Game Design, Programming and running a one-man games business…

Guitar Vs Piano Vs C++

I haven’t played the guitar for ages, and just picked it up and hammered out a few notes. I find doing so very frustrating these days. Years ago, I could easily practice up to 12 hours a day, but the guitar is like weight lifting, you need to keep doing it to stay up to a certain standard, a little each day (or a lot).

The thing that I find most frustrating is the lack of precision. I used to spend hours playing through the simplest scales, making sure each note was perfect, that there was no handling noise or slurs, and that every note sounded clearly and precisely. It’s important to practice really slowly and cleanly with a metronome if you want to play fast, because the slightest imperfection when you speed stuff up and it just sounds like a mush.

Life is much easier on the piano. you can’t accidentally apply some vibrato or a bend, and it’s very hard to actually miss a note as there is no bending involved. You don’t need two hands synchronised to play a single note.

But C++ is right up the other end. The code is either correct and works, or it doesn’t. Better still, I can step through the code and even step backwards through a frame render and see exactly what I did, when and how it went wrong. There is no fuzziness, ambiguity or degrees of perfection. The code works or it does not work. Its binary, not analogue.

Somehow, I’ve become inteolerant of analog stuff where you can screw up ‘a bit’. I find it frustarting and I’m never happy with what I’ve done. Years of playing thr guitar and working with wood have probably taken their toll on my ability to perform analogue tasks. Binary FTW!


4 thoughts on Guitar Vs Piano Vs C++

  1. There is some meta-abiguity with code. The code might work but it is sometimes not optimized or the classes are pooly organized. You can’t escape the analogue – muhahahahaaaa!

  2. VAI! If only I looked 50% as cool as him when I played. (and if I could only be 50% as good as him too!)

    Anyway… guitar players get more [INSERT VICE] then piano players and I suspect that piano players get more [INSERT VICE] then C++ coders. :)

  3. Binary would lead to Fascism…. You need some kind of analogue behaviour in your way of thinking… call it diplomacy or whatever… and accept that not everything is Black or White…

Comments are currently closed.