my ukulele progress

I've been a bit busy lately. I work in logistics/supply chain and I don't get the luxury of hiding out and indulging my paranoia. If I don't work, then communities don't get food--although what they seem to be desiring most of all is instant noodles, so that whilst they hide from the virus they poision their bodies with MSG. I'm afraid I offended some people with what seems a cavalier attitude. I'm just nihilistic. I wash my hands; I avoid getting other people's bodily fluids in my orifices (a good principle in general even outside the pandemic context!); at that point it is all in the lap of the gods. There's no need for bottled water or toilet paper or overthinking.

And on that note of simplicity, what I have been doing in my spare time is re-acquainting myself with the mixolydian mode. I plan on using that mode in conjunction with my dom7 chords in the rhythm changes. The mixolydian is the default pattern in that context because of the flatted seventh in the mode and the flatted seventh is, of course, the signature sound of the dominant chord. Even though I know the mixolydian I have been trying to get a little bit more detailed in that knowledge. For me that amounts to being able to move horizontally (from string to string). That breaks up the mode and makes is sound more musical rather than like a scale. It helps if you want to make double stops. So that's what I'm doing as the world descends into its silly maelstrom
 
ripcock, please look at your PMs.
 
I made a stew of sorts for my wife. It consisted mainly of chicken thighs, red beans, and rice. She likes it. Happy wife, happy life. Because of that principle, I cannot play instruments late at night, my preferred time. But what I can do is think. And I'm still thinking and wondering why people eat so poorly during this quarantine. I can personally attest to the fact that people are buying a ton of instant noodles, which is a cancer cocktail...just add water. Why? I realize you have to stay at home, but why stay at home and eat crap? I literally just came from the local market where I bought some chicken and vegetables and eggs. There's no reason for crap. Yeah...I get it; you stay in your domicile until you cannot breathe and then go to the hospital. I grant that. but why eat instant noodles until that moment arrives?

Governments are getting more and more Draconian. The one upside of the approaching martial law is the confiscation of toilet paper. People cornered the market on toilet paper with the thought of exploiting the community's weakness in this trying time. It will be great to see the government take it away by main force. Capitalism sucks.

I played around with my cigar box guitar in open D tuning. I always use a slide with that instrument because when I re-attached the neck I screwed it up, rendering the action to be measured in inches. I mainly played pentatonic stuff, both blues-based things as well as some funk (focusing on the tonic and dominant degrees)

I did some other stuff which I will annotate later since I need to go right now.


I was fumbling around with the B section of my rhythm changes. Traditionally, it is just a III VI II V progression and it is normally played with the dom7 chord quality. I changed it a little bit. First of all, I have been playing this progression with all the chord roots on the C string. So I am going from the 8th fret, to the 13th, to the 6th fret, to the 11th. Obviously, that has a low/high/low/high pitch thing going on. So that's the first thing I had going on. Secondly, I changed the two lower chords to 13 chords. I know that's no big deal; jazz musicians actually call the 13 chord a 7 chord.

Therefore by B section runs: G#13 C#7 F#13 B7

The other thing I did was figure out an ending that I liked. Rhythm changes ends on a root dominant root progression. I like to end on a high note, so I play those last three chords as E6 (rooted on the 4th fret), B7 (rooted on the 2nd fret, drawing the pitch downward), Emaj7 (rooted on the 7th fret). I like this ending because the Emaj7 is an octave higher than the E6. I like this maj7 chord because I play it as a diagonal barre and that's fun.
 
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I've been working a lot lately but I just browsed the site and found several posts relating to cheap ukes. People seem to be thinking that cheap ukes are a different beast altogether and need special attention. However ukes are ukes. I am a fan of high-end ukes because of the personalization and guarantee of quality. But a cheap uke can good as long as there's no intonation problems. Yes, they are ugly and assembly line and might have high action or pokey frets, but they play.

I have been doing some thinking lately. I was thinking about a reading jag i've been on: Golden Age British detective fiction. What I really like about it (aside from being a New Historicist's gold-mine for historical data) is how unrealistic it is. I like that these novels have their own diegetic space; their worlds have been largely fabricated and I appreciate the creativity involved in creating this faux world.

And I noticed that my musical tastes run parallel to my literary ones. When I see people playing perfect renditions of existing songs, I mentally, if not physically, shrug. It is perfect but I have to wonder if a monkey could do that if you gave it enough bananas. What I value is creation as opposed to emulation. Emulation is all about the fingers while creation is about something deeper. And that's what this diary demonstrates. Admittedly, my music probably sucks when viewed on the spectrum of possibilities, However it is mine and spontaneous and sincere.
 
Listening to the greatest Black Sabbath album, Sabotage. That's how you can legitimate a Black Sabbath fan: if their favorite album isn't either Sabotage or Technical Ecstasy then they didn't grow up with Black Sabbath; they're johnny-come-latelys who have synthesized the experience through media.

But on to creativity. In the kitchen, I made a nice casserole:

1. softened butternut squash cubes in boiling white stock with cinnamon and brown sugar.
2. added a cup of millet cooked with baharat
3. added a pound of ground lamb (with some garlic a lot of tikka masala spice and green chiles) which had been browned
4. added a pound of white cheddar (as an uxorial concession; I would have preferred no dairy or at least some Stilton)
5. poured in a pie dish and baked so that the flavors would marry (if I had had my wits about me, I would have had a pastry shell ready)

In terms of ukulele playing, the main aspect worth mentioning is the changing of instruments. I put away my beloved Yorkie and got my Kamaka out. I have a mixed relationship with the Kamaka. My Yorkie is my love because I created it. It was my vision made real and for that reason it has a special place in my heart. However I have to admit that the Kamaka plays better in certain ways. It is much more resonant. Usually that doesn't matter because I mute it while playing, but when you just give it a big strum, it sure can echo. And it sustains the glissandi very well. I like that. That being said, I still have an awkward relationship of the Kamaka because of the way it was built. My Yorkie was built to be everything I love. The Kamaka was built to be all that I don't love. It is kept in gCEA tuning and it has a spruce sound board to emphasize that end of the spectrum--a spectrum that I definitely do not like. Why did I spend $2000 to have something I don't especially like? That's a matter of philosophy. I am endowed with an opinion and I embrace that opinion. But I am aware that an opinion is just as opinion. So I want a ukulele that contradicts me and demonstrates the other, more traditional, point of view. I got it because I didn't like it. Similarly look at my master's thesis. I am decidedly a scholar of ancient Greek poetry. So what did I do my thesis on? A Latin historian. Why? Because I didn't want to be pigeon-holed by my own personality. Same thing with the Kamaka.

And the Kamaka does streamline things a bit since it is for all intents and purposes a three string instrument. I was playing my shrill chord progressions today with that high G, but filling in the gaps with only the upper three strings. I have to go now and attend to the casserole, but I'll try to return and expand on what I was doing.
 
I've been prepping for all day--at least intermittently. I made porridge, red beans and rice, and now pinto beans. I still don't understand the Covid mindset. People are buying a ton of instant noodles. Why? Haven't they been to the store lately? There's meat and vegetables and other whole foods. It makes no sense. But, then again, neither does it make sense that gun shops are considered essential services. Yet, their lobby has won the day. Amazing.

And equally amazing is my practice. As I mentioned earlier, the gCEA tuning really simplifies things since it essentially a 3-string instrument. It limits your choices and allows you to focus on what is actually there for use.

I did practice moving from an Em6 to finger picking. The E major pentatonic still is the easiest and most natural shape to work with. I tried using some modes of the harmonic minor and while none of them really sounded bad, they didn't quite sound right either. If i contented myself with only using part of the shape I suppose I could use the G Ionian #5 and tie it into the G of the Em6.

That lead to practicing the harmonic minor modes themselves. I am fairly fluent with the central ones, but the less used ones, the ones based on the II, III, VI, and VII degrees, are a bit hazy. They definitely deserve a bit more attention.

I also practiced minor arpeggios. Basically played a 12 bar blues in E using arpeggios. I thought it sounded good, but my wife didn't as it woke her up. But it was after noon, so it was fair game. She says real instruments just penetrate the walls in a way that recordings cannot.
 
I have to wonder if I'm the only one not really affected by the pandemic. I see a lot of headlines about how teenagers or this-or-that population is coping with it all. Maybe I am in a perpetual state of self-quarantine but my life hasn't changed. I read and play music. I go about the neighborhood and read a little in the sun. I go to work. What is there to cope with? I think I would like to have a haircut but cannot until the place re-opens. That's the extent of my anxiety in this crisis.

Musically I haven't felt very adventurous. Since I have the gCEA uke out, I thought I would play the one thing it is useful for, "Stairway to Heaven." and then I naturally morphed into the chord progression for "Hotel California" and ended by starting to wank around with the melody for a Led Zeppelin sound which is very easy since it is basically the Dominant shape pentatonic. I think I'll re-start that tomorrow and include the entire song including the solo.

I also ran across a new picking pattern called the Cotten pick. I don't know if it is authentic or not, but it sounds good. It is essentially an outside/inside pick with a little extra up front:

P1 P2 I
P1 M (outside)
P2 I (inside)

Instead of using the regular PIMA fingering, I prefer PPIM. And the P1 and P2 above are the P on the G string and the P on the C string.

This is a nice pattern regardless of whether it was actually employed by Cotten. It sounds better on low G; the A string pops out more. With the high G, the high notes are twice as frequent and as the Invisible Hand of Adam Smith would have it twice as valueless.


addendum: I spoke too soon. For lunch I found myself eating bunker food. Therefore I have been impacted by the virus. I had a frozen turkey burger and a can of foule. You know times are rough if I'm frying a frozen meat patty and throwing some tomatillo sauce on top. The foule has a special covid19 angle. My wife having been swept up in the pandemonium that the media was inculcating wanted some toilet paper. I told her she could go to Walmart with the rest of the sheep, or a little ethnic market I knew about. She went to the ethnic market and doubled our toilet paper stockpile from 4 rolls to 8. Luckily she didn't get persuaded to invest in bottled water by the media. We have two faucets at home with perfectly good water which the virus cannot alter. My wife bought the foule to legitimize her presence at the market. So happily I received some nice fava beans to which I added olive oil and lemon and a handful of sabzi dolmeh as garnish.
 
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I haven't updated in a while.

I just made a pot of carne adovada. I tried to up the ante flavor-wise. I increased the red chili content but also augmented the brown sugar to keep the balance.

I had some strumming issues. With all this damned hand-washing that I am required to do, my hands got all dried out and the fingertips cracked. It was painful to strum. I used some triple-antibiotic ointment and repaired the worst crack. I don't know if it was the moisture or the three antibiotics, but it is half-way healed. In the past, when this happened I super-glued my cracks shut. I may still do that if the crack isn't filled in by Sunday when I return to work.

However, my cracked middle finger didn't really impact my finger picking.

I caught the bug of a ten-day blues challenge in E on Patreon. I didn't actively participate by uploading videos. I just became interested once again in pentatonics. Even though I was thoroughly hamstrung with a re-entrant uke, I played a lot of shapes. My ukuleles are designed to have a lot of shapes. I have seven (the five standard shapes + two shapes at an octave higher). I just played around with connecting bars of chords with bars of finger picked fills. In the ten day challenge there was a day devoted to turnarounds; I'll study those since you can never have enough turnarounds.

Moving from E minor pentatonic to Em6: I practiced filling in some notes with the Em6, one of the central chords in my Rhythm Changes. In the past I found the Leading Tone shape of the E major pentatonic very nice in this regard. I filled out my toolbox with a few more scales which I don't readily use. I used the E dominant diminished scale and the E whole tone scale. The former has all the chord tones in it. The latter seems to work because it is weird. The only connection between the m6 and the whole tone scale is the E. I suppose it sounds purposely recherche and therefore jazzy. One thing I like about these new scales is that they are essentially above the chord on the fret board whereas the major pentatonic is below. I like the sonic options. These scales occupy the first seven frets of the fret board. That covers more than a third of the total real estate.
 
I received my government check today which is pure gravy since I've been working continuously throughout the pandemic. Feeling a little bit flush I went crazy at the market, spending $73 which, for my wife and me, is rather indulgent. We eat whole foods and things without labels as a rule. It is hard to rack up a bill when you eat like that. I think that's why the so-called quarantine means nothing to me. I quarantine myself every day. I don't go out to restaurants and let Food Inc. poison me, so I'm not really feeling the pinch. By the way, people are still buying really crappy survival food. Why can't they just buy some meat and vegetables to renew their flesh while they wait for the end?

I did a cursory glance at musical websites to get a feel for what knowledgeable people are using around certain chord qualities. Here's what I culled for my current project:

m6: I already had that taken care of with major pentatonic and dominant diminished
7b9: again the dominant diminished (alternatively, the Phrygian Dominant my favorite scale)
m7: Dorian mode
7: Mixolydian mode
maj7: major pentatonic

That was for the A section

The B section is traditionally all dom7 chords. However I play half of the bars as 13 chords. Dom7 chords obviously use a Mixolydian scale and 13 chords work with what the sites were calling Lydian Dominant scales, but I grew up calling that the Overtone Scale. The Phrygian Dominant also doesn't clash with dom7 chords but it does with the 13.

Despite all this new gleaned info, I didn't put it to practice. For whatever reason I got hung up on that E located on the 9th fret of the G string. For some reason I just felt drawn to it and decided on just building stuff around it.

The first thing I did was to collate the Tonic shapes of the E minor and E major pentatonics. This is a bit tricky because if you get the ratio wrong it doesn't sound right. Like most people, I use the minor pentatonic as a base and I jump into the major pentatonic just for a little bit of flavor. The problem arises when you use too much flavor. I think the problem is that the major pentatonic is just the relative major--i.e., it is just the minor pentatonic in a different key. Therefore if you play the major pentatonic too much it just sounds like you're playing the minor pentatonic in another key instead of adding some flavor to the original key you were playing in.

After that I started jamming on a progression. Well it wasn't actually a progression because its formula would be: I I I I I I I I etc.

I stayed on the I chord and the only difference was the chord quality. I wonder what that's called in theory because it isn't a progression. It doesn't progress. Anyway, here's the chord qualities I was playing with:

E7sus2, E7sus4, Em add9, Em, Em7b5, E+.

Actually the two sus chords were the kernel of what I was doing and I added the other qualities as variation before returning to the sus chords. I will return to it later, and describe which ones worked the best.
 
I just glanced and saw that there's a thread exulting in cheap ukuleles. I don't really understand. When I was a child I paid $23.89 (that price is still seared in my mind) a month to pay for a flute. It was a crappy instrument but it was all I could afford. I certainly don't romanticize and rationalize it. I would never pine for the days when it is all I had. My current flute's tail piece alone cost $1700 (pure silver) and I love it. I've never found myself thinking that penny-for-penny that first flute really played better than it had a right to. So, again, I don't understand. Is it a pride-thing to be able to say that you've squeezed some music out of something for a minimal price?

Another one of those perennially unanswerable queries. Something less mysterious was me filling my pen's reservoir and tucking my pocketbook into the inside pocket of my favorite sports jacket. I was going to the park to sit, and think, and write out what I'm currently doing for my rhythm changes project. It is getting a bit unwieldy. What follows is a description of what I'm currently doing and it isn't meant to be prescriptive. And it doesn't take into consideration any variations such as tonic, dominant, or tritone substitutions. It is more of a baseline. Here's what I doing bar for bar, with the chords on the left and the scale I use for improv on the right.

1a. I (Em6) major pentatonic/diminished dominant
1b. V of II (C#7b9) diminished dominant/Phrygian dominant
2a. II (F#m7) Dorian
2b. V (B7) mixolydian/phrygian dominant
3. same as 1
4. same as 2
5a. I (EΔ7) major pentatonic
5b. V of IV (E7) mixolydian
6a. IV (AΔ7) major pentatonic
6b. IV (A°)
7. same as 1
8. same as 2
9. same as 1
10. same as 2
11. same as 3
12. same as 4
13. same as 5
14. same as 6
15. I (Em6) major pentatonic/dominant diminished
16a. V (B7) mixolydian/phrygian dominant
16b. I (Em6)
17. III (G#13) Lydian dominant
18. III (G#13)
19. VI (C#7) Phrygian dominant
20. VI (C#7)
21. II (F#13) Lydian dominant
22. II (F#13)
23. V (B7) Phrygian dominant
24. V (B7)
25. same as 1
26. same as 2
27. same as 3
28. same as 4
29. same as 5
30. same as 6
31a. I (Em6)
31b. V (B7)
32. I (Em6)


That's the current state of affairs in my rhythm changes. The only thing I have been contemplating is to alter the voicings of one of the A sections.
 
I saw another covid thread today and I was quite nonplussed by its appeal to communal insanity (you may not be the only one going crazy, but don't include me). At this point, there's only one thread I would like to see: "if you got infected, who would you take out before you die." I know my answer; I know in whose face I would sneeze in the hopes that he would in turn infect his child and have to watch his son die a slow but inexorable death of asphyxiation.

I drove my wife to the pharmacy today and marveled at the stupidity of the precautions. I saw people in their car taking off their masks with their hands. If there is any virus on the mask, it is now on their hands, and about to enter their bodies. Amazing. It is all so haphazard that makes you wonder if it is doing anything at all or if we did nothing if that would have the same results. And to top it off, I'm waiting for the boomerang affect. With the Republicans pushing America to get back to normal before the flu has ended, it is inevitable that there will be a second period of infections which will probably kill more people than the first. It reminds me of an old James Fenimore Cooper novel depicting two crews of sealers trapped on Antarctica. They made it through the winter which was bad enough, but just when they thought they had turned the corner, most of them died in the spring (because of the winds and the concomitant wind chill).

I just made some soup based on an account of the soup that Toscanini favored. It is essentially a grain and butter, with some celery and some stock. I substituted quinoa for the rice in the recipe as well as added some green onion and garlic.

A broke with my usual habit and learnt an existing song. It was the Beatles' "Norwegian Wood." I eyeballed the sheet music and got it in about 30 seconds. Then I was "what's next?" I don't actually understand the appeal of playing existing music. It is rather boring. All you're doing is painting by number.

I rinsed my palate of creativity by playing several scales in E. I know a few exotic, Eastern scales that are rather asymmetrical. I descended with them and ascended with other scales. The idea was a kind of East meets West type of thing where I tried to find the canonical scales that suited the Eastern ones. The best matches were the dominant scales and minor-based scales.
 
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As I mentioned earlier, rhythm changes is written in the ubiquitous AABA format. I think I can improve upon playing the "A" section the same way thricely. It seems as if I play the second "A' differently, it will make it less stolid. On the other hand, repetition is what makes music music. I may be destroying the song by changing too much, but I have to try nonetheless. I can always revert.

So let's see now, where are my roots as I currently play them? The first 8 bars go: 4 6 9 11 4 6 9 11 4 2 4 6 9 11.

It is evident that the way in which I currently play this section ascended generally as the 4 6 9 11 shows. What if I changed the roots to 7 1 2 2. In that case my Em6 starts higher on the neck, but then, instead of ascending in pitch, the remaining chords of this group all go low and cluster around the first fret. The only thing that gives me pause is the F#m7 with the root on the E string. I hate that shape I'll try it and see if it miraculously has fixed itself in the manner of BbΔ. If I still do have difficulties with it, I may want to try a Cm7, the tritone substitution of F#m7 and a much easier chord
 
well that certainly shook things up a bit. As I started mixing up the inversions of the chords, it made things a bit more interesting. I could change whether the pitch ascends or descends between chords. I could easily do that for an hour. There are so many variations now that it is possible to just strum and enjoy the new sounds indefinitely. To be honest, I'm probably going to do just that. Then, I foresee that there will come a time when I ametrically insert some improv between the chords. Then, once I see what works and what doesn't, I will play in time.
 
Whiling away the time before I have to get ready for work I severely redacted my songbook. It should be born in mind that my songbook isn't like most peoples which contain chord charts and lyrics of campy old songs and pop songs that are desired to be a player's repertoire. My songbook contains the elements with which I make my songs.

I eliminated a lot of pages which were no longer necessary or had been deprecated by better pages. Here are the pages that made the cut.

page 1: harmonizations of the modes
page 2: shapes for the modes of the harmonic minor
page 3: fretboard diagram of open D7 and open D
page 4: formulae for 11 twelve-bar jazz progressions with 7 turnarounds attached
page 5: the four movable shapes for the chord qualities I find essential (m6, m7, m9, madd9, Δ7, ø, 13, augmented, sus, triads--plus all their variations
page 6: E Pentatonics with all the notes written out
page 7: shapes for all modes
page 8: pentatonic shapes
page 9: a two-page lay-out of exotic scales such as Hungarian minor, Scriabin, enigmatic, etc

That gives, I think, a rather good snap-shot of what I'm doing musically. Of course, there are things I pick up, play with, and discard...but they don't make it into the songbook. Things like cycle progressions or blues licks or finger picking patterns. Those things are fun but they aren't part of my musical core like the songbook is.
 
The wife wanted something like carne adovada but quicker. Carne adovada is just braised pork or chicken or, in theory, beef. You need a fatty cut of meat like a shoulder roast, so that the process of braising can break down the fat and connective tissue, and those things become part of the flavor. It doesn't work with lean meat. Braising makes things tender and juicy. You cannot make lean meat any tenderer or juicier than it is; you will only make little pieces of shoe leather. So you cannot properly braise yuppy meat like chicken breast or pork tenderloin without desiccating it.

So to emulate the carne adovada vibe, I combined sauteed chicken and a chili sauce.

chili sauce: 1 cup red chili powder, 1/2 cup of brown sugar, 1/4 cup of oregano, a little less of cumin seeds mortared and pestled, 1 cup of stock.
chicken: sauteed in garlic, lime juice, and onion salt.

When the chicken was done, I poured the sauce on top and it seemed satisfactory.

After that was done, I played around with some ideas on the ukulele. What I'm currently diverting myself with are arpeggios. When I was a kid, arpeggios were fundamental and easy because with real instruments you need to know how to play the note before you can play it. With the ukulele you can just play shapes and not worry about the notes. So I had to do some thinking to realize what notes I wanted in my arpeggios and where those notes were.

My ukuleles are designed to end on E6. That means I could go three octaves, from E4 to E6. So I played around with that range of notes using the arpeggios of Em, Em7, Edim7. For me, these are the fundamental sounds of music. At least American music. Although I've listened a lot of Julian Bream, I don't actually know anything about the European tradition. But in the United States it is a matter of "Graecia capta ferum victorem cepit," as Horace said in his second book of epistles. Captured Greece captured its savage captor (with its culture). Same thing in the United States. African slaves enslaved the U.S. with its music. Slave music overlapped with the European inheritances to create blues, jazz, rock. And the sound that those genres have at their core is the aiolian mode. And it is my contention that the ukulele, like a guitar, was meant to play aiolian music. That's a bit polemical. Let's just say that the aiolian is my sound and the fact that the fret markers indicate the minor scale is just a coincidence.

Regardless, here's what I did with the arpeggios. I was grooving on a nice Harmonic Minor progression. Sometimes, when the progression looped around to Em, the tonic chord, I would finger pick the arpeggios to break up the chords. Arpeggios are symmetrical and fun to play, but the thing that makes them interesting are the different ways to play them. There isn't a big range of notes as I mentioned. The choices involve which E4 to start with and how to form the arpeggios around them. My preference is to start with the E on the C string because I hate open strings. So the E on the E string is out. I could start with the E on the G string except that wouldn't work on my re-entrant Kamaka. So I prefer the E4 on the C string.
 
I had some sujuk sausage and Oaxaca cheese for breakfast and followed it up with some chord substitution experimentation.

Focusing on just the dominant chord substitutions, I played around with exchanges between the V7 and

iim7
II7
#Vdim7
7b9
the v of v

They sounded pretty good and the ones that didn't were just a victim of awkward inversions. I bet if I would have found the right voicing, all of them would have been great.
 
So what have I been doing? I've been noticing the obvious, which isn't always easy. For example, I was kind of amazed when in the early morning the western side of the valley gets the morning sun before the east. I would have thought that the eastern side, being closer to the rising sun would get its affects first. Once you think about it, it makes sense. The mountains in the east create an obstacle to the rising sun and it is only after the sun is higher that the eastern part of the valley steps outside of the shadows of the mountains. It makes sense once you think about it, but you never think about it.

The same phenomenon exists with diminished 7 chords. I know on an abstract level all about them, but I never really thought about them, and when I did it was really illuminating.

I wanted to play some arpeggios. My mind works in the aiolian mode naturally. When I looked at E minor and where the notes occurred on the fret board, those E's and B's and D's just popped up everywhere. Patently I could, with a little ratiocination, map out how to do a little three-octave run. But when I looked at the Edim7, my mouth was agape. It was so regular and so symmetrical. It was kind of like Platon's music of the spheres where music and mathematics seems to meld.

I instantly saw the possibilities. In the matter of Edim7, the shapes range from open position all the way to the 19th fret. I do not think I have the ability to articulate all the ramifications that I have in mind. Suffice it to say that I am going to try to play three of the four notes of a shape and then move on to the next shape for the last note of the arpeggio, and then to recursively pick the next shape until I hit the E6 on the 19th fret.

At this point I don't have a game-plan, but I will experiment and update.

Just to illustrate what I'm talking about, take the lowest instance of Edim7 (0101). You pluck the first three notes, G C# E, but then move to the next shape (3434) and when you pluck its first note, A#, it completes the arpeggio started by the G C# and E of the previous shape. And you keep on doing this 'til you get up to the 19th fret. Another way to think of it is to visualize the triangle-shaped chord (G major) but you play it on the lowest three strings instead of the highest. You just play this chord on every third fret and you've got yourself a nice little run.

Once you hit the 19th fret, to descend back down to the nut you could just do what you just did backwards. However, another option is to switch to the upper three strings and form the other triangle chord (the G7). In this case, that would be x 19 18 19. Now play the strings backwards (A string, E string, then C string). Play this chord and then move it down three frets and play again. Do this 'til you hit x010. How's that for a sweet roundabout from the nut to the 19th fret back to the nut.

And that's only one option. The easiest alteration would be to change the order of the strings picked. For example in the descending example I just cited, you could for every chord pluck the A string then the C string and then the E string. That variation is cool because you would end on E, the tonic of the chord.

The other variation, the one I am more partial to, is to vacillate between two shapes. In this instance you would take the first shape (0101) and the second shape (3434) and then alternate between the two. That would look like this: on the G string G and A#, on the C string C# and E, on the E string E and G and on the A string A# and C#. Of course, if you wanted to go to the third and fourth shapes, you wouldn't play the C# of the second shape. You would defer that 'til you reached the third shape and link it all up. Also if you wanted a denser sound, you could after, combining the first and second shapes, combine the second and third shapes. You'd be repeating the second shape, but no one would notice in this musical context.
 
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With a liberal lump of serendipity, I ran across a reference delineating an application for the VII dim7, which I just happened to be playing around with.

The concept is that VII dim7 affords rather smooth transitions in modulation. If I understood it correctly, the procedure is to play the dim7, then play a dom7 that is rooted in one of the flatted notes of the dim7.

For example, in the key of E the VII dim7 is D#dim7, whose notes are A D# F# C. Flatten those notes: Ab, D, F, Bb, and now go to the key where those notes are the V chord of the root.

The keys with those V chords are G, Bb, Db. What's cool is that if you're travelling around the circle of fifths, these keys are every third key just like the dim7 recurs every third fret.

Just to lay it all the table, here's what I did. I took a little progression in the Harmonic minor harmonization and I played in one big cycle around the circle of fifths:

Em
B7
Am
D
D#dim7
D7 (transition from E to G; the dim7 and then the 7 require some resolution/turnaround)
Gm
D7
Cm
F
F#dim7

F7 (transition to Bb)
Bbm
F7
Ebm
Ab
Adim7

Ab7 (transition to Db)
C#m
Ab7
F#m
B
Cdim7

B7 (transition back to E)

That's a cool a cycle. I did the keys in order. I wonder what it would sound like to mix them up and go from E to Bb to G to Db? Anyway, what is interesting is that in all these keys the dim7's (D#, F#, A, C) all have the same notes. It is what holds this cycle together.
 
I had been working on the dim7 cycle mentioned above. Obviously the project is inchoate and what I was working on was a smoother transition between the keys. It sounded a bit abrupt to my ears. What sounded good to me was to shuffle a note in the dom7 after the dim7. For example I would play F#dim7, then F7/F7sus4/F7. For some reason the little bit of variety seemed to make it work better.

However that line of musical investigation came to a sudden but temporary close because at work I bent back the nail of my right ring finger. That's my main strumming finger. So strumming was out of the question for a while. In the interim I have been playing around with finger picking. Mostly I was playing dim7 arpeggios--trying different articulations to try to make it sound more musical. I also was trying to combine different scales as a basis for improvisation.

Something that didn't work was combining the lydian dominant and the phrygian dominant. The phrygian dominant sounds so exotic and the lydian dominant has a very "major" vibe. Those two clashed a bit. I had a bit more success combining the Enigmatic scale and the Hirayoshi scale (although not at the same time) with pentatonic shapes. Scales are probably my favorite tool. I find it really rewarding to learn and scale and then to re-arrange the notes and you're making music. The only burden is to remember what you've done because music needs some repetition or motif for the listener to hang on to.

On the plus side, I am going to get a free haircut because I've been an essential worker and have become shaggy of pate, eye brows, and side burns. I guess someone has taken pity on all our disarrayed follicles.
 
The weekend’s output has been varied. I made what a pub I used to frequent called dirty rice. I took my normal red beans and rice and threw in some random things. I am strictly a fresh herbs kind of guy; I believe in ad hoc purchasing which is diametrically opposed to what all of us did a generation ago. The old philosophy was to have a spice cabinet with one of everything under the sun—all stale because who could use all those things.

Although I only buy what I need and keep it fresh, I had acquired over a span of time a few miscellaneous jars of this or that which I, of course, don’t use and it was just mouldering in the cupboard. So I decided to throw everything in with the rice.

To the best of my memory, I threw in some dill, ginger, paprika, and lime-pepper. I also threw in some basil because I like basil. Now the only old spice in my pantry is some allspice.

Musically I had been working on my harmonic minor progression, in its Db iteration, and getting it all tight. However, I finally became frustrated with the fingernail on my right ring finger. I had damaged it and in its present state it is more of a hindrance than anything else. Therefore, I ripped it off. That made the finger a bit sore for strumming.

Accordingly, I switched to finger picking.

My philosophy is to play scales until the scales fall from your eyes. So I decided to play around some more.

My love for the Phrygian dominant scale is well-attested. I thought I would expand upon that feeling. I noticed that if I play the E Neapolitan scale, its final four notes are the initial four notes of the B Phrygian dominant scale. So I could make one big super scale of them both. It was great and it is such a big scale and it occupies such a nice chunk of real estate on the fret board that it is really easy to improvise with it. The only problem is the B on the 14th fret of the A string; it just isn’t working. No matter what I do, it doesn’t come out clean. It seems to be some sort of wolf note because the Bb below it and the C above it work fine. C’est le vie, huh? I’ll just have to play around it. I am currently using a D# tuning...if that matters.

The other thing I did was practice the F# Lydian dominant scale. That scale is useful for my Rhythm Changes project, but it is so meh! It sounds so “major” and in fact it is a ionian scale with second and third strings flipped. Obviously I wanted something tastier. I noticed that the first two notes of the F# Lydian Dominant are the same as the first two notes of the F# Hungarian Minor. Of course I had to transition to that scale. For whatever reason I can play that scale extremely quickly. It is fun to play. I haven’t really thought about it, but it may not work where the Lydian Dominant does in Rhythm Changes. I’ll have to see if it clashes with the 13 chords I want to play under it.

Finally I am a bit crest-fallen because I feel I have been hoodwinked to an extent. I bought a local iconic beer which is marketed as an IPA. And it isn’t. It is more of an amber or a pale pale with extra hops thrown in. It kind of resembles an IPA but the lightness of the beer doesn’t support the hops. If it were marketed as a hybrid beer, maybe I would be okay with it. But once you instantiate the rubric of IPA, it must be admitted that beer is not a good representative of that style. It is no more an IPA than it is a stout. It is food (but not beer) for thought. I should be aware of how I label myself. I may fulfill the criteria of some labels but fail in other categories.
 
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