Ted

[Ted]

hi there Tony! i am still reading through your posts, but just wanted to say hello 🙂

i grew up a jazz bass player but never really learned what the hell i was doing. to this day i can still pick up a bass and play with a band given a chart. ah how i miss my easily movable shapes 🙂

i’ve actually been thinking a lot about what you said re: the chord forms. i’ve been playing songs from the dot books, and my hands seem to be remembering some shapes now – i’ve learned Misty, Someday My Prince Will Come and Fly Me To The Moon from the old dot books, and started voicing Nearness Of You but got tripped up on some chord that i didn’t know the rules for.

i would very much like to be able to play charts from a fake book with a band, but to be honest, my primary interest in learning the piano is to use it as a composition tool – i would love to be able to use a piano keyboard like a computer keyboard. i am most interested in composition…specifically of electronic and popular music, as well as r&b, but i crave rich harmonic content.

i would love to hear more about the method you described, as i’ve been trying to distill sudnow’s thoughts into something more mechanical. i want to be able to use the piano as a writing tool, but i also want to be able to PLAY it.

one thing that has put me off from voicing my own chords is that i do not feel confident in my ability to do so, and there is no way for me to check my work except against the existing sudnow dot books. i also find it tricky since suds does some clever things. to make matters worse, despite years of playing jazz in my teenage years, i have a woefully weak understanding of harmony – i get tripped up on voicing my own chords when they don’t follow sud’s rules.

however, i spend all day programming. i am also extremely lazy, and i like to learn things quickly. i also believe the numbers are in our favor in terms of forms to learn…there are at most a couple hundred forms, and this is a hilariously large upper bound.

as such, i’ve been considering building the following tools:
1. given a melody note+chord, output the fraction
2. given a melody note+chord, output the fingering
3. given a bunch of chord changes and melody notes, output an entire dot song

doing this would allow me to double check my work. but…there aren’t THAT many forms, right? so what if i also could generate every possible fingering for every maj7/min7/dom7 + melody note? this set simply cannot be that large.

another thing that just came to mind as i was writing this is perhaps it would be interesting to take every dot song that suds put together and see if there are shapes that he used to move between certain chords to ascertain implicit rules. the sample size is unfortunately small (the old song books are 30 songs each, plus Misty and some of the others, plus the new song book), but it may yield some interesting data and patterns.

anyway, if there is anything mechanical you thing we could do to approximate the Conti methods you described, please let me know…i am tempted to check out the Conti books you mentioned, but if there are some simple principles that you can share with me, i wonder if we might be able to Conti-ize suds’ writing 🙂

hope to see you around! if you are interested in chatting, please shoot me an email at ted.kalaw@gmail.com

thanks!

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