@Robusto Yes: Dutch oe is like English oo.

I don't perceive any difference.

I'm glad you eat Dutch.

@Cerberus Which one? Like the oo in boot or the one in foot?

took, rook, look vs fool, tool, shoot

bʊk vs tul

@Robusto Well, I would say both.

It can be pronounced short or long, I think, depending on the word and possibly the context.

I'm not sure: I know too little about Dutch pronunciation.

And maybe there is a slight difference in quality between cookie and koekje.

But it's very close at any rate.

I don't know.

forvo.com/search/koekje

The pronunciation of koekje.

forvo.com/word/boek/#nl

And boek, which means book.

I'm so bored...I've begun commenting anything...like it's an incurable illness. I miss questions that ask something.

@RegDwigнt They could bring the text to the Incomprehensible Room.

[ SmokeDetector | MS ] Pattern-matching website in body (97): Which is the best classic car shop to visit? by muscle car on english.SE

[ SmokeDetector | MS ] Bad ns for domain in body (98): What's the meaning of "exposure " in this context? by user337359 on english.SE

@KannE Something?

There, I give you one just because I'm nice.

not something?

yet another!

Nihao @MattE.Эллен have you made great progress in Chinese? =)

@Jasper no :d still haven't had a chance to look at the video

@MattE.Эллен and now for something completely different?

@Cerberus Very tasty but a little gamey

@RegDwigнt something wicked this way comes?

Hello @MattE.Эллен are you still taking Greek classes now?

I I only took that for a while, but I need to save my money. I might start again now I have a full time job

Hmm OK. I think books can help you to learn too, and will be cheaper than classes.

But many will find classes more helpful than books for foreign languages.

I was so tired yesterday I slept for 12 hours.

sounds like a sound sleep

@MattE.Эллен I, uh, er, something something?

@RegDwigнt you're really something?

hey guys, i have a sentence and I think it's grammatical but I'm not sure:

> SpecifiedTime: The Unix time the callback data entries whose create times are older than to delete.

so I'm referring to a Unix time, and I'm deleting callback data entries that have create times which are also Unix times

the callback data entries that have create times older than "The Unix time" (a specified Unix time) are the ones that get deleted

"The Unix time the callback data entries whose create times are older than which will be deleted" ?

@Jez even if it's grammatical it's unwieldy AAF. This looks like documentation, in which case clarity trumps brevity. No need to be curt. If you need two sentences, fine. If you need five, so be it.

> SpecifiedTime: a Unix time; all callback data entries whose create times are older than this time will be deleted.

Hey @Rob, if you got five minutes to spare in the foreseeable future, could you maybe explain to, like, a complete moron what notes are easy and which are hard on a flute?

It kinda bugs me to ask, but I've read Wiki and I've read Rimsky-Korsakovs Orchestration, and if anything I now know less than before.

I'm asking because I've been writing a piano quintet and it hit me that I could give the first violin's part to a flute.

The violin can play all the notes just fine, but fuck me if I know what the flute can do.

Also, when do you need to breathe? Do you need to breathe?

I am at a loss.

Thanks.

Actually, I'm stupid. I could just go ahead and replace the violin with a flute in the score and show you. Give me two minutes.

musescore.com/user/27897310/scores/5459526

Right, here goes. Just took the exposition and copypasted the first violin's part to be flute. Ticks in at less than 2 minutes. No idea what to do with the violin now, but that's my concern not yours.

So basically 1) I have no idea if any of the passages are unplayable because of oh I dunno E and D are easy but the D sharp is a completely impossible fingering at this tempo and 2) when do you need to breathe. Do you need to breathe. And do I need to actually put in all those commas for breathing, I'd figure any competent flute player should know when they are about to die.

Thanks again.

Oh, and 3) how much of concern is forte vs piano in which register. Does your tone break in half for any of this.

@RegDwigнt The flute's range is 3 octaves and a fifth. Most notes are relatively easy to produce, but the most facile finger technique occurs in the first two octaves. In the altissimo register (the final fifth) the notes are hard to produce, shrill, and hard to keep on pitch—but that didn't stop Strauss from bedeviling us with them in his Alpine Symphony (which I had to sight read at one audition).

The money notes—those that can hold their own in a full orchestra and still remain "sweet"—are from about A4 to A6 (A above middle C to two octaves above that, depending on how you're counting).

Things that are hard to do in finger technique are working across the break back and forth where you have to go from fingers all on to all off. The patterns are what we call "ungrateful," and they're even harder if you have to play them legato.

@RegDwigнt yeah, i came to that conclusion.

@RegDwigнt I always hated the "etwas langsamer" section in the first movement of Strauss's Ein Heldenleben, just because it always felt so damned awkward. Not really hard to play, but it just doesn't feel good in the hands.

Runs and glisses and trills are the flute's bread and butter, though.

As for breathing, the flute uses the most air of any wind instrument except the tuba.

@Robusto Mkay. So looking at that, I should never have asked because looking it that my thing must be something I could play if you gave me the flute and told me which way up to hold it.

Do you care about beaming the notes any specific way?

On the piano I tend to follow the fingering, and for the violin the string layout.

Well, we're always in the treble clef, so the beams go on top.

I mean the grouping.

Also, used ledger lines instead of 8va ------------- signs.

Yeah that I know. Same as for violin.

@RegDwigнt Give me an example of what you think might be problematic. We don't use vocal grouping, we always beam quarter-note subdivisions instead of splitting them, etc.

Yeah that's all what I needed to know. Again, I don't know the instrument so I wondered if you needed a visual split between two notes of different register.

No. In fact, that would be harder to sight-read.

Perfect, thank you.

De nada.

Like, on the piano if I have an arpeggio up that has 5 notes in it, or 6 or whatever, I might group it that way to visually make it easier for the player to parse. Chopin doesn't do that, and that's why so many people struggle with Chopin. They can't group the notes themselves.

Likewise on the violin. If I have a run-up like E-F#-G-A-H-C#-D#-E, I might split it after three notes rather than four, because that's where you change from one string to another.

Ah.

Hey, check this little concertmaster solo on the fiddle:

Lotta mobile chords there.

Lol triple stops. Tanks but no tanks.

Hehe, yeah.

Gimme a fiddle I might pull it off at 1/10 the tempo after three months of practice.

I seriously don't know how people get that good.

Well, I do know.

Idiot savants.

Lotsa talent, lotsa practice.

You can get really really good at just one thing, or somewhat rubbish at all the things.

I am firmly in the second camp.

Life's too short to do just one thing.

Also, it would kinda bug me if I knew how to play the piano but didn't know how to do dishes or play with children.

There were very few things I really couldn't play on the flute—usually modern monstrosities—but there's plenty I could never dream of playing on the piano, and I'm sure it's the same for violin.

Well, as Harold Ramis taught us, you only need 10 years to git gud. 10 years of listening to I got you babe, mind.

Heh.

Well anyhoo. Ill go back to drinking, it's Friday again wouldn't you know it.

Thanks a bunch. This gives me confidence.

@RegDwigнt Uh-oh. Perhaps I went too far ...

Nah, it's just that, like I said, I've been digging into orchestration recently and I do believe that by the looks of things it's flute that can be my gateway drug to all winds, just like violin previously let me grok the string sections.

Cor anglais certainly didn't give me any confidence at all if you know what I'm saying-.

@RegDwigнt Sure. Go nuts. The worst that can happen is you'll piss off a bunch of flautists.

Not in this life I won't. I saw your Strauß.

He wasn't the worst. At least his shit was musical.

Some of the 12-tone stuff is really hard and you don't get to enjoy it.

BTW, it caught me by surprise when you said those 4 minutes were the longest you've heard of me so far. You can give a listen to that StackExchange thingie, it's 6 minutes. MIDI yes, but both technically and harmonically at a much higher level than this Home thing.

Which is just a glorified version of My Way if you look closely. And by glorified I mean simplified.

Nothing of note there really. I was surprised to see you comment at all.

Prosit.

@RegDwigнt It's on your channel? I thought I'd heard everything. You're not talking about the conglomeration thingie are you?

The composer conglomeration or what conglomeration?

Who's confusing whom. I'm the one that's drinking.

Hold on.

You had a song cycle or something?

I don't recall your opus off the top of my head.

There. Took me a while to find my own channel. I see everything threefold.

@RegDwigнt Musta missed that one. December is not a great time for me to be attentive.

Well happy listening then. Or happy guessing them composers.

You might actually guess every single one except the Russians and Armenians.

Most people can't tell Haydn from Mendelsson.

Or Haydn from Stockhausen.

The Stockhausen syndrome is the worst.

The Haydn syndrome, not so much.

That's how I tell the two apart.

A wise policy.

One thing I will say, though, is you need to get your stuff in front of a chamber ensemble. That synth makes everything sound unnecessarily like early video-game scores.

I was thinking about going the opposite way. Just writing everything as a score for a 16-bit game, and titling it as such.

It's all the rage these days, you know.

So I've heard.

But when you have staccato dots above eighth notes, they ought to be played staccato, not the-patch-can't-recover-that-quick legato.

But yeah I'm getting there slowly but steadily. I've had people from the US requesting to play my stuff in a live setting.

We'll see. The channel is like six months old now.

Good job. Get them to record it.

Right now I'm just dumping everything as quickly as possible.

@Robusto yeah I asked them as much.

Also. Also! I've been listening to a lot of Blade Runner the last couple weeks. And from there everything Vangelis.

Uh-oh.

Fuck me, I can tell you, his sound font is like worse than what you get by default with Firefox.

But people paid actual money to hear it.

Lotsa money.

Listen to Chariots of Fire. Go listen to it right now.

Jesus Christ.

And I'm not even mentioning, like, A-ha or Jean-Michel Jarre.

Context is everything really.

You can get away with the worst shit if everything around you is even worse shit.

Yeah. I think the only thing of his I liked was the opening of The Bounty score.

Oh that's a great one.

Also on my playlist.

The slurred descending flute sound I like.

Like, really, that man knows what he's doing. That's why you don't mind the sound font. Hell, that's why I don't mind the sound font.

In the end it's just the black dots on the black lines. Is all I care about.

The score is just the bones. You have to flesh them out with real musicianship.

Precisely.

If synths have taught us anything, it's that.

I used to have a two-octave synth as a teen, when I had no other instrument.

Single-tone, no touch-sensitivity.

I rocked the shit out of that one.

Heh, I had a piano with a cracked soundboard.

A key actually broke off.

So I learned to compose around it.

It's not the tools, it's how you use them. All those great sensei keep saying that, and we're all like oh and ah such wise words. But barely anyone actually goes ahead to try and live by them.

Have you ever listened to David Bedford?

That is not a name I have heard before.

Well why don't you just say Mike Oldfield.

You had me at Mike Oldfield.

@RegDwigнt Or anything. So many are not real questions. I guess they're just bored too.

Kenneth Patchen is another name that is new to me.

Even though my second name is Kenneth.

He was an American poet, an experimentalist.

@Robusto I have a whole playlist with stuff like that. Let me see if they have that on Spotify.

I would be surprised if Spotify covers him.

Lotsa stuff.

Nurses Song with Elephants.

12 hours of Sunset.

Great Equatorial.

Lots of things with Dunkirk in the title for some reason.

And lots of Albert Hall.

Some of his stuff I'm not particular to. But some of it I think is truly great.

@Robusto that is the weirdest mix of Tron, Jean-Michel Jarre, Nils Frahm, and Keiichi Okabe. I like.

^_^

Reminds me of this.

Very similar chords.

I'd be surprised if he wasn't aware of Bedford's work.

I think he's aware of more things than there are things. I saw him on stage and you couldn't even tell if was the composer himself. You'd think him a random conferencier. Such a humble guy. And then you listen to his stuff and he knows every single note in and out.

Kept saying hontoni arigato gozaimashita all the time like he was a nobody.

Nice.

Righty-right, so before I go, one last clarification, especially after looking at that Strauß: do you care at all for taking a break to catch your breath after 16/32/64 bars, or do you just play whatever is thrown at you. As in, not because it's your job, but because it's just what you can do no problem.

Well ... as an orchestral player you always have to do what you can do, even if the composer is unaware of the limitations.

That is what I am seeking to avoid.

But take the classic Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun, for example ...

There's enough people not giving a shit. Especially among composers. Especially among "composers" on MuseScore.

@Robusto well precisely I wouldn't begin to know if that's a piece that just kills you flat and you have to find a new player.

It used to be the opening solo was done with one breath break. Then somebody played it complete without a breath. Suddenly everybody had to do the impossible.

My piano stuff is playable if you had like three years of lessons. My violin stuff likewise. Less if you're an adult. I can play most things I write after just one year at the instrument. So with the flute that's my target range as well. I am not looking at Stravinsky.

If anything I'd be happy if more people could be won over to play "classical" music.

Eliticism is nice and all but you can't live off that.

Well, there are those who can't live on a diet of Nicki Minaj and R Kelly.

Is R Kelly still not in jail? Boggles the mind.

That reminds me I should go off before I get sad because of things random.

Thank you once again.

I'll ping you again when I need to master the tubular bells.