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Comments
I didn't bring a weapon because everyone else has one, and yours are now broken. - The Enchantress
Dawdles - please give us a break from your relentless put downs.
Read your last post - you may need to clean your mirror
Please Wait, I need more time to configure.
The Crusader is especially good against Skeletons.
The chest beater can't help himself
The rest of us would like to discuss music !
normal service will be resumed. I apologize for interference in the usual schedule. we had unusually wet leaves on the lines!
Honestly, I’ve got some difficulties identifying who is the first troll in all those recents quite aggressive discussions. I’m absolutely not sure it’s the member mentioned above. It seems to me that there are at least 2 or 3 members who never stop with provocation. It’s really not only one member. It starts again and again topic after topic, always with polemical approch and it ends always with arguing. On this modal thread, it seems that some other members joined the party. Trolls tend to create troll behavior around them. So this thread like precedent ones ends up all about trolling. Sorry @LinearLineman but it seems to me that most of your recent threads ends that way. Perhaps you’ve been too much polemical at some point and now it’s also hard to slow down? Honestly I’ve got some hesitations to reply and even read the threads you create now. If you want to create such deep discussing threads, you should moderate and auto-moderate, not flaming. Just my opinion.
it's an interesting point of view.. but how do you do this "moderate and auto-moderate" stuff. I am genuinely interested , and yes I am aware that picking up on yr comment is getting even further away from the discussion in question so feel free to ignore me.
Internet has its own set of rules called netiquette. Not my own point of view in fact. Perhaps it’s a good way of doing things on Internet forums to never answer to attacks? This is auto-moderation and contribute to natural non-direct others moderation. Always trying to have last word when arguing is so negative. This is just discussing, this is personal strength to respect others opinions. We’re real people on a virtual media which most of the time can’t reflect who we are. We can’t see each other’s faces, and written language has its limits, it’s so easy to have bad interpretations. Being too much emotional or taking things too much personal is such on nonsense on internet IMO. Perhaps some kind of discussions are not that well suited to Internet forums, leaving too much space for polemical reactions and arguing.
Reminder: https://techterms.com/definition/
Now back on topic, copy/paste from my previous post which has been lost in all those off topic comments
Music is pitch, dynamics, duration and tone. Freedom in music is the ability to emphasize one or more of those characteriscs. Genres tend to be blocked in certain ways of thinking music. That’s not bad. Western music is mostly pitch oriented, electronic music is a lot based on sound textures and rhythmic transe, for example.
Modal music is different from tonal music in the way music is thinked. To me, tensions/releases in tonal music is made by note position relatively to chords notes, and to chords progressions which give some colors to notes. Modal jazz tensions/releases are inside the scale, each degree has a relationship to others degrees. If you play this note, it will tend to lead you to play this other note. This is a colorful language in iself too. Indians learn ragas during years, and each degree has its own name. Resonant body like human voice, horns, strings all have natural overtones. This is why Bartok scale is considered the most natural, but this is also why pentatonic scale is so universal: first natural overtones. People all around the world just listen to what’s inside the sound.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acoustic_scale?wprov=sfti1
It seems that there are some physical rules in music, this is a tangible phenomenon we can’t flex by thought. But human being interact with that sound and create lot of ways for its own feelings expression and communicate them.
John Coltrane was deeply involved in modal jazz after its tonal period. He was studying ragas, oriental and african music. When you listen to its latest works, you can hear lot of stuff in its scales. Modal playing is another way to create and resolve tension, out of scale playing is plainly possible too, by using other modes as there is no real tonality.
well, i agree, and usually follow that rule myself, even more so in the real world, I thought there was maybe some technical aspect that could help keep the flack to a minimum that I was missing.
but I would probably respectfully disagree about how this 'virtual' media reflects how we are. I am of the opinion that the words you use entirely reveal yr intellect and it's in a space where ONLY the intellect, sense of humour and knowledge makes any sense or is of any use, i agree that emotions should be guarded at the very least.
maybe there is some arguement in the idea that etiquette is historically a class based definition but that would be too complicated to debate. and probably none of us wants to waste much more time about the ins and outs / ups and downs of the forum.... after all Quanta is on the horizon!! and things generally are quite inspiring in ios right now.
@LinearLineman (and @Janosax ) - thank you for a great discussion, lots to ponder
I do think it's worth adding that "wrong notes" are just wrong. Playing them should not be encouraged.
If you think they are the "right notes" then they are simply not wrong. Thinking should be encouraged.
"Play those funky wrong notes, white boy".
Random thoughts since this is a long thread, and lots of questions, ideas, etc. have already been posted.
Most of the modal music I've heard - Indian, Persian, and Arabic classical music; long passages of Coltrane's "A Love Supreme", Frank Zappa stuff, other extended rock jams - starts and ends in one key; next to zero modulation into other keys. A lot of electronic music stays in one key from beginning to end, so it's not surprising that modal playing/composing is often used in electronic music.
Fareed Haque teaches two different approaches to jazz improvisation - the bebop approach (for jazz tunes from the bebop era and earlier) and the modal approach. The bebop approach is built on chord tones, so much practice goes into arpeggios of each chord in the tune you're working on. You throw in connecting notes - non-chord tones - so that your solo doesn't just sound like a long arpeggio exercise. Quite often, the melody of the tune is also used as a guide for soloing. In the modal approach, your practice emphasizes the modes for the tune you're working on. For example the modal jazz classic "Maiden Voyage" uses the Mixolydian mode in 3 keys, and the Dorian mode, so you would practice those two modes throughout the range of your instrument. I guess Haque developed this approach from growing up in the Chicago jazz scene, absorbing knowledge from older players the old-fashioned way - on the bandstand, informal hangouts, offstage jams, etc.
My first exposure to modal jazz was "So What", a structurally simple tune - all in Dorian mode, and just two keys - D and Eb. I was confounded by the "just play Dorian" advice; because when I listened to the classic Miles Davis recording, the soloists were inserting notes outside the Dorian mode yet still sounding relatively consonant with the rhythm section. I later realized that while Miles and others were into the then-new modal jazz, their playing still reflected years of acquired and heavily practiced bebop vocabulary; which I as a jazz noob didn't have. I didn't make a more serious effort to acquire and practice this bebop vocabulary until years later - and it's only after I started working with that stuff that inserting chromatics and stuff like that into my playing started to feel more natural and less forced.
Synthesizing: Ten Ragas to a Disco Beat:
You can even hear them superimposing chords, Cannonball especially.
Classic! So lucky to have been able to see him play this stuff live - couple of years ago I think. He was followed a couple of nights later by another acid pioneer - DJ Pierre.
Yeah, one of several bebop concepts those guys used in "So What" that nobody pointed out to us at the time.
I do recognize though that it's a- tough subject to teach to a large university class when you're not sure what levels of student you're dealing with. The following quarter, the teacher tried to address this by imposing auditions to get into the class where there were none before. I failed my audition.
I forgot how I was tested, but it was pretty obvious I was way below the level of all the horn players and pianists in the class. Number of guitarists was cut down from like 5 down to 1 or zero because of the auditions, lol. The one quarter of this class that I did take though was a good experience, even if a lot of the lesson material flew over my head.
Getting into the jazz guitar class was much easier. I just had to show I could play 2 octaves of the major scale, and all the cowboy chords. But I was unable to continue in the next quarter because the university cut the class.
Speaking of "kids only want to play easy stuff", here's Kingfish Ingram playing the blues classic "The Thrill Is Gone". While the song is not new, his approach is... Check out the solo that starts at 3:13 - it's a lot more sophisticated than the bad blues cliches one hears in pedal, amp, etc. demos on Youtube. Quartal intervallic jumps, a bit of superimposition, etc.
I believe Kingfish was only 17 when he recorded that. He's 18 now.
I agree that modal machines make for a harmonically poor music. I've been using novation circuit with its scales function for the past few months and often hit a brick wall where the notes I wanted weren't available in the given scale.
I'm going to be using the full keyboard from now on to open up my compositions to anything my brain can conjure up.
Great topic/point
That is a video on tonal harmony vs. modal harmony -
Modal music is tonal music. Because tonal music is any music that has a tonal center, and all modal music has a tonal center.
"Functional harmony" and "tonal harmony" are pretty much the same thing. In functional harmony you have tonic, subdominant, and dominant chords - these are the I, IV, and V chords. Modal harmony is just chords you can slap together any which way as long as the notes are from the current mode. So for example in D Dorian mode, you can grab any notes you want out of D Dorian and make a chord out of them. An even more oversimplified way of looking at it is there's no functional chords in modal harmony - no subdominant or dominant.
There is no need to "master": tonal music before attempting modal music, especially if you're already proficient with a sequencer. Just start doing it. For an interesting experiment, sequence chords in C major the "normal" way - you'll probably end up with something that fits functional harmony. Now try sequencing chords from randomly chosen notes out of the C major scale - which is actually the same as the C Ionian mode. The chords will still "fit" the C Ionian mode, but they might not fit functional harmony anymore - at least if you make an honest effort to choose random notes. Congrats, you just sequenced your first modal song.
that video will just confu> @tja said:
the problem with this (and with a lot of what people teach as harmony) is that it unnecisarily complicates things. He makes the claim that music evolved from tonal to modal, but this is somehow different from the gregorian modes. and none of that is true.
as GovernorSilver pointed out, modal music absolutely IS tonal harmony in action. And the term modal means simply that you are playing melodies based on the modes a given scale. So it does indeed mean the same thing as the older version of the word (even if the approach was different).
As someone who studied theory for a long time and never got satisfactory answers, I realized late in the game that the problem was that so much of it is based on very arbitrary systems. I suggest learning starting at the lowest level first to build a strong foundation. people get cocky and make assumptions as though they know what they're talking about. We know on a gut level what harmony is, but what's happening at the physical level, the acoustic level. Harmony means nothing without a basic understanding of what the harmonic series is. sounds complicated, but like mixing color, you have to start with the absolute primaries. And it's odd that musicians don't learn the basics like most visual artists do.
he harmonic series is the foundation of all music, and yet few musicians I meet can sing the first seven harmonics accurately (even singers!).
the sooner one realizes that a scale is simply a rearranging of harmonics, the quicker one can begin to make use of all this stuff. and the more you internalize the relationship of the harmonic series to consonance and dissonance, then you can throw all the convoluted explanations of tonic, subdominant etc mumbo jumbo because it all makes sense on a very practical level: as you move away from the root you create tension. as you move back to it, the tension resolves. You memorize all the names of the modes and all the roman numerals, but without understanding how this all relates to the series, then it's like paint by number rather than paint by.. well, simply understanding how to mix color.
what does consonance mean? it's simply what happens when we mix intervals that are found low on the harmonic series. the higher we climb , more dissonance is introduced. (each prime number introduces a novel harmonic - a new tonal degree as it were, while even numbers are heard as octaves by our ears). so to create a scale, we simply divide these upper harmonics in order to bring them down into manageable octaves and arrange them chromatically. by the time they're all packaged up and tempered, all context is lost as to how these intervals were arrived at. And this is precisely why it's so helpful to learn, to unravel what we actually mean by these words so that the words have meaning and weight behind them.
I realize that it might seem like a lot to take in, or too esoteric. but it's not. It will absolutely help ones understanding of music to get this stuff in your head. It's very useful to understand the relationships between timbre, spectrum, rhythm, and scale. And it applies to everything that is audio, from recording dialog, composing a melody, to mixing and mastering a track.
https://pudding.cool/2018/02/waveforms/
Weird to do this lecture on piano, which is out of tune with the harmonic series.