I’m looking for people to jam with or maybe a band to join around the areas of:
If you happen to be nearby and are looking for a guitarist, give me a shout. Reply to this post or fill out the contact form.
I’m sure by now that all guitarists have heard the sad news the Les Paul has passed away. He had an amazing life and will be missed by all guitarists that have ever heard him play, or owned a Les Paul. See some of the stories and tributes below:
Tags: spotlight
Totally off base here, but everyone prepare yourselves for:
12:34:56 7/8/9
That’s 12:34pm and 56 seconds on the 7th of the 8th of the 9th! We’ll have to wait 100 years to see that again!
If you’ve had any formal music training, or have studied any music theory in your own time, you will know that the C major scale is for some reason considered “special”. It has no flats or sharps, and is produced by playing all of the white keys on a piano, starting from C.
Why should this be? Why “C” and not “A”?
Well, here’s what I think. “A” is important. It’s the note (440Hz) that orchestras tune up to before practicing or before a concert. And if you think about your modes, the C major scale can be used to play 7 different modes, including:
So each and every one of the modes mentioned above has no sharps or flats. You’ll notice that the 6th one in that list is A aeolian, which is A minor. So it seems to me that A minor is the “special” scale, or key, if there is such a thing. By special, all I actually mean is that at some point when musical notation was being formed, someone had to pick a starting point. They called it “A”, and they chose the minor scale, NOT the major scale. Only at some point later on, someone must have thought that A minor was too sad and found that the relative scale C major was much more chirpy. Indeed, even the 440Hz value for A was only arrived at very recently, and is still controversial.
No scale can really be thought of as “special” except in the realms of musical theory and notation, all of which has been ordered and devised by human beings to try and make some sense of the physics of sound vibrations. All scales are equal in a sense that once you are in a scale or a key, you can relatively reproduce the same notes, chord progressions and tunes that you can in any other scale or key. And theroetically speaking you can continue any scale infinitely upwards or downwards, although it quite quickly reaches pitches of such high or low frequencies that the human ear can not hear.
Also bear in mind that all of this relates mainly to western music, which comparitively speaking is still quite young compared to music from many other parts of the world. It has more order, and more rules in place; rules which sometimes sound best when broken or bent.
I’ve not mentioned the guitar yet in this article. The guitar (in standard tuning) is quite well suited to songs written in A minor (Stairway to Heaven, Babe I’m gonna leave you, Anji…). Coincidence? Perhaps.
Tags: a minor, circle of fifths, modes, theory
I’ve changed the homepage of this site to try and encourage visitors to use the tagging system. The usual posts can still be found here or by clicking on the link in the right hand menu.
I need to get around to tidying up the site some time soon as it looks a little overcrowded and the javascript is slowing down page load times.
I’m not a web designer so any feedback would be appreciated!
Further to my previous post on phrygian mode, see what you think of this:
Pick a tone, say C for convenience. What is the phrygian mode for C? Well according to the interactive circle of fifths, it is achieved by playing a G# major scale, but using C as our centre. What else do you notice about G#? Well, it’s the second to last mode going anti clockwise, followed by C#, which would be C locrian mode.
What we’re getting at here is the fact that C phrygian, or G# major (ionian) is made up of all notes that are in fact root notes for the major scales that give us our different modes for C. So if you ever want to draw quickly upon a set of modes for a particular note, simply think of phrygian mode. The notes required to play phrygian mode can then all be used as roots of their respective major scales, in order to achieve the other modes of the note we began with.
To simplify it further, we’ll use E as an example. E phrygian mode is achieved by playing C major but with E as the tonal centre. Click on E in the interactive circle of fifths, and once it’s at the top you’ll see that each mode is simply a letter, no sharps or flats. So these notes are all from our C major scale, or E phrygian. Once you know what your phrygian mode is, you have the tonal centre for every major scale required to achieve the other modes. Nice.
And if we want to get all geometric about it, phrygian mode in relation to ionian is made up of two points of an equilateral triangle, the third point of which would make phrygian mode for our note that made phrygian mode for our first note! (It also points to the third chord in the major key, which we’ve already shown to be important!) This would give us C, E and G#. Play those notes together and you have what is called an augmented chord, consisting of two major third intervals.
Tags: augmented, circle of fifths, phrygian, theory
Good day All,
Apologies for the long silence, I’ve been camping, caving and climbing in the Peak District. Had an amazing time and feeling very, very refreshed now!
I’ll be writing up some stuff here soon enough.
Until then I suggest you keep practicing! That’s what I’ve been doing!
To get some practice with modes, lets have a think about the key of C major. Refer to the interactive circle of fifths to help you.
The key of C major includes the notes C, D, E, F, G, A and B. Or, looking at the circle of fifths, F, C, G, D, A, E and B. The line in the circle tells us all of the notes in the key we’re interested in. The third note of the key is what we’re interested in today. For the key of C major, our third note is E. In the circle, you can see that it is the penultimate note before the dividing line.
The note E is contained in the major scale for all of the notes in the key of C. Put another way, every major scale in A, B, C, D, E, F and G contain an E somewhere. And if you remember from the post on phrygian mode, E phrygian is simply a C major scale and phrygian mode is a kind of oppsing major scale.
So what you can do here is try playing the major scale for each of the notes A, B, C, D, E, F and G, but concentrating on the note E. You will be cycling through all 7 modes.
Things to bear in mind here and rememeber while you are practicing, are that E is the third note of C major. It is a “major” third because it is the middle note of our C major triad. And the third chord in any major key is always minor. So, our third note from a major scale is the major third of the major triad, making the first chord major. In the key in question, it is actually the root of a minor chord. It is also the root note of the phrygian mode using the parent major key. And phrygian mode is the “anti” major scale, in a way.
Tags: circle of fifths, modes, phrygian, scale, theory, video
I spotted a forum thread at My Les Paul which had some nice discussion. I posted my own comments there, and have copied them here as well. Hope you find it useful:
The question is not answered all that easily… A scale or a chord can have a root, and as pointed out by others, the root is not necessarily the lowest note of the chord.
You start to delve into the area of inversions and modes here. An inversion is a chord where the lowest note is not the root. So, G,C,E could be thought of as a C chord, even though the lowest note is not a C. This can be written as C/G, which you’ve probably seen before. There are many inversions of the same chord going up and down the scales and the neck of the guitar, typically achieved by playing your open chord shapes but using bars at different parts of the neck, or simplified chords using less than all 6 strings.
Modes are similar in a way, in that you begin by playing a major scale, but not the “ROOT” note, i.e. play a C major scale, but starting on D (this would be Dorian mode). As each mode has an associated root chord (C ionian, D dorian, E phrygian, F myxolidian, G Lydian, A Aeolian and B locrian) you can write a song in each of these modes by using the chords from C major but changing the root chord, i.e. maybe the chord that you keep coming back to, and the scale that you base your melodies around to be a note (or chord) from C major, other than C.
Off the top of my head, Guns and Roses Sweet Child of Mine is a good example of a song in myxolidian mode. And I think that David Bowie’s “Man Who Sold the World” is a good example of switching between modes from Phygian mode to Aeolian (I think!!!).
Hope this helps, and doesn’t just make it more confusing. I find this quite useful:
The Guitar Master’s Interactive Circle of Fifths
Tags: chord, modes, scale, theory
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