Piano Key2

Every since about 1709 when Christofori announced that he had invented an instrument to upscale the harpsichord, which plays all at one volume level — no soft or loud — that played both soft and loud — which he appropriately named the “pianoforte” (which means “soft-loud” — later the name was shorted to just “piano”) — people throughout the world have been entranced with the harmonic sound of the piano - it’s richness and fullness in enabling musicians to play many notes at once or in rapid succession.

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So, you’ve been dying to play the piano. But you don’t want to spend years learning how to read music. Of course you don’t! And you won’t have to IF you learn a chord-based approach to playing the piano.

Here’s a method I use to get my students playing piano in a flash. First, you need to learn a few chords. But not just any chord type. No. The chord type I have my students learn first is something called the open position chord. And with it, you’ll be able to create your own unique music right away!

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It’s true that most guitarists ignore the theory side of things, and it’s no surprise - the majority of sites and books out there don’t exactly make it look…”fun”.

OK, so it can never really be fun, but for those guitarists who actually care about progressing, it’s essential to know theory. A good place to start is by learning the 7 modes on your guitar. This lesson article will introduce them. You can then use the free resource that follows if you wish.

The best way to think of modes are as scales. These scales, like the pentatonic or major scale can be mapped out on the fretboard. Think of the modes as “flavours” of the major and natural minor scales.

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Most beginning guitar players start with a rather inexpensive instrument. They usually have a mass production clone of a Fender Stratocaster or a Gibson Les Paul. The most popular clones are made overseas by Gibson and Fender themselves through the Epiphone and Squier lines. These are built to the same specs as the American made models. They are decent instruments in their own right but they can be improved greatly with just a pickup replacement. As long as the neck is straight and the tuning pegs are fairly tight, this is often all you need to upgrade to a pro sound.

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There is something about the Hawkins clan that I like. My most adept and austere teacher was a Hawkins related to Black Jack the Privateer and I wonder if this man who died recently while happily flying his model airplanes is one of them. I think it is very possible that genetic information transfer is real. Mathematics and astronomy was his forte but he also had a gift for Public Relations when he ran the contest to pay a large sum to anyone who could do the math in Crop Circles.

“Perhaps the most obvious scientific investigation that can be performed, when one is confronted with the intriguing shapes that crop circles can take, is a geometric analysis of the symbols.

This was the approach followed by Dr. Gerald S. Hawkins, former chairman of the astronomy department at Boston University. Hawkins was probably the first person who unambiguously demonstrated that crop circles are much more than just some arbitrarily sized and randomly positioned patterns in the fields. After reading the bestseller Circular Evidence, in which an extensive overview was given of all British crop circles for the period 1978-1988, Hawkins analyzed all formations presented in this book. (2) In those early years the pictograms still had simple shapes: single circles, multiple circles in a pattern, and circles with concentric rings around them. All diagrams were put through a straightforward mathematical analysis, during which the proportions of the circle diameters and the areas inside the rings were determined. A total of twenty-five pictograms were taken into account.

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