Wikisoftpeople Blog

Best key to learn on guitar

2011-08-14T15:51:17Z

If any of you out there have endeavored to learn how to improvisationaly solo on guitar the first thing you are going to run into whether you are a seasoned musician or beginner is the shear number of pathways there are to solo in a given key on the guitar.

This has to do with the way guitar was set up to actually simplify the playing of chords, and it is pretty dang simple to play chords on guitar, that is why we see a lot of rock bands blaring power chords and making some pretty decent sounding music without even changing the formation of their chord structure once, besides just sliding up and down the neck like a trombone.

Solo'ing is a little different. If you want to create fluid solo's utilizing all octaves available on the guitar you really have to think about guitar as an instrument. It is much harder than just looking at a piano. With a piano you can clearly see how many octaves are available to you. That is because each time that the piano starts its black white key pattern over again you have reached a new octave.

This can be easily ciphered as well, by simply playing the white keys from left to right. Starting with the C key. You will notice that this produces Do Rei Mi etc... as long as you don't play a black key and you will also notice you are back at Do again in the same place in relation to the black keys where you first started only the note is now higher pitched.

So on guitar, this relational pattern doesn't exist. It has to do with where the notes were placed, but there is no simple key where you just move up the neck and you play a scale in successive order. On piano the key of C is also the only key where this works like that besides a minor i believe its relative minor, but its basically the same thing. On guitar, however, all keys have the exact same pattern. On piano, only C works in the fashion described, if you want to play in B or A or E you have to learn where to use the black keys, or the sharps and flats for every different type of major, minor, and whatever scale you are working with.

That makes Piano very difficult for scales as well and requires a rich understanding of music theory to play all scales on piano in all keys. Most piano musicians do not know all the scales, they have a few worked out and that's what they like to play in. I would recommend that they include E minor/major pentonic in that repatoire though, because of the advanced ability for guitarists to play those two keys fluidly on guitar. unless the guitar play has drop tuned or capo tuned his instrument, but even in the capo case you will lose the ability to reach octaves on most guitars unless they are cutaway or electric with extra frets, and you can only drop tune a guitar a key or so without getting slinky guitar strings that are unplayable. So for this reason learn E.

The reason I say that is that the E scale is the scale that is at the very open position on the guitar. Open meaning you can play the bottom string, the one closest to you, producing the lowest tone, without pressing anything down on the fret board, and in standard tuning is supposed to produce an E. Now the magic about this position is that it allows you to play half of the notes of the scale, at least the pen-tonic scale, without pressing down any notes with your left hand. That is because it makes a bar under the root note, which in this case is E.

So that gives the E scale an incredible advantage for producing Drones (open notes) that you can fall back to while soloing to get back to your root note. Also as mentioned it is difficult to see how many octaves the guitar has on guitar, well for all intensive purposes referring to classical music, it only has 3. I know sad right? All those frets all those keys, and it has about as many octaves or less than a harmonica.

But the cool thing is if you think of guitar soloing in a horizontal and vertical way. You want to get through much of your solo vertically, horizontal slides would only be used for flare and additional intonation, but don't get lost always be aware of your original starting vertical movement. Until that is you run out of room. But then find the next note higher up the neck where you can continue to move vertically. Then at last move horizontal up into no mans land when you can absolutely find no more vertical structures.

You can hit a 4th octave on guitar after sliding up, but the very last one you have to bend the string to hit the 4th root note up the progression. Which makes guitar players look absolutely the coolest when they do that big bend to end their lead.

How did Bach write music?

2010-01-29T08:16:01Z

I know that this web site is dedicated to my web projects etc... but I guess it is my blog and I can write about whatever I want to here. For those of you who know me I play guitar... have for a long time. For about the past year I have been playing Bach songs from a small song book that goes over his most famous songs. There are tabs and there are notes... I use the tabs for the fingering and the notes for the rythym... I can play pretty perfectly Bouree, and Air, and a few of the other Cannons. For some reason I find it really intuitive. Like I can just start playing one I've never played before and get the melody. Really I find these songs much easier to learn than, say even some pop songs. They are playable, really playable melodies and super complex... but the thing is... I could never write anything like this. I mean when I try I realize how complicated they are... the way the bass moves in comparison to the melody, and the way chords are added in is so ... masterful.

I looked online, but I can't find anything about how he composed these songs. I have a speculation it would be much easier to write them if I were playing them on piano... but if that is the case how did he know they would transpose so perfectly to cello or guitar even.

The closest hint I ever heard about how these songs were constructed was that he never wrote a parralel fifth, which basically means no to ascending bar chords.... at least that's how I understand it. I also read on that he started a style of music where he would play with the bass and treble harmony... meaning as the bass descends the treble ascends and vice versa and through that he would create these astounding melodies.

I also learned that music majors have to study bach more than anyone else.When learning how to compose he is like God in the classroom. I am starting to see why.

Anyhow if anyone know how the heck he did it feel free to leave me a comment I would love to understand how to write more like that.

Matt J. Fox Pick Up and Delivery New Web Site

2010-01-14T01:19:32Z

I recently created a brand new web site for my other company Matt J. Fox Dry Cleaning. I think it came out looking pretty sweet. On top of a web site I also created an invoicing program that will bill online.

There is also a google maps integration that shows my route on the different days that I work. Over all it is a pretty suite looking web site. Check it out at Matt J Fox Drycleaners.

If you have any questions feel free to contact me at any time.

- Matt

Drycleaning Route Invoice Program

2010-01-02T03:42:02Z

I have recently created a full fledged drycleaning route invoicing program in PHP and MySql. This program is really helpful for anyone who needs an invoicing program that bills on a monthly basis for any kind of route services.

Add quantities, ticket numbers, see quartly yearly and monthly reports. See item totals. Best part of it is being able to send out an automaticly generated invoice and give users the ability to pay through paypal.

Create new months add past due balances, add percentage discount, referral discount programs and more.

Contact list expense reports are also included.

If you would like to see a demo of this feel free to contact me at any time.

-Matt

Android Google Maps Real Estate Listings Trulia.com My Maps Editor

2009-12-21T17:47:01Z

I just recently got an Android and part of the reason I got it was because I work with Google Maps API and program dealer locators and other things and wanted to see how difficult it would be to program for the Android. I started with a project in mind that would show me on a Google Maps markers of all the homes that recently sold, and homes that were recently listed.

At first this seemed like a daunting task and I was confused how I would accomplish such a thing. I figured I needed to write a program that would send me my gps coordinates in a variable form that php could handle that I could then send back to google maps and keep it refreshing.... that would be a poor mans way to do it.

Turns out that Android is so flexible that it allready had all the tools for everything I needed to accomplish this. There is a program called My Maps Editor by Google. This program for Android does a few things.

First and foremost what it does is that it links of with your My Maps account through Google. You may be asking yourself "What is a my maps account?" It is simple, you can use your gmail log-in to get to "your maps" from the google main page or the google maps page. Once there you can create markers or lines on maps and save them under different titles. You can make them public or private for the world to see.

So for example. Say you have a route that you like to run and you wanted to make it public. You could draw a line of the route and place markers showing distances etc... and put them in a map and save it as Coast Ridge Run and make it public. People who were searching for Coast Ridge Runs would probably come accross your map on a Google Search.

Ok that is great but how does it help us with the houses that have recently sold or are being listed. Well if you go to Trulia.com if you do a basic search for a zip code in a given area you will notice in the top right of the page there is an RSS icon. If you click on that you will see that there is a Google Earth RSS option. If you click on that it will give you the option to save a .KML file. If you save that file and then go back to your google my maps. You can choose to import a .KML file to your my maps. This will put on the map all the markers of houses that have recently been listed.

If you have my maps on your Android you will be able to see these listings from your android. And even better you can have the map follow you by GPS from your current coordinates.

So say you are a real estate agent, and you want to see houses that have recently been listed in the area while you are showing a client a home. If you had specified the URL to the KML file for your my maps to grab information. You would have the most current info at your finger tips of what houses have recently been listed in the area. Or if you were driving your car down the street you could see in the different areas what is going on.

This is a powerful and unique tool for agents. The only problem is that Trulia's web site appears to be broken, or they do not want to put information up about sold homes for .KML files. All of there other RSS feeds do seem to work, but the KML files do not. That means that we need to manually edit their RSS feeds to fit with KML in order to have accruate and up to date information.

This is something that I am working on at the moment, but feel there must be a better way to do it with a screen scrape or PHP program that reeds the feed etc... but this might be getting over my head.

Will have more on this later. But as of now Android is a hit! and has made my housing searches just that much easier.

Is now working with rollovermonkey.com

2009-12-08T20:25:38Z

As of yesterday we are working to develope an ecommerce site for www.rollovermonkey.com this is a company that develops toys and one of the toys is a monkey that laughs and rolls over.

There will be more on this to come and should be an interesting and fun project. We are planning on using Google check out with wordpress ecommerce plug-in.

How to add php variables to paypal buttons

2009-12-07T22:41:11Z

After extensive searching on this topic I have uncovered the easiest way to send customizable invoices through email generated with PHP variables.

If you are trying to do something similar to this you may have thought it would be easier than it actually was. Paypal will have you think that you need to add an item through their interface for every item you want a button for.

In actuality you can simply past this code

https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr" method="post">

youremail@youremail.com>

http://www.yoursite.com/returnpage.php">

https://www.paypal.com/en_US/i/btn/x-click-but02.gif" border="0" name="submit" alt="Make your payments with PayPal. It is free, secure, effective.">
https://www.paypal.com/it_IT/i/scr/pixel.gif" width="1" height="1">

Notice how I did the php echo of the price variable? That's the trick...

Now you may also be asking how do you put this in an email?

Well you don't put this in an email because emails first off vary and there is no platform between gmail, yahoo mail, outlook, thunderbird, etc.. etc.. etc.... not to mention some browsers or users refuse to view email using html for spam reasons.

So we need them to go back to their browser. So simply take the price that you wanted them to pay that was sent to the email and create and echo the variables you want into a link in their email.

Then use GET commands to pull that information and create the button from the code we made above.

if you are unfamilar with get variables there is a good tutorial on them here : http://www.w3schools.com/PHP/php_get.asp

Let me know if you have any questions.

Thanks,

Matt

Another Dealer Locator Installed

2009-08-03T21:35:29Z

If you look through my portfolio some of the projects that I have been working on have to do with Maps through Google. I have sold a few dealer locators to various corporations and the most recent one is through Agro K corporation. Agro K sells a variety of crop products and they have various distributors through the world.

This new script allows Agro K to easily manage their distributors through a CSV file that is uploaded through a password protected admin page.

Users then click dealer locator from the company main page. Here they type in their address and they will get results on a google map of the closest businesses that sell Agro K's products.

Check out an example of it here. Agro K Dealer Locator

Enter key does not Submit Forms in Firefox - Solution

2009-07-31T20:45:57Z

I just recently came accross a unique coding problem and it seems to be pretty common on the web. When you create some forms when you hit enter it doesn't submit the form to the javascript code.

I recently completed a job for Agro-K corporation doing a distributor locator that uses Google Maps API. They were pretty happy with the installation although they realized that when they typed in an address and hit enter nothing seemed to happen.

I was aware of this but the previous client was OK with just clicking the button manually so I left it at that even though I thought it was somewhat annoying.

Anyhow, here is the code that I was using and here is how I resolved it.

    Radius:





   Director Name full or partial








Office Name full or partial

So the basic thing that is happening here is there is a form, and at the bottom there are several buttons each with an onclick command that will run a specific javascript function when clicked. However not when you hit enter ... in Firefox.

So I went on the search and this is what I dug up. The code should look more like this to achieve the desired effect.

Ok so I tailored this down to just one button for the code, but here it is.

    Radius:

The difference is I added the

tag and made the button into a submit button. I overloaded the form though by adding an "onsubmit" to the

Integrate a blog to your existing website

2009-06-22T17:09:42Z

So you want to add a blog to your existing website?

Moveable type is a freeware blog that you can accomplish this with. Upon installing movable type you get a site that looks like the one below.

When you first bring it up it is somewhat dissapointing. Most of all it isn't branded in any way for your current web site. Sure you might be able to put your company name in the title, but what about the layout that you have already put blood sweat and tears into?

You might think of trying some of the other styles. This one above is called Cityscape. Cityscape is a template that comes with Moveable type along with several others that can be changed from the administration page. I was tempted to use this one because it matches the city theme of my web site and it does look pretty sleek.

In Movable type if you want to change themes you just go to the Design tab in the mt.cgi page and you select the styles option. This will bring you to a page that shows your current style selected. If you would like to see more options click default styles.

So how do you make these styles fit with your current theme!? Below I am going to share some basic tricks to get it going.

Step 1: Install Moveable Type .

For a basic tutorial on how to get Movable type installed on your domain go here.

How to Implement Movable Type

Step 2: How the Blog Works and Where Critical Style Sheets are Located

Now that you have Movable Type installled and running on your web site lets talk about how to customize it or better yet let's talk about where that install set up key components like your style sheet, where your files are saved and how pages are generated.

If you look up your style sheet through your source you will notice that it points to a style sheet that has nothing in it but an import that imports two separate style sheets. These two different style sheets are called.

screen.css and base.css

Base.css sets up the base of each page. Moveable Type uses Perl in the style sheets. It uses Perl to read IF statements in your style sheets to determine whether the style being used is 3 collums 2 collums or something else. It reads this information in a commented out section at the top of the style sheet. It also gathers information such as the author name of the style and so on which becomes visible when you select a style from the select a style page in the administration console.

Screen.css is the other imported style sheet and screen controls the elements like the logo, the header etc... We are mostly going to be working with Screen.css

Step 3: Add your own folder for your own style sheet

We will start the process by looking at where the screen.css is located for the cityscape theme.

screen.css is located at mt-static/themes/cityscape-sf/screen.css

In this folder are all the images that go along with that style for screen as well.

And at mt-static/themes/ there are different folders for all the different styles available to you.

This is where you add your own folder and your own screen.css file inside that folder.

If you look at the image above you will notice that I added a folder called Wikisoftpeople. Inside here are my images for the wikisoftpeople layout such as the header the banner, my navbar etc...

In the screen.css are all the important pieces of information I used to include all of these properties.

Step 4: Editing the style sheet.

There are two ways to customize your web site from this point on.

At frist I thought maybe I should simply use my current CSS from my homepage and try to just implement specific features of the blog onto each page.

It seems particularly easy because moveable type works with doc tags that are built into it. Here is an example of one below.

<$mt:BlogName encode_html="1"$>

If you put this doc tag in your html it will show your blogs name.

With this in mind I figured all I had to do was include these tags where I wanted to include blog features..

What I found while trying to achieve this effect though was that it was the doc tags are rather complex and that they work in conjunction with each other.

I decided to try a different approach first. I decided to look for a default Movabletype layout that looked similar to my own page allready and modify it so it fit within my web site. I.E. editing the screen.css file on my own.

This works and did not take more than a few hours. This part you will have to work out much on your own, because each persons own stylesheet is defferent. Play with the different styles and try to add your own images and backgrounds and change the widths etc...

For example I had to move the Perl doc tag for footer out of its div tags and all the way to the bottom for the footer to stay at the bottom.

Post your own integrations in the comment boxes below. If you need any help with this on your web site I would be glad to help.

How to implement comment bubbles in movable type

2009-06-22T09:32:36Z

One thing I noticed on a few movable type blogs was they had customized comment bubbles at the bottom of their pages like this one. I thought that this was much easier on the eyes and was wondering if perhaps there was a plug-in that people were using to get this effect. I looked around and found nothing. I realized it must not be that hard to edit the CSS to do this and it wasn't.

So here is what you will need.

download these images:

this one

and this one

You are going to want to copy these images to where your screen.css file resides. You can find out where this is by looking in the source of your entry page and following the trail to find out where the css file is. It may link to a different .css file that imports the screen.css file. Find out where that is and then copy these images into that directory.

After you have done this you are going to want to add a couple lines of code to your .css file.


.comment .comment-header {
    background: #fff url(entry-comment-bg-bot.gif) no-repeat 0 0;
    padding: 8px 0 0 25px;
}


.comment-content {
    background: #eeeeea url(entry-comment-bg-top.gif) no-repeat 0 0;
    padding-top: 5px;}

Depending on which style template you are using you may need to make sure that the comment boxes are not being changed in the base .css file. Typically this should work on its own as is.

Now if you refresh your page with your comments you should see the comment box, but does it look like this?

That is because the default comment template displays the person who wrote the comment above the bubble. We want the person who wrote the comment below instead so we need to move some of the document tags around. Here is what the tags should look like.

Text File with Comments Template Code up to where Footer Begins

If you replace everything in your comments template up to where the footer begins with the code inside the referenced text file, you should get nice looking comment bubbles like the test one at the bottom of this page. Lastly you may need to edit the comment images themselves to fit on your screen. I custom made mine to fit to the width of my blog. If you have any questions let me know. Thanks, Matt

How to implement movable type

2009-06-19T20:48:37Z

I have been working with web sites and doing design for years now and of course without a doubt I noticed the importance of blogs on the web. Specifically I noticed how they could be used to raise search engine rankings.

I would like to post a tutorial of how to implement a blog on your own web site.

So after looking over wordpress and several other free blogs out there I decided to settle with using movable type.

The reason why I chose movable type was their program was quick and easy to download and the documentation was fairly easy to read on how to install it.

If you would like download movable type do so now by going to.

Download Movable Type

I downloaded the developer version.

Once you download movable type you are going to want to extract the files. It is a pretty hefty zip file with over 2,000 files and components so it may take you a while depending on your pc to even extract the files to a folder.

This is where things get a little bit complicated. Movable Type is written in Perl. If you were like me you probably have never installed a script written in Perl before. Movable type sort of assumes that you know how to work with Perl and their directions are not too clear. I had to search the web to find out more about Perl and to find out if I had Perl capabilities on my server.

It turns out that I did and this is how I figured that out. I downloaded a Perl hello world script and placed it in my cgi-bin. Before I did this though I did all sorts of non-sensical things like tried to place a .htaccess file in different directories to let me run Perl scripts from places other than my cgi-bin.

Don't do this. Perl scripts for the most part - if you want to make your life easy run from the cgi-bin. This is how I see it becasue it worked pretty well.

Below is the hello world script so you can get Perl working on your server. Save this text with notepad and save it as helloworld.pl pl is the suffix for perl programs. Place this in your cgi-bin directory on your web server, which should be www.something.com/cgi-bin/hellworld.pl

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

     # Tell perl to send a html header.
     # So your browser gets the output
     # rather then (command line
     # on the server.)
print "Content-type: text/html\n\n";

     # print your basic html tags.
     # and the content of them.
print "Hello World!! \n";
print "
Hello world
\n";

Here is the example on my server:

<Hello Wold Example

If you get Perl working correctly it should look just like this in your browser with your own domain.

It should be noted that this did not work for me at first. The reason why!? Because I needed to "Set Permissions" or CHMOD the file to 755. It will not work unless it has permissions set to 755. I use dreamweaver to set my permissions and it should be noted that for some reason files within the cgi-bin on my server do not set permissions the same way. If I set the permissions then refresh it appears that the permissions go back to what they were previously. I found though that if I set the permissions and then disconnect from the remote server and then reconnect the changes I made upon reconnect are saved. This may work the same way with your ftp client and your server as well so try that out if it gives you some trouble.

I also wanted to know what version of Perl I had because I think it specified that I needed version 5 or greater.

So I have another script to find that out as well. Once again put this in your cgi-bin and set permissions to 755.

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
$command= $];
$title = "Perl Version";

print "Content-type: text/html\n\n";
print "$title";

print "
$title

\n";
print "Perl version : ".$command;

It will look like this if everything is working correctly.

Perl Version

If it is not good I am sorry because I am not a Perl expert, but I think these are some pretty good trial and error steps to get you started. Contact your site admin or host for more info and how you can get Perl set up if needed.

If everything is good from here you want to take movable type that you extracted and move the contents of the first subfolder and ftp them to your cgi-bin folder on your server. You have about 2,000 plus files to upload so most likely that will take a little while.

You are going to want to CHMOD/set permissions on everything to 755 and then run the file mt.cgi from your address bar.

http://www.something.com/cgi-bin/mt.cgi

This will get your movable type installation started. From here most of it is pretty self explanatory. I did run into a couple of hick ups when I was setting up my send mail server, but that was only because gmail kept putting my movable type messages into the spam folder and I thought I wasn't receiving any mail at all. Also I was having errors on the first part of the installation because I hadn't CHMOD all the files in the cgi-bin and folders to 755.

The only other issue I ran into was that movable type could not run many of the files in the mt-static folder because they are in the cgi-bin folder. Remember cgi-bin is mainly for cgi! Don't worry though in the installation procedures it has a check for this and recognizes this problem and offers a solution for it. What it does is it copies the folder mt-static to your www/ or public_html/ domain directory. It also updates all necessary links all across the board.

You will also be asked what you want to name your blog. This is how you willl access your files. I named mine blog not knowing that it would be where the blog resides. Thus if you look up at the address bar you will see the main folder for this blog is under www.wikisoftpeople.com/blog

You may want to put more thought into this for search engine optimization purposes.

However if you have gotten this far it means you should be able to start posting entries. Any time you want to post an entry you just log into movable type from your mt.cgi address or www.something.com/cgi-bin/mt.cgi

Any time you want to veiw your blog you go to www.something.com/blog or whatever you named your main directory.

There are some cool styles that come with movable type and you may want to play around with those. In my next blog I am going to begin writing about implementing movable type into a web site that allready has a design and the best way to go about doing this.

Thanks for reading and if you have any questions feel free to post.