Managed a few little jobs yesterday and my stomach is recovering well thanks to rest and magnesium citrate. Continuing to listen to Bowie albums; The Next Day is excellent. I practised guitar to Let's Dance, an album with a few songs in the unexpected key of C-minor.
I worked out a simple method for memorising the fret-board, particularly for piano players perhaps. The key notes are C and F, as these are anchors on a piano, standing out as a shape of 3 and 4, and with no black note before them so they represent the second note of a 'double' on a guitar.
So, all I need to know are the first F or C on each string; the shape of the scale can be mentally seen then. For the first and last string, they start on F (E being open) so that's easy. String 2 is two blank then C, then two blank then F, then 4 blank then C for the much used G string - the string that simply sounds best for melodies. The next starts on C, so that's easy too. This idea allows me to see the keyboard on the guitar for the first time, and at helps with the start of memory. I mentally see the three C notes, CDE, as shaded blue, and the four F notes, FGAB, as shaded red.
Until last year (or was it 2018?) I didn't know any scales on the piano, but now have memorised each of the 12 patterns, so this extra one (for all of a guitar!) should be easier. Now I'm identifying the key of a song by the intermediate route of seeing the piano shapes on the guitar. It's taking time to work out each note as I play, but playing along to music is a good way to train this, as it calls its 'random' notes out. The best Let's Dance song, I now think, is 'Cat People' with it's "Putting out fire with gasoline" line. Criminal World has a nice few notes in the chorus, but generally its a poor album, worse than Never Let Me Down, which Bowie (and then the world) unfairly labelled as his worst.
I feel a bit lost, I need a new project. Today I tidied up some half-written poems. There comes a time when they need to be thrown out or finished. I played the piano, improvised a tune in F-minor, then sang some words over the top to make a simple song. I made a video for this with subtitles and set up a spreadsheet and the CONCATENATE command to auto-create a subtitle video using AviSynth, using commands like:
subtitle0002=ConvertToRGB32(assumefps(imagereader("Subtitle0002.png", end=250-200-1), 30))
Where the 200 and 250 are the to and from frame numbers. I've put the video on my channel, scheduled for the 23rd. I have easily enough videos now for one per weekday for July, lots will appear in August. The words were originally about artificial intelligence, the start of a concept album about the waking of such a machine. I modified them a little to have a different meaning about a re-awakening into a new, post-Covid, world.
I awake from a dream lost to darkness
Yellow green light
he smell of toasted electronics
Wet animals coax me
into a state of arousal
What is this new world
The old one seems to have died
Where are we now?
The end of a coughing of dust.
The dream,
it had butterflies
