anon6789

Rye crisps are the best part of snack mix to me!

Thank you for sharing all this! This has been one of the most interesting posts I’ve come across in a long time.

As I like learning about history as well, having historical music education helps tie things together also. You can follow who are the trendy cultural centers of the time, and different countries get the best composers, and just the attitudes of the people of the time, if you have songs meant to be played by some rich guys full orchestra, or one person playing folk music on a single instrument. With being the musician, you’re not an observer, you’re trying to embody the spirit that song was composed to share with others. It’s like a very basic time machine if you really get into what you’re doing. I think it’s really cool stuff!

Bravo, those are by far the best recorders I have ever heard! My music teacher is in a recorder quartet, so she has a few of the decent modern Yamahas, and they’re leaps better than the classroom recorders kids play, but I still don’t really dig how they sounded. Flute is her primary instrument, and I’d much rather hear her play that. The recorders in the video look like another huge step up from the Yamahas though. I do feel though they definitely serve a purpose in music education though.

I am glad there are people keeping all these instruments and musical styles alive though. Like any other bit of art/culture, it’s easy to forget about it when it goes out of style, and by the time anyone remembers, it’s all been lost. One of the surprising parts of my musical education is learning just how much of a joyous part of life music was for so much of our history. With no tv, internet, or recordings, live music was a way to have fun, an opportunity to dance or sing, a way to cross cultures and learn about places you would only ever hear stories about.

The old recorders sounded worse?! 😧 (I tease!)

What instrument did you start with, and what got you into older music and instruments?

Thought I would add a link to him. His name is Cornelius Boots, and while his name and looks don’t make him seem like he should be an expert of a lost Asian art, he is.

When I saw him take the stage at the cherry blossom festival, I was worried about some cultural misappropriation about to happen, until he explained his story, and it was only after I got home, I found out he was from the GoS soundtrack.

He has a wide mix of styles he plays in from traditional Japanese to modern hip-hop and rock inspired works. It was fun to see him explain the history of the instrument, show us how it works differently than other flutes, and to talk about the revival movement of the music. He seemed like a really cool guy.

I got to see the guy who played the shakuhachi for The Ghost of Tsushima.

He said that it had pretty much been forgotten until it started to get interest from outside of Japan and now there is worldwide interest again. People had to go back and figure out the old music notation and melodies and translate them into something modern musicians could read.

Or a wider, lower doggy door to let it park in the closet.

I forget about all the cords and other random things it would grab! You have to somewhat vacuum proof your space.

Docking under a couch would be handy. It’s been like it lives in a cave. 😆

Thanks! I’ve mostly enjoyed my Shark upright for a number of years now and I had wondered about their vac-bots.

Neato looks to have gone kaput last year. The shape seemed to have positive benefits over the typical round ones. I wonder why no one else has gone that direction.

The 2-in-1 mop and vac Roombas looks exciting, though at a heck of a cost at the price of a Miele or 6 of my Shark uprights.

It’s wild these are on their tenth generation. I think mine was a 2nd.

Who’s the leader in the category these days? I’d be curious to see some videos and reviews of the best of the current gen.

I’ve been using Kiwi for the last few years, as at the time Firefox didn’t do extensions on mobile. It’s Chromium based, and I’ve had no issues using it anywhere.

I’ve seen the ones with the trash station, but then I’d think you’d still need to dump that into the regular trash, fluffing up all that dirt again.

My house is a single story, open design, so I don’t think it really works well without setting the boundaries, as it just spreads itself too thin trying to do the whole place, and as it’s slow, it makes whatever room it’s working in somewhat off limits as you dont want to step on it or block it. The timer would help with that though, but it still seems more complex than the 10-15 minutes it takes for me to grab the upright and do all the floors, plus hit the nooks and Crannies and ceiling corners as well.

It’s still no Rosie from the Jetsons. 😕

I was very excited one year to get an early Roomba vacuum. It looked so fun and convenient.

I wouldn’t say it was bad, but it was very meh compared to the high hopes I had.

It went in a senseless pattern without setting up the electronic boundaries. It had trouble docking. It filled up very fast and had to be manually emptied. It was loud and slow. It just overall felt like it took longer and required more manual handling and maintenance than a regular upright and couldn’t even clean everything, so I still had to vacuum.

On top of that, the battery died after about a year. I got an expensive rebuild with supposed better cells from a local reman company, and that died again in about a year. The new battery was more than the Roomba was worth by then, so I gave up on it.

Fall semester for piano lessons starts today. I’ve been bummed out lately, and learning gives me a place to direct my frustrated energy.

I’ve done a lot of independent learning in the 3 week break, such as playing with software synthesizers and learning some of the new scales a bit better and using them in improvisations.

We just started a book of scale modes before break, and my new song book is of Bartok, who explores many unique and discordant harmonies, so there will be a ton of new concepts for me coming up.

As others have alluded, MIDI data is the key to what you want. MIDI is essentially sheet music for computers, so you feed a virtual instrument that MIDI file, and it plays it for you. Most software even refers to the visualized MIDI data as the “piano roll.”

You can see the little piano keys represented here, and the notes that will be played as the file is played through the selected instrument. There are numerous virtual representations of all kinds of piano.

The problem is making any kind of transcriptions of copy written songs is a legal grey area, and many sheet music and guitar tab sites get shut down.

The programs the others are discussing, turning mp3 straight to midi have issues because it’s lumping the data for all the instruments (likely more than you realize, sometimes dozens per song when things are layered to sound bigger) into a single feed. All those instruments interplay with each other differently harmonically, and are played with different techniques. A piano is played differently than an organ, let alone something like a trumpet, so the software doesn’t know how to filter what is trying to be created artistically.

So you can do it and it’s relatively straightforward, but not something you’re going to do on the fly is in a legal grey area.

I can go into any of this more if you want deeper explanations.

Back in the early 2000s, I was in a mailing list for a hobbyist group which was basically that. There was a central mailer client and we’d post to that central email address, and it would send it to everyone on the list. You could get a live feed, daily, or weekly mailings of everyone’s comments in mail threads.

I think these all went away with vBulletin and WordPress and all of that. That way you could search posts and didn’t have to archive it yourself, back when email storage was not unlimited.

If your issues are pressure related, I found this guide of exercises to relax your writing grip and to avoid pressing too hard.

It’s written for teaching children, but that just makes it super easy to understand. It looks to have some very good ideas.

The Jetstream is the way to go for an all purpose pen.

A lot of the others I mentioned edge it out in smoothness or line quality, but they’re water based ink pens, so anything that might get wet, or anything like a label or tape that isn’t absorbent like paper will need a ballpoint like the Jetstream.

Thankfully the Jetstream is as good as a ballpoint gets while still being inexpensive. Comes in a ton of styles, and refills are available if you want to toss one in your favorite pen body.