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Post subject: Re: Got to give it up - key
Posted: Sat Jan 31, 2015 7:06 pm
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Equus wrote:
I can't even really tell you what major or minor is and my dad was the music teacher. I never paid attention in his class. I play strictly by ear, and now I am figuring out tab.


Most Western music is based on the 12 tone scale, and intervals on it.
From then, it gets confusing.
Each step is called a half-note, while every two steps is called a full note.

Play one random tone.
If you go up 4 half-notes and play that too, it's called a "third"[*], which is the major building block of most older and non-guitar music.

If you go up three more (i.e. 7 half-notes up), and play that instead, it's called a "fifth"[*]. On an electric guitar, that's also called a "power chord".
If you play both the base note, the third and the fifth, you play a full major chord, the most common chord in Western music.

So far, so good?

If, instead of going up 4 half-notes, you only go up 3, you get a "minor third". The full chord you get using that is called a minor chord. Some like to say it sounds sadder than a major.

Now, if you also drop the fifth one half-note (from 7 steps from the base to 6 steps), you have a "minor fifth". A chord with a minor third and a minor fifth is a typical blues chord.

If you know just those three varieties, you can go a long way.
But learning to recognize those three by ear is really useful.

7ths, 6ths, 9ths, sustained 2nds and 4ths, and all other chords are pretty much going to be variations of the above three, with extra notes tossed in or played in a different octave. And for most music, only the first two, the major and the minor are going to be the base for the other chords.

[*]: "Now why is it called a third and a fifth?", I hear the cries. You may not want to know, but it's because someone back in ancient times for religious reasons abhorred the number 0, and insisted on counting intervals from 1.
In the common 7-note scale[**] of Western music, playing C-E is going two named notes up, and starting the count at 1 instead of 0, that makes 3. Thus a third.
If playing C-G, you go four named notes up, starting with 1, and end up with 5, thus a fifth.
Note that I say "named notes". Not full notes. A fifth is 3.5 full notes higher than the base note, but it's counted as four (plus one for the base note to give five) because of the 7-note scale. As long as you start at C or G. Otherwise that rule fails too.
No, it makes little sense, but is what it is. And it became the base for how the piano keys are ordered, ergonomics be damned.

[**] Which is commonly called an 8-note scale, because the octave is counted too. However, the 5-note pentatonic scale is never called a 6-note scale, because then, the octave is not counted. Confused yet?


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