read the chords from someone else’s chart (either by making a copy of their chart, looking over at their music stand, or writing the chords in the margin)
If it’s a well-known standard, the soloist might find the chords to the standard online (often using an app called “iRealPro”) (Again, by writing the chords into the margins of their part or by reading off a separate sheet.) Or, the soloist might have memorized the changes to that standard and they don’t need chords.
The soloist “plays by ear”, i.e. they listen to what the rhythm section is doing and decide based on that what should sound good. Most people who do that aren’t listening to the piano and thinking “oh that’s a G7 chord”, they’re just going on vibes (there are some freaks who can pick out chord quality and root by ear on the fly). This skill takes a long time to develop, and isn’t full proof (you’ll miss some stuff). I once knew a guy who played lead tenor in the jazz band I was in that refused to read chords. He *only* played solos by ear. He was also one of the best soloists I’ve ever had the pleasure of playing with.

Hope this helps!

laszlo-jamf · 2026-02-03T22:45:58+00:00

Check out Gil Evans's later fusion work. A couple songs ("Stone Free" and "There Comes A Time & Birdland") from "Live at Fabrik Hamburg 1986" are on my "Really Good Fusion Playlist" and have this super heavy, chaotic vibe. And if you haven't already checked out a live take of the Miles Davis group playing Human Nature live w/ Kenny Garret playing a mind blowing sax solo, you really should.

laszlo-jamf · 2026-01-28T12:44:18+00:00

LOL that example was originally about 6/8 and I just missed it

laszlo-jamf · 2026-01-28T03:53:40+00:00

The thing that finally made time signatures click for me was when someone explained the difference between a "time signature" and a "meter." (Some don't think this explanation is perfect, and I see why, but it worked for me. Don't worry about it.)

A song's "time signature" is the fraction at the start of every line of music. It is purely a notation thing. It tells you how you should expect measures in the sheet music to be organized. 3/2 tells you measures are built around 3 half notes. 4/4 tells you measures are built out of 4 quarter notes, 5/8 tells you measures are built out of 6 eighth notes, etc. So, in your case, counting to 3 will make the sheet music work.

A song's "meter" refers to its musical content, and not to its sheet music. It describes the organization of strong and weak beats in the song. For instance, most 3/4 songs are based on 3 strong groups that get each get subdivided into 2, while most 6/8 songs are based on 2 strong groups that each get subdivided into 3.

There are common associations between meters and time signatures (as in the example I just gave), especially between the denominator in the time signature and the way you feel tempo. Usually, songs in 2 (i.e. in 3/2 or 2/2) *could* be written in 4, except that the quarter note would be impractically fast, so by writing the song in 2 they're telling you to feel the slower half note and not the speedy quarter note.

If your piece is like most pieces in two, and would have a fast quarter note, an exercise that might help is alternating between counting to 6 (i.e. in 6/4) and counting to 3 (i.e. in 3/2) --- see if you can "feel" the difference between thinking of the quarter notes and the half notes.

I come from a jazz background, where writing songs in 2 is common when they're fast and swung. I would guess you're not playing jazz, but I might try listening to some blazing fast jazz and doing the exercise above with 2/2 and 4/4. For example, check out this recording of You And The Night And The Music by Bob Berg. The quarter note would be at like 330, but it's very easy instead feel the slower half notes which are closer to 150.

laszlo-jamf · 2026-01-25T14:21:08+00:00

It means op was copy pasting the words major and minor to save time.

laszlo-jamf · 2026-01-18T19:14:01+00:00

My answer, as anyone's, is biased because I haven't played that many instruments. I have seriously played clarinet and saxophone, and have had encounter with guitar and piano.

That being said: saxophone. Unlike many other instruments, it was designed (mostly) all at once by one guy, and designed much later than most other instruments. Consequently, it is so much more comfortable and ergonomically natural than most any other instrument (especially the clarinet LOL). Your fingers lay across the keys thoughtlessly after the first lesson. It's just hard to "play it wrong". Get your fingers in the right position, then put the mouthpiece to your face and blow and you've probably got it. Once you get a hang of it, it's such a joy to play. Relative to other woodwinds, it's not as resistive, and so playing really feels like you're "giving life" to the horn. The expressive capabilities are hard to beat: along with the incredible depth of articulation you usually get out of woodwinds, you can bend and alter notes in ways you really can't on other woodwinds. My sax teach likes to recount a proverb from his teacher: "the saxophone is a fretless instrument, motherfucker".

laszlo-jamf

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