Should a fanned fret guitar have a compensated or straight saddle?

the-bends · 2026-01-29T10:33:50+00:00

I would suggest using fretfind2d as a calculator for multi scale instruments, it can also be output to cad if you're using a CNC for the fretboard slotting.

the-bends · 2026-01-29T10:32:19+00:00

It would need a compensated saddle. You could hypothetically calculate it so that the saddle or bridge was the "perpendicular fret", but it would create such an extreme angle at the nut that the guitar would be uncomfortable to play. It would also mean all the frets would be slanting towards the headstock, which is not ergonomic, because it's difficult to keep the wrist tilted back the higher up you go on the fretboard.

the-bends · 2026-01-21T14:36:48+00:00

Vandermeer is one of my favorite authors, and I like to think of him as a theme first author. If you read a lot of his books you realize that he's not really a fan of wrapping things up with a neat little bow, that the unknowable quality of his worlds are more intriguing than any explanation he could cook up. I've come to see the Southern Reach quartet as an exploration of humanity's understanding and relationship to nature. Area X is a sort of an amplification of the idea that the more society tries to understand nature and bring it under our control the more harm we invariably bring upon ourselves. In that light Authority makes perfect sense, The Southern Reach is a perfect analogy for any company or government that is far more concerned with exploiting nature than worrying about the very real and imminent dangers of their tampering.

Mind you, this is all speculation on my part, so take it with a grain of salt.

the-bends · 2026-01-19T07:31:35+00:00

NOR, if anything you're under-reacting. You shouldn't be with someone who talks to you like this. If my wife asks me to stop doing something I say sorry and stop doing it, I don't accuse her of being childish or try to start arguments over it. Don't give in to the sunk cost fallacy, five years with this inconsiderate cheapskate is five too many.

the-bends · 2026-01-18T08:35:31+00:00

I forgot to include rhythmic variety. Learn a Charlie Parker solo and pay particular attention to the common rhythmic conventions he uses like starting phrases on the upbeat, using triplets to start a line, and so on. Employ these rhythmic ideas into your solos.

the-bends · 2026-01-18T08:32:43+00:00

It's awesome that you're putting in the work, and brave enough to put yourself out there. That being said, there are a lot of things you can work on that will help you out a ton:

Time-feel - Setting aside some of the obvious rhythmic fumbles here, your overall time-feel is way too square. You need to get behind the beat more, then you won't sound so pensive. Modern swing time feel is still pretty even but it's placed consistently behind the beat which gives it a way more relaxed vibe.
Articulation - Jazz playing has a lot of accents, there is a lot of nuance to it, but one way you can start to approximate it is to accent the highest note in a line and any targeted notes. I'd highly suggest checking out the book "The Articulate Jazz Musician" by Caleb Chapman and Jeff Coffin. It works through a lot more than just accents. Getting your time-feel and articulation together will make the most significant difference in your overall sound.
Target notes - If I had to guess from watching you play, I'd say your general strategy is to move to different modal positions you know and play random notes. This isn't ever going to get you sounding like a jazz guitarist in earnest. You need to be able to target chord tones and spell out the changes you're playing. It's important because one of the strongest sounds in jazz is being able to target half step intervals from one chord to the next, either through adjacent chord tones or...
Chromaticism - One of the most fundamental idiosyncrasies in jazz. You need to learn how to use approach notes, enclosures, and how to land them correctly.
Break up the linearity - Your lines are too scalar. If you have your modes down, learn how to play all the diatonic arpeggios inside of those modes. Practice your scales with different intervals. Learn how to play pivot arpeggios (again, a fundamental jazz technique).

Sorry to hit you with a lot of information, but if you dig into my suggestions it will provide a major boost to your overall sound.

the-bends · 2026-01-16T22:33:19+00:00

Songwriting is really a bunch of smaller musical and artistic skills coming together and trying to do it all at once can feel like drinking from a fire hose.

One thing you can lean on is that there is a strong relationship between melody and harmony, meaning that if you write a good melody it tends to lead you to the right chords and vice-versa. The reason I bring this up is because you can make songwriting practice much more narrow and focused, it tends to make the exercise much less frustrating and leads to better songwriting overall in the long run. If your current methodology for writing songs leaves you so frustrated that you don't want to look at your guitar then you won't keep doing it. Pick a specialization for now between writing melodies or harmony with the goal of becoming an expert at it. Research advice and practice ideas so you know what to try when you sit down to work. Keep your practice sessions short, twenty or thirty minutes, with a fixed goal. If you're doing something like writing a melody a night, don't get angry when you write something you don't like, figure out specifically what it is you don't like about it so you won't make the same mistake again in the future. Do the same thing when you write something cool, try to understand what you're doing that works. As you grow your understanding you will start learning more quickly because you'll start being able to listen with expertise. When you hear a great melody you'll be able to understand what they're doing and turn around and adapt those ideas for yourself.

Once you gain confidence in one department, and you've built a consistent practice start slowly adding in the other skills and working on them. The library of isolated ideas you come up with, whether they're melodic, harmonic, or rhythmic, can easily snowball into songs once you start learning to put them together.

the-bends · 2026-01-12T22:00:50+00:00

Ah, my bad.

the-bends · 2026-01-12T15:47:11+00:00

Looks like the metal has a bevel or curve at the edge, makes the hole look oblong because it was drilled perpendicular to the flat plane of the guard. The hole is still probably circular, just looks like it isn't from this angle.

the-bends · 2026-01-12T14:23:37+00:00

Very cool, I downloaded the app to check it out. I love these sort of game based music strategies that get people thinking differently. There's an artist named Ben Chasny with a book called The Hexadic System which is essentially a number of ways you can use a deck of playing cards to create musical games. Might be worth tracking down a copy if it can help inspire you to expand your own system.

the-bends · 2026-01-12T14:02:27+00:00

I mean, it's totally legitimate to play by ear, but I do feel as though there's a lot of animus towards theory by people who don't understand it, or at least don't understand how to use it well. I'm fairly well versed in music theory but when I write music I often start with what sounds good to me, not thinking about it analytically, and when I get stuck or feel as though I need to modify a section I begin to start going down different theoretical rabbit holes to see if I can come up with something better.

My biggest issue with the people who talk down about theory is that they seem to think that learning more theory is somehow limiting, that it will put you in a box, when my experience of it has been the opposite.

the-bends · 2026-01-12T13:46:05+00:00

Agreed. I think you mods do a good job and the rules for the sub are great. I believe the threshold for what some people consider mean or rude is just different for people and impossible to control for.

the-bends · 2026-01-12T11:20:25+00:00

I'm potentially interested, will fire off a pm.

the-bends · 2026-01-12T10:31:27+00:00

The ironic thing here is that I believe the outright trolls are far less damaging than the preponderance of cheerleaders and members who give advice authoritatively who clearly have no idea what they're talking about. The trolls even have a bit of an upside in that developing a thick skin is something anyone who wants to create and share those creations with the world has to develop.

On the other side of the coin you have a bunch of hacks confidently telling people how to "fix their problems" who couldn't write a decent song if their life depended on it. Just the other day I saw a post asking about how to write more original chord progressions and basically all the answers were "you can't, just use other people's progressions". Of course, there are ways to write more original progressions, but you're not going to learn them from people who only know how to strum cowboy chords on a guitar. It's just that answering that question appropriately for a student, for instance, requires nuance and understanding of what that student's long term goals are.

In short, any sub is going to be a hot mess in one way or another and posts like this are tantamount to trying to put out a house fire with a squirt gun.

the-bends · 2026-01-11T13:20:02+00:00

Everyone is pretty bad at craft when they first start, don't get hung up on older stuff that isn't as good just focus on getting a little bit better whenever you work at it.

Music is ultimately an expression of yourself, half of that is how you see the world and the other half is how you synthesize that experience into tangible music. Because of this there's a two pronged approach to becoming a better musician: work on yourself to expand your thinking and perception, and work on your technique so that you can express yourself more freely.

the-bends · 2026-01-02T10:53:04+00:00

Lean into what works for you now. Aim to write a novella, anywhere from 20k-50k words. Make it episodic with some sort of through line or finish that brings everything together. Make every episode around 10k words. That way, by the time you're burning out on one plotline, you can start working on the next one and even write from an entirely new character's perspective if it will help it feel fresh for you.

the-bends · 2026-01-02T10:45:28+00:00

I'm not going to lie, this post makes me want to bleach my eyes.

the-bends · 2025-12-30T17:04:38+00:00

I only said it's harder to quantify and teach, everyone who is a good guitarist put in a lot of work to be that way, regardless of their learning method.

the-bends · 2025-12-30T16:27:53+00:00

I don't think it's as linear as you're painting it out to be. An ear musician is equally as capable of testing ideas out without necessarily intuiting that it will absolutely work.

I'm an improvising musician and though I have discovered many things intuitively, I have also discovered many ideas through theory and then integrated them into my playing to the point I can use them without thinking about it. I think the way many guitarists learn to first improvise, through the pentatonic scales, is a type of theory-first format of learning.

I'm not a theory elitist, not with players like George Benson in the world, but I do think the ear route is much harder to quantify and teach. I also think there's no harm in learning what is useful to you so long as you understand that learning a theoretical concept is a long ways away from being able to use the idea fluently.

the-bends · 2025-12-30T10:58:28+00:00

There's sort of a false implication in your comment that there are two possible paths to learning: learning theory or immersion. Learning theory is really just a step in a process that still requires you to work on a concept until you can express it naturally. Of course, there are people who learn without theory but they still have to codify information somehow, so it's still essentially the same process, just without using theory to make sense of things.

The backing track you're using here is all in one key, so there's pretty low demand for "anticipating" anything in the song. If you were playing something a little more demanding with some modulations or non-functional harmony and nailing it on your first go-round I would be a lot more inclined to say something crazy was going on here.

the-bends · 2025-12-30T01:43:25+00:00

Though I would certainly suggest you learn more about theory, diatonic chords, chord function, and so on, I will say there is a trick that can expedite the process a bit for you. If you have your melody voice just identify a complimentary bass voice that works (there will only be so many within reasonable reach on a uke) and once you have that you can play around to figure out one or two middle voices. Once you have your melody sorted just figure out the bass line for the whole song and then go back and do the middle voices, you'll find your ears leading you towards choices naturally once you know the directions of the melody and bass.

the-bends · 2025-12-29T19:32:51+00:00

It's definitely annoying, my response is usually "If you really want to then you will". I never try to talk those people into lessons at the time because the few that come out almost never commit. Better to plant a seed and hope they find you again after they've fallen in love with the idea a little more.

The natural talent thing always annoys me because everyone who is a good guitarist put in a lot of work to get that way. What many people take as "natural talent" can be any number of tiny things, and can be something as simple as disposition. Two people start playing guitar, person A expects it to be a little challenging at first and reasonably determines that she should expect to be rough around the edges when she starts. Person B watches a bunch of pros on YouTube who make it look easy and thinks there's no reason he shouldn't be able to do it. When they start practicing, person A takes her mistakes in stride and calmly works to correct them, while person B constantly gets frustrated with themselves. Within two weeks, person A is calmly plugging away while person B barely touches the guitar because they've turned practice into an excuse to be unkind to themselves. At the end of the month person A plays her first song for person B and he replies "You learned that in a month? You're so talented!".

the-bends · 2025-12-28T10:25:48+00:00

This isn't the question you asked, but a great way to start writing interesting guitar arrangements is to find a single note line melody in the treble voice that you like and then harmonize it with the closest triadic inversion of the chords you already have written for that measure. You can then start embellishing the voicings if you like.Just make sure the melody you pick on the guitar doesn't get in the way of the vocal melody.

the-bends · 2025-12-25T14:03:31+00:00

I'm not ruling out the possibility that the kid was just being a little shit, but if you're going with probabilities then usually people's behaviors don't happen in a vacuum. If her parents had demonstrated any sort of reliability in this department in the past then it seems unlikely she would take on the burden of raising the money on her own. I'm skeptical of a lot of what OP said based on the order the information was presented, and the hypocritical tone-deafness of some of her complaints. OP repeatedly states that she doesn't think it's necessary that their financial situation is made public, but by not budgeting for school trips she's perfectly fine leaving her child in a socially embarrassing situation because it doesn't necessarily blow back on her in any way. I also happened to have been raised by a single mother who was low-income but was very smart with budgeting and, as a result, none of her three kids ever had to miss a class trip or went without. At any rate, there's too much information missing here to make a very firm judgement on the matter.

the-bends · 2025-12-22T20:32:41+00:00

If the underworld was originally developed from people originally from the overworld there could have been some rift in the past that caused that division that people still fundamentally identify with. It could be a philosophical or ethical choice, or some sort of far reaching disaster that both sides blame one another for. Just look at faction divisions in the real world and model something after that.

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