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Sometimes it's easiest to see concrete musical examples.
The author's claim here is that a scale is only the stepwise ordering (hence "ladder") like that shown in the following:
Contrast this with the following Debussy excerpt:
In this latter excerpt, there is no stepwise pattern, so the author is making the claim that it's incorrect for us to say "this ...
7
...A B C D D# E F G# A
Just the list of tones isn't enough to describe in a meaningful way what is happening. It could have various musical meanings.
D# could be a chromatic passing or neighbor tone.
D# could be the temporary leading tone of E, harmonically V/v
A lot depends on the harmonic context. Even if you have playing only a single melodic line ...
6
In a modern western orchestra, that's about it. Unless you're foolish enough to try to write precise pitches for flexatone or slide whistle, and then try to write a chromatic scale.
Playing a chromatic scale on timpani is definitely dubious. Besides the speed and accuracy needed, you would be re-tuning the same drum as you played it, which would cause a ...
5
Are some scales used more than others within a genre of music?
Short answer: yes!
I think an exploration of the relationship between genre and tonality could probably fill several very large books - partly because the term 'genre' itself can cover many different axes. For example, we can look at genre from a geographic point of view, and see that many ...
5
So I like Richard's Answer, and I think it's good, but I think it's worth adding as an addendum that his definition of "collection" actually disagrees with the author's. The author says :
The world scale, therefore, cannot properly be used to address a group or set of pitches in which no ordering is implied. That's where the word collection comes in. By ...
5
If you consider every chord made up of notes from a diminished scale to be "of the scale", then a diminished scale contains not just diminished triads. The diminished scale is highly symmetrical, so to find triads in a diminished scale you only have to consider a small number of candidates, which you can then transpose to get the full list.
Let's look at ...
5
Adding the D♯/E♭ into your playing isn't much to do with the harmonic (or any other) minor.
It's a flat 5 in blues, or a sharp 4 in jazz. Take your pick - especially if you're a guitarist..!
It's a note that's been used and used since the early 1900s, as so out of tune it sounds really good.Works just as well in major keys too.Since it's between ...
4
There must be many, many chords using the notes in any given scale.
Yes. If we use C major as the given scale, we could make lots and lots of chords, like : BEF, BCD, EFC, etc. Depending on how we run the combinations we could have as many as 210 three-tone chords!
But, many of them will not sound good, like BCF.
In major key music the follow lists the ...
3
Instruments capable of chromatic runs over their whole range at high speed[1]:
Keyboard:
Piano
Harpsichord
Organ
Accordion
Ondes Martenot (also full-range glissando)
Synthesizer
Celesta
Strings:
Violin
Viola
Cello
Double Bass
Guitar
Mandolin
Banjo
Hurdy-Gurdy
Brass:
Horn (modern valved)
Trumpet
Trombone
Tuba
Woodwinds:
Flute
Oboe
Clarinet
Bassoon
...
3
To my mind, the word "scale" does have two distinct common usages; when analysing the tonality of a piece of music, it often does mean 'collection' insofar as order in time is not a primary consideration; On the other hand, there is also the pedagogical form of the scale which presents the collection of pitches ascending or descending in time order (i.e. ...
2
I just ran across this Masters dissertation on Coltrane and Slonimsky! It is as comprehensive an answer as could possibly be hoped. It does address Giant Steps (there are 39 references to it), but in addition, Coltrane's "use" of Slonimsky in many tunes and improvisations. (I was searching for something about One Up, One Down, which I found)
http://www....
2
Assuming that after the B7 you return to chords in G major, as Dom mentioned, the ear normally likes the minimum number of note differences.
If you are doing pop/rock type of music, I would suggest the E ascending melodic minor scale, { E, F#, G, A, B, C#, D# } to keep the number of new notes at a minimum while avoiding the minor third leap between C and D#....
2
Yes.
The diminished scale is symmetrical: every third is the same distance as all the other thirds. Since all the thirds are minor thirds, all the chords that naturally occur in the scale will be m3+m3 = a diminished triad.
The same will be true of the whole tone scale: every third is a major third, so every triad will be augmented.
2
There are some compositions that require the Orchestra to use Natural Horns or early versions of the instrument. I suspect that most modern orchestras will have the modern horn players fill the parts, but you wouldn't be able to do a chromatic run on the original instruments. For example the bugle and or the hunting horn are sometimes used, and I believe ...
2
I never encountered the idea that - in English - scale means exclusively the tones all in step-wise order... except on this StackExchange forum! That singular meaning of scale has always struck me as strange.
Obviously, specifying the tones in step-wise order construes a performance aspect. Supposedly we could only refer to a scale when we have a step-wise ...
2
You may have been doing many different things with the notes, depending on how you emphasized the notes in relation to a beat you heard in your mind. Maybe you just flirted with the blue note - maybe you played something "modal" ... but perhaps you were outlining chord changes with the notes you played. Maybe your playing lead yourself to imagine chord ...
1
The diminished scale is often used with the 7b9 family of chords. C half-whole diminished is associated with the C7b9 chord:
C E G Bb Db
(the whole scale is C Db D# E F# G A Bb... notice that you have a major 3rd between C and E thanks to skipping over both Db and D#)
Edim7 is the same chord as C7b9 without C in the bass, so they're often completely ...
1
The other answers provide a lot of information and go into a lot of technical detail. I could list all the nuts and bolts as well, but it seems like you are just discovering music and want a simpler algorithm to memorise, perhaps.
There are 2 diminished scales, each has 8 notes per octave. You can think of those notes as being odd or even in number (for the ...
1
This question seems to hinge on how things are spelled - including enharmonic spellings - and the effect of spelling on interval names.
If the diminished scales are spelled as two superimposed diminished seventh chords, we get...
|C |Eb |Gb |Bbb |
| D| F| Ab| Cb|
...or...
|C |Eb |Gb |Bbb |
| Db| Fb| Abb| Cbb|
Let's use the second scale ...
1
Odd question! The twelve major chords need naming from their root note. So C major is so-called due to its root note being C. All the others are named in similar manner.
Major chords probably occupy 60/70% of popular songs (my estimate). Certainly more than the half (against minor chords) that statistically they might occupy. There are many, many songs ...
1
The author states that the word scale is used incorrectly 99% of the time. I find this claim to be wrong. In 99% of the time, we give functions to notes, bringing order to this collection. The vast majority of notes in compositions have two dimensions: a function (tonic, mediant, ..) and a pitch class (any semi-tone in the octave).
I still don't ...
1
In my education, the circle of fifths/fourths works clockwise adding sharps and goes a full 360 degrees adding sharps all the way around until you arrive back at the beginning. The same holds true moving in a counterclockwise direction, but adding flats instead of sharps. That means a sharp key is also interpreted in theory as a flat key, and a flat key may ...
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