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Introducing music.isallicare.com

A while back I blogged about music theory for geeks and got a lot of feedback from my fellow musicians (some geek some not). Then I blogged for over a month about a new technology named Dojo Toolkit, which essentially is a JavaScript toolkit to create really cool looking AJAX/Web 2.0 applications. As a pet [...]

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Developing a Dojo Application 6 – Epilogue

About 6 weeks ago I started a pet project to experiment with Dojo Toolkit which I tentatively called Musician’s Friend. My goal was to see whether this technology is really mature and stable enough to be used in an enterprise grade software project, and to create an application that might one day [...]

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Developing a Dojo Application 4 – Splash Screen, Title Pane and Dialog Box

This week I’ll complete the chord and scale definitions and add some functionality to the application.

There is a large number of chords, most of which I believe is now included in our application. I omitted some rarely used chords which spread out to two octaves. Also note that some added notes, such as ninths, elevenths, [...]

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Developing a Dojo Application 3 - Wiring it up

I left it where we had a simple GUI that didn’t do much last week. This time I’ll try to implement a simple, but working version of our little Musician’s Helper application. My primary design goal is to make this really intuitive and useful for a musician who wants to figure out or practice [...]

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Music Theory for Geeks: 3 The Magic Circle

Last time I went through the chromatic and major scales. Today I’ll put the chromatic scale on a circle and create a pretty handy gadget, a low-tech computer to figure chords and scales out.

In fact I will create two circles, which we’ll attach together later. The first circle is for the “degrees”, and it will [...]

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Music Theory for Geeks: 2 The Major Scale

Now that we know what a musical note refers to, we can move on with some other basic concepts. At the end of the day, all music theory is based on the 12 notes in an octave. So once you understand how each note is related to others, the same principles hold for other octaves [...]

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Music Theory for Geeks: 1 Introduction and Basics

Music theory is hard to learn for most people. It involves a lot of abstractions at many different levels, such as notes, scales, chords, progressions, inversions, etc. It takes years to assimilate all of this information, and even more before you can actually put them to practical use. I’ve always thought that the standard learning [...]

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