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music theory

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skunkape

skunkape

Paranormal Maven
I've gathered from reading these forums that there are a few intelligent musicians floating around out there. Here is the thread where we discuss all things musical. I'll just drop one word to get the ball rolling..."tritone."
 
Hi Skunkape,

I assume you are a musician yourself. So with regard to music theory, do you yourself
for instance sight read or not.

Personally I can read, but that's the quickest way to make me turn down, by shoving dots in front of me.
With the kind of things I want to do I just improvise.
Dont get me wrong I am not knocking those folks who read for a living,
ie orchestra or session players, and I do find some theory very useful on occasion.

It's just something I have noticed amongst the guitar playing fraternity for many years now,
and that is. There seems to be two types of player. Broadly speaking that is.

The Technician and the Rocker.

I am most definitely a Rocker, and while I can appreciate the skill involved in pulling off some amazingly intricate and fast stunts, many of todays players like to do. It tends to leave me a bit cold and indifferent.

It always makes me think of typists.

For many years I worked in a well known guitar store here in the UK, and must say
that I noticed that with the growing popularity of tuition courses with organisations like the Guitar institute. So the up and coming new players all ended up sounding alike. Maybe I am just jaded but songs are where it's at for me not homogenised
gunslingers.

Peace,

Mark
 
That Jake E. Lee can rip...I own a Charvel because of him...

Been playing around with the Lydian Dominant scale lately...it has a really neat spacey feel. Its structure is : Root, 2nd, 3rd, augmented 4th, 5th, 6th, dominant 7th. I'm just sitting around improvising some Hawaiian style slide acoustic, but using the #4 and 7, and it sounds like being on a beach on another planet. This is actually a more "natural" scale than the Western major scale most of our music is based on. If you strike a series of natural harmonics down the length of a string, you get the notes of this scale...as if it is somehow fundamentally embedded in the vibratory physics of sound.
 
Doesn't a Tritone refer to a diminished chord? If so, I use them all the time.

I taught guitar for years, and gigged around some, but now I just play for my own enjoyment.

Super-technical guitar playing doesn't interest me, sorry. Gut-level feeling, as played by Jimi, SRV, and Clapton are much more my style.

Nowadays I put all my pedals and amps up, and I play more acoustic. I'm personally more interested in being a complete musician than acquiring some sort of super proficiency (which I would have never achieved anyway).

Music is life, as far as I'm concerned.

The Golden Mean is at the heart of the major scale; String theory says reality is built on vibration and fequency; so music must be a fundamental representation of the cosmos. (Hippy talk is fun, but I like it).
 
Graphimancer said:
Doesn't a Tritone refer to a diminished chord? If so, I use them all the time.
String theory says reality is built on vibration and fequency; so music must be a fundamental representation of the cosmos. (Hippy talk is fun, but I like it).
Click to expand...


When I say tritone I mean a flatted fifth/#4...a diminished chord also includes a minor third in addition to the flat 5...Why was the Catholic Church afraid of this interval in the Middle Ages? I have a few intuitive hunches, but I'll have to do more study before I can clearly articulate my ideas on the subject. I'm gonna go crank up some Sabbath and dedicate it to to Pope Rat-burger. Has anyone else noticed that a perfect fifth, i.e. the "power chord" most frequently used in that hard-rockin' Devil music is produced by dividing a string at 2/3 rds of it's length. 2/3 expressed as a decimal= .666! (insert diabolical organ music)
 
Yeah, I've heard all that. You can read all sorts of symbolism into the Western music tradition, and not just the devil's chord.

Classical composers avoided the diminished chord because of its disonance. They had formal rules that governed the use of intervals and which chord followed which. Those old rules are good to know, even though we largely break them at will in modern music.

Take Blues, for example. At it's basic level, it's minor pentatonic scale with flatted fifth (the bluesy note) over a major progression. That dissonance makes for the Blues sound, which is equally unsettled and urgent. (Yes, I drastically simplified that explanation.) To our ears, after decades of Blues, Rock, Jazz, and all the styles it influenced, this sounds good to our ears.

Do supernatural forces have a particular affinity for certain intervals? I find that hard to believe.
 
Just got to wondering how many of our favouite songs or albums, have been written under the influence of whatever drug you might care to think of.

For instance, I seem to remember having heard that Santana's third album was very much cocaine fuelled. Also I think whatever the drug of choice was in whatever decade. The effects can be heard in the music,

Punk - speed
Reggae - weed
Hippie - lsd

So funnily enough today I am 44 and happily, completely out of touch with what
is popular musically.

What do you guys think influences today's breed of hit song writer.

Mark.
 
dusty said:
Punk - speed
Reggae - weed
Hippie - lsd

So funnily enough today I am 44 and happily, completely out of touch with what
is popular musically.

What do you guys think influences today's breed of hit song writer.

Mark.
Click to expand...

What's passed off as rock today seems to largely be influenced by Prozac and Zoloft. I hope the next wave gets their hands on some better shit. I'm betting on natural psychedelics like salvia, ahuasca, san pedro, etc.
 
...stumbled over a neat trick...The harmonic minor scale is typically a very dark sounding scale, but if you play it over a dom7 chord whose root is the V of whatever key the harmonic minor melody is in, it sounds more like lively gypsy music...for example, over a B dominant chord, you would play the melody in E harmonic minor...have fun.
 
There's a neat trick if you don't have time to learn the fingering, and that's playing it in the major scale one half note higher than the root. We used to play faux Flamenco like that, and it actually sounded not too bad. In other words, if you were playing in C, play a C# scale with a C thrown in.
 
Graphimancer said:
There's a neat trick if you don't have time to learn the fingering, and that's playing it in the major scale one half note higher than the root. We used to play faux Flamenco like that, and it actually sounded not too bad. In other words, if you were playing in C, play a C# scale with a C thrown in.
Click to expand...

If I follow what you're saying, I believe what that does is put you playing in Locrian mode...that is a helpful device for visualizing it.
 
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