How I hack music theory/solfege and learn to play saxophone in 4months from scratch!

As a nerd innovator that started to play an instrument from scratch in my busy life of entrepreneur, CTO, dad, crossfit amateur, beef eater, I needed to find a way to learn fast and if possible, take some shortcut to enjoy playing saxophone asap.

As I didn't know absolutely nothing about music theory (aka solfege), this complex boring norm used to play any track in a finger snap (when you are used to read it), I detected that it will be a blocking point on my learning path.

So I decided to hack music theory and find a way to play any track in 2minutes taking into account my beginner level and my lack of theorical knowledge : quite a big challenge!

After couple of months of work, I ended up successfully and after only 4 months of practice (by myself) I was able to play almost 80 tracks quite easily (still with my beginner technique and rookie style in the music universe. Remember, the point was to enjoy playing music, not being a pro in front of a crowd). After 12 months, I played 160 tracks, and even Take Five (a very hard one) at 130BPM (the official tempo is 150, not reachable yet for my level).

At the end of this article, I will share some humble, non beautified videos of my at M+4 and M+12.

As some real musician friends asked it to me, I've publish the tool I've built for myself on the web just in case other beginner want to try it : https://www.playthatsheet.com

From time to time I've updated this article and if you are brave enough, you are about to dig into a loooong story that illustrate all the cool steps and great persons I've met on the journey of this project. I do guess it could help you in several ways :

• help some of you that has always wanted to play an instrument and still hesitate owing to this big wall called solfege (I faced it too for decades)
• inspire some entrepreneurs, innovators that will discover the intuitive "test/try/error/learn/adapt/improve and enjoy every small steps" mindset I've used on this project, removing the big money stress and biais. If you believe in your idea, never give up, hard work always pays off.
• inspire some teckies outthere that have lot of brillant ideas but often don't develop them. The hardest action is to make the first step. One step at a time, keeping the passion and focus on what let you believe in the idea
• share some positive vibes

Please do not hesitate to add comment and feedback at the end of your lecture, it will be always very welcome.

Take a cup of tea/coffee and let's dig into this playthatsheet journey...

Where this idea was born and how cool was the journey so far?

Since I watched the movie '37°2 le matin' and listen to the famous track 'betty&zorg' from Gabriel Yared (listen to the exact movie scene that created this sax dream in my kid's head here. In 2min you see an old man learning this sax track by ear. Badly executed at the beginning and then pretty good. Another version here executed by a sax pro classical player.) when I was kid, I think I always wanted to play saxophone someday : 'when I will be tall enough'. And this "one day" occured, after a big day of work during the 2nd lockdown in France I talked to my lovely wife about saxophone for no particular reason. As usual, my wonderful wife helped me and reply 'why don't you just buy you a 1st price sax and learn by yourself?'

M-0 - Feb 2021 : let's buy a 1st price saxophone

That's exactly what I've done. I visited thomann.de website and bought a sax Tenor for 600€.

10 days later I received it and I was super excited but there was a big issue :?how this golden tube is supposed to work and how do we mount it?

I spent a bit of time on youtube and decide to buy an online course from Yannick Coderre to learn the first steps. 4 days later I was able to blow into this wonderful instrument and create decent basic sounds. Then I tried to play some kids songs like 'au clair de la lune' or basic scales. Cool, I was playing sax!

Ok, but now I wanted to play real music! Not in orchestra or like a pro nor improvising like Mr Coltrane. I just wanted to play some easy track such as Bella Ciao or Betty&Zorg or even some MarioBross theme music. This is where the BIG trouble appeared to me :?music theory.

At almost 40, I did not want (nor have time to) to spend 6 months learning this music language, and spend hard time decoding notes in a very low pace. I mean, I was convince that I will need at least 6 months to be able to read an average track music score and play it in real tempo by myself :?NO WAY!!!?Did I give up sax? Nope.

As a computer nerd expert, I decided to try to hack this music theory norms and build a system that let me use tablature. In short, this idea was born on this particular nerd chair you can see on this image.

M+1 - March 2021 : My 1st draft : a manual sax tablature paper+pen

I started by looking on the web for some saxophone fingering charts and found them quite complex to read quickly. So I decided to open a powerpoint file, draw some rectangle and circle to create my saxophone 'holes' (later I learnt the good term 'keys'). In short, a big rectangle to define the saxophone and 6 holes. 3 holes at the top for the left hand and 3 at the bottom for the right hand. As I was still looking and learning a lot of info on youtube, I refined my rectangle and circles and add some circle for the palm keys, the octave key and the pinky finger 'keys'.

My first hack attempt was born.

I picked up some easy track like 'pink panther theme' and spent almost 30-40min to decode manually each note and with an A4 page full of empty fingering, I use a pencil and fill the hole for each note (with sometimes big mistakes that I'll discover and fix while trying to play it and recognizing by ear that it didn't sound right). I totally skip the tempo topic and the rythm of each phrases and I tried to play each note with the same intensity without any subtility. Classical beginner mistake.

But at the end, I was able to play the pink panther by myself in a bad form, without respecting the rythm, but enjoying the path! And most of all, my kids were able to recognize the track : my 1st big beginner success !

M+1 - March 2021 (a week later) : the 1st real paper version (too many paper)

As a computer scientist, I wasn't able to continue wasting 40min per track to decode them from a traditional paper music score to my manual paper&pencil version. So I decided to ask my computer to help me make some automation and save me these 40min per track.

My 1st real version was a paper version. In short, to not be too technical, I created a script, an algorithm to transform a musicxml music sheet into a list of images representing each fingering note. MusicXML is the open source (id est: free!) format of a music score. This free file that can be edited and read by a computer scientist like me. So I let my algorithm analyze the XML format of a music sheet, extract each notes and pitch like (G5, F6#,C4b,... or DO,RE,MI,FA if you are using the french notation) and transform these letters into a list of images displayed on a web page.

Then, I was able to make a screenshot of my web page, copy/paste this screenshot in a powerpoint file and print it in A4 format. Finally, I joined my A4 paper together and?tada!?my home made music score tablature was born (still a lot of manual human action to end up to a usable result).

My friends was laughting at me as I had like big pieces of paper (A3 or more) to put in front of me before being able to play let's say Ravel-Bolero. But at the end I was happy, able to play most of musicXML music score and I was able to play (still without tempo and rythms. Sorry for the author and for my neighbors and family that were listening) 'fly me to the moon', 'bella ciao', 'eye of the tiger' and so on. Wow, beginner level 2.0 completed.

M+2 - April 2021 : my 1st digital version : let's play that sheet in tempo!

Killed by some real musicians friends that remind me tempo and rythm were not just an option but a bold mandatory concept in music, I worked on it. My ecological self also beg me to save some trees and find a digital way to read my fingering images instead of printing them several time on paper. That's what I've done by first digitalizing the fingering on a readable screen. Each line of fingering was readable and the screen was scrolling automatically when it was required (because playing saxophone and pause to use your hand to scroll down with your mouse computer was not a good habit)

Then I learnt that music theory, especially for rythm can be written in a lot of ways. Two 'linked' notes can represent a single note played for a longer time. And lot of other weird music theory stuff. Anyway, I've tried to get through that and 'translate' most of the music theory math.

A blue rectangle allowed me to know for how long I had to blow in my instrument to maintain the note for the good amount of time and switch to the next note. This rectangle moved to the next note following the tempo written on the original music score.

The algorithm of?PlayThatSheet was born!

From that day I've not printed a single paper (thanks for the planet) and I use my ipad pro as my main support to play and read music with my sax!

M+4 - June 2021 : The first MVP version (v1) with some cool automation and setup options!

I was enjoying my everyday self lesson (+ youtube and online courses lessons) to improve my level but I was still stuck with some legendary track such as 'Take Five' (tempo 150 and some complex fingering and weird 5/4 rythm) ! That's why I decided to add some cool computer automation. On each track fingering page from playthatsheet, I've added a 'page setup' button at the top of the page to let me setup the tempo automatically. The computer calculate himself the tempo required to play a track (like take five) for a beginner. The tempo is slowed down until the track can be played smoothly (from 150 to 30 or 45 in this case). For an easier track such as 'bella ciao', a tempo 50 or 60 is affordable for a beginner and the computer deduce it too.

Damnly cool nope? (reminder, I'm a nerd, we loved cool computer automation, even useless one, which is not the case here)

I've also added a midi ugly synthesizer to let the human hear the song before playing it with his instrument. When my kid ask me to play 'hunter x hunter' manga theme, I had to use it as I didn't know this song at all. I first played it with the midi synthesizer and them tried it with my sax. 5min to play it from scratch. Pretty usefull feature.

From there, I've shared playThatSheet to some friends and then to the world as I received lot of feedbacks saying this tool was damnly cool for beginners and even for more advanced players. I've also received some grumpy feedback from traditional musicians arguing that music theory was a must learn and that it is more efficient than images/fingering (easy to say for a person playing/reading music for 10+years...). I simply ignore that negative trolls, and continue my music journey, driven by pleasure and energy sharing with mainly beginners and 40+ years old persons (so far).

After only 4months of self learning (as a non musician, rusty sport nerd guy), this is me, without marketing/video beautifying preparation, just a raw video to remind me what was my level at this time and help me see my progress later when I could lack of motivation on the path...

M+6 - July 2021 : let's scale this idea to other instruments !

Some friends asked me if I could do it for Tuba. So I "forked" playThatSheet that is now available for flute and baritone/Euphonium/Tuba. Almost any wood instrument will be working using the same concept with small tech effort on my hand, so I will probably add trumpet, recorder and other instrument with "holes" (remember, I'm not a musician, just a human being that want to enjoy music and share it with friends & family, nothing more).

Each week/month from time to time I was adding new track (musicxml files) to let me improve my "repertoire". In July 2021, I was able to play almost 110 tracks, and I could do some blind test game with my kids, family and friends and entertain them for 2 hours stack ! (and they succeeded to guess each track).

I even heard my spanish neighboor (when I was in holiday in spain) playing with their own friends from their house next to mine, and making their own blind test as I was practicing my sax daily. Cool, spreading good vibes for free with other human being, breaking language barriers (isn't it one of the aim of music?)

M+7 - August 2021 : my first paying customer (that I was not even looking for)

At the beginning, I built playthatsheet tool for my own need and use and then I shared it to the world over Internet to let other human being that want to start an instrument (wood one : sax, trumpet, flute, tuba, euphonium...) and enjoy playing music without necessarily having to learn solfege/music theory at all. Why ? To avoid the first cause of failure on any musician learning journey, especially for people that jump into it as an adult, with very few amount of available time, busy life, kids, work, sport, friends, taxes and other topics to deal with.

My entrepreneur self told me to monetize this idea as it seems that it didn't exists at all for saxophone. Indeed, I've not seen any tool that convert a music sheet into a list of tablature/fingering images that help any user to play music in a row without knowing music theory. Yes, there is powerful tool to digitalize traditional paper music sheet into an interactive playable music sheet on your computer/tablet (like tomplay for example), but these tools are damnly expensive for a simple amateur, and didn't answer my need at all (I don't want nor need to learn solfege).

Lot of friends told me "people would pay monthly for your tool man". Maybe true. But I know the story between "would pay" and "know that your exists, love your tool, want to buy it, do not need customer support". I didn't want to build a business model, spend time and money to make it happens for an hypothetic source of income. And it kills the beauty of open source, so I decided to keep my tool totally free of charge. Music is an "universal common good", like water or air.

But just to see if there is some anonymous Karma on the web, I've simply added a "buymeacoffee" button. It's a simple button from which people can send me 1$ to buy me conceptually a coffee and tell me that playthatsheet helped them somehow. I was not expecting a single cents from it but as a nerd, I've paid some coffees (or beers) in the past to some anonymous developers/projects that were open source. A way to encourage them to pursue this open source vibes.

And somehow, this anonymous Karma occured at the end of august 2021. A guy named "claudius" bought me not one but 5 coffees! He didn't even send me a message or any explanations. I replied to him right away to thanks him back, telling him that he made my day (and even week) but I never heard back from him ever. Anonymous karma :)

I was officially usefull enough to let an unknown persons send me 5$. I will never be rich with that but the joy that I felt this day worth way more and was priceless!

M+10 - November 2021 : my first catch with a real famous US sax pro player!

I was playing sax 10min a day, almost every day (at least 4-5 times a week) from february, listening to a LOT of jazz and sax songs and various players to train my physical ears and let my brain connections improved (oh yep, I'm also a bit in the neuroscience topics so I know some theorical stuff on it and I known that I will need to spend at least 5000h, brainly speaking, to learn this new skills which is playing sax. Yes, creating neurons connections and human brain automation take times but every human being can do it owing to neuroplasticity!).

I also listened to some saxophone podcast on spotify (especially "everything saxophone" podcast from Donna Schwartz) to learn new sax stories and stuff, discovering this universe. I ended up discovering a cool sax pro player that also build and sell some sax mouthpiece (a part of a saxophone) . This guy, called Matt Lee was a self made musician. He learnt sax by ear, the hard way! Cool, a mate that didn't read music, didn't look like the traditional pro jazz/classical sax player. A weird guy, I'm not alone! Plus, this guy is a pro now! He even ended up playing a private session for the terminator (a big nerd reference), I mean Arnold Schwarzenegger when he was governor! So, ok, Matt Lee was certainly not spending 10min a day like me but maybe 10h a day but I was not expecting to have his level, I just wanted to enjoy music my way.

I decided to contact him on instagram, just to telling him that his podcast episode on "everything saxophone" (ep.119 if you want to listen to it) inspired me a lot to pursue my sax learning curve "by ear" with my additional "digital ear" which is playthatsheet. I just thanks him, not trying to convince him nor asking him to look at playthatsheet or anything else. No entrepreneur nor marketing strategy/trick behind that "thanks guy".

By the way, my instagram account was there just to let my tool eventually known by some random instagram user. I was not expecting to be a youtuber, an influencer and I was not hunting followers (I didn't not care at all). I barely do it, forcing me, because some friends annoyed me several time ("create an instagram account, a youtube chanel, a tictoc Luc, this tool needs to be known by the public, blablabla..."). So I've done it, posted some ugly non beautified videos to not having an empty account and let it there without more work on it.It ended up with 12 followers for months.

But, unexpectedly, one day of November 2021, Matt Lee replied to me from USA! He even followed me on instagram. It ended up making a x5 on my followers from 12 to 60 (no missing "k" here, so it's not 60k followers but 60, 6x10.). Wow, I'm a kardashian now! At least, 48 additionals persons got to know playthatsheet and had the opportunity to use it (or not) on their own learning/playing path!

Then, I also thanks the creator of "everything saxophone" podcast, Donna Schwartz on her instagram account as it was owing to her that I discovered Matt. And she also replied+followed me 2 weeks later. Gosh, music universe is great!

M+11 - December 2021 : the big revamped v2.0 Let's build it from scratch again and let's make playthatsheet great again, yes I can

In December, I caught COVID-19 (but don't worry, I survived using treatments like in India and Japan) so I was locked down again. I took this time to fix some big issues mentioned by big trolls from real musicians on some sax blogs.

For example, during the summer I tried to play sax with some real musicians. I was with my fingering images on my ipad and they were on their traditional piece of paper (music theory/music scores). It was damnly hard to sync me with them as they asked me to start at measure 32 for example. Doo, ok, let's try to scroll on my ipad and find the part of this music they are talking about. Almost impossible. I also tried to convince some other sax player (high level guys) to play with me using my system (just to see their opinions). They were not able to do it. They were speaking music theory, not fingering images! It was like if we were blind and tried to speak french to an british guy. Non compliant universes.

So for this 2021 summer, I sticked to some beginner sax guys like me and we were using playthatsheet, with 2 ipads (1 ipad for the alto sax of my friend, and 1 ipad for my tenor sax, because to play together we needed to transpose notes to avoid killing our ears and public, aka our kids).

So from September 2021 to December 2021, I decided to build a v2, trying to add 2 lines. 1st line with my language (fingering images), and 2nd line displaying digitally the traditonnal music sheet (like a subtitle for movies). What a VERY hard topic and feature to build from scratch.

So I asked Google to find me some cool nerds that have worked on this "traditional sheet music" digital display on the web an I found some cool open source projects (remember open source means, they share their source code and energy for free in some case. playthatsheet is free, I didn't want to make it a business so I wasn't able to pay for an external library or piece of source code I've not built myself. My money was my time and passion). So I found a great 10+years cool tec called VexFlow (a cool music engraving nerd way of using musicxml file into music theory note displayed on screen). Then I found another super duper cool nerd team from Austria that developed a very cool open source project that integrate a cool audio player (even better than my midi synthetizer attempt), but instead of using fingering images like me, they were using music theory stuff (that I'm not able to read). The project is called OSMD for Open sheet music display. Exactly what I was looking for (thanks to github, a geek website to store source code. I've first grab them their). I found that this open source project was built and maintain by a company called phonicScore. I felt in love with their mission (pasted from their website) :

"Our mission is to provide easily accessible digital solutions for musicians based on the principles of Deliberate Practice: Because we are convinced that this is the only way to really get better and have fun practicing or learning a musical instrument."

Wow, good vibes, let's grab these guys on LinkedIn and see if I can share the tec flow.

Their "team" description is exactly the motto that motivate me to create playthatsheet ! (except I'm not targeting anyone specifically. Just human being that want to play music as amateur, for fun and joy) :

"Our team consists of experienced employees with technical and economic backgrounds. We are united by the joy of making music and the will to make the world a little better by allowing many young people to learn to play a musical instrument and not to give up this project prematurely due to frustration with practice."

I chitchat with the guy pointed with the red arrow on the picture, Simon Schmid, a young very talented tec guy from PhonicScore. He always answered my questions and we shared some common tec topics and purposes related to OSMD, pitch detection algorithm,... (globally, tec applied to music). Then I found that OSMD team had a "sponsored version" of their github opensource code.

So I decided to invest 6x my cumulated incomes from playthatsheet (aka 5x6 = 30$, wow, what a business angel I am, maybe even a VC!) to pay one beer per team member. We chatted asynchronously for a month or two, mainly during the night like most developers do and share this positive energy between France and Austria.

This OSMD source code was so good that I decided to totally revamp my own source code (it's like if you have built your own house, you decided to remove stuff inside it, destroy the house and built it almost from scratch again and put back stuff in again) to use OSMD as a strong master piece of my front end code (to let me start from the digitalized music sheet and add my features over it : fingerings, notes name, players overlays,...). It tooks me around 2-3 weeks to buid it again but I ended it up with a pretty cool playthatsheet v2 !

The new 2.0 version now included several cool features such as :

• deal with multi instruments sheet. It means I can play a song with a list of fingering images on an infinite line and see the traditional music sheet notes at the bottom for my sax AND for the piano.
• audio player for multi instruments : I can now play my sax part with a backing track (most often piano, but it could also be violin, accordion,... it works for almost any instrument). I can decide to mute one or several of them if I want. For example I hate playing sax with a backing track of the same sax part because midi audio player is not so good at imitating sax sound (but it is quite good for flute, piano, violin, bass, drums...).
• metronome option : I can play/hear a metronome at each beat to help me follow the tempo now. Quite good when we have issue with rythm, and you do not need to take a physical metronome with you, everything is packed digitally on playthatsheet ;)
• change the tempo on the fly: I can slow down the entire track or speed it up in a single swipe/click and adapt the difficulty depending on my level and the level of the track I want to play
• transpose instrument : wow, transposition is an hard math/music theorical topic. But to make long story short, it let me use a music score made for alto sax (which is setup for a Eb/Mib note) and play it with my tenor sax (Bb/Sib). It means a music score made for an alto sax+ a piano will sound good using my tenor sax (after transposing it from -7demitones of +5demitones depending on my need).
• import any musicxml file from the end user computer: I've built a library of almost 200 tracks now from all styles of music but if anyone has a musicxml sheet file (from his music teacher or bought on the web) he can upload it on playthatsheet and play it on the go. I personnally use musescore website to find new traditional music sheet (it's like my google for music sheet, not perfect, not pro level sheet but most of the time good enough for my needs)
• last but not least : auto play from microphone! For me it was the hardest tec part. it is still not perfect but in short, you open your device microphone and as you blow into your instrument, playthatsheet convert the sound in Hertz frequency (very complex stuff here but it is out of the scope of this story. It is called pitch detection) and find out what is the theorical note played. (A4=440Hz for example, but not on all instrument and not on all weather conditions, but I cracked a solution to deal with that automatically). So in short, your computer detect which note you are playing and scroll the sheet/page automatically. When you are not playing the right note (or your pitch is too far from the theorical expected one) it notices it to you with a red rectangle (damn, bad note or not good for human ears). My must have option I personally use every single day to try to have a good pitch/sound for all notes I'm trying to play (still, I'm not and will probably never be Maceo Parker, but who cares?).

Wanna see this v2 in images ?

On the left picture, you have a Xmas song display with my v1. Not relevant rythm notes, almost impossible to read for a traditionnal musician that uses solfege.

On the right picture is the same track with my v2. Less notes display at the same time but perfect traditional music notation at the bottom, a better UX/UI and rythm bottleneck issue fixed.

Other cool options I mentioned before can be seen on these pictures

M+12 - Jan 2022 : 1st day of 2022 : the best way to start a new year with my 1st 100% stranger paid me a coffee and thanks me

Remember, I caught COVID-19 at the end of december, so I let you imagine my mood after a locked down Xmas party and an locked down new year party. We enjoyed it anyway with my wife and 2 kids but not the same "family&friends" periods like we used to have every year. So my mood was not as good as it should be after 10 days of holidays. Starting the year like that was not my best "new year" ever, until magical internet karma happens.

I received another buymeacoffee surprise! Another guy, from Netherlands this time offers me 5 coffees (wow, 5 more dollars. At the end it is more 4.43$ after buymeacoffee commission but again, money is not my motto on this project, let's even say adventure). Read his comment on the picture on the left, it worth 1 million dollars for me.

This guy is 73, from another country, discover my tool (I don't know how), find it "magnificent", and he even called it "a method". I would not say it is a method but I start this 2022 year helping another human being that is 73 years old! Then, I contacted him back, listen to his inquiries and update playthatsheet source code to fit his specific needs that required 2hours of my nerd time and will help him maybe for months. This grandpa energized guy will enjoy learning and playing sax, and share it with his children and grandchidren, I mean 3 generations of human being! What a twist after a quite bad end of 2021!

M+12.5 - mid January 2022 : My current level after 12 months of learning by myself

To conclude this quite long article for now, I'm sharing my current sax level, still with bad video quality, no professional nor marketing beautifying stuff (aka in raw ugly mode). I'm trying to play Take Five from the great Paul Desmond with a piano backing track (barely audible on the video) at a 130BPM tempo (which is very fast for me and with very complex fingering notes using pinky finger and low notes. Hard for beginner, and even for advanced player I guess). I'm also trying to improvise a bit at the end, but very not successfully (try, error, repeat, try, error, repeat,... succeed, I know the routine as a former "high" level sport person).

So, I'm still a beginner (less beginner at M+12 than I was at M+4) but I'm enjoying my everyday saxophone time (10min, nothing crazy even for busy people), learning new stuff everyday, sharing music with friends, family and neighbors (no troll nor bad feedback from them, so far so good), training my ear on spotify, listening advices from pro youtuber (such as the excellent Jamie Anderson channel), podcasts and real musicians friends around me.

I also share playthatsheet with some anonymous users over internet from almost all over the world (see the google analytics map on the left). USA,France, Spain, Germany, Netherlands, UK, even kangurus in Australia!

My aim was and still is to enjoy my learning journey and share this joy and good vibes with other human being. At the end, we are a social species and finding a way to take a break with job, life, taxes, pandemic, idiots and simply take time to share good moment and positive attitudes with other human being without being biaised by money is so great to live.

As S.Jobs said "stay angry, stay foolish", and try to be more "here & now" (as others would have said). We have all 24 hours per day.

The aim of life is not to die rich but to live a fullfilled joyfull life, shared with other folks...

(gosh, not bad quote. I can even sign it : Luc Bonnin)

M+13 : February 2022 : First Matrix glitch !

Remember, I'm a geeky nerd musician, so this "matrix glitch" will be more affordable to my geeky mates, but I'll try to explain it a bit for the rest of the readers. So in our geeky weird world, among all tecky& sciFy references, Matrix and Terminator are often in our list. In the developper/coder world, we also have a so called "recursive function" kind of functions that consist of calling a function inside itself (to iterate and loop recursively). Yes, it is a bit complexe but nothing crazy, it is used in various occasions such as when you ask your computer to find a file in your finder/explorer. You enter the name of the file and the computer execute a function "find" that look into your C:/ main folder and loop recursively in all subfolders. You do it as a human when you look in a box that contains other boxes, books, pages,...).Ok, you got the context now, but what's the point Luc?

In Feb 2022, I've lived my first 2 matrix glitches, and I'm proud to create a recursive call on my linkedIn post :)

Remember Matt Lee (M+10 Novembre 2021, mentioned earlier in this article) ? As I've updated my article in Jan 2022 and I've used one of his picture, I've asked him if it was OK and if he allowed me to do it. He accepted, but he did more than that, he shared my linkedIn post in his facebook page! He even ended up his post by a "thanks Luc Bonnin" ! So cool isn't it? So by adding the image you can see on the left, I'm quoting the quote of my article in my article. Boom, 1st recursive call ever in a LinkedIn Post (sorry Elon Musk, you didn't thought of this one did you?).

And as positive vibes often spread to other persons, Donna Schwartz thanks me too on a comment to this article. So let's make a 2nd recursive call on a LinkedIn Post from the feedbacks list :)

M+13 (bis) : February 2022 : Again, one step from Terminator

I've already mentioned it in the M+10 November 2021, but just a small "aparté" on the Terminator Damocles sword most innovative teckies have felt in their life. I'll share my experience on this that occured couple of years ago as I find it funny. As I was creating an Artificial Intelligence algorithm with a UK folk, dedicated to analyze human faces emotions and deduce what human were feeling as they were viewing a video (you can try the free demo on haalia.ai website), we, humans creators of this algorithm were thinking of wether or not there were a risk of using our algorithm for bad purpose. Theorically, it could have been a piece of skynet codes to build the Terminator but we took some precautions to not allowing that (humanity will be safe, or at least will not be killed by robots by our fault. Of course another easy additional precaution was to also avoid, at any cost, to meet any girl called Sarah Conor. We are never too safe with Terminator). But honestly, I never thought a single second about Terminator during my playthatsheet journey and I ended up being one step away from the real terminator! As I'm now in contact with Matt Lee (on the right of this picture with his soprano sax) and as he is in contact with Terminator, I'm too closed to him. Hopefully he seems less dangerous in real life :) When I realize that, I share it with some nerdy friends and we all laughted, finding that useless fact damnly cool (I know, nerd are weird)

To be continued...

The story ends here for now, but I'll update this article each month when there will be new steps or news to share, so feel free to get back here and read the new "episodes" ;) and I hope, enjoying the journey with me.

I really hope you enjoyed reading it as much as I enjoy sharing this story by writing it (and living it each day for several months now). Feel free to share your thought on it in the comments below.

If you wanna dig deeper

I hope you will enjoy PTS (PlayThatSheet) and do not forget that we will still need real sax pro and teacher to learn lot of things that PTS nor music theory can teach us : improvisation, style, embouchure, vibrato, growling, ...

I've personally started some physical teacher at the end of 2021 to learn part of these stuffs that only a professional human teacher can teach you: sorry music theory, you cannot do everything, you are not a book :)

Enjoy your sax (or whatever instrument you are trying to play), enjoy playthatsheet and follow me on social networks if you liked the idea and the story.

You can also buymeacoffee and send me a kudos/comments. Good vibes are free to send and priceless to receive !

www.playthatsheet.com

The linkedIn page :

https://www.dhirubhai.net/company/playthatsheet

The PlayThatSheet youtube chanel

The PlayThatSheet instagram page

The tic toc page (I don't understand this social network at all. Maybe I'm a boomer now, as my son is bullying me every month)

https://www.tiktok.com/@playthatsheet