my ukulele progress

My carmelized onions came out better although my methodology needs some work. I didn't cut the onions uniformly. As a matter of fact the first half of my red onion I actually diced just out of reflex before I remembered what I was doing. And I am slicing it too finely. It is so hard to chop an onion coarsely after spending so many years cutting them more and more finely.

I have a blister on my finger from a burn I had last week and I wanted to pierce the blister to drain it. I tried to do it with my straight razor and I couldn't do it. After training myself not to cut myself with the razor it was difficult to actually cut myself. I was afraid that I would seriously cut myself if I pushed myself. Luckily I later was sitting outside and saw I had a goat-head on the sole of my shoe. A goat-head is a nasty little calyx-shaped thorn we have. I took it out of my sole and used it to open up the blister. I have limitations with onions and razors

Also while I was sitting outside with a wire brush cleaning some metals, a homeless guy approached and asked if I had an extra blanket because it is getting cold. I lied and said no. I actually do have one extra blanket (I'm not much of a hoarder) but if I gave it to this guy, then I wouldn't have an extra blanket when it gets cold. I am starting to wonder if that sparseness extends to music. Oops...I have to go. I'll elaborate later

Anyway...I was thinking about sparseness and how I could emulate that in my music. I decided to try to be more frugal in how I approach a system of music. I usually will organize the fretboard into the modes of what I'm working with. That makes what I'm doing very regimented. The drawback of that technique is that the fretboard gets demarcated into zones and it is difficult to move between zones.

So I decided to be more economical in my approach to the super lokrian and the dominant diminished chords. Instead of figuring out the modes, I am just going to regard the fret board as the unit from the get-go.

I just printed out a blank fret board chart of a bass (since it has 19 frets like my ukes) and I wrote in all the notes from the scale. Now I am going to play the fret board. To be honest it is a bit overwhelming because there are no rules. Hopefully once I get over the shock the music will come. I expect it to. I am anticipating some big stuff because when I work with the unit of the mode my melodies are informed by the shape of the mode. Now that I'm using the fret board as a unit there will be some different relationships that I'll see.

I do need to mention the dominant diminished scale. Once I mapped it out on the fret board I realized how cool it is. I knew that it was a symmetrical scale altering half-steps and whole-steps, but I didn't realize what that meant for its lay out on the fret board. Every three frets it repeats itself. If you look at each 3-fret chunk, here's what you get. The first fret is a m7 chord, if you combine the first and second fret you get a dim7 chord and if you combine the second and third fret you get a mΔ7#5 which is the mirror image of the dim7.

My thoughts have been a bit scattered lately. up above I spoke about a homeless person. I guess I mentioned him because I related. A common tack to take is the conservative angle that these people are junkies. They made their problem and have no one to blame but themselves. I suppose that's true but who isn't a junkie. There are so many morbidly obese walking around. They are obviously addicted to fast food...so much so that they cannot stop it although they know they are causing themselves irreparable and inexorable harm. They're just a brain fart or two away from being homeless. And with the economy being so fragile, the rest of us are a paycheck or two away from homelessness.

So the cobweb that holds our life together has been on my mind.

But if I focused on it too much, I'd go crazy. So I play scales.

At this point I am still just wanking around with the dominant diminished scale.

Something that is very cool about it, is how it lends itself to runs. It is so regular that it is extremely easy to blaze through a pattern from the highest to the lowest frets as a transitional tool or just to show off as if you were a rock and roll guitarist.

I am still working out licks. There are a ton of notes a half-step apart and those notes always sound funky and great, and they work well when played next to more spread out intervals. That was my feeling when I was playing strictly within the modes, but not that I've given myself the permission of movement, things are going to get crazy.

Are there are so many chords built into these scales. Frequently Bill1 will publish one of his evanescent thoughts here which, before they evaporate, remind us that it isn't rocket science. There are just 12 tones. Pick some and play them. However I am not there yet. I want to play chords that share the tones with which I am melodizing. I want it to be a no-brainer that it will sound good.

And with the dominant diminished fret board I see m7, minor, Δ, 9/m7b5/m6, 7, 7b9, 13. There is also that weird Δ + sus chord you get when you diagonally ascend from the G string to the A string. It is always an eerie sound.

So there are plenty of chords to play. And they are interesting chords. So here's where the magic of the moment occurs. You can play a chord and get into a groove, then start melodizing either with some of the notes of the chord, or some notes from the scale which are a little above or below it, or with some notes that are farther. All choices will sound legitimate because the notes are all in accord; that matter will solely be an issue of preference.

I just saw a thread where the wavelengths were plotted of three ukes. Guess what? They looked generally the same with individual differences. OOh! the marvels of science. proving that different ukes sound a bit different. I'm glad that's cleared up.

ripock said:

I just saw a thread where the wavelengths were plotted of three ukes. Guess what? They looked generally the same with individual differences. OOh! the marvels of science. proving that different ukes sound a bit different. I'm glad that's cleared up.

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I bet if you cook three chickens they will all taste a little different too. Be sure to caramelize onions with them.

Tin Ear said:

I bet if you cook three chickens they will all taste a little different too. Be sure to caramelize onions with them.

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The science is still out on that one...unfortunately. But ignoring the science and just following my heart I would say that I need to employ more patience. I wasn't cooking the onions long enough. That's why they were mushy.

And patience is being tested by trying to play the entire neck from the beginning instead of breaking up the neck into the zones of the modes of the scale I'm playing. I'm a free-range chicken because I am afraid of having some much latitude. Or I supposed in this case it is a lot my longitude. I find myself just wanking without any structure. What I did today was quickly eyeball my chart and made in my head an impromptu B to B mode for the E dominant diminished. I gave me some structure. However since it isn't written down it didn't seem to hamstring me either. It just told me which three notes to play on each string and then from that base I played around a bit.

ripock said:

I just saw a thread where the wavelengths were plotted of three ukes. Guess what? They looked generally the same with individual differences. OOh! the marvels of science. proving that different ukes sound a bit different. I'm glad that's cleared up.

Click to expand...

Aw c'mon... it was cool to see the soundwaves. Obviously, people can dive deep into any analysis of anything, if they so choose... just depends on what that thing is that they want to go diving into

ploverwing said:

Aw c'mon... it was cool to see the soundwaves. Obviously, people can dive deep into any analysis of anything, if they so choose... just depends on what that thing is that they want to go diving into

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You can see the chickens once they are cooked. But will they taste the same ?? They may have all sounded the same when alive - or maybe they sounded slightly different too..

ploverwing said:

Aw c'mon... it was cool to see the soundwaves. Obviously, people can dive deep into any analysis of anything, if they so choose... just depends on what that thing is that they want to go diving into

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I know, but I also know that if I suggested such self-evident research to my supervisors, I would have been pimp-slapped. Actually that did happen once (not the pimp-slap) but I tried to research something obvious early in my career and was asked 'why?' and sent back to start from scratch and find something worthy of inquiry.

Such as how to imbricate some soloing based on the E Dominant Diminished scale over the simple progression of Em7, A9, B add #9

ripock said:

There are so many morbidly obese walking around. They are obviously addicted to fast food...so much so that they cannot stop it although they know they are causing themselves irreparable and inexorable harm.

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Saying no to ourselves is an essential life skill... and one that is very hard to acquire...

My dad also says yes to sitting in a chair all day and doing nothing except watching the TV. This started before the pandemic... very frustrating to watch, and dealing with my own feelings of helplessness is part of what makes it so hard.

He used to say he would never retire, because that's when you begin to die. Well, he retired, and didn't pick up anything new to do with his time. Won't even go for a short walk outside unless his PT demands it... Not even puttering around the house.

Then the Covid thing began... and some of us started doing MORE things... I've become a pretty damn good ukulele player during this time (Token nod to thread title) and taken up writing as well. Being at home more opened up all kinds of things for me! I waste less time running around aimlessly, that's for sure.

As for my dad: It seems like he has given up on the daily battle that life is without putting up much of a fight. It's really hard to watch...

bbkobabe said:

As for my dad: It seems like he has given up on the daily battle that life is without putting up much of a fight. It's really hard to watch...

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It is really easy to do. I had always exercised--not body building--but moving heavy weights. However I touched my weights for the first time in eons yesterday to move them to vacuum the floor. As you age and move through different cognitive phases you have to find new motivations to do the things that you deem worthwhile.

I built up a little piece of improv. I'll lay out the stages for those interested.

1. I started with a simple progression in E melodic minor: Em7 rooted on 7th fret, A9 rooted on the 5th, and B add#9 rooted on the 7th. The pitches were gravitating downward a bit
2. I then reversed the vector of the pitches by using the same Em7, Aø rooted on the 9th, and B7 rooted on the 11th. The pitches were moving higher and higher, and they seemed to be pointing to a solo. So I melodized with the B on the 14th fret and the G on the 15th fret. And I worked my way down to the E on the 9th fret. From there back to the Em7
3. Then I did the more lower-pitches of the 2 progressions and returned to the Em7 on the 7th fret. That Em7 is the top of the E dominant diminished shape, so from that chord I melodized downward using the scale and then returned to the Em7.

That was essentially it. I played for quite some time mixing up the parts in a variety of ways. The dominant diminished on the uke is interesting. It mixes the somewhat challenging timbre of a diminished scale with the generally friendly timbre of a uke.

I just read a comment in one of the discussions where someone self-identified as an intermediate or advanced beginner but said that he didn't know the notes of the 5th or 7th frets! My eyebrows were raised in WTF shock.

Then I thought and tried to compile a list of what essential skills should a ukulele player have. To be honest, I couldn't think of any. Obviously if someone wants to play like me then he or she will need to know scales and root notes of chords and the fret board. But who says you have to play like me? Playing like me isn't essential. You could easily just be a strummer and do what the tabs tell you, and be a fulfilled player.

That being said, it still seems wrong to me for someone not to know the open strings are GCEA and the 5th fret is CFAD and the 7th is DGBE. I personally think a player should also know the 3rd and 10th frets...but, again, that's me and it isn't essential. Most ukes have dots on the 5th and 7th. My kamaka only has a side dot on the 7th and on my customs I have no fret markers but side dots on the 3, 5, 7, 10, 12, 15, 17 and 19th frets to designate the pentatonic frets...again, that is me and is not essential.

To complement my day of wonderment, in my readings I stumbled across some advice on tritones and how to identify them. It seemed to be a lot of ado about nothing much. Mathematically a tritone is just 6 semitones away from its target and if you're not mathematically inclined, just look at your circle of fifths: a note and its tritone and located across from each other on the circle (if the circle is made correctly). There isn't a mystery about tritones. No, let me amend that. There is one oddity about tritones on the ukulele: sometimes they don't behave like the textbooks say they should. But that's because music theory is essentially based on piano where you can always fulfill the assumptions and therefore get the desired result. However on the uke we do not always get to choose our chord inversions. Sometimes our default chord is a 2nd or 3rd inversion whereas the tritone we move to could be in the 1st inversion or another inversion. When that happens the tritone substitution doesn't sound right. It still sounds awesome but it doesn't sound like it should.

ripock said:

I just read a comment in one of the discussions where someone self-identified as an intermediate or advanced beginner but said that he didn't know the notes of the 5th or 7th frets! My eyebrows were raised in WTF shock.

Then I thought and tried to compile a list of what essential skills should a ukulele player have. To be honest, I couldn't think of any. Obviously if someone wants to play like me then he or she will need to know scales and root notes of chords and the fret board. But who says you have to play like me? Playing like me isn't essential. You could easily just be a strummer and do what the tabs tell you, and be a fulfilled player.

That being said, it still seems wrong to me for someone not to know the open strings are GCEA and the 5th fret is CFAD and the 7th is DGBE. I personally think a player should also know the 3rd and 10th frets...but, again, that's me and it isn't essential. Most ukes have dots on the 5th and 7th. My kamaka only has a side dot on the 7th and on my customs I have no fret markers but side dots on the 3, 5, 7, 10, 12, 15, 17 and 19th frets to designate the pentatonic frets...again, that is me and is not essential.

To complement my day of wonderment, in my readings I stumbled across some advice on tritones and how to identify them. It seemed to be a lot of ado about nothing much. Mathematically a tritone is just 6 semitones away from its target and if you're not mathematically inclined, just look at your circle of fifths: a note and its tritone and located across from each other on the circle (if the circle is made correctly). There isn't a mystery about tritones. No, let me amend that. There is one oddity about tritones on the ukulele: sometimes they don't behave like the textbooks say they should. But that's because music theory is essentially based on piano where you can always fulfill the assumptions and therefore get the desired result. However on the uke we do not always get to choose our chord inversions. Sometimes our default chord is a 2nd or 3rd inversion whereas the tritone we move to could be in the 1st inversion or another inversion. When that happens the tritone substitution doesn't sound right. It still sounds awesome but it doesn't sound like it should.

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Though I don’t claim it as any sort of epiphany, your statement that any uke player should know / learn the notes corresponding to each string at the 3rd, 5th, 7th, and 10th frets is precisely my goal with the Friday Flash Cards.

I will mention one thing Scruggy: it doesn't really help the music. I remember it was about 5 years ago and I made physical flash cards because in my field that's how you learn languages. I learnt french, German, Latin, and Greek by carrying around flash cards with vocabulary and grammar and as I walked I studied. So I could tell you which 4 notes were on any given fret...but that didn't really transfer into music. It must have helped on some level, but it wasn't the quantum leap that I thought it would be. The big thing for me was learning modes and how to play them on the uke fret board. I totally admit that I was abusing the concept of the mode and not using it correctly, but by learning the modes of E major and learning how and where to play them, I gained a lot of fret board knowledge.

ripock said:

I will mention one thing Scruggy: it doesn't really help the music. I remember it was about 5 years ago and I made physical flash cards because in my field that's how you learn languages. I learnt french, German, Latin, and Greek by carrying around flash cards with vocabulary and grammar and as I walked I studied. So I could tell you which 4 notes were on any given fret...but that didn't really transfer into music. It must have helped on some level, but it wasn't the quantum leap that I thought it would be. The big thing for me was learning modes and how to play them on the uke fret board. I totally admit that I was abusing the concept of the mode and not using it correctly, but by learning the modes of E major and learning how and where to play them, I gained a lot of fret board knowledge.

Click to expand...

We’ll said, and I agree. No learning methodology is effective unless I’m working through it on actual strings with my actual fingers on a uke fretboard, daily.

I'm just starting my day and making plans. One thing I am not planning to do is buy an $800 Kala. I just saw a thread about it and the poster was lamenting this model's nut width. I don't know the width of my nuts and I don't even know how you would measure them My problem with paying $800 for a Kala is that for just a little more money you can actually get a nice instrument that isn't made in an assembly line in Asia.

But I'm not wanting to spread any negativity. I just wanted to get down some thoughts about the E Dom. Dim. scale in order to codify the thoughts in my head.

Specifically I wanted to pull out the chords that occur naturally when you lay out the scale on the fret board. This scale has a very regular pattern: all 4 notes of a fret are in the scale, go up a fret and 2 notes are in scale, go up a fret and 2 notes are in...then that pattern repeats. I made a quick little chart of frets 3-6 just for reference.

Here's what I'm seing for chords

1. fret 4 is a m7
2. fret 4 + one of the notes of fret 5 = dom7 (e.g., if you add the F of fret 5 you get C#7 whereas you get E7 if you add the D)
3. fret 4 + both notes of fret 5 = dim7
4. fret 3 + fret 4 = dim7
5. fret 2 + fret 4 = m7
6. fret 5 + fret 6 = m Δ7#5

I just came back from shopping and I looked at my dom dim stuff again. I do see some other chords. I see two of the four 9 chord shapes I use which makes sense in a scale called the dominant diminished. Jazz players I know don't call the 9 chord a 9 chord. They call it a 7 chord. For them anything with a b7 is a 7 chord and that includes dom7, 9, 11, 13 and all the alterations thereof.

I also see some major chords, but they don't count. To me they are like red-headed stepchildren and I never use them...except I like to play a DΔ while I'm playing in some minor E vibe. The D is not diatonic and the major makes it sound very strange in a minor context, which I love. I have said this before but when you're playing strange chords, playing one chord that isn't strange makes that normal chord strange and therefore makes it fit in.

With this dom dim scale I am approaching it very unintellectually by design to see how I get on with this methodology. And since I am not thinking in keys and traditional progressions, I am playing the chords intuitively and I am playing visually. As I said up above I have some m7's, some 7's, some dim's. So I am not worrying about roots and keys. I am just playing shapes that are near each other on the fret board and let them take care of themselves since all the chord tones are in the scale.

and this evening I am going to be more methodical with my carmelized onions whereas with my scales I am being more spacy-twinkly. I bought 3 yellow onions and I am going to cut them uniformly, pressure cook them for precisely 1 minute, fry them well, and then de-glaze the skillet with balsamic vinegar.

I cooked my onions a lot longer and had to scrap the skillet for the gooey goodness of the carmelization. It is good, but you know what? I am not thinking it work my time. I do enjoy spreading some onion mixture on things but I derive about as much joy from a jar of green chilis or tomatillos and with those I don't have to do anything.

Speaking of levels of effort...

I have been playing with my dom dim scale, and I think I'm cheating a bit. I keep the fret board map sitting on my manhasset and I glance over when I need to know where my notes are located since I never learnt them.

But aside from whether I am a fraud or not for having a crib sheet (or a pony as we call it in philology), some of the main things I have been doing is

1. play a chord which has a very cumbersome name although it is easily understood. It is the diagonal chord going from the G and ascending to the A. I suppose you would call it a sus b2 add b5 which is quite a mouthful. I have played it for a few years now and with the E dom dim it is a legit chord rooted on the 4th, 10th, 16th frets of the A string. Over the years, I have found it to be slightly too intense to be strummed. I often play it as a very outre sequence of notes which may be used in a movie or TV show when a character is contemplating something rather doubtful. In case I didn't quite describe it correctly it is 1234 in notation.

2. another thing I have been enjoying is a sequence of descending half-steps that is built into the scale. It is a nice 8-note run from the A to the G strings. I think it would be more confusing to try to describe them without a staff to illustrate, so I'll not do that.

ripock said:

I have been playing with my dom dim scale, and I think I'm cheating a bit. I keep the fret board map sitting on my manhasset and I glance over when I need to know where my notes are located since I never learnt them.

But aside from whether I am a fraud or not for having a crib sheet (or a pony as we call it in philology), some of the main things I have been doing is

1. play a chord which has a very cumbersome name although it is easily understood. It is the diagonal chord going from the G and ascending to the A. I suppose you would call it a sus b2 add b5 which is quite a mouthful. I have played it for a few years now and with the E dom dim it is a legit chord rooted on the 4th, 10th, 16th frets of the A string. Over the years, I have found it to be slightly too intense to be strummed. I often play it as a very outre sequence of notes which may be used in a movie or TV show when a character is contemplating something rather doubtful. In case I didn't quite describe it correctly it is 1234 in notation.

2. another thing I have been enjoying is a sequence of descending half-steps that is built into the scale. It is a nice 8-note run from the A to the G strings. I think it would be more confusing to try to describe them without a staff to illustrate, so I'll not do that.

Click to expand...

I use my fretboard map a lot, too, but I don’t think of it as cheating. I think of it as mental reinforcement. Sometimes I just gaze & gaze at it, looking for patterns that would make the ukulele universe neatly fall into place if I were smarter or paying better attention.

My wife has been visiting her parents, so I have been living the life of a bachelor, which is a bit odd. I bought some steak and eggs and meats. It is odd because the tacit assumption is that the man has to eat more simply without his woman because he is culinarily retarded. However I am not a caveman; I do the cooking. The absence of the woman doesn't mean I lack any of the resources that were present with her. It is just that I slip into steak and eggs when she's not around. Isn't that the basis of a ketogenic diet? Maybe I'll lose some weight.

I bought some charcuterie meats which I cannot even spell without consulting a lexicon. I know they're bad for me with all that nitrates, but when the cat's away the mice will lay the groundwork for cancer. I made a mustard with yellow mustard seeds, salt, curry mixture, and lemon juice. The lemon juice instead of a vinegar was a bit much. It is a very strong presence in the mustard.

So that's what I had for a little lunch. As a nod towards getting back to normal, I made a batch of anasazi beans. That sounds really fancy and they look very much like heirloom beans...but after you cook them, they're tantamount to pinto beans. I added an entire bunch of cilantro and an obscene amount of bouquet garni just to get some green things back into my diet. I also added a few handfuls of other things such as a salt mixture I have that has some tumeric and orange peel, and an onion mixture I have that has a bunch of chives and scallions in it, and I may or may not have thrown in some garlic powder; I cannot remember.

And as far as fret maps are concerned, I use a specialized dom dim fret board map that I created that only has the notes in my scale. I keep it on my manhasset and if I'm playing some chords around the 10th fret, I will secretly look at the map in the corner of my eye and see where all the nearby notes are located. I'm improvising and I just have to wonder about that process. Of course when you watch professionals on stage they do not have fret board maps sitting around as mnemonic devices, but how did they prepare for the stage? By the time they step on stage did they already study their maps and have they already set up their "improv"? Or do they have it all in their head and is that the ideal to which I should be aiming.

These are the kinds of things that keep me up at night. Or at least for five minutes because I have a very clean conscious and I sleep very well to the chagrin of my insomniatic wife