Wheat Williams

8,773 reputation

734

bio	website	wheatwilliams.com
	location	Atlanta, Georgia, United States of America
	age	49
visits	member for	1 year, 9 months
	seen	6 hours ago
stats	profile views	72

Apple Certified Macintosh Technician (ACMT) and Apple Sales Professional (ASP).

Microsoft Windows SBS 2008 (Small Business Server) Network Administrator, supporting Windows 7 clients.

Volunteer business administrator for the Atlanta Baroque Orchestra.

I have also been a technical writer, computer magazine tech journalist, music critic and music journalist, copywriter and publicist, and professional musician.

Languages: English, with some German (Deutsch), Spanish (español), and French (français)

	8,773 reputation	bio	website	wheatwilliams.com	visits	member for	1 year, 9 months
734 badges		location	Atlanta, Georgia, United States of America		seen	6 hours ago

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262 Comments

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Feb 7	comment	Name of baroque formation with five musicians (soprano, recorder, violin, viola da gamba, lute)? "Broken consort" is a Renaissance term that means that it is a group with different kinds of instruments. If there were 5 recorders of different pitch ranges, it would be a "recorder consort"; if there were 5 viols, from viola da gamba to treble viol, it would be a "viol consort". Anything with both strings and woodwinds would be called "broken".
Feb 7	comment	Name of baroque formation with five musicians (soprano, recorder, violin, viola da gamba, lute)? Given the birth and death dates of the composers, these pieces could be categorized as late Renaissance or very early Baroque. They were written at a time when one style period was quickly evolving into another.
Feb 5	comment	Some acoustic guitars are easy to play but some aren't. What affects playability? Find a good technician and have a talk with him about your playing style. Do you fingerpick lightly? Do you strum hard? Do you bend strings a lot when you solo? (if you bend strings a lot, you'll need a higher action). The purpose is to enable the guitar to be easy to play AND well-intonated AND with no buzzing. All these subtle little adjustments can add up to a big difference in playability. You will need to provide the technician with another brand-new set of the string gauges you want. He will throw your existing strings away and start with a new set. They always do this.
Feb 5	comment	Which electric guitar strings have the least (pitch) bend If you have an unusual custom alternate tuning, with custom string gauges, then a professional setup would be essential. Good guitar technicians can calibrate all the parts of the guitar to be optimized for your particular situation. It might be the best US $60 you ever spent.
Feb 5	comment	Which electric guitar strings have the least (pitch) bend Yes, a good guitar technician could file out, deepen and enlarge the slots for the strings in the bridge saddles and also in the nut to fit the gauges of strings you are using. Lowering the action overall might help with intonation, and might make the guitar easier to play as well. All of these factors require professional calibration, which is what a "setup" is all about.
Feb 5	comment	Which electric guitar strings have the least (pitch) bend For example, if your electric guitar is strung with the gauge of extra-light strings we call "9s" (0.009 inch diameter on the high E string) then switch to "10s", "11s" or even "12s". This will require a new professional setup to get proper action and intonation with the newer heavier strings.
Feb 1	comment	Free Sheet Music? Please? If it is good music it is worth paying money for. Music is written by your fellow musicians and they need to earn money from writing it. If you expect to earn money from playing music, you need to be willing to support your fellow musicians by paying money to them for their compositions.
Jan 18	comment	Some acoustic guitars are easy to play but some aren't. What affects playability? Well perhaps I didn't put it correctly. I tried to make the point that how the action needs to be set depends on the needs of the player, implying that some players need higher action than others.
Jan 12	comment	What makes a happy song happy? This is a fascinating question worthy of discussion, but it is just too broad and open-ended to work in the context of this forum. The answer, like many things in life, is "Nobody knows why, exactly, but everybody recognizes it when they hear it."
Jan 11	comment	positioning of neck pickup on guitars This is one reason why 22-fret guitars sound different than 24-fret guitars. With a 21 or 22-fret neck, it's possible to position the neck pickup in the "sweet spot" for certain harmonics on the open strings. With a 24-fret neck, the pickup has to be positioned away from the position where those harmonics are the richest.
Jan 10	comment	Music and time, “natural” time If you can't count time, it will be more difficult for you to be able to play in a band with other musicians. If all you want to do is play music by yourself, this is not as much of a problem.
Jan 6	comment	Bass guitar solfeggietto adapted from guitar tab It's "more complex than coding"... I took two years of calculus before I switched majors and took two years of music theory, and for me, music theory was more difficult than calculus.
Jan 6	comment	Does the bass note in a “slash” chord really have an associated interval? Looking at a single chord in isolation is not going to tell you anything useful. You need to examine the entire chord progression to see how the bass note fits in to the composition. Perhaps it is a passing tone rather than a chord tone in this particular example.
Jan 6	comment	Why do some artists tune their guitars half a step or whole step down? And Muddy Waters was known for capoing on the second fret and playing and singing songs in F#. Perhaps that suit his voice better.
Dec 28	comment	Acoustic Guitar Pick-Up Microphone Replacement You would be better served by posting this question to a forum for acoustic guitar owners, such as acousticguitarforum.com
Dec 21	comment	What is the “lead”, the harmony and the melody in modern dance music? I fear that this question is too basic, too broad and too confusingly worded to work on this forum. Anybody want to attempt to rewrite it to clarify it?
Dec 18	comment	What kind of headphones should be used with a digital piano? And don't let the volume get too loud and don't listen through them uninterrupted for extended periods. Take breaks where you take the headphones off for a few minutes. Headphones can cause "aural fatigue" in the short term and even damage your hearing in long-term use if you are not sensible about them.
Dec 18	comment	What parameters decide one's vocal range? All that I am saying is that I've never heard of any research that indicates anything to the contrary. I could be wrong. Perhaps this is something that should receive scientific study.
Dec 18	comment	What parameters decide one's vocal range? You've made a good point that many people choose to sing in a register other than their true physiological register out of ignorance or lack of training. I'd point out further that every individual has a true vocal singing range, determined by physiology, but the vast majority of people don't really sing and never get any vocal training, so they have no awareness of what kind of singing voice they possess.
Dec 17	comment	Is there an Android app for detecting the pitch of my singing? Any guitar tuner or instrument tuner which accepts input from a microphone can be used for this purpose.