WHAT'S WRONG WITH WRONG NOTES? MODAL PLAYING!

McDtracy

@Wrlds2ndBstGeoshredr said:
Weird to do this lecture on piano, which is out of tune with the harmonic series.

Which instrument is "in tune" with the harmonic series. (Trick question).

You can tune a piano perfectly in tune with the harmonic series for 1 "western" key.
Then all the other 11 keys sound really really bad and "ill-tempered". Many digital keyboards/synths can perform this trick.

There's the "Hermode Tuning" that dynamically shifts 5ths and 3rds in chords to be
"just tuned". The Colossus piano app has this feature.

I will insist that "wrong" notes are still "wrong". If you think they are "right" then you are right and they are NOT wrong. This would make me "wrong" but don't tell me, OK. There may not be any notes you deem to be "wrong" and that's OK... (but probably not right IMHO). YMMV.
WTF?

Wrlds2ndBstGeoshredr

@McDtracy said:

@Wrlds2ndBstGeoshredr said:
Weird to do this lecture on piano, which is out of tune with the harmonic series.

Which instrument is "in tune" with the harmonic series. (Trick question).

Diddly bow, bugle, overtone flute...many others.

McDtracy

@Wrlds2ndBstGeoshredr said:

@McDtracy said:

@Wrlds2ndBstGeoshredr said:
Weird to do this lecture on piano, which is out of tune with the harmonic series.

Which instrument is "in tune" with the harmonic series. (Trick question).

Diddly bow, bugle, overtone flute...many others.

Here's the trick... any instrument that can bend a pitch in realtime could be said to be in tune. Horns, voices, many fretless strings above the open fret can all tweak the pitch to be "in tune" for their contribution to a chord.

My first exposure to this idea was watching a philharmonic french horn player rehearse a brass ensemble and tell a trombone. "Hey, you've got the third... bring the pitch up a taste and listen for the harmonics of the chord to line up." The nest time the trombone did and the chord just pop'ed. Many have heard this in choirs and other contexts where your pitch made the music "in tune". When it aligns the upper harmonics of the chord come out in the sound. Guitars and keyboards are typically condemned to not hear those perfect chords.
I've always suspected many metal player preferred just avoiding the 3rds to hear more
pitch perfection in their tone.

palm

@Wrlds2ndBstGeoshredr said:

@palm said:

Weird to do this lecture on piano, which is out of tune with the harmonic series.

my thought as well. it just popped up and the point of deriving scales from harmonics comes through. but his explanation is a bit convoluted and yes, the piano is not a great instrument to demonstrate harmonics on being that it only represents the first 3 before it's wildly out of tune with the harmonic series. that's what you get with irrational tuning systems though...

Wrlds2ndBstGeoshredr

@McDtracy said:

My first exposure to this idea was watching a philharmonic french horn player rehearse a brass ensemble and tell a trombone. "Hey, you've got the third... bring the pitch up a taste and listen for the harmonics of the chord to line up." The nest time the trombone did and the chord just pop'ed. Many have heard this in choirs and other contexts where your pitch made the music "in tune". When it aligns the upper harmonics of the chord come out in the sound. Guitars and keyboards are typically condemned to not hear those perfect chords.
I've always suspected many metal player preferred just avoiding the 3rds to hear more
pitch perfection in their tone.

Amazing. I've just mastered that same trick over the past few months, learning to hear and focus on the upper harmonics in my voice and tune them to the tanpura when singing ragas.

But once you tune into those microtonal variations, you realize that there is no such thing as "perfectly in tune", because the tanpura strings are each changing pitch throughout their individual amplitude envelopes, as is your voice. But there is still the phenomenon of locking your voice into the tanpura cloud. It's real.

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LinearLineman

@GovernorSilver said: "at least if you make an honest effort to choose random notes. Congrats, you just sequenced your first modal song." That reminded me of something I once read about zen calligraphers trying to arrange dots in a random pattern. It was almost impossible after the first dot to make a consciously random pattern. Sorry, just random thoughts.
@tja Please don't deny yourself the pleasures of modal playing because of a video. This is just fun after all! Now, please excuse me, I am having a midi nervous breakdown!

GovernorSilver

@tja said:

@GovernorSilver said:
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.

Please bare with me, I have no idea about musical education!

From the video I posted, I got the impression that you need to avoid everything that would inspire some expectation in the listener - and any listener would except things in regards to the functional harmony, expect this or that resolving of tones, expecting those chord next, waiting for the tonic, etc.

And you can only avoid this as musician, when you already know functional harmony.

That's what I took out of that video.

Still wrong?

You don't need to avoid anything if you want to use modal harmony. Just use a sequencer app with a synth set to a scale, so that you don't have to worry about "avoid" notes, then try what I wrote earlier.

The other night, I opened up Xynthesizr, set the scale to C Major (same as C Ionian), and just started stacking randomly chosen notes to create chords. Instant modal chord progression - that's modal harmony. Try it yourself if you have that app.

For a better understanding of what we're talking about, I would recommend you study the basics of functional harmony, and how to build chords from the major scale. I learned this stuff in university class, so I don't really know what the best websites or apps are for your self-study, but you could try this one for now:

https://www.artofcomposing.com/08-diatonic-harmony

Rick Beato has a lot of great lessons on YouTube, but I don't know which videos are the friendliest to beginner students of music theory.