Blogs

hi there.  This is a continuation of my blog I see threes, which i will be referring to and expanding upon, the earlier blog should be considered required reading...

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8 July 2014

Welcome back :)

So where were we ?

We talked about this little interval, the 'diatonic third', and learned that it is just the note after the next in the scale.  They come in two kinds of flavours, minor thirds which are three frets worth on our guitar necks, and major thirds, which are four frets worth.

And we learned that these diatonic thirds are the foundation of harmony, we smash two of them together and we have a chord...

We learned to play a major scale up one of our strings while harmonising in these diatonic thirds on the adjacent string.  Which is really really cool, all the cool stax double stop licks are there..  well.. almost, thats coming soon ;)

We played around with modes a little.

Then, as we were wrapping the semester up, we arpeggiated a chord from the pattern we'd worked out.

Right.

Moving on, lets add a string to our guitar.

its time to 'see threes' a little further, shift the horizon a little.

Ive been talking about a gdg guitar all this time, but we haven't really made use of the bass string except as a drone.  Its going to stay that way...  We're adding a high b string.

nb This means that the strings we're really focusing on are Keni Lee's 'devil tuning' that a lot of you are so fond of in the 3 string world.  Although I personally don't get into that tuning, it is very much how i treat this 4 string tuning, the bass string is often left out, but still I feel a little naked without it.. they  (dgb) are also within standard tuning on a guitar ...  yep, these are all working 'G' licks there too ;)

When you get down to it , most open tunings are the same.  In the six string world people do open e, EBEG#BE and open d, which is the same thing detuned a couple.  They do open a, EAEAC#E and g, same but detuned, then theres dobro tuning for the bluegrass guys, GBDGBD and a couple of C6 variants in the Hawaiian guitar world.  This might seem like there is a lot of difference between these.  When you can 'see threes'  you'll see.  THERE ISNT.  same same same.   Over here in 'weird guitar corner' where guys make em with less strings than standard our tunings are usually a slice from within one of those tunings.  If we look at them in terms of scale degrees we can see that there is a lot of common ground.  Because they're all built around a major triad its all (i) (iii) and (v) notes.  Theres only so many combinations that come up when we line them up in ascending order of pitch.

In part 1, when we built Ian we were dealing with a (v) string and a (i) string.  There is a 5 fret difference there, which is known as a 'perfect fourth'.  Sounds like it might be a shade more than our diatonic third doesn't it?

The perfect fourth plus the perfect fifth make an octave.  We're calling our thirds 'diatonic' because they change in shape a lot, as we've seen.  The fourth and the fifth are different, they're quite static.  Only one of our chords/modes has an imperfect fifth and its that weird double minor bastard we talked about at the start, his fifth is lowered, those in the know call it diminished.  Theres also only one chord/mode which has an imperfect fourth, this is raised in order to balance out that diminished fifth in the other mode, otherwise we'd have cats making babies with dogs and all manner of chaos obviously...

This diagram demonstrates what Im talking about, the green ellipse is two adjacent strings which are a fourth apart, where our Ian from last page will work.  We're now going to look at our G and B strings, who are a major third apart, this is the red ellipse.  We'll then be looking at tying the two together, the blue ellipse.  Look at where we'll get other opportunities to use this stuff...

anyway heh. point is there are other intervals besides our thirds, although our thirds are special, and they are what we're here to discuss.

The other intervals come up because they are there in our tuning.  We had a fourth.  Now we're going to look at the high two on our gdgb job..  g to b is a major third, four frets.  So to play a major third above a note on the g string..  we just play it at the same fret!  yep and obviously a minor third will be one fret behind..

So here's our mate Ian from last time, Ive moved him onto our four string guitar but otherwise he's just the same.  Lets revise for a second

.....

and heres our new one.  Lets call him Dave.  These are exactly the same notes

Have a crack..

All of the stuff we talked about last time, doing modes, arpeggiating a chord etc will all work here too obviously.

Practice practice

go crazy

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13 July 2014

well that was much the same eh??

hopefully you've been flat out practicing Dave anyway...

cos now we're going to stitch the two together and you'll wanna know him for that

ok so let me trim Dave so he lines up nicely with Ian

There we go, so thats Dave in his third mode.  Which makes sense because we were starting at (iii) on the higher string with Ian right?

What we've got here is all the triads in our scale.  Cool huh.  See if you can work out which are minor, which are major, and who is that sneaky diminished bastard...

have fun

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24 July 2014

Inversions

Once a month or so we get a new guy on the forum ask 'hey I made a G guitar.  How do I make a D chord?'  Quick as a flash some helpful soul will tell them to play all the strings up at fret 7.  Heres a list I made, they'll say, its super helpful.  fret 1 G#.  fret 2 A.  fret 3 A#..   etc.   

....

and hey, it gets you started right?

..

this is kinda where we are at right now.  We've found a single voicing for each of our chords.  But a change from (i) to (v) or (vi) involves a lot of lateral travel up and down the neck doesn't it?  Its certainly a step in the right direction, we have much more harmonic movement than our 'helpful soul' above handed us because of our shifting thirds but its all a lot of work eh.

lets go back to where we started, the piano keyboard,  for a few minutes.

Something that's always of interest to me is how players and students of different musical instruments view things differently.  Guitar players, having six strings to worry about, often do not understand the intricacies of chords, especially to begin with.  To them a chord is a pattern memorised from a little diagram which some other helpful chap mapped out onto paper, a shape with a name which they brute force their fingers into memorising.  Therefore a chord change is a very tangible point in the chart at which they instruct their hand to move to another one.  Pianists and organists tend to view things very differently.  Their world is scales, which begat chords.  In fact sometimes a pianist will perfectly play chords without having a clue what the guitarist and his hand calls that chord !  This is kind of a mind boggling concept at first (for the guitarist) but there you go.  Of course the pianist can tell you what the chord is, but he has to stop and think, he didn't at any time tell his left hand 'go to Am7'.  You see, he isn't reading the text up top like you do, he actually reads those lines and the funny little dots!  At the point where the big box with A came on the scene, only one or two of those funny little dots actually moved, some others may well have stayed the same.  (Don't be hard on yourself tho, those lines and dots are deigned to be played straight down onto his instrument, its much easier for him than for you)..  Organists do tend to have a perspective somewhere in between these extremes (of independent melodies and harmonies intersecting on one hand, and big interchangeable blocks of notes that always belong together in the other) because of the nature of their instrument, how they have a volume pedal to make swelling pads, and how the stops work to create additional harmonic content.

So lets take a look at how an organist sees threes (chords) 

As before, we will stick to the key of C, so the black keys are not part of the scale, they are just there to indicate which threes are major and which are minor.  (also, I quickly knocked this keyboard myself in illustrator with no regard for proper proportions ok ?)

lets start by making a (i) chord, just exactly as we have when we mash Ian and Dave together

lets say we have to go to a (iv) chord.  well, we can do this

Just slide the whole thing up 3 right ?

It works, and its very "rock'n'roll"...

but kinda one dimensional right ?

and its a lot of work on a guitar neck.

kinda like that helpful guy's chart, fret 1 G#......

You can do wild thing, but no ones gonna pay for two hours of it.

Lets just look at them together for a second...

An organist can see the shared (i) note.  So he (usually) would move that to the bottom of the (iv) chord

Ah!  now this is much easier for him!  Because the two chords now have a common (pedal) tone, a pivot point.  He can keep one digit (thumb for right hand, pinky for left) anchored, and slide the other two up a degree.  This is significantly easier on the keyboard, he doesn't even need to look, where moving the whole lot up by three, well he might miss right?

So lets look at that (iv) chord voicing for a second..

the triads we have been making to date have been what is known as 'root position' chords.  The (i) note is at the bottom, so they are stacked threes.  What we have here is a fourth and a third.  But a fourth on the bottom is the same (well an octave lower..) as a third on the top..

(tangent 1) .. a fourth and a third, now where have a heard that before ??  scroll on up to where I was talking about this tuning, and where we'll get to reuse Ian and Dave ;)

(tangent 2).. while you're there..   didn't I say something about fourths and fifths ??  Oh yeah they're both nearly (6 times out of 7) always the same, much simpler than these thirds...

Where was I?  root position right.  Ok well this voicing here (made from (repetition is key ) a fourth and a third) is what we call a 'first inversion'  because it's (i) note is the second one in.

Now the thing thats especially cool about this trick on a keyboard is that it doesn't give two shits if the resultant chords are major, minor or whominished.

lets look at it from a (ii)m to a (v)

same.

nice huh.

Can you see why we learned Ian and Dave separately from each other yet ??

I call this move a (+iii)

a (i) becomes a (iv)

(ii) becomes (v)

etc.

note that once you go beyond (vii) with this "roman arithmetic" you can modulus it. (basically add or subtract vii (7 hahaha) to bring it into the range of (i) - (vii) ...)  

so if you get an (viii) or (ix) or (-ii) later when we're subtracting don't panic, just %=vii   ;)

So how can we implement this (+iii) move ?

easy, from any of last times root position triads advance along the pattern with Dave, but not with the bottom string (the middle string being part of Dave, not Ian)..

Hang on a minute lets take a look at that root position (ii) chord again

hmm, and the 1st inversion (iv)...?

Ah so !!

another way to look at it, slide last weeks triad up to a (ii) chord, then move the low note back down.  this is a (+ii) move eh??

Have a crack.

Theres more.

ps.  This is Keith Richard's most famous move right here. This is start me up.  Do it backwards and its honky tonk woman.  Alternate the two and its you can't always get.....  

( and tumbling dice...  brown sugar...  street fighting man...  etc etc etc etc)

the trick is to let that pedal tone sustain across the change.  Keith isn't the only proponent of course, just the guy who made it his own.  Stephen Stills also loves this, check out any of his open tuned stuff notably Judy Blue Eyes of course.

pps..  This is also how pedal steel copedants work..

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29 Sept 2014

ok i took a couple months off there, sorry, stuff came up

lets revise a little, cos we're at the big payoff for the semester.

We've got a four string guitar tuned GDGB (DADF#)  (EBEG#)  (AEAC#)  (etc,etc)

We've been playing a major scale with a harmony note, and that harmony note has been a diatonic third.

First semester we learned to do it on the D and G strings, and we called that pattern Ian

Then this semester we came back and learned to do the same thing with the next strings, G and B, and I called that pattern Dave (nb. Dave is in his third mode here, for convenient stacking onto Ian...)

Ok then we stacked the two and viola, we had a chord

OK  so far so good.

Then I put up a bunch of Keyboard diagrams and confused the living shit out of you.

oops.

:D

naw, hopefully some of that inversion stuff sounds promising eh?  Lets take a look at how to use it in the real world, and why we learned Ian and Dave as separate pieces.

Lets grab a chord in its root position, that is to say straight across Ian and Dave.  It doesn't matter if its minor or major or diminished, this just works so long as we stick to our scale, i.e. don't lose sight of Dave and Ian's boundaries and let in any illegal fry cooks.

The solid numbers are the fret we're shortening each string to.  The faded numbers are only our new ability to 'see threes' ok, thats our super secret x-man power.  The orange circle indicates the root note of our chord.

Now an obvious change we can make is to move the whole stinkin lot along one right?  I was at a (i) chord, and this brings me to a (ii) chord, so lets call this a (+i) kinda change.

Now theres a pretty obvious (-i) change there too eh? I won't bother to map that out, but lets pull a (-i), which will put us at a (i) chord again.  The rest of these changes I'm going to show you now are all originating from here, but i don't want to recycle this image every second time ok...

Another easy change to make is a (+v) (.NB this will be to our 'relative minor' if made on a major chord i.e. from (i) -> (vi)     ) Oh boy, you'll like how easy this is.

Yep!  Thats it.  Cool eh.

Ok How about a (+iii) that'll take my (i) chord to a (iv) chord. 

(Yes this is the one you should've wound up on last time )

Wait theres more!, theres a couple from going backwards too!

This is a (+ii) it makes my (i) chord to a (iii) chord

And this is a (+iv) It makes my (i) into a (v) chord

These will all work from any root position across Ian and Dave there, try it..  I've demonstrated them against a (i)chord, but if you do these changes against a (iv)chord then that is just the scale degree against which these inversions will apply their math operator e.g. a (+v)move on the(iv) chord = (ix) i.e. (ii)   ----- subtract or modulus 7 remember ;) 

What we have here is a series (as we move up the neck) of neat little families of neighbouring chord shapes which we can easily shift between.  Somewhat like 'caged'.  Hopefully its a pinch more than that, we might be equipped to work one out for whatever new tunings we want to explore. Also, CAGED are all major forms and they don't work together in the one key without some lateral movement, these guys all come from the same parent scale, and will major, minor or diminished as appropriate.

Have fun, thats it till next season, when we flip that diatonic third over on his head for another uber-useful interval, the sixth.  We'll also have a look at extending the tertian harmony further, four (and more) note chords, 7s, 9s, 11s etc.

Homework for the break: (beyond practicing those awesome change secrets above )   Ok all this time we've been talking about diatonic thirds.  Right at the start I said they're the building block of chords.  Well....

That is true, we call it 'tertian harmony' ...    BUT..   there are other ways of building harmony.  Have a play with Quartal chords, i.e. seeing 4s.   John Mayer loves quartal harmony, he'll often build weird jazzy chords from fours.  Because nearly all fours are perfect its difficult to build a whole composition on it, it can quickly sound very ominous and churchy.  But for an unexpected turn its a cool trick to play with...   

enjoy your break

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