thorrild wrote:A small religious war is being fought elsewhere in this forum this week: Are sharps used only by heathens? Is it heresy to believe in flats?
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NOTE: The usual advice to take everything with grain of salt and to keep a salt shaker handy applies, since I wrote this soon after awakening and before I had several cups of Massimo Zanetti Master Chef® coffee made in the ratio of 1/2 cup of ground coffee to 12-ounces of water at the ideal brewing temperature of 200 degrees Fahrenheit using the single-drip method, and it is not my fault, since I got tickled by your characterization of the two camps as heathens and heretics, respectively. Fortunately, I was not enjoying a sip of coffee at the time, because I probably would have spewed it all over the computer display . . . ]
Toward the goal of introducing a bit of clarity, I would not characterize the discussion as being a "small religious war", although I think there are some strongly felt opinions, a few of which might be based on misunderstanding a bit of admittedly abstruse humor, which apparently only made sense to me, but so what . . .
So what! We all have life experiences, and speaking only for myself, some of them are a bit unusual, which certainly is the case with the sequence of events which began with my taking an interest in violin when I was in the fifth grade but abandoning it quickly when I discovered the string bass, which made a lot more sense to me at the time and continues to be the case, where timewise this mapped to having a few years of string bass lessons during which since the bass clef made absolutely no sense to me I discovered that it was easier for me to "play by ear", with the consequence that a few years later at the age of 13 years-old (a) I had a Karl Knilling string bass; (b) I could play it reasonably well; (c) Although I could not read bass clef, I had played rudimentary piano long enough to know the names of the piano notes and could map them to notes on the string bass; (d) By virtue of being one of the few people in town who actually had a string bass, this led to forming a musical business relationship with a vastly skilled piano player who among other things was a year older than me (14 years-old) but looked to be in his early-20s, and for a variety of reasons had a car, was married, and owned a house, which continues to be a bit mind-boggling when I think about it; (e) Having a musical group which included a real string bassist at the time was a big draw in the local nightclub circuit, which mapped to better pay, which one certainly can understand would be a big motivation for a 14 year-old pianist who had to support a wife and make car and house payments, hence made it practical for the pianist to devise a system of playing piano that included providing me via his left hand with the root notes of chords and other cues regarding the types of phrases I should play, since I was the only musician who was in constant "play by ear" mode, with everyone else using sheet music and "cheat sheets", since being able to play virtually any song by special request was yet another way to make more money, which as I recall led to moments where for example someone might request "Begin the Beguine" (Cole Porter), which made about as much sense to me at the time as a Celtic dirge from the third century in terms of never having heard the song to the best of my knowledge, having no idea how to play it on string bass, but this not being a problem, because all I had to do was watch what the piano player was doing with his left hand; and (f) at an early age being in musical groups with grown-up horn players (primarily trumpets and saxophones), who with only one exception were odd at best, which inevitably led to the piano player and I making a lot of jokes about horn players to relieve the frustration caused by their always demanding to play songs in weird keys that had flats rather than sharps, which as I tried to explain in the aforementioned discussion actually was a good thing when considered in retrospect, because in some respects it actually is easier for me to play songs in keys that horn players favor than in keys that guitar players and keyboard players favor, at least when I am playing electric bass and to some degree when I am playing lead guitar, where for rhythm guitar the key does not matter, because I know Barre chords, which are the ultimate weapon when one plays electric guitar and has no choice but to be in a musical group with horn players and one has memorized all the notes on each string of an electric bass up to the 15th fret and knows what I call "low" and "middle" Barre chords in a virtual festival of flavors or "shapes" . . .
Explained another way, for quite a few years I existed in a surreal universe of nightclubs, money, booze, cigars, go-go girls (
a personal favorite), and fricking horn players who loved flats nearly as much as they loved Revlon® cosmetics and polishing their top hats, with the result that I decided at an early age that I prefer sharps to flats, as did the piano player, which is fabulous . . .
"Begin The Beguine" (Cole Porter) -- Fred Astaire and Eleanor Powell -- YouTube music videoFabulous!