I wouldn't say I follow them as guides, but I think the field is changing quickly enough that it's good, or at least interesting, to read what's working well for other people.
I really want Anthropic to let me make an API token that pulls from the same pool of usage that my Pro subscription does with the official clients. It would be cool to be able to run experiments with alternate clients and automation and stuff without having to go swipe the card at the ol' API token refilling station.
Copyright: Zero guardrails on anything related to third-party IP, which lets you do some funny things. (I'm including a picture/prompt of Super Mario, Mickey Mouse, and Bugs Bunny partying at a nightclub in the blog post)
Moderation: It has far fewer guardrails and any other Google AI product I've tried, and it is possible to prompt engineer some images that would definitely be considered NSFW by most people — more NSFW than actual NSFW image generators (a post-generation filter will catch most nudity, however). I have not had any rejections for more innocous queries that could be misinterpreted as being NSFW.
It might be the safety moderation system. It's rather aggressive and when it does kick in (at least in the API), it often returns an empty response giving basically zero indication as to the root cause.
I had a blast with this. I got Claude to write a function for encoding a string to Morse and sending it, and then a patch that displays a 10-character rolling display next to the name of other users. From what I can tell with zero Morse code experience, most users are just sending random characters by accident.
I was pretty pleased to see it work when I ran two windows side-by-side, called `sendMorse('never gonna give you up')` in one window, and then watched it roll through the display on the other window.
I'm vaguely reminded of the excellent Jackbox game Tee Fury, in which players submit slogans for T shirts and "art" separately. Players then get to choose from a few options for slogans and designs to make T shirts which are voted on by the group.
I have fond memories of laughing until I was in tears when playing with a group of friends over drinks during the lockdowns in 2020. Something about the process just naturally results in hilarity (especially if you're in a group where you can be offensive).
It's like exquisite corpse for t-shirts. Or, in your case, shorts.
Whenever one of my friend groups is gathered we always make it a point to do an exquisite corpse story on a piece of paper while we’re inebriated in some way xD Video version will be wild
My experience with ear training is that you really need to connect it to your instrument. If you're on the train where you can't play, obviously it can't hurt to train interval recognition and chord quality - but the ultimate point of training your ear is to build that connection between what you hear in your mind and what comes out of your fingers on the instrument.
If there's one "secret trick" exercise for guitar (and other instruments, I assume), it's singing as you play. Put on a loop and try to just sing the notes as you play them. Or scat a little lick and then try to replicate it on the guitar. It's really effective, it feels like it just "gets to the heart of the issue."
It works to boost interval training too - grab a root note somewhere, play, say, a minor third, get that sound into your head, and then sing it as you play it.
Transcription is also really helpful. Print out some blank tab, download Transcribe! so you can slow / loop sections, pick a song you like, grab your instrument, and just start trying to figure it out. It's grueling at first but it gets a lot easier with practice. As a side benefit, you get to steal licks from players you like.
For the most part, the great players are people who did a ton of this - whether it was rock guys listening to the same blues record over and over and learning the licks, or jazz guys doing obsessive transcriptions. Steve Vai famously found his way into Frank Zappa's band because he sent copies of his transcriptions to Zappa himself.
The closest thing to a "secret trick" on guitar IMHO is to learn (1) the diatonic intervals(!), and (2) the fretboard, i.e. how these intervals happen to interact with the guitar tuning you're currently using. Start by singing ut, re, mi, fa, sol, la (solmization) and find the notes on the fretboard as you do so.
(You may notice that we don't use ti or altered solfège syllables: that's because it's convenient to keep mi-fa as the only marker for a half-step and use an exceptional hexachord mutation whenever we need to reach other notes. (For example, the full major scale is sung ut, re, mi, fa, sol, re, mi, fa and descends fa, mi, re, sol, fa, mi, re, ut. Note how the half-steps are consistently mi-fa and fa-mi. Centering the system on that one feature agrees with the guitar's nature as a relative instrument; unlike on the keyboard, we need not think by reference to a single diatonic scale and its 'sharp' and 'flat' notes.)
The system also extends cleanly to other intervals; for example, the minor third is just re-fa or mi-sol, the major third is ut-mi or fa-la, etc. Very easy.
I think we're largely advocating for the same thing, though your method is more formalized.
Either way, my bigger point is: connect "ear training" to your practice on the instrument, and don't neglect the speaking portion of learning the language in favor of the hearing.
I also think it just takes your ears much longer to develop than your fingers on guitar if you start from zero.
Even zero though is highly variable. I have noticed how some children have amazing intonation when randomly singing and some are quite bad.
I think trying to copy Steve Vai would be as valuable as trying to copy the way Lebron James plays basketball. Of course, a ton of practice is involved but these are the supreme outliers in terms of being gifted at their task.
For many new guitar players, I would suspect transcribing lines is like trying to dunk the ball when you are only 5'5". I can transcribe anything on guitar 40 years later but I remember the immensely frustrating experience of not being able to transcribe anything. Reading how all the "greats" would do this. My ears just took a very long time to develop. Like 15-20 years long.
Any ear training was just a demoralizing experience for me because I really started from absolute zero with no ability to hear or sing anything note wise. I can remember all the hours I practiced various modes and scales. They were just finger patterns. It took so long to actually be able to hear them.
Thanks. As a beginner guitarist just starting to get into ear-training, that all sounds like good advice. However, I’m curious as to what you mean by “Put on a loop”?
By "put on a loop" I mean "play a sequence of known chords in a loop" - so that you can practice playing and singing notes in context (i.e. in context of a song, jam, etc).
There are tons of backing tracks available on YouTube, but a loop pedal is more versatile, allowing you to play arbitrary chord progressions and workshop them.
Transcribe! is a seriously great piece of software, it's got everything you need to get started with transcription. Another great way is to just get in the habit of tabbing out little melodies that get stuck in your head. (Yes, it's fine to start transcribing in tablature, reading standard music notation is a great skill but not necessary to get started.)
hubguitar.com has a little tool for building printable blank tab sheets which I used years ago to create a few PDFs, of which I've printed dozens of copies over the years.
Thanks for the clarification about playing to a loop.
I have an iPhone and was thinking I could probably learn enough Garageband to create some simple loops that I could play along to. I’m currently at the stage where I’m still working on my timing and developing a solid rhythm (which doesn’t come naturally to me) so until now I’ve been focussing on strumming chords.
I’ve been following Justin Sandercoe’s lessons and was recently learning to play “A Girl Like You”¹. Up until this lesson, Justin always told the learner exactly what notes to play in a riff but for this one, he left it up to the learner to figure it out themselves. He gave enough clues for a beginner like me to figure it out (e.g., that notes are in the C minor pentatonic scale and that they go up and down followed by a big jump up, etc.). I had to listen very carefully and it took me a while but with the clues, I eventually figured out how to play the riff. I got a much greater buzz from learning this way, instead of simply being spoon-fed the notes so this has sparked my interest in ear-training and transscribing.
A looper pedal does sound like something that would be useful in the future when I start to learn more lead parts but I don’t think I’d benefit from it right now. Thanks, also, for the Hub Guitar recommendation. I hadn’t come across that site before and it looks like a good resource.
There’s a lot of bad shit in the modern world but if you want to learn music, it’s a great time to be alive: there are so many great resources for learning, good quality guitars are cheap, my €120 Spark Go modelling amp can emulate more tones than I could ever want, my smart-phone can be a metronome, tuner, ear-trainer, or digital audio workstation – and with Apple Music play 90% of the music I might want to listen to.
You can _definitely_ learn enough garage band to make a simple loop! It's very easy to set up, actually - at least on desktop, and I'm sure it's similar enough on the mobile app.
You can mark a section on the timeline to loop, and if you record when you're in that state, it'll just continually record to that same section of track. You can also set it up to do a metronome count in before actually recording. So, if you can manage to stay on time for 2 or 4 bars in one go, you can just record some quarter note strums into your phone mic - bang, perfectly serviceable loop for practice.
You can even start out with just a loop of a single chord to get a sense for how different notes sound against it in context. When that gets boring, do a little I-V or I-IV loop and try to notice the change in feel of different notes in, say, the major pentatonic scale for the root note. Then try a twelve bar blues, and then, ya know, whatever. It's a lot of fun, I'll often just toss out a quick loop and noodle if I've got ten minutes between meetings or a long build or something.
The only "secret trick" to play guitar that I know is practice, practice, practice. Nothing beats everyday practice, even it is for 10 minutes. Not even telling what you can achieve with 4 hours daily practice. The continuous interaction with your instrument, will make you learn that when you hear a sequence of musical notes, your fingers would naturally went to the correct position on the neck to reproduce it, even without thinking.
Agreed, and I slightly hesitated to use that phrase, but I do think the "sing and play" exercise is a uniquely good thing to practice, practice, practice. It just seems to really work to connect the part of your brain that comes up with melodies to the part of your brain that runs the fingers. YMMV, of course.
The first thing that came to mind the first time I saw Skibidi Toilet was this kind of TF2 SFM memery, which I love. The expressions in the second verse and the Spy's slow turn to look to heaven still really amuse me:
squidbillies, i think, is a good example of something that appears on the surface to be completely stupid, but actually has a pretty clever core. South Park is kind of similar, I think I'd have a difficult time convincing my parents generation, for example, that South Park is at times one of the smartest shows on TV.
the 6-7 thing has been a source of constant amusement for me. my kid told me that one of their teachers had (with good humor) banned saying "6 7" and we immediately went down a rabbit hole of how he could "side-channel" 6 7s into conversation - like "hey, $teacher, what's the next prime number after 61?"
he told me there's a small bustling trade in learning numbers in other languages - "seis siete" for example.
