New answers tagged scales
1
There are many reasons to play scales, but they all come under one general purpose: To prepare you to play actual music. So you should play them in the manner that best prepares you.
If you are about to perform a piece that contains mostly staccato passages, it might serve you best to play your scales staccato. If you find you are having trouble with legato,...
4
a) release the previous note at the same time that I press the next
note
b) let go BEFORE I press the next note OR
c) let go AFTER i press the note (but not so much that it bleeds
together)?
This is a question of articulation:
a) called portato, non legato
b) staccato -> Staccato Signifies a note of shortened duration or detached (not ...
6
Practising scales is about warming up, learning which notes go with which, diatonically, and for playing in exams!
How you play them, as Heather suggests, can and should vary- a lot! Play them piano; forte;slowly;fast;staccato;legato;with crescendo/diminuendo;combinations of all the above!
It's a different situation for exams - they need to be played ...
4
Practicing scales is about notes and fingering. You can use whatever articulation you would like, and it is helpful to mix it up. Sometimes play separated, sometimes slurred. Maybe an alternation of two notes slurred, two notes staccato. The options are endless, and what you choose is based on what goals you have.
1
There are many teachers in existence who lack skills a "good" teacher should have and I don't know any teachers who don't consider themselves "good". Therefore I take issue with a blanket response of get a good teacher. I feel there are other ways to learn besides formal instruction. Children become very proficient on their digital devices just by playing ...
7
I think you might be conflating intervals with scale degrees. Count intervals as notes above a pitch, not as members within a scale.
Your interval listing should be P1, m2, m3, M3, d5, P5, M6, m7, P8.1 Let's look at our first disagreement: for C to E, you have d4 and I have M3. C to E must be some type of third, because counting up from C we get (C–D–E = 1–...
8
I‘ve found this picture:
I‘ve encountered this picture recently here:
https://www.musical-u.com/learn/how-to-use-circle-fifths/
It says:
Russian composer and music theorist Nikolay Diletsky set this whole wheel rolling in the late 1670’s. He intended his book Grammatika as a guide to composition, but with the rules of music theory in mind.
7
from the Wikipedia article
In the late 1670s a treatise called Grammatika was written by the Ukrainian composer and theorist Mykola Dylets'kiy. Diletskii’s Grammatika is a treatise on composition, the first of its kind, which targeted Western-style polyphonic compositions. It taught how to write kontserty, polyphonic a cappella, which were normally based ...
1
It's not necessarily (in fact, not likely) what you're seeing in your example, but a piece with a tonal centre of C but frequent occurrences of F♯ could be in a C Lydian Mode.
The Lydian mode is the mode based on F. So if you played all the white notes on a piano starting on F, you would be playing an F Lydian mode. More generally, it is equivalent to a ...
0
Most of Here There and Everywhere is diatonic, as far as the melody and harmony is concerned, although it does modulate in the middle 8 to a key a m3 above the verse key.
The guitar accompaniment (single note stuff) uses chromatics, so really can't be said to be playing in any 'key' apart from the one prevalent at the time - the chromatic notes being all ...
1
Like Tim explains and Lawrence shows ... your song seems to have a momentary modulation (maybe 1-2 bars) to the dominant G (V = 5th degree). This is managed by the D7, dominant (V) of G, called secondary dominant. This chord is built by D,F#,A,C, where F# is the leading tone to G.
V7 of V in C:
The term secondary dominant refers to a triad or seventh chord ...
1
The examples so far all include a modulation, so that the F# occurs while the chord is G.
But it's very possible to get an F# even when the chord is still C. For example: ‘Maria’ from West Side Story. The second, fifth, and eighth notes in the melody are all F# against a C chord (and several more later on). (The same three notes recur at the start of ‘...
4
Sure, that's not a problem. As another example, O Canada, when rendered in C major, would have four F♯s in it.
X: 1
T: O Canada
M: C
L: 1/8
K: Cmaj
E4G3G|C6D2|E2F2G2A2|D6z2|
E4^F3F|G6A2|B2B2A2A2|G6
2
Depends. Here are examples from two very well-known pieces (bonus points for identifing them :-) of a ♯4 that definitely is just decorative, not a modulation, and one that is a modulation. Which category does yours fall into? If in doubt, show us the piece.
7
That song - and thousands of others, can and still will be in key C, even though there's an F♯ note in there somewhere. I suspect it comes just before a G note, and what's happened is that the song's modulated briefly, sort of visiting key G, but not moving permanently into key G. It probably wanders back to all key C notes soon after.
This sort of ...
2
In my opinion it doesn't make a lot of sense to train sight reading by randomly generated notes. Sheet music - in common practice - is composed in scales and chords.
So it makes more sense to train sight reading by learning the pictures of chords e.g. triads and arpeggios
in root position 1,3,5 (c,e,g and all other chords notated on the lines or between!)...
5
From your question, and the subsequent edits, it is clear you have no idea how fingering on the piano works. I think you have the impression like many beginners do that piano playing starts from a fixed five finger position (like 'C-position' or 'G-position') and then veers out of that.
In reality, in most piano-music (that is a bit more complicated than ...
4
Scales fingerings are for scales. Which only get played in practice time and exams. They're designed to allow flowing movement of the hand/fingers.
Pieces rarely contain scales - maybe partial scales, but even then, they won't necessarily start and finish as they do when playing 'proper' scales.
So, although it's comforting at the moment to do what works ...
9
When sight-reading, your long-term goal should be learning to read and play entire phrases of music, not individual notes. What fingering choice is practical for a specific note might be completely different depending on the phrase. For example:
I don't think you would try to play the highlighted D note with any other finger than the thumb of your right ...
2
Note that the altered scale is just one out of many scale choices over a V7#9 chord. If you think that the chord implies the altered scale, then you imply an altered 5 in the chord. If the actual voicing really has a natural 5 (and note that most of the time the 5 is either omitted or indeed altered), then the altered scale is not the appropriate chord scale....
0
You don't HAVE to play the ♯5. Yes, it clashes with the ♮5 in the basic chord. Just like the ♭10 (even if we do insist in calling it a ♯9) clashes with the ♮3. And the ♮5 is a very neutral, harmonically inactive note. It's generally the first note to be omitted when voicings get too full and muddy.
3
Firstly, no two pianos are tuned exactly a like. Using one instrument to make a broad claim is not scientific. Even if a large sample of pianos were used, then the results would be valid for piano.
Now consider that different major keys are rooted at a different pitch. C# major is
half a step higher than C major in the same octave range. Simply, higher is ...
5
There is a long history of the character of keys and scales. As ggcg says it comes before the time of equal temperature where the different keys had actually a specific sound (because of the pythagorean tuning.
Even the Greek had their theories about the character of the modes. This has been overtaken even in the medieval church music and later, when the ...
5
This is a poor video, in my opinion. It seems to be oriented around some concept of 'brightness' that doesn't seem well-defined by the presenter, and doesn't quite seem to correspond to any other commonly agreed-on definition of 'brightness'.
He gets off to a bad start by claiming that a major chord sounds brighter than a minor one because it has a major ...
0
From a typographer's point of view, I would ask myself what the typical reader expects the most:
If it's a book about gypsy music, or a songbook of gypsy songs, or sheets for a gypsy band, I would stick with the non-western scale. Because here the reader expects to see a gypsy music.
If it's for someone else, maybe for a conventional band that will ...
1
I would use the key signature corresponding to the root of your scale. Use the minor key signature if your scale has a primarily minor feel and the major key signature if it has a primarily major feel or is ambiguous about its major/minor tonality.
The reason for this is that clearly indicating the tonal center of your piece will make it much easier for ...
0
Would you write key signatures for non-conventional scales?
Yes I would, as it will be easier to me to write and to read it - and probably to others.
But I wouldn't use the Roman numbering like you did in your question.
For example, the gypsy scale, I-♭II-III-IV-V-♭VI-VII.
e.g. the gypsy scale I would notate as Phrygian with an augmented 7th and with ...
5
If there is a clear sense of a root - perhaps the first note in your examples - then it might be easier for someone reading your piece if you use the key signature (whether major or minor) of that note and use accidentals for the other sharpened or flattened notes. But your first example could - assuming the first note to be C - be written with the key ...
6
It's 2019; feel free to alter traditional notational norms in a way that's most fitting for your music.
Many composers have used non-traditional key signatures that don't follow the standard order of sharps and flats. And I've seen key signatures that use all kinds of accidentals, so don't be afraid to mix sharps and flats.
Here, for instance, is your ...
11
Bartok did use some unusual key signatures for such scales. I don't know if it's a good or bad idea; much depends on how easy it is to read such a piece.
I would probably just find the major or minor key signature that minimized (or nearly minimized) the number of accidentals and use that. One might still change key signatures if parts of the composition ...
1
There are many different patterns for playing a major scale on the guitar. All will use the same formula of TTSTTTS (or WWhWWWh) - gaps between successive notes. The simplest one will start on one string, somewhere, and go progressively up that same string in the increments shown. It works, but is hardly practical.
Probably the most common uses all of the ...
3
So you already know how to construct a scale from semitone jumps, and you know that frets are spaced at semitone (i.e. half step) intervals, and so you were able to put these two things together to form major scales on one string. Now you only have to see the string-to-string intervals in terms of semitones, and you'll be able to utilize more than one string....
1
I don't know what you mean by the primary scale. Do you have a reference which defines that term? Do you intend to find ways to divide the octave up into 7 intervals, and then somehow decide which of the pitches would have to be the tonic in order for the scale to be primary? If so, then I don't know of anyone else who does that, so I don't see the value of ...
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