petals and notes

first off, happy birthday brother frank! i have no idea if you read this but i hope you're having a good one.

ever since band in fifth, sixth and seventh grade, maybe eighth too, in which i played the trumpet, and ever since the few piano and guitar lessons i had in my teens, i've always wanted, desperately at times, to understand how music works. i did well enough memorizing notes and chords, but it was always a mystery to me how keys worked, why there were all those sharps and flats, and why, whenever i tried making up tunes myself, they always had a similar sound to them that i couldn't escape from.

it's ironic that i have spent a good deal of my professional life working with music-making machines and still have never figured it out. but, i'm taking long overdue action to remedy this situation. for the past many nights (and some days) i have been moving through a book i found on my bookshelf (who knows when i bought it) called how to write songs on guitar by rikky rooksby. i'm slightly embarrassed to carry it around with me becuase so many people have the impression that i know what i'm doing! but, let me put it out there right now, i don't! (i feel much better.)

after a few nights with the book, i have enough of a grip to see how fantastic the mechanisms behind music are. of course i knew they were magical because i love music and love the way it sends me, but to see how it works...wow! i have tried reading harmony textbooks, and i may try again, but because i had trouble hearing what the books talked about, and because they assumed some proficiency on a keyboard, i felt left in the dark. the rooksby book works for me because he uses popular music on guitar that i know so much better than classical to demonstrate chords, chord progressions, arrangement, rhythm, melody and lyrics. when i see a chord progression i often can play the song in my head and hear what he's talking about. if i can't, i go to the iTunes store and listen to a free clip of the song, which, most often, is the part the rooksby calls out. very handy.

it's exciting to begin understand how the simplicity of a seven-note system (scale) translates into nearly infinite possibilities, almost like dna. i feel like i'm a kid looking up into the night sky and trying to grasp it all. beautiful and sublime. so, what does this have to do with flowers?