2004-12-03 - 1:46 a.m.

OH! OH!

I mean, OH!

+ MEANS augmented! As in "aug." I can just get the chord online now. (- means diminished, too, by the way, just in case that's needed later.)

You know, and I'm NOT talking about anyone who has recently posted to my guestbook, but it took me about four or five people who went to college to study music theory, and fifteen to twenty diagrams, and (and I'm not kidding) two or maybe three total hours worth of dialogue to find out that "+" is shorthand for "augmented." And that was just to get to +="aug." I still had to hear about WHY and HOW it was augmented afterwards, starting with do-re-me, delving deep into E G B D F, with a drop D tangent thrown in, and plussing a plus, and a whole thing about jazz chords, and how GMAJ is the same thing as G, unless it's specifically written as GMAJ, and back to fa-so-la-ti, which will bring us back to, oh, by the way, now that I've said the word "augment" five hundred times in conjunction with a bunch of other words, including the word "plus," that "plus" you keep so foolishly referring to, you're now ready to know that it means "augmented."

It was like watching people figure out with an abacus an algebra problem I came to them for an answer to because I just needed the number, but having to also listen to how they each came to their respective conclusions, which were each, by the way, completely different, and all most assuredly correct.

I'm not, mind you, suggesting that closely guarding the secret behind augmentation smacks of elitism. I'm just suggesting the perhaps less insulting idea that people that know music theory don't want to give out free answers to folks who don't. It's like it's their mission, or at least part of what they learned, to spread the word about music theory. They want to teach, but they want to teach the hard stuff first, and they probably learned that approach from THEIR teachers, who just wanted to show off. As for the teachers, I don't go back that far and I don't do windows. You can have they also were stuck with teachers that wanted to flummox and impress, so that's how they learned, so that's how they taught, and keep going backwards in time like a mirror held to a mirror or teachers at a university are paid to teach well, so they're crappy teachers. You can also have you make no sense and constantly contradict yourself, I completely disagree with everything you're saying about music theory and the people that taught it to me , I put salad in the toaster, and you're a pompous asshole too, but those are your opinions, not mine.

I just don't WANT to know this stuff. I don't WANT that kind of killjoy knowledge. I want to be amazed by stuff. And I want to be amazed at myself when I figure it out on my own.

I mean, I'm a smug bastard. Seriously. I'll watch "bad" bands and know exactly what everyone in that band is doing, and if they're good I'll shut my brain off and enjoy it, and if they suck of course I won't like the music very much.

(There are HUGE and occasional exceptions.)

I'm seriously running out of wonder and amazement, and I want to stay on a good pace for this kind of stuff--basically until I'm mature enough to move on to a completely different mindset.

If I knew that a band just flipped a few technical things around for their song because they knew all the tricks, and that that sloppy bassist I admired was just faking it and could actually play Chopin on a singing saw just by reading sheet music, it'd take a whole lot of fun out of it, wouldn't you think?

I'm sounding like a self-admiring jerk right now, and I know it, but most of the things that I say are conceited and misguided. That's how I've gotten through life so far.

But if someone came to me and asked me how to play an Em7 (one of the best chords in the universe, by the way--I'll tab it out at the bottom), I'd be able to figure out how much they knew about the guitar in about fourteen seconds, and customize my response based on my findings.

If they wanted to know WHY it was an Em7, I'd accurately direct that person outside, straight towards a circle of beard scratching people all pointing either at or away from each other, said circle doing so because some poor fool asked for directions to Mass Ave and Boylston.

Yours truly,

Andy Rooney

Em7
E 0
A 2
D 2
G 0
B 3
E 0