Unless you spent a lot time playing clarinet in high school, there is a good chance you don’t think much about scales in music – like, are there only 12 notes in an octave, the way you see…
Joshua Aaron
With a keen ear for detail, Joshua Aaron delves deep into the rhythms of the music industry. His insightful reviews of songs and their corresponding sheet music unravel the magic behind every composition. Journey with him through the symphony of sound.
I did twelve tone for my senior project, it was a good time but very time
consuming, its more like constructing a puzzle then other written forms of
music.
And Miley Cyrus already sounds like “Last sacrament” to me! ;D
The music you showed all but made my ears bleed
I was half expecting you to zoom into the word “frequencies” at 6:22, haha.
Color boils down to the frequency of light, and different tones in music
are different frequencies of sound.
Let’s break this down scientifically a tone is a set sound in which the ear
hears so then we have to break down the word sound a sound is vibration
moving at a certain frequency so now in a waveform they your ear then
receives and changes into sound. So if you take frequency ranging from 1
Micro Hertz to 60 megahertz which sounds will you hear. Wonder if the
decibles are sub decibels and what if they are over 60 decibels. For
example take your hand and play a beat on your counter you’ll notice each
hit sounds slightly different listen very closely and you’ll hear that each
hit has its own unique pitch so.
After reading what I have just wrote do you understand that a true scale of
each individual frequency would be massive so using the eastern scale just
simplifies things for people who need them simplified
Im I just an uncultured idiot or do these actually just sound really really
bad?
3:50 that guitar sounds so demented and crazy-like. If slipknot had one of
those just imagine the possibilities. I’d be one happy boy let me tell you.
Haha. I need more.
shouts out to those gamelan fans out there, the most high brow shit ever
conceived by man <3
i always prefer bands like Last Sacrament. the slides always remind me of
when i was younger, and more carefree. it just makes me feel a lot more
happy.
and i’ve never been much of a muscition, but i’ve known about microtones
since my ma is a artist and a muscition.
I take music classes and I didn’t even know that. I find that very
interesting.
Why no love for peddle steel or fretless guitars? Or auto bending guitars,
they can all give you the same(and in my opinion better) results. Actually
you could probably do whole episodes on molding instalments. So what I am
saying here is more, please!
thiS VIDEO WAS SO AWESOME I WISH I COULD MAKE A MORE INTELLIGENT COMMENT
BUT I’M STILL REELING FROM HOW COOL THE VIDEO WAS
One song I remember in particular that felt insanely weird but
awe-inspiring to listen to was Tool’s Eulogy, mainly because of the way the
singer sort of twists and warps the note of his voice in the chorus. It
sounds so creepy, but the exact notes feel handpicked when sung with the
music.
I have a microtonal guitar. It’s an Epiphone Les Paul. To get a microtone,
I bend the string. Done.
It’s not really that there are “more notes”. Pretty much any interval that
sounds consonant and is musically useful is represented by one of the notes
in the 12-tone equal temperament, it’s just that on a microtonal instrument
you can approximate some of the intervals a lot more precisely. The overly
sharp dominant 7th you hear on your piano can be played almost exactly in
harmony on the Tonal Plexus.
While experimenting with microtonal scales is fun and I certainly don’t
want to discourage it, there absolutely is a reason why most peoples’ (and
not just western) music ends up with the same or very similar scales. It’s
just the natural physics of the acoustic waves. Each note played on an
instruments consists of the base frequency and many overtones (or
harmonics) that are just multiples of the base frequency (e.g. 440 Hz for A
and then 880, 1320, 1760 Hertz, …). And if you look at these overtones,
the first twelve of them (except for the weird seventh) will make up the
normal 12-tone-scale we are used to hearing. Any harmonics above these 12
are usually very high pitched and so quiet that humans can’t detect them
anymore.
So, what I’m saying is: If you for example pick a string, you are really
not hearing one single note, but many. And the spectrum you hear does
already make up the so-called “western scale” that we are used to and that
many disconnected tribes all over the world figured out. Going away from
this scale can be considered (to put it carefully) experimental or (to put
more harshly) breaking through the boundaries we are suggested by
acoustical physics.
All this being said, I still wonder even today whether microtonal music
sounds so weird and off-tune because it breaks the natural scale suggested
by harmonics or because we are just so very used to the sound of the
western scale from even before birth… and honestly, I don’t know the
answer.
I saw Harry Partch and his Ensemble many more years back than I can
remember. It was one of, if not the most awesome concert I have been to.
Not only are all of his instruments works of art, the music was “trippy”
and “out-of-this-world” as we use to say.
Impossible colours? I think not! I made a paint once that could only be
described as “fluorescent brown”. It was hideous!
About microtonal instruments: Couldn’t we say that a fretless bass, a
Theremin, or a drum were microtonal and only the manner of operating them
was conventional? I used to retune one or two of my drums for a specific
song in order to create a dissonance that I suppose could be described as
microtonal. Otherwise, I had them form a “proper” chord.
I’ve always liked that Black Flag song, btw. Never knew what it was called
before.
You could have touched on fretless basses (or other fretless instruments).
As a fretless bass player, I can tell you that it permits you to use a much
more “wide” approach to the instrument, although it can also sound terrible
and random if played imprecisely. Jeoren Paul Thesseling (ex-Obscura) uses
the micro-tonal system a lot in his work, though more subtly than Last
Sacrament, and it adds an oriental vibe to his works sometimes, I recommend
listening to him.
‘you kind of have to be super serious about modding all your shit’
hahahaha this is a great episode. really clear and concise explanation of
what microtonal music is without all the bs mysticism you find on a lot of
videos
Does that mean that rap verses could be played on microtonal instruments?
You clean your kitchen? Ha thats only for women.
Im so glad rob dyke sent me here, any time I see one of your vids in my
feed I get excited
did anyone knew that sam is left handed?
Wouldn’t a slide-whistle be a micro-tonal instrument?