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Permalink Reply by Robert Stapleton on March 15, 2015 at 1:35am

It's been awhile since my Berklee days, so I had to double check my facts. Found this on their site:

Hey again. Michael Moyes, Student Advisor for Berkleemusic here. I have been furthering my harmonic knowledge this term and have been spending some time thinking about Tritones and their numerous functions in music of all types.

A tritone is a musical interval of three whole steps, or 6 half steps. The interval is also known as an augmented fourth, a dimished fifth, or the ‘devil’s interval’ due to it’s dissonant sound.

This interval has been and continues to be utilized in music of all styles and can be found in tunes like “Maria” (from West Side Story), “Purple Haze, “and even Rachmaninoff’s famous Prelude in C# minor.

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Permalink Reply by The Phrygian Kid on March 15, 2015 at 5:25pm

 Yep you're dead right, the tritone is colloquially known as the devils interval, i apologise.. It's odd because several popes have outlawed the ♭ⅱ since the middle ages, declaring it 'Diabolus in Musica' (devil's note).  Composers risked excommunication if they used it!  (a distinction the dimV has never earned to my knowledge, as you say, they're reasonably common ) So yes, sorry I confused em, devils note / devils interval..  

the best.

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Permalink Reply by Robert Stapleton on March 15, 2015 at 10:18pm

No biggie. That's interesting about the Diabolus in Musica phrase.

Just curious, how do you get the flat sign to appear in your text? Some sort of keyboard shortcut?

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Permalink Reply by The Phrygian Kid on March 15, 2015 at 11:33pm

Well if you have a mac (like me) just go up top to the menu bar ⇒edit⇒specialCharacters and its there in the palette under musical symbols..

if not maybe try this.  I never worked it out, so when I used to make teaching docs on an ubuntu/debian machine at uni I just had a document with em all that I emailed myself from my mac at home and I'd copy/paste from that.

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Permalink Reply by Robert Stapleton on March 16, 2015 at 7:54am

I am Mac friendly.

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Permalink Reply by Cause the Blue rat on March 15, 2015 at 4:38pm

I know I've tried it. I'll try one for a bit. See how many different things I can do with it. Then go on to another one. I've tried so many different open tunings now. Each one of them gives you a different favor.  Something new to create with. Going to have to build a guitar for all the ones I have the most fun with. 

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Permalink Reply by TN Twang on March 16, 2015 at 3:26am

CB Rat,

Thanks for bringing the discussion full circle. The only real use for music theory is to generate reasons to build more guitars. ("But, Dear, I have to have an instrument to demonstrate Robert Johnson's flat-seventh tuning in G. I'll just hang it over there.")

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Permalink Reply by Cause the Blue rat on March 16, 2015 at 11:06am

In all honesty I didn't even read the conversation. I looked at the toping and thought "Holy cow, I haven't commented on this yet? Can't pass it up". Typed and entered my post from the first page.

The very reason I wan't to have a few more is to keep them all tuned differently. My only regret is when I started all of this I didn't think of recording everything I did. learned my lesson there. Got a few hundred videos of myself playing now. It's awesome. If you go from an open G to and open A style tuning it opens all kinds of new possibilities. Just by retuning one string. Have you tried an open C tuning yet? Endless dude. Just endless. 

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