A Musician’s Guide to Alternative Uses for Polyhedral Dice
May 5, 2008 by e
Filed under Dungeons & Dragons, Geek Life, Geeky Products
Wondering how polyhedral dice can make you a better musician?
Think I’m crazy for suggesting that thought?
I might be crazy… but I might be right. This is a post for all the music geeks out there, or parents of budding music geeks! Your dice can come in handy for practicing! Here’s how!
d4
The d4 is useful for practicing scales. If you hate practicing scales as much as the next musician, why not try this: Once you’ve determined the key you need to practice, toss the d4. The result is the number of octaves you will play. (This can get extra fun when it reaches the upper limits of your instrument’s range!)
d6
The d6 is the most readily-available die in your average, non-gamer household.
Here’s how I used to use the d6:
Pencil in numbers from 1-6 next to all the lines of your etude or piece.
Or, number the measures individually if it’s a particularly nasty section.
Toss one d6 to determine which measure you practice.
Toss another to determine how many times you have to play it right before you can move on.
d8
The d8 is perfect for learning scale degrees and practicing sight-singing.
Your first step is to grab a piece of staff paper and write out the scale you’re going to sight-sing in, numbering your scale degrees:
- do
- re
- mi
- fa
- so
- la
- ti
- do (upper)
Now, throw your d8 several times, writing down the resulting notes on the paper. You can start on do if you want. Once you’ve gotten a line of notes, sing it! Add rhythms or alternate octaves if you want to add a challenge.
d10
The d10 would work well for similar purposes as the d6. Or you can use it to determine how many minutes you will dedicate to a certain passage or exercise.
Somehow, practicing stuff you don’t want to practice is less painful when the dice gods are in charge.
d12
The d12 is Schoenberg’s dream die. Music majors, rejoice! Now the dice gods can determine your tone row for you.
The d12 is also excellent for all you wind players who have to do scale competencies in order to pass band. Pair it with the d4 for maximum torture… I mean, practice value.
- C
- C#/Db
- D
- D#/Eb
- E
- F
- F#/Gb
- G
- G#/Ab
- A
- A#/Bb
- B
Roll for your key!
d20
…roll for initiative! Once you’re done beating the pulp out of some Brahms or
massacring some Coltrane, use the dice for what they’re meant for, guys and girls!
Get out there and game.
E. Foley is a geek girl extraordinaire. She writes great online dating profiles for geeks and non-geeks, helping clients all over the world find love. She is the National Online Dating Examiner, columnist at Dating Sites Reviews, and a ghostwriter for several other dating & relationships sites. She lives in Maryland with DaveTheGame and her two adorable cats, Mr. Peanut and Don Juan. (Email e, or follow @geeksdreamgirl on Twitter.)
sweet! seriously, what a terrific idea! that so totally would’ve helped when I didn’t want to practice
I’m totally going to use this as inspiration for some little activities for my music classes. Now we just need a bucket of d5s for pentatonic randomness.
I’ve seen d5s somewhere….I think they’re d10 labelled 1-5 twice, but still….
“Stay tuned next week… I’m not sure if we’re in Eberron or the Arbor system… hmm…”
Hopefully Eberron. No offense to Star Wars, but I’m not the obsessed fan who’s memorized every planet, character, species, etc. Nor have I played Star Wars d20, so most of those logs, I’m at a loss as to what’s going on.
As far as I know were playing Star Wars.
We want to at lest get the party together.
Don’t worry though…I have the an entire campaign planed out and I have the next adventure almost ready. They are about 6Lv and I plan to fold the campaign around 16-18Lv after a great climactic ending. I do need some time to get the adventures ready and I am looking forward to playing for a change.=P
Nicely put together! Y’know, being a recovering RPGer, writer and musician, I’ve done waaaay too much thinking over the years about how we use chance to fill in the gaps when we run dry on ideas or are just too lazy to come up with something with a reason behind it…who needs a Tolkein when you can just blog the adventures of your Tuesday night RPG party?
The studio notes duplicated in “More Dark Than Shark” list backgammon dice as essential to Brian Eno’s early studio hardware; being based on powers of two, they’re a great way for relatively conventional composers to decide how many times to repeat something. This goes back at least to Mozart, though, who famously had a dice game for composition – google “aleatoric music” and you get the whole history of chance-based (more often than not, dice-based) music on up from Mozart to John Cage and, more recently, the generative music of Koan (championed by Eno, no surprise there, and later shrunk down by Thomas Dolby’s Beatnik system), and other software packages that do for aleatoric music what Neverwinter Nights did for dice-based RPGs.
This sort of thing works great for techno, especially if a DJ’s ultimately gonna decide when and how your composition begins and ends, but it doesn’t generate much emotion or plot…luckily Homo sapiens are already MUCH too good at projecting their own ideas of emotion and plot on any random data they’re presented, giving us the concept of stochasticism.
Manko,
There’s a great little exhibit in the Haus der Musik (http://hausdermusik.at/en/2.htm) in Vienna where you can compose a minuet based on chance. They have big fuzzy dice that have sensors in them, so when you throw them, the number that comes up pops up on the screen and plugs in a section of music. It’s pretty nifty.
I never thought of using it for techno, but that makes sense, too. As one of my students says, “Techno is looping one thing over and over until your listener is tired with it, and then adding one little ‘ding!’ in that same loop… looping that until the listener is tired with it…” etc etc. He’s not too far off from the truth.
you know, there was a period in college when I actually used a d12 to determine keys for various finger exercises. glad to know I’m not the only one out there…
you’ve just created a soundtrack to my D&D sessions.
Classy.
Also, for those of us who’re more rock-inclined, you can steal a page from Rivers Cuomo’s playbook (dude from Weezer, if you didn’t know) and use d20’s to determine your set list.
Killstring´s last blog post..Mark Gridley