My first melodic minor lick

Continuing with my battle to unveil the secrets behind the altered scale, I came up with the lick of this post.

I was trying to develop new ideas in a mix of notes that came to my mind with the geometry of the scale. Then this lick started to get shape, but wasn't sounding dominant but minor though.

I then remembered that the altered scale has exactly the same of the melodic minor scale half tone upper. In my case, I was practicing over the notes of G altered, which has the same notes of Ab melodic minor. I shifted all the notes half tone up, just to make it over the key of minor A, instead of the odd key of minor Ab.

The result can be seem in the picture below. However as I'm very bad in transcribing the notes to the score - specially the time intervals - I put an audio sample in this post, just to make sure I'm expressing myself more clearly and I'll not forget the lick later.

One interesting aspect of this lick is regarding the time division. Instead of starting playing in the first sixteenth  note straight away, there's a small pause in the begging. So instead of something like counting the four time intervals per whole time (like 1, 2, 3, 4), I started it from the second or third (like 2, 3, 4, 1, where the 1 is in the first interval of the next bar if I can say that). Ok this is a bit confusing, even for me, there are some nomenclature I don´t remember and on the top that it my English is not good enough to express what I want now. Hopefully the audio will speak for itself.

Melodic minor lick - audio

The audio quality is not good, but can give you an idea. 

Pointers part II, learning how to do addition and subtraction again :-(

Last time I wrote about pointers I think the real use for then wasn't clear. I think now it can start to make more sense.

But before get to point I want, more theory makes necessary :( !

Pointer arithmetic

With normal numeric variables the result of simple operations like addition or subtraction are quite predictable if we know the contents of such variables. However this rule doesn't apply for pointers.

Pointers don't store numbers, but memory addresses. So if a pointer points to the mem. address 0x98456732 what happens if we add 1? The answer is, it depends! It depends on the pointer's type and how many bytes does that type needs to represent its information in the memory.

For example, on my 64 bits laptop using Visual Studio, a int variable has a size of 4 bytes, a double, 8 bytes while a char only 1 byte.

So when summing or subtracting pointers, this must be taken into account. Lets have a look in one example:

#include "stdafx.h"
#include <iostream>

int _tmain(int argc, _TCHAR* argv[])
{
1 int x = 10;
2 int *ptr = &x;
3
4 int address = (int)ptr;
5 printf("\nThe pointer points to %X == %X\n", ptr, address);
6
7 ptr++;
8
9 int difference = ((int)ptr) - address;
10
11 printf("%d bytes were added to %X\n", difference, address);
}

In this program at line 1 an int variable is declared and initialized with 10. In the line 2 I declared the pointer and initialized it with the address of x. Then at line 4 the address of x is assigned as a normal integer to the variable address. The printf at line 5 shows that the value stored in ptr and address are the same. Finally at line 7 the pointer is incremented by 1 unit! So now what's the value of the pointer? The answer is: the new value is equal to the original memory address plus 4! What lines 9 and 11 do is just proving what I'm saying. But why 4?

Let's call the memory address number being pointed by ptr as addr_number. The new address number obtained after the addition can be thought as:

addr_number + 1* sizeof(int) == addr_number + 1*4 == addr_number + 4

So for every arithmetic operation with pointers, we have to consider the size of the type which the pointer was declared. The same applies for subtraction. About multiplication and division, I've never seen or used it in practice but I guess the same logic applies.