Music Warrior Network character art

Music Warrior Network

A door onto every site in the Warrior Network — what each one covers, and which one to open first.

Eleven free sites, one subject each: a wide-angle site for people who play several string instruments, a deep site per instrument family, one for theory with no instrument attached, one for training your ears, and one for the bluegrass band. This page exists to hand you to whichever of them owns your question.

The Sites

One card per site: the subject it owns, what it is in a sentence, and whether it is open to readers yet. Every card leads to a fuller page here before it leads anywhere off this site.

String Warrior

many string instruments at once

The one site that answers a question across instruments rather than inside one, so a shape you know on one neck can be found on another.

Open

Theory Warrior

music theory with no instrument attached

Music theory with the instrument taken out: notes, distances, keys and the way chords are stacked, explained without asking where your fingers go.

Open

Keys Warrior

the keyboard

Everything drawn on eighty-eight keys instead of on strings, which is the one layout where the distance between two notes is visible.

Open

Ukulele Warrior

the ukulele family

A whole site for four strings and the re-entrant tuning that makes them behave unlike anything else in the network.

Open

Bass Warrior

the bass

The site for the instrument that is judged on what it leaves out, where a line is built from chord tones and time rather than from shapes.

Open

Mandolin Warrior

the mandolin family

The site for an instrument tuned in fifths, where every shape you learn moves the same way in every key and doubled strings change the sound of a chord.

Open

Guitar Warrior

the guitar

The deep home for six strings: shapes, positions and the movable systems that let one grip travel the whole neck.

Open

Banjo Warrior

the banjo

The site for an instrument where the right hand is the subject: patterns that never stop, over chords that mostly stay put.

Open

Fiddle Warrior

bowed strings

The only site here for an instrument with no frets, where where you put the finger and how you draw the bow are two separate problems.

Open

Ear Warrior

hearing, rather than playing

The site that plays you a sound and asks what it was — the only one here where the answer is not on the screen already.

Open

Bluegrass Warrior

a genre, and how its band works

The site about what a room full of these instruments does together: who keeps time, who fills, what key gets called, and how a circle runs itself.

Open

Country Warrior

a genre, and the song underneath it

The site about the song a country band plays: its form, the key a singer actually calls, and the part each chair is expected to carry once the changes are set.

Open

Nashville Warrior

a notation, not an instrument

The site for the page of digits a rhythm section gets handed ninety seconds before a take: how to read one, what every mark on it costs you, and why it survives a change of key untouched.

Open

Mariachi Warrior

an ensemble that plays in sections, not turns

The site about how a mariachi divides its labour: three sections, a strumming pattern several players execute as one, and the song forms that hand out every decision before a note is played.

Open

Jazz Warrior

a genre, and the tune as it gets called

The site about a standard as a working object: the form written in degrees so it survives any key, the changes that come out when somebody calls one, and the four substitutions players habitually make to them.

Open

Tres Warrior

the Cuban tres

The site for an instrument that states harmony as a repeating line: three doubled courses playing one bar of eighths at a time, silences included.

Open

Charango Warrior

the charango

The site for an instrument raked in whole-hand strokes: five doubled courses, a twin E an octave apart, and harmony that arrives as rhythm.

Open

Cavaquinho Warrior

the cavaquinho

The site for an instrument whose right hand does as much work as its left: four steel strings chopped into down strokes, up strokes, and mutes, one bar at a time.

Open

Sitar Warrior

the sitar

The site for an instrument tuned to two pitches only — three courses on one, two on the other — where the structure that actually governs a piece is a raga and a thaat, not a chord and a scale.

Open

Oud Warrior

the oud

Six unfretted courses, tuned C–F–A–D–G–C, charted in positions instead of frets — with the honesty to say which maqamat a 12-TET map cannot reach.

Open

Cuatro Warrior

both cuatros — Puerto Rican and Venezuelan

The site for two instruments that share a name and nothing else: ten steel strings picked as a lead voice, four nylon ones strummed as a rhythm section.

Open

Gear Warrior

the equipment around an instrument, not the instrument itself

The one site here about everything surrounding what you play — the companies behind it, the shops that stock it, and a plain case for what to spend money on.

Being built

How to Use the Network

1

Name the Question

“How do I play this on my instrument” and “why does this work” are two different questions, and the network answers them on two different kinds of site.

2

Pick the Site That Owns It

Every instrument family has exactly one deep home, and nothing is duplicated across two. The cards above say which home is which.

3

Follow the Doors

Each site links out at the point where somebody else’s answer is better than its own, so you rarely have to come back here twice.

One Home per Subject

The rule the whole network is built on is that every subject has exactly one home. An instrument family is taught on one site and mentioned on the others; a genre is a site of its own because no instrument owns it; theory is instrument-free because it has to be. That rule is enforced mechanically rather than by good intentions: a validator refuses to build the network if two sites claim the same family, or if two sites ship the same sentence about the same thing. This site is the one exception that proves it — it owns no subject at all, and its whole job is to point at the site that does.

Network Questions, Answered

More on the full FAQ page.

Why is this a separate site instead of a section?
Because each of the others is a whole site already. A network of specialists needs a front door that belongs to none of them, and a page that says “this question is answered over there” has no business competing with the page that answers it.
Which site should I open first?
If you play one instrument, open its own site — it goes deepest. If you play several, start with String Warrior, which asks one question across all of them. If you want to know why any of it works, Theory Warrior takes the instrument out of the question entirely.
Do all of these cost money?
No. Every site on the network is free, with no accounts, no ads and nothing tracking you between visits. This one keeps a single setting — your colour theme — in your own browser, and sends nothing anywhere.
Some of them say “being built”. What does that mean?
Exactly that: the site exists in the same codebase as the rest, it is not finished, and it is not open to readers yet. Its page here has no outgoing link, because a link to an unfinished site is a link nobody wants.
Do the sites repeat each other?
They are checked not to. The network runs a copy validator across every site’s head text on every change: two sites shipping the same sentence about the same thing fails the build, and so does a site that starts writing another site’s titles.