Rolling Music Theory Thread

THE STUNNING CONCLUSION

a funny aside: I just received texts from P4trick St1ckles right now with photos of his guitar parts. He writes his riffs down pricksong style. "Imagine the last D major chord as the sort of arpeggio you would hear if you beat the End Boss in the castle dungeon. Obvi when the dots meet and spar it is Aeolian vs. Phrygian hot licks throwdown"

Wait were prick-songs written in neumes or something else?

Those texts remind me of some guitar blog I came across the other day in which the guy said "as the Dark Lord loving shredder that you are you should be thoroughly familiar with the harmonic minor by now."

Thinking of starting Richard Taruskin's magnum opus Oxford History of Western Music soon.

Guess neumes were out of fashion by then.

Meanwhile leafing through ancient copy of Donald Jay Grout I just found on the shelf.

He Poos "Cloudbank."

http://www.counterpunch.org/2010/01/15/histories-of-western-music-from-grout-to-kleinzahler/

Your Easter Sunday homework is to report on which mode this is in:
http://images.zeno.org/Kunstwerke/I/big/HL70394a.jpg

crucifixolydian

Just heard SHA on car radio and saw the light. Now how about you?

Does that mean that you strongly feel that it is in D now?

Not quite. Just messing really. Although there was a guy on the thread on the other borad I linked who played in Grateful Dead spinoff bands name Steve Kimock or something who had a pretty well-reasoned argument for D, in which he asked the musical question: "Instead of asking what key is the song in, I ask what key am I in?

And I quote

Still much easier for me to detect Mixolydian when they unequivocally hit you over the head with it, as in "Mama Told Me Not To Come" or certain James Brown grooves such as, I think, "I Can't Stand Myself (When You Touch Me)"

Meanwhile got the first two volumes of Taruskin's Oxford History of Western Music. Will report back with any questions.

Lots of CCR songs are Mixolydian too, I think. There are certain swampy funky grooves it works well with.

Hear it much more clearly on "Fortunate Son," for example, than on SHA.

Face it, Mixolydian scale sounds more bluesy and Major scale is more country so...

Plus the solo came to the guy in a dream!

"Sweet Child o' Mine" is my go-to rock example for the Mixolydian mode.

(The intro and verses anyway. You actually get a V chord in the chorus.)

tbh pentatonic major probably signifies stereotypical old-time Country than full-on Ionian. Tons of exceptions no doubt.

depends on what country song you're talking about. folk songs, parlor music, blues, swing, boogie-woogie, and other idioms all fed into country/hillbilly music and they all had different melodic inflections. i dunno if it's practical to speak about country music in the first half of the 20th century in modal terms.

Though if someone wants to do an indepth analysis of this song I'd love to hear it just because I like this song & I'm bored & not near a piano at the moment. I know there's a raised fourth right outta the gate. Also I like that there's a picture of a CD-R containing only this song.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fsn6P4SDLLg

depends on what country song you're talking about. folk songs, parlor music, blues, swing, boogie-woogie, and other idioms all fed into country/hillbilly music and they all had different melodic inflections. i dunno if it's practical to speak about country music in the first half of the 20th century in modal terms.

Country music considered chronologically was a much bigger tent then some might realize, as I learned when I recently read Creating Country Music: Manufacturing Authenticity, which I never tire of flacking. Do you know that book, crüt?

The Floyd Tillman song sounds, analytically, straightforward to my ears, crüt. The auxiliary raised-fourth (in this case coupled with a raised-second) is such common example of chromaticism that I'm sure there's a name for it, see the famous Beethoven minuet. All the stanky details in this recording are the product of the individual players all imposing their own varying degrees of chromatic inflection, the dissonance created by the slide guitar moving step-wise upward from IV to V is pretty intense. There's gotta be a name for this kind of stuff in country music. Love the add6 on the last chord

Flam's last post has reminded of the original reason for the recent revive as well as helping me address some actual musical confusion I've been dealing with recently. Will post more later hopefully, right now need to answer Sund4r on the other thread plus I am watching Hairspray, which may figure in as well.

Specific thing: Certain Northeastern Brazilian styles such as the baião are known for using the Lydian mode. Two things. One: cheap, poor man's way to get a Lydian sound is to just play major triad shape and then move it up a whole step and play it again. Second thing: it's not really Lydian. How is it not? First way it is not quite Lydian is that it is Lydian Dominant. Second way is more confusing. In fact I heard some kind of explanation that somebody either heard it wrong or Luiz Gonzaga played the sharp four by accident(!) or his instrument was out of tune or busted. But...

Flam's discussion of different people bringing their own approach to chromatic made me think more about what the heck was going on in the baião. A little judicious googling came up with the idea that the mode is not just Lydian Dominant, it is a combination of Lydian Dominant, Mixolydian, and Dorian, some kind of synthetic, über mode. In fact, there was a piece I had been trying to play that was exactly that and it was driving me crazy. Note that the way it worked it wasn't that the extra notes were used as passing tones, just that in different sections or different bars or different half-measures the fourth goes back and forth from sharp to natural or the third goes back and fourth from major to minor.

Maybe if I had fleeter fingers or a better ear or a satisfied mind I would have just accepted these flipping thirds and fourths and moved on, but I couldn't and it was really affecting my ability to memorize the piece. Also, felt like in some sense it was my punishment, if you will, for too much time playing in the lower positions and not shifting, and liking to be in one 'macroharmony,' as it were, for a longer period than is allotted at faster tempos or with more busy chord changes. On the other hand, if I had been born into the style, I wouldn't have to ask questions I would just know, but unfortunately I don't have that luxury. But now I have a name, 'escala nordestina' which is enough for now. At this stage I don't need some kind of Euclidean axiom proof of something ('alpha' theory) just a name to tag it with and a pigeonhole to put it in ('beta' theory)

Back to the general theme of the revive. In jazz, you are frequently given a set of chord changes and asked to improvise over them. You can play the chord tones on the appropriate beats but then what scale tones (assuming you've chosen an appropriate scale) or chromatic tones do you play in between? There is some balance to be struck between playing scalar and playing chromatically. Too scalar and it might be boring, too chromatic and it ends up sounding like what one Berklee instructor (Bob Pilkington?) calls "the drunken line."

As far as the scales you choose you can get a lot of mileage out of the more neutral scales, especially if you are playing bass:) If you want to get beyond and use some slightly more exotic scales then maybe you've got to do more work. The reason Hurting (no real names on the theory thread when screennames are available) disapproves of a certain kind of paint-by-numbers pick-a-scale-any-scale approach is that presumably the players aren't really listening to the others in the ensemble or even to themselves.

( running out of road. See what the subconscious mind sorts out overnight )

(Tom, delete the Rolling Music Theory Thread now please)

(One man's scale choice is another man's chromaticism)

lol
baião please

Haven't caught up with recent posts but I kind of wish I were going to this:
http://www.mtmw.org/docs/MTMW_program_2014.pdf

I wish you were too.

If the geirfiddler could see you now!

How many heptatonic (seven note) scales allowing one augmented second, no chromatic clusters?
Spoke too soon. Just looked at some Jimmy Wyble etudes that are way over more head and they use a seven-note scale which is basically a diminished scale with a note deleted. The augmented second is not contained in a perfect fourth which makes it more out sounding.

didn't explain that well, didn't say that right, try again. Augmented second is not bracketed by two half steps. One of the thirds ends up being a perfect fourth!

One of my jazz school classmates used to say that he hated when people improve using the whole tone scale because it sounded like a cartoon character who just got bonked over the head.

*improv

There was a guitar player in this weird band in Austin back in the day who almost always played whole tone scales-his name was the same as one of the top sixties studio drummers- but I was too busy being creped out by the borderline offensive wardrobe of his bandmembers to notice.

My advisor advised me against writing with it (at least straightforwardly) because everyone has already heard Bartok and Debussy. Worked when Crimson did it, though.

Why would you not want to sound like a cartoon who just got bonked over the head??

A fair question.

For me it actually most evokes Monk, who does kinda sound like a bonked cartoon in the best way possible.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VSoQ9Augp0Q

In the Mick Goodrick book he says something about the symmetric scales not having "handles."

The riff to Born on the Bayou is mixolydian, isn't it? Just a b7th within a major scale?