Again, thank you for helpful support.
Now, I became a "patron" of a singer, and I asked a question before about her song.
Welcome to my new Patrons, and to the old ones, thanks for sticking around. 🙂
We're hovering right around $400 a month, so I figure it's time for me to invest in some percussion instruments!
I want to build a little "kit" and I'm asking around for advice on what to include. Shaker, tambourine, cabasa, cajón… if you have any input or expertise, I'd appreciate it!
I don't have any real percussion training, so I'm looking for things that will be easy for me to use.
Certain months I would also like to put the $400 toward hiring a real drummer, depending on what songs we want to do and what they call for! This can be complicated because I have to hire a drummer, find a place to record drums (it takes a lot of mics), and maybe have someone mix drums for me as well (I don't have much experience in making them sound good). That's why I've set the goal so high on this one.
Interested to hear what you all think
I input the whole sentence. (which I don't like somehow).
What does certain months mean here? Also, I don't understand who they are when she says "what they call for!"
Best Answer
The cited use of certain is syntactically valid, but it's not really idiomatically acceptable. The well-established "standard" usage fore the context is Some weeks I'd like to do X.
But there's also a semantic issue involved. In contexts such as...
...it's tempting to say the highlighted terms are interchangeable, but actually they're not exactly equivalent. When certain is used in this way, it doesn't just mean some - it always carries the implication some specific [weeks, prisoners, etc.], where (in principle, at least) there is some reasonably clear-cut way of identifying which particular weeks / prisoners fall into the relevant category (weeks when a drummer will be hired, prisoners who will be granted parole).
TL;DR: When certain replaces some, it always implies certain specific / particular. Which doesn't make much sense in OP's context, making the cited usage non-idiomatic to most native speakers.
The general principle (for many/most people, but clearly not all native speakers - as shown by certain/some1 answers and votes on this page) is that some is often used to refer to a "random" subset, whereas certain normally implies reference to a "pre-determined" subset (or one for which the relevant inclusion criteria are available, at least in principle).
1 Using certain in this exact context would strongly imply I know exactly which posts I'm referring to (and you could probably figure it out easily if you took the trouble). Any such implication is weaker or non-existent with some.