MaW: this may apply more to the guitar chord naming conventions, which may vary a bit from what keyboard players would call chords. But, as I understand it (and note that I've had very little formal schooling in music):
If a chord has its basic with the third _altered_ up to a 4th, the chord is a sus4.
If a chord has its basic triad with the third _altered_ down to a 2nd, the chord is a sus2.
Both the sus2 and sus4 have a kind of ethereal quality since they don't seem to strongly imply major (upbeat) or minor (downbeat). They're used a lot in church music -- some Christian rock pieces I used to play are pretty much entirely made of sus 2 or 4 chords. The Rush song Natural Science has a great 12-string guitar intro that uses sus chords heavily.
If a chord has the second _added_ to the major triad it will usually be actually added an octave higher, making it a 9th, called an add9. If it has both a dominant 7th _and_ a 9th, they you dould just call it a 9th chord, like A9. That's a common jazz voicing.
If a chord has the 4th _added_, it's usually added as an octave higher, making it an 11th, so you might have an add11 although I think that notation (and chord itself) is relatively rare. You're more likely to see a 7sus4, which would consist of a sus4 triad (1, 4, 5) plus a 7.
In other words, the sus2 or sus4 alters the 1/3/5 or 1/b3/5 triad, while the 7th chords (dominant 7th or major 7th) are added.
Things get kind of complicated because on guitar you often will leave out notes from a 7th chord or 9th cord and especially an 11th or 13th since you frequently just don't have enough places to play the notes. The 5th is commonly left out, but if you have a 7th or 9th you might find that you can leave out the 3rd too and the chord will still fit (it will just be missing a little bit of its character). But not much -- and on guitar, actually the crowded notes next to each other tend to sound slightly dissonant, for reasons having to do with temperament (not mine, the instrument's) and compromised tuning.
Also, keep in mind that the notations really don't make all that much sense. They are traditional, though. Feel free to jump in and correct me if I've gotten one of these details wrong; as I said, I'm coming at this from traditional guitar notation.
When you factor in inversions, and the problem that the same chord might actually be named in several different ways depending on which note you consider to be the root, things get really complicated. In guitar you almost always name the chord from the lowest note because that will quickly guide the person playing to the right strings. Mostly. Did I mention it is complicated?
Changing keys (modulation): Once you know what to listen for, sometimes it can be obvious when you hear them. The best example I can think of is Re Your Brains. It starts out in C, but at the end of the second chorus, going into the bridge, it changes keys to Ab. Then at the end of the bridge, it modulates back to C.
[key: C] We'll all come inside and eat your [modulates to Ab] brains! I'd like to help you... Well, technically I am. I guess I [modulates to C] am.
In early music, they would mostly only play in the key of C, and keys that were "related" to C (only differed by one or two notes) so they designed the keyboard to be biased towards the key of C. The piano isn't the only instrument that's biased for one key over another. My recorders are biased for the keys of C and F, and my Baroque flute is biased for the key of D. A clarinet in Bb would, presumably, be biased for the key of Bb. Other keys are possible on these instruments, but they would involve slightly more complicated fingerings.
The piano is a bit misleading, because it *looks* as if there are missing notes, but there really aren't. The distance between E and F, for example, is the same as the distance between F and F#. You basically just take the scale of all half steps (chromatic scale) and color black the ones that don't fit into your C-major scale pattern:
0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12
Why are those keys black? I guess just to make them look different. In the "diminished adagio" I linked above, you can see a harpsichord where all the white keys are black and the black keys are white. I don't know why they picked that particular color scheme, but I've seen it on a lot of harpsichords. It's just convention -- like a coding style.
BtW, Just to make this clear, the Whole step/Half step pattern people are talking about is another way of taking about the major scale pattern I posted. You just look at the difference from each note to the next note.
<0, 2, 4, 5, 7, 9, 11> <2, 2, 1, 2, 2, 2, 1>
Since a "1" is a half step (H), a "2" is a whole step (W). Hence the pattern WWHWWWH.
paulrpotts: If a chord has its basic with the third _altered_ up to a 4th, the chord is a sus4.
If a chord has its basic triad with the third _altered_ down to a 2nd, the chord is a sus2.
According to a book I have on jazz theory, suspended chords technically add the 2nd and 4th intervals in addition to the third, which can still be major or minor. So you could, in theory, have a suspended C-minor chord with the C, Eb, F and G all played together. However, I've never heard a song that sounded right when the chord is interpreted this way. It just goes to show that chord names are pretty ambiguous, and they don't always sync up between different musical cultures.
If a chord has the second _added_ to the major triad it will usually be actually added an octave higher, making it a 9th, called an add9.
The add2 chord should be part of your musical vocabulary. It's a very serene chord to me. I used Eadd2 at the very end of the Space Doggity solo I posted last week.
voidptr: Changing keys (modulation): Once you know what to listen for, sometimes it can be obvious when you hear them. The best example I can think of is Re Your Brains. It starts out in C, but at the end of the second chorus, going into the bridge, it changes keys to Ab. Then at the end of the bridge, it modulates back to C.
Coulton has written quote a lot of songs in which the bridge modulates to the #V (or was it bIV?) then back. Someone should make a list.
A different example of modulation in the JoCoeuvre would be Still Alive. The verses are in D, but the chorus modulates to F (the minor 3rd interval).
@SpaceParanoids: I think we were converging on that add2 idea, but it seems that it's more idiomatic on piano than on guitar. You must also have experienced those times when you can add the second to pretty much every chord you play; it's quite addictive, but can be difficult to give up.
Perhaps we are blurring the distinction between chord symbols and voicing now, or at least entering the zone where things are blurred. If I am given your example notes C-Eb-F-G without worrying about what chord symbol to call it, I'd probably bring out the fourths in the voicing: C-Eb-G-C-F (reading from the bottom, dropping the low C an octave if your hand can do the tenth to the Eb). In this case I wouldn't call it "sustained-sounding" though. Creamy, maybe!
Borba & SpaceParanoids: I've always seen sus written out as shorthand for "suspended," not "sustained," although one of my church music directors always said "sustained."
Ahh, Wikipedia says "either way" (a suspended 2nd or 4th can either either add to the existing third or replace the third). Although they categorize this chord type as one of the triads, which sounds a bit silly if you have four notes. Also, if you don't replace the third, you'd have to distinguish the case of the minor 3rd. Would you ever have a use for an Amsus2 that included a 2nd and a flat 3rd? Mmmmaybe...
On guitar adding both the 3rd and 2nd or 4th intervals to the chord would only be possible with some really oddball fingerings or some very specific partially-open chords. A second interval in general is usually pretty awkward to play on guitar, without really wide reaches or partially open chords that aren't movable, hence the tendency to use the 9th.
@Paul: Sorry, I should have said "suspended-sounding". My terminology confused the issue more. Regarding Wikipedia, I'm afraid I have to relate it back to culture - the meaning completely depends on what culture (classical/jazz/rock) you're in at the time, and unless it's clearly stated, you have to check what surroundings you're in before talking in absolute terms. A good indicator that you're not in classical territory is the use of chord symbols at all ;-)
One thing I love about guitar is that it often suggests really good voicings, especially typical jazz ones - many chords sound good when constructed from a mix of fourths and thirds. The piano, on the other hand, seems to suggest triads to anybody trying to make sense of how to construct a chord, and there are only so many plain triads you can handle at a time. Then again, as you pointed out, a keyboard does give you the advantage of being able to play adjacent notes simultaneously, often using a single finger (sideways thumb) when you're in luck.
Following up on the various posts about the inherent meaning of white notes, one instrument which deserves more love in terms of bending your brain around scales is the orchestral harp. For those not in the know, its strings are tuned to the "white" notes, i.e. seven strings per octave: C-D-E-F-G-A-B. Seven pedals modify the pitches up or down as required (a pedal per note name), so you can, for example, change all the Fs to F-sharps to change the scale from C major to G major. I find this a fascinating halfway point between strict diatonicism and chromaticism.
Borba: I used to play Chapman Stick (see stick.com), which is tuned in stacked 5ths instead of stacked 4ths like guitar is (mostly) tuned. Actually that's not entirely true: that's just the bass side. It is typically played with hands crossed, leading to all kinds of bizarre parallel constructs. Really a challenging (and liberating) instrument. In 5ths, you can make a lot of really wide bass chords that sound very consonant. It's neat.
I never got all that good on Stick and wound up selling it like a lot of musicians do... but I'd like to get one again someday!
SpaceParanoids: maybe it is piano players who tend to sometimes write or say "sustained," since they have a sustain pedal to contend with? I guess judges might do it to. "Objection your honor!" "Suspended!"
This is a great thread. Thanks for the explanations of what the sus4 means.
Angelastic: I'll probably be repeating some of what other people have said, but it sometimes helps to explain things differently.
Your confusion about keys is understandable. There are several reasons why you would choose a particular key for a piece. Yes, certainly something written in C major could be transposed up one tone (you'll find I talk mostly about tones and semitones instead of steps and half steps, this is a British thing - Americans seem to mostly say steps, we say mostly tones, much like they have whole notes and half notes and quarter notes, and we have semibreves, minims and crotchets).
Umm, where was I. Oh yes. You could take something written in C major and transpose it up a tone, and it would be in D major. Because they're both major scales, you'd find that the gaps between all the notes would be the same, so it would sound the same, just a bit higher in pitch. What makes a tune is not the absolute note values, but the intervals between them. If you preserve those, you can move it up and down as much as you like.
Of course, what you will then find is what has been mentioned by voidptr - if you take something written for recorder that's in, say, F major (which is the key which has one flat - B flat, to be exact), and transpose it into D major (two sharps - F and C), then two things are likely to happen. First, you'll probably run off the end of the instrument unless the original piece had a very small range of pitches (recorders only usually manage two octaves and a tone at best - and the note a semitone below the highest note is either difficult or impossible to play on most). This is obviously not desirable, so one reason for choosing a key turns out to be fitting the piece onto the instrument you intend it to be played on (this may involve changing your mind halfway through, and transposing the whole thing into a different key).
The other thing that might happen is that the recorder player you're writing for will hate you, because generally speaking we prefer to play in flat keys. The treble recorder's 'native' scale is that of F major, which can have two beautiful octaves (the descant recorder likes C major in the same way), and adding extra flats is pretty easy up to three or four - five flats is getting a bit tricky, but it's not impossible. Sharps, on the other hand - we're okay with G major (one sharp, which is F sharp), but D major can start causing problems, and A major could be considered marginally evil. For some reason, recorders trying to play in sharp keys don't stay in tune as well. I don't know why, but it's much harder to get everything to blend in tune nicely in a sharp key.
So you do need to consider what you're writing for before you start as well. If you're aiming at a treble recorder and you want to use two octaves of range, you probably want F major or F minor or you'll be demanding third octave fingerings and most people can't play those. If you want to write for a modern oboe though, you've got at least three octaves to play with (not entirely sure what the range of an oboe is), and the modern fingering system makes it much easier to handle more non-native keys.
I'm not going to mention transposing instruments right now though. That's just a trick to make the parts less terrifying to read, I think - another reason for key signatures, by the way. Colleenky said it was because we're lazy, but it's not just that - it's much easier, once you get used to it, to see the key signature at the start of every line and remember that every B you see should be a B flat unless you're explicitly told otherwise rather than have every single B in the piece have a flat sign next to it, which would leave the music quite cluttered.
Bear in mind though, there are no key signatures specifically for minor keys. Why? Well, minor scales aren't necessarily the same going up as going down, which would confuse the key signature something wicked, so what we do is use the key signature for the relative major, which contains most of the sharps or flats required for the key, and stick a few accidentals in to fill out the rest of the notes required.
Briefly, the relative minor of a major scale has as its tonic (first note) the sixth note (submediant) of the major scale. Largely the same notes involved, but in the harmonic minor scale you raise the seventh degree by one semitone going up and going down, while in the melodic minor you raise the sixth and seventh going up, but don't raise anything at all going down. So A harmonic minor (relative of C major) is A B C DE F G# A G# F E D C B A, while A melodic minor is A B C D E F# G# A G F E D C B A. If you think that's too weird to work, play them and see what you think.
paulrpotts: maybe it is piano players who tend to sometimes write or say "sustained," since they have a sustain pedal to contend with? I guess judges might do it to. "Objection your honor!" "Suspended!"
For me, I think it just comes from seeing "sus" in sheet music for many years before learning what it actually stands for. My brain saw the abbreviation as "sustained" for whatever random reason. I doubt it had anything to do with the sustain pedal, because I'm not sure I knew that term either. I used to know it as the loud pedal, and my friends in the piano business always seem to call it the damper pedal.
Why are there keys? You might as well ask me why we have eyebrows. Sure, there's an answer, but it never occurred to me to ask. It is The Way of Things.
I second (or third, or whatever) what others have said about using keys that suit a particular instrument. Pianos and guitars are sort of unique in their breadth of range. Most instruments (inlcuding the voice) are more limited. And then there's the additional issue of the characteristics of the sound throughout out an instrument's range (timbre and tessitura). For example, I have about a three-octave range on a good day, but my voice is strongest around the middle octave, so I might transpose a song to fit in that range (as I did for the children when they performed Fancy Pants.) On the other hand, Stravinski intentionally wrote the intro to "Dance of the Young Girls" in Rite of Spring as an extrememely high solo for the bassoon to make it sound strained, harsh and primal. (This is a freakin' amazing piece of music, by the way. For anyone who's not familiar, it's the piece that accompanies the dinosaur bit in Fantasia.)
Though I can't find a good citation right now, another issue to consider is the Baroque idea of "affect," which tied music to different emotions. It was thought that each key had its own unique character and could elicit specific emotional responses. (I'm oversimplifying the case, and one of the other musicians here is bound to call me on it. ;-) ) I think that this idea carries on today, to some extent. It's entirely subjective, of course, but different keys somehow feel different, even though they are objectively the same patterns.
Finally, it's important to remember that music theory is just that - theory. It is a set of rules made up after the fact to describe musical behavior. Someone didn't sit down one day and invent keys, they just evolved organically.
I used to know it as the loud pedal, and my friends in the piano business always seem to call it the damper pedal.
I'm no pianist, but isn't the damper pedal a completely different pedal? The sustain pedal lifts the hammers from the strings so that they continue to sound. The damper pedal shifts the keyboard and attendant strings over so that the hammers hit fewer strings and they sound more quietly. (Every piano key is actually sounded by three strings each, if I remember correctly.)
And quickly, regarding sus chords. As a chord symbol, this was confusing to me at first. In classical analysis, a suspension is a pitch that does not belong in the current chord but was held over from the previous chord ("suspended"), which then resolves to a chord tone. The idea of having a suspension without a resolution was a little foreign. I'm still learning the conventions of pop/jazz chord symbols. :-)
Finally, it's important to remember that music theory is just that - theory.
Quote of the day. Thanks Colleenky. The most unnatural-sounding musicians are those who try their first creative work by trying to deduce practice from theory. Obviously thinking about the theory allows one to grow, but Theory is its own person, thank you very much, and does not have to ask Practice for permission to go to the dance. Uh, I mean conference.
Since we are in the habit of drawing parallels from the IT world, it's a bit like the distance between Computer Science and the "goddamn login page".
Colleenky is quite right about the idea of different keys having different moods. This partly comes from the modes which largely preceded keys and definitely do have their own moods, but also comes from the old tuning mechanisms.
Equal temprement has been mentioned - it's a tuning system commonly used today which is basically a giant hack, almost every note compromised in some way. The reason is that it's nigh-on impossible to tune an instrument that can play perfectly in tune in every key without giving it an utterly ridiculous number of very-slightly-different notes to play. There are perfect mathematical ratios between various intervals which you would use if you were tuning a given key, but shift into another key and the intervals for that key are consequently going to sound slightly different.
Back in the baroque, they hadn't invented equal temprement, which sounds the same in every key, and the tuning systems they used sound slightly different in every key, so key choice is arguably even more important in music of that period. As an example, my viol teacher prefers to tune her viols using velotti temprement, and the result is that a consort of viols playing in velotti temprement sounds slightly different to one tuned in equal temprement, and we do notice a stronger contrast between major keys.
Another example of this is Bach's Well-Tempered Klavier, which was written for a keyboard tuned in (you guessed it) Well temprement. All the different temprements are based on different theories of how the notes need to relate and what compromises are acceptable and indeed how many keys you need to be able to play in. Equal temprement is a good compromise for lots of instruments playing together in different keys, especially when some of them are transposing instruments like clarinets.
The recorders I play are all nominally tuned to equal temprement when they're made, but recorders have a bit of an advantage in that their tuning can be relatively easily altered by the player by adjusting how much air they use for any given note (playing a recorder in tune is one of those skills most school children never get told they need to obtain, which is one reason why school recorder playing tends to sound so awful and people consequently think it's not a real instrument). As a result, we can deal with some of the temprement-induced tuning problems, and one thing that comes up an awful lot when playing in recorder groups is that when we hit a definite chord, people who're playing the third in the chord will flatten it down a little, which produces a much purer chord - the major third in equal temprement is really astonishingly far from pure, and it makes a significant improvement to the sound if you take that into account and compensate accordingly.
@Bry: I love you're usage of the term in media res to describe that effect, and will promptly start referring to it as such in all future discussion.
@SpaceParanoids: I'd say bVI, yes. And it's not just Coulton. I've seen similar transitions long before hearing of Coulton. Though he does like them. The bIV key is special, because it has a lot of exotic notes, but it still has the original key note in the tonic chord. So it's a balance between different, yet familiar. The same is true of the iv chord that he uses all the time. I singled out Re Your Brains as an example where the transition is particularly audible, even for someone who doesn't necessarily know what their listening for.
Re keys: In the Baroque, the different keys actually were slightly different because not all half-steps were created equal. In general, keys close to C sounded good, and the further you got from C (in the circle of fifths) the worse it sounded. There were a number of different tuning systems being developed to try and cope with this, all of them making compromises in the intervals. Okay, I'll go into this after all, since I can't stop thinking about it now... Here's one way to explain what happened. Normally, this is explained with a circle of fifths, which I'm deliberately avoiding.
Originally, intervals were defined by frequency ratios. An octave must be 2:1 in order to sound like an octave. A fifth is conventionally defined as the ratio 3:2, and a fourth is the ratio 4:3. If you start with a frequency, say A=440Hz, and multiply by 3/2, you get 660Hz, which should be E. If you go up a fourth from that, you have 440(3/2)(4/3) = 440(2/1) = 880 which is an octave higher as it should be.
Here's where things get tricky, though... Let's find out the ratio for a whole step (A to . We can build this interval by going up a fifth (3:2) to E, then up another fifth to B (3:2), then down an octave (1:2). This gives (3/2)(3/2)(1/2) = 9/8. Now, if we go up six whole steps, the new frequency is the original times (9/8)^6 = 2.027 which is just slightly more than an octave, but it doesn't quite fit. It's close enough that it will actually sound like an out-of-tune octave. In fact, with the prime factoring, no matter how many times you multiply 9/8, you won't reach a multiple of 2. In other words, if all whole steps were defined by the ratio 9/8, then there wouldn't be an integral number of whole steps that could ever fit perfectly into any number of octaves. All sorts of compromises were made in the Baroque era, to make this fit, and these gave each key it's own out-of-tune-ness, which gave it some sort of character. But there wasn't necessarily a consensus that was ever reached on what keys had what character, since this tuning was likely to vary from place to place, or from musician to musician. Bach wrote his famous Well Tempered Clavier to showcase all of the keys in one particular tuning system that he liked.
These days, what we do in our equal tempered system, is make everything equally out of tune. That is, we define a half step (I'm switching to half steps now) to be 2^(1/12), so that when we play 12 of them in a row, the final note has a ratio of 2^(12/12) = 2 = an octave. If originally a fifth was a ratio 3:2, or 1.50, it is now defined as 7 half steps, or a ratio of 2^(7/12) = 1.498. Hence modern music is technically out of tune, compared with Pythagoras' nice rational number system.
As a result, we can deal with some of the temprement-induced tuning problems, and one thing that comes up an awful lot when playing in recorder groups is that when we hit a definite chord, people who're playing the third in the chord will flatten it down a little, which produces a much purer chord - the major third in equal temprement is really astonishingly far from pure, and it makes a significant improvement to the sound if you take that into account and compensate accordingly.
This is why a cappella vocal music kicks accompanied vocal music's ass - tuning! :-) This is also why good choral composers will not double the third in a piano accompaniment in the same octave as any of the voices. It's out of tune.
[Wishing I had time to understand temperament, tuning and acoustics better.]
I'm no pianist, but isn't the damper pedal a completely different pedal? The sustain pedal lifts the hammers from the strings so that they continue to sound. The damper pedal shifts the keyboard and attendant strings over so that the hammers hit fewer strings and they sound more quietly. (Every piano key is actually sounded by three strings each, if I remember correctly.)
No, the damper pedal is definitely the same as the sustain pedal. That's the pedal on the right, and basically the only pedal you can count on being the same on every piano.
The left pedal is usually called the soft pedal. On grand pianos it's sometimes called the una corda pedal. It shifts the entire action to the left so each hammer hits only one string. However on uprights, it just moves the hammers closer to the strings (and ruins the action, in many pianists' opinion).
If there's a middle pedal, it's usually bass sustain on uprights (fairly useless), and sostenuto on fancy American-made grands (Steinway, Baldwin, Mason & Hamlin, etc). The bass sustain pedal lifts the dampers for all the notes below E3, and the sostenuto pedal holds up the dampers on whatever keys are currently being pressed. I've never had a piano or keyboard with a sostenuto, so I've never learned to play that way.
One minor nitpick -- on most pianos, each hammer hits three unison strings for most notes, but only two strings in the lowest octaves.
After my "tempermental" post last night ;-) I feel like I understand it better than I use to (useful side effect of teaching something -- you learn it too!).
I can now figure out how much flatter a pure major third is from an equal-tempered major third.
Re: damper: I was always taught that the damper is the thingamabob that causes the piano strings to cease to vibrate so quickly; the damper pedal raises the damper, which allows the strings to continue to vibrate, sustaining the notes.
Regarding tuning: this is a favorite topic of mine. For years I just thought that I had broken guitars, or that I was really bad at tuning them, because I would tend to tune by ear. Tune a guitar by ear such that an E major chord sounds very nice and sweet -- in other words, so it has pure intervals, probably very close the idea Pythagorean frequencies in that key -- and you think you're done. Then you play an A major chord, or a D major chord, and it sounds terrible. WAYYY off. So you try to fix it. and then your D major chord sounds WAYYY off. The difference is not subtle if you have any kind of an ear for pitch at all. I thought for years that I must not have a good ear for pitch -- because I couldn't get a guitar to sound in tune to me in more than one key no matter what I did. But it turns out, of course, that I couldn't get it to sound in tune because I _was_ hearing just how far off those intervals are.
In fact, it's impossible to get a guitar to play pure (Pythagorean) intervals in all keys. You'd need movable frets. Guitar is made worse by the fact that all the intervals are the same -- 4ths -- except for 1. That interval between G and B is always sounding out of tune compared to the others. There are some elaborate workarounds -- instruments with angled frets, kinked frets, etc. One that works pretty well is the Buzz Feiten tuning system -- there is a very elaborate and very interesting (well, interesting to a certain kind of music geek) patent you can read describing this system of tuning offsets and corrections in excrutiating detail. But the upshot is that you have to use a compromised, approximate tuning on guitar the way you do on piano, and kind of hope for the best. This is true especially if you're trying to play along with a group that includes a piano. In that case you'd better tune to the piano, and hope the piano is pretty well in tune across the keys.
This is another reason why a lot of the best-sounding chords on guitar contain open strings and wide intervals: intervals of a 4th or more between strings on guitar while those seconds and thirds (as opposed to 9ths and 10ths) tend to emphasize the "rounding error." The same is true on piano, actually, and I'm always cringing at pianos (typically in churches with heaing/cooling problems, instruments that get moved a lot, or just anywhere, really, where they don't get the keyboards tuned regularly). This is one of the reasons that violins are tuned in 5ths, I think (wider), and also the incentive for things like the New Standard Tuning (guitar craft) that uses mostly 5ths, and Chapman Stick intervals. And some keys just tend to sound better on guitar because you have more voicings that sound cleaner. A lot of the church music is in Eb or Bb which is a little frustrating for guitar -- you're often having to chose chord voicings that just don't sound very sweet, and using a capo often tends to exaggerate tuning problems (because it puts pressure on the strings).
Not being able to have one set of pitches that sounds Pythagorean-perfect in all keys is one of those fundamental weird things about the physics of our universe. It seems like it ought to be simple, just like if you draw a triange with two sides that are one inch long, the length of the third side seems like it ought to be some kind of simple ratio. But far from it! It's like a little practical joke the Creator/anthropic principle/laws of physics left for us, and somewhere he/she/it is still giggling while we curse and try to tune our guitars!
Interesting to go back to the side thread. One of the comments was about practicing piano in the dark (or with eyes closed).
Last night I was working with my son Isaac a little bit on the guitar part for "My Monkey." (It is frightening how quickly a 14-year-old learns, compared to fast how I learn; also, I think he has more native musical talent than I do). We were talking about how that is a deceptively simple part: that is, the chord fingerings are pretty easy (the correct chords are actually _easier_ to finger than the ones I had learned from the incorrect tab). But there are some barriers. The first is that you have to be able to jump to the right chord fingering practically instantaneously. The only way to get this down is just to practice those moves. The second is that you have to play it with a steady rhythm (foot-tapping or whatever you do to maintain the rhythm) since that part kind of _is_ the rhythm part to the song. The third is that you've got to play it with a little character (personally I like a bit of string squeak and twang; it humanizes the performance a bit). And the last is that you've got to focus part of your brain on making the bass notes you are picking flow together to form a coherent walking pattern.
So then if you try to sing the vocal on top of it, you are actually playing: a "rhythm" part (hitting the beats), a bass part (getting those picked notes to flow together), an accompaniment part (the major, suspended, major 7th, and other chords you are finger-picking), and the melody too. All together.
It's no wonder I occasionally find myself with my mouth hanging open (or actually drooling) while I play! And it does help to try practicing with eyes closed.
ok, piano players. Since the subject of pedals was brought up, i always wanted to know, how do you know when to press the pedal? is there something on the sheet music that says to press it?
Sometimes, yes. Classical music or music notated for teaching purposes, mostly, but notating it is optional, with its use often being obvious from context. One can compare it to the number of times a screenplay/script tells an actor to pause. Sometimes a playwright will really want the actor to do it in a given place, but if it's not stated, it's not as if it doesn't get done!
ETA: I should add that we're talking about the sustain/damper/right pedal here. The left pedal is not used that often by most people unless they are specifically told to, and music that requires it will gladly tell you ('una corda' and 'tre corde' respectively - please correct me if my Italian is wrong). As alluded to above, the "proper" implementation of this pedal on a grand piano involves shifting the whole key mechanism to the left by a few millimeters, which has two effects. For the high strings with three strings per note, it shifts the hammer off one of them. And for lower strings (also really part of the effect on the high strings) it merely shifts the hammer off the "calloused" compacted area where it normally hits and onto a fresher bit of felt, resulting in a more woolly tone. Uprights generally fake it by bringing the mechanism closer to the strings and thus reducing the arc that each hammer can travel - this tends to regulate the impact velocity and thus volume.
The middle pedal on grands that have it is pretty nifty, but the chance to learn to use it properly isn't given to many. There are some pieces that simply can't be played properly without that pedal, but one can always fake it.
For the sake of completeness, some uprights have a middle "practice" pedal with a completely different function, namely to reduce noise by dangling a sheet of felt between the hammers and the strings. This one normally has a locking mechanism so you can set it and take your foot off. Rather icky to play with though...
That middle pedal on an upright is probably better served by a decent electric piano I think... if you have a need to keep the noise down, I hear some of them these days are very good, I know they can't stand up to a grand piano but can they substitute nicely for an upright?
The idea of singing and playing an instrument at the same time confuses me hugely. It's theoretically possible to play the viol while you're singing, but I have to concentrate so much on one or another that to do them both at once is asking for disaster. I guess if I was better at viol playing and better at singing, it wouldn't be so difficult.
@MaW: If I won the lottery, the first thing one of the first things I'd buy after my wife's clothing and car shopping trip would be a Yamaha Silent Piano. Those things are amazing in being Real Mechanical Instruments with all the benefits of digital. In the meantime, I have an ageing Roland digital piano and nothing else...
Sorry, this is getting further off-track. Must restrain myself or pay a suitable penance.
@paul: I'm really glad you brought up the intonation on guitars. I'm relatively new to ukelele, and was getting frustrated with the fact that every time I thought I finaly had it in tune, I'd go and play an F chord that sounded terribly out of tune (fingering is, I think, analogous to a C chord on a guitar). I had assumed it was just because I had bought a cheap $50 uke, and the fretboard maybe wasn't as accurate as it should be, on, say, a $200+ instrument. Actually, that might still be an issue, but at least now I'm aware that tuning is a real limitation for fretted instrumented. You may have just saved me $200! ;-)
@Maw: You've never tried singing into a recorder? Try it, it's fun! :-D
Actually, this is one of the reasons that I bought a uke. I'm not fluent enough at piano to play and sing at the same time for more than a few notes (especially if I'm also trying to simultaneously read music from two staves and read lyrics), but I wasn't sure that I really wanted to commit to a guitar and become a guitarist. After hearing Still Alive, then watching Kristen and Molly on the Uke, I thought that it would make a fun (and cheap) compromise. After a minimal amount of practice, I find that I am able to sing while playing.
Voidptr, I'm betting your issue is mostly cheap uke related. Intonation is a problem with small scale lengths to start with so on inexpensive ukes it's really a problem. Cheap strings are also a factor.
Probably, but since I'm just playing around with it, I'm not terribly concerned. I'm not sure what strings were on it when I bought. I have bought some nylgut strings since then, but haven't had the time (or guts -- no pun intended) to try switching them yet.
One thing that really bugged me when I started thinking about fretted string instruments playing chords -- like guitars, ukes, and the like -- was voice leading. I've done a bit of baroque and classical composition, and the cardinal rule is no parallel octaves or parallel fifths. Sometimes I have to make several concessions and rewrite harmony parts to obey this rule, but guitars just play chords, with little concern for individual voice leading. Basically, I just have to get used to tossing the old rules out the window, which makes me shudder a bit, but there's no helping it.
Whaddaya know. I assumed that the damper pedal was to dampen the sound. Didn't even know there was a damper to be lifted.
Re singing and playing: This scares me a little, though in college, we had to do sing-and-play exercises as part of our theory training. Other than hitting the right notes at the right time, I don't think that my singing or playing was particularly good on those. ;-)
P.S. Going to see my mom this weekend. She's gonna teach me some uke basics. :-D
I will see if I can get that new tab into the Wiki. It would be nice if it could be corrected in the song detail page too.
The only other thing I can think to say is that I'm glad the movie is blurry enough not to show the huge pimples on my nose in high resolution. 41 years old and my nose still breaks out like I was a high school student living on chocolate and pizza... sheesh...
@paul: Great stuff - I must admit a video demonstration is so much easier to follow than our long written posts, and even though I'm not a guitarist, it's great to peek into your technique.
This is also why good choral composers will not double the third in a piano accompaniment in the same octave as any of the voices. It's out of tune.
This may sound arrogant, but it's not often that I hear a piano-related piece of wisdom that I ought to have known about, but never came across before (as opposed to trivia, of which there is an infinity of factoids out there!). Thanks for jolting me.
Every time Paul posts a link as text, I'm too lazy to click it so I don't bother. So for those who are somehow as lazy as I am, here's his video, and here's his blog article.
Sorry, Bry, I am kind of used to some other forums like Reddit that linkify URL's automatically. Didn't quite realize I could include HTML (my brain moves a little slow at 2 a.m., I guess). Anyway thanks for URL-ifying them.
(too lazy to copy/paste a url to visit a site, but not lazy enough to resist copy/pasting the urls, banging up some html, and making a whole other post on the topic....?)
Paul: No problem! Sorry, didn't mean to call you out or something -- you're not by any means obligated to link, it's just my preference.
three08: Quite literally -- when I'm just browsing the forums casually, as I do about twenty times an hour , if I can't just right-click and open something in a new tab for later, I'll often neglect to open it at all. In fact, I ended up visiting Paul's links above by pasting them into the dialog box provided when I hit the "link" button, previewing my post, and right-clicking on them there.
Yes that does help. I didn't pick up on the clue, because Mac users can right click if they have a Mighty Mouse configured for two buttons, or a third party mouse.
Comments
If a chord has its basic with the third _altered_ up to a 4th, the chord is a sus4.
If a chord has its basic triad with the third _altered_ down to a 2nd, the chord is a sus2.
Both the sus2 and sus4 have a kind of ethereal quality since they don't seem to strongly imply major (upbeat) or minor (downbeat). They're used a lot in church music -- some Christian rock pieces I used to play are pretty much entirely made of sus 2 or 4 chords. The Rush song Natural Science has a great 12-string guitar intro that uses sus chords heavily.
If a chord has the second _added_ to the major triad it will usually be actually added an octave higher, making it a 9th, called an add9. If it has both a dominant 7th _and_ a 9th, they you dould just call it a 9th chord, like A9. That's a common jazz voicing.
If a chord has the 4th _added_, it's usually added as an octave higher, making it an 11th, so you might have an add11 although I think that notation (and chord itself) is relatively rare. You're more likely to see a 7sus4, which would consist of a sus4 triad (1, 4, 5) plus a 7.
In other words, the sus2 or sus4 alters the 1/3/5 or 1/b3/5 triad, while the 7th chords (dominant 7th or major 7th) are added.
Things get kind of complicated because on guitar you often will leave out notes from a 7th chord or 9th cord and especially an 11th or 13th since you frequently just don't have enough places to play the notes. The 5th is commonly left out, but if you have a 7th or 9th you might find that you can leave out the 3rd too and the chord will still fit (it will just be missing a little bit of its character). But not much -- and on guitar, actually the crowded notes next to each other tend to sound slightly dissonant, for reasons having to do with temperament (not mine, the instrument's) and compromised tuning.
Also, keep in mind that the notations really don't make all that much sense. They are traditional, though. Feel free to jump in and correct me if I've gotten one of these details wrong; as I said, I'm coming at this from traditional guitar notation.
When you factor in inversions, and the problem that the same chord might actually be named in several different ways depending on which note you consider to be the root, things get really complicated. In guitar you almost always name the chord from the lowest note because that will quickly guide the person playing to the right strings. Mostly. Did I mention it is complicated?
[key: C] We'll all come inside and eat your [modulates to Ab] brains! I'd like to help you...
Well, technically I am. I guess I [modulates to C] am.
In early music, they would mostly only play in the key of C, and keys that were "related" to C (only differed by one or two notes) so they designed the keyboard to be biased towards the key of C. The piano isn't the only instrument that's biased for one key over another. My recorders are biased for the keys of C and F, and my Baroque flute is biased for the key of D. A clarinet in Bb would, presumably, be biased for the key of Bb. Other keys are possible on these instruments, but they would involve slightly more complicated fingerings.
The piano is a bit misleading, because it *looks* as if there are missing notes, but there really aren't. The distance between E and F, for example, is the same as the distance between F and F#. You basically just take the scale of all half steps (chromatic scale) and color black the ones that don't fit into your C-major scale pattern:
0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12
Why are those keys black? I guess just to make them look different. In the "diminished adagio" I linked above, you can see a harpsichord where all the white keys are black and the black keys are white. I don't know why they picked that particular color scheme, but I've seen it on a lot of harpsichords. It's just convention -- like a coding style.
BtW, Just to make this clear, the Whole step/Half step pattern people are talking about is another way of taking about the major scale pattern I posted. You just look at the difference from each note to the next note.
<0, 2, 4, 5, 7, 9, 11>
<2, 2, 1, 2, 2, 2, 1>
Since a "1" is a half step (H), a "2" is a whole step (W). Hence the pattern WWHWWWH.
Apu: How about, "The Be Sharps?"
(edit: s/sustained/suspended)
A different example of modulation in the JoCoeuvre would be Still Alive. The verses are in D, but the chorus modulates to F (the minor 3rd interval).
Perhaps we are blurring the distinction between chord symbols and voicing now, or at least entering the zone where things are blurred. If I am given your example notes C-Eb-F-G without worrying about what chord symbol to call it, I'd probably bring out the fourths in the voicing: C-Eb-G-C-F (reading from the bottom, dropping the low C an octave if your hand can do the tenth to the Eb). In this case I wouldn't call it "sustained-sounding" though. Creamy, maybe!
Ahh, Wikipedia says "either way" (a suspended 2nd or 4th can either either add to the existing third or replace the third). Although they categorize this chord type as one of the triads, which sounds a bit silly if you have four notes. Also, if you don't replace the third, you'd have to distinguish the case of the minor 3rd. Would you ever have a use for an Amsus2 that included a 2nd and a flat 3rd? Mmmmaybe...
On guitar adding both the 3rd and 2nd or 4th intervals to the chord would only be possible with some really oddball fingerings or some very specific partially-open chords. A second interval in general is usually pretty awkward to play on guitar, without really wide reaches or partially open chords that aren't movable, hence the tendency to use the 9th.
One thing I love about guitar is that it often suggests really good voicings, especially typical jazz ones - many chords sound good when constructed from a mix of fourths and thirds. The piano, on the other hand, seems to suggest triads to anybody trying to make sense of how to construct a chord, and there are only so many plain triads you can handle at a time. Then again, as you pointed out, a keyboard does give you the advantage of being able to play adjacent notes simultaneously, often using a single finger (sideways thumb) when you're in luck.
Following up on the various posts about the inherent meaning of white notes, one instrument which deserves more love in terms of bending your brain around scales is the orchestral harp. For those not in the know, its strings are tuned to the "white" notes, i.e. seven strings per octave: C-D-E-F-G-A-B. Seven pedals modify the pitches up or down as required (a pedal per note name), so you can, for example, change all the Fs to F-sharps to change the scale from C major to G major. I find this a fascinating halfway point between strict diatonicism and chromaticism.
I never got all that good on Stick and wound up selling it like a lot of musicians do... but I'd like to get one again someday!
Angelastic: I'll probably be repeating some of what other people have said, but it sometimes helps to explain things differently.
Your confusion about keys is understandable. There are several reasons why you would choose a particular key for a piece. Yes, certainly something written in C major could be transposed up one tone (you'll find I talk mostly about tones and semitones instead of steps and half steps, this is a British thing - Americans seem to mostly say steps, we say mostly tones, much like they have whole notes and half notes and quarter notes, and we have semibreves, minims and crotchets).
Umm, where was I. Oh yes. You could take something written in C major and transpose it up a tone, and it would be in D major. Because they're both major scales, you'd find that the gaps between all the notes would be the same, so it would sound the same, just a bit higher in pitch. What makes a tune is not the absolute note values, but the intervals between them. If you preserve those, you can move it up and down as much as you like.
Of course, what you will then find is what has been mentioned by voidptr - if you take something written for recorder that's in, say, F major (which is the key which has one flat - B flat, to be exact), and transpose it into D major (two sharps - F and C), then two things are likely to happen. First, you'll probably run off the end of the instrument unless the original piece had a very small range of pitches (recorders only usually manage two octaves and a tone at best - and the note a semitone below the highest note is either difficult or impossible to play on most). This is obviously not desirable, so one reason for choosing a key turns out to be fitting the piece onto the instrument you intend it to be played on (this may involve changing your mind halfway through, and transposing the whole thing into a different key).
The other thing that might happen is that the recorder player you're writing for will hate you, because generally speaking we prefer to play in flat keys. The treble recorder's 'native' scale is that of F major, which can have two beautiful octaves (the descant recorder likes C major in the same way), and adding extra flats is pretty easy up to three or four - five flats is getting a bit tricky, but it's not impossible. Sharps, on the other hand - we're okay with G major (one sharp, which is F sharp), but D major can start causing problems, and A major could be considered marginally evil. For some reason, recorders trying to play in sharp keys don't stay in tune as well. I don't know why, but it's much harder to get everything to blend in tune nicely in a sharp key.
So you do need to consider what you're writing for before you start as well. If you're aiming at a treble recorder and you want to use two octaves of range, you probably want F major or F minor or you'll be demanding third octave fingerings and most people can't play those. If you want to write for a modern oboe though, you've got at least three octaves to play with (not entirely sure what the range of an oboe is), and the modern fingering system makes it much easier to handle more non-native keys.
I'm not going to mention transposing instruments right now though. That's just a trick to make the parts less terrifying to read, I think - another reason for key signatures, by the way. Colleenky said it was because we're lazy, but it's not just that - it's much easier, once you get used to it, to see the key signature at the start of every line and remember that every B you see should be a B flat unless you're explicitly told otherwise rather than have every single B in the piece have a flat sign next to it, which would leave the music quite cluttered.
Bear in mind though, there are no key signatures specifically for minor keys. Why? Well, minor scales aren't necessarily the same going up as going down, which would confuse the key signature something wicked, so what we do is use the key signature for the relative major, which contains most of the sharps or flats required for the key, and stick a few accidentals in to fill out the rest of the notes required.
Briefly, the relative minor of a major scale has as its tonic (first note) the sixth note (submediant) of the major scale. Largely the same notes involved, but in the harmonic minor scale you raise the seventh degree by one semitone going up and going down, while in the melodic minor you raise the sixth and seventh going up, but don't raise anything at all going down. So A harmonic minor (relative of C major) is A B C DE F G# A G# F E D C B A, while A melodic minor is A B C D E F# G# A G F E D C B A. If you think that's too weird to work, play them and see what you think.
;' )
I second (or third, or whatever) what others have said about using keys that suit a particular instrument. Pianos and guitars are sort of unique in their breadth of range. Most instruments (inlcuding the voice) are more limited. And then there's the additional issue of the characteristics of the sound throughout out an instrument's range (timbre and tessitura). For example, I have about a three-octave range on a good day, but my voice is strongest around the middle octave, so I might transpose a song to fit in that range (as I did for the children when they performed Fancy Pants.) On the other hand, Stravinski intentionally wrote the intro to "Dance of the Young Girls" in Rite of Spring as an extrememely high solo for the bassoon to make it sound strained, harsh and primal. (This is a freakin' amazing piece of music, by the way. For anyone who's not familiar, it's the piece that accompanies the dinosaur bit in Fantasia.)
Though I can't find a good citation right now, another issue to consider is the Baroque idea of "affect," which tied music to different emotions. It was thought that each key had its own unique character and could elicit specific emotional responses. (I'm oversimplifying the case, and one of the other musicians here is bound to call me on it. ;-) ) I think that this idea carries on today, to some extent. It's entirely subjective, of course, but different keys somehow feel different, even though they are objectively the same patterns.
Finally, it's important to remember that music theory is just that - theory. It is a set of rules made up after the fact to describe musical behavior. Someone didn't sit down one day and invent keys, they just evolved organically. I'm no pianist, but isn't the damper pedal a completely different pedal? The sustain pedal lifts the hammers from the strings so that they continue to sound. The damper pedal shifts the keyboard and attendant strings over so that the hammers hit fewer strings and they sound more quietly. (Every piano key is actually sounded by three strings each, if I remember correctly.)
And quickly, regarding sus chords. As a chord symbol, this was confusing to me at first. In classical analysis, a suspension is a pitch that does not belong in the current chord but was held over from the previous chord ("suspended"), which then resolves to a chord tone. The idea of having a suspension without a resolution was a little foreign. I'm still learning the conventions of pop/jazz chord symbols. :-)
Since we are in the habit of drawing parallels from the IT world, it's a bit like the distance between Computer Science and the "goddamn login page".
Equal temprement has been mentioned - it's a tuning system commonly used today which is basically a giant hack, almost every note compromised in some way. The reason is that it's nigh-on impossible to tune an instrument that can play perfectly in tune in every key without giving it an utterly ridiculous number of very-slightly-different notes to play. There are perfect mathematical ratios between various intervals which you would use if you were tuning a given key, but shift into another key and the intervals for that key are consequently going to sound slightly different.
Back in the baroque, they hadn't invented equal temprement, which sounds the same in every key, and the tuning systems they used sound slightly different in every key, so key choice is arguably even more important in music of that period. As an example, my viol teacher prefers to tune her viols using velotti temprement, and the result is that a consort of viols playing in velotti temprement sounds slightly different to one tuned in equal temprement, and we do notice a stronger contrast between major keys.
Another example of this is Bach's Well-Tempered Klavier, which was written for a keyboard tuned in (you guessed it) Well temprement. All the different temprements are based on different theories of how the notes need to relate and what compromises are acceptable and indeed how many keys you need to be able to play in. Equal temprement is a good compromise for lots of instruments playing together in different keys, especially when some of them are transposing instruments like clarinets.
The recorders I play are all nominally tuned to equal temprement when they're made, but recorders have a bit of an advantage in that their tuning can be relatively easily altered by the player by adjusting how much air they use for any given note (playing a recorder in tune is one of those skills most school children never get told they need to obtain, which is one reason why school recorder playing tends to sound so awful and people consequently think it's not a real instrument). As a result, we can deal with some of the temprement-induced tuning problems, and one thing that comes up an awful lot when playing in recorder groups is that when we hit a definite chord, people who're playing the third in the chord will flatten it down a little, which produces a much purer chord - the major third in equal temprement is really astonishingly far from pure, and it makes a significant improvement to the sound if you take that into account and compensate accordingly.
@SpaceParanoids: I'd say bVI, yes. And it's not just Coulton. I've seen similar transitions long before hearing of Coulton. Though he does like them. The bIV key is special, because it has a lot of exotic notes, but it still has the original key note in the tonic chord. So it's a balance between different, yet familiar. The same is true of the iv chord that he uses all the time. I singled out Re Your Brains as an example where the transition is particularly audible, even for someone who doesn't necessarily know what their listening for.
Re keys:
In the Baroque, the different keys actually were slightly different because not all half-steps were created equal. In general, keys close to C sounded good, and the further you got from C (in the circle of fifths) the worse it sounded. There were a number of different tuning systems being developed to try and cope with this, all of them making compromises in the intervals. Okay, I'll go into this after all, since I can't stop thinking about it now... Here's one way to explain what happened. Normally, this is explained with a circle of fifths, which I'm deliberately avoiding.
Originally, intervals were defined by frequency ratios. An octave must be 2:1 in order to sound like an octave. A fifth is conventionally defined as the ratio 3:2, and a fourth is the ratio 4:3. If you start with a frequency, say A=440Hz, and multiply by 3/2, you get 660Hz, which should be E. If you go up a fourth from that, you have 440(3/2)(4/3) = 440(2/1) = 880 which is an octave higher as it should be.
Here's where things get tricky, though... Let's find out the ratio for a whole step (A to
These days, what we do in our equal tempered system, is make everything equally out of tune. That is, we define a half step (I'm switching to half steps now) to be 2^(1/12), so that when we play 12 of them in a row, the final note has a ratio of 2^(12/12) = 2 = an octave. If originally a fifth was a ratio 3:2, or 1.50, it is now defined as 7 half steps, or a ratio of 2^(7/12) = 1.498. Hence modern music is technically out of tune, compared with Pythagoras' nice rational number system.
[Wishing I had time to understand temperament, tuning and acoustics better.]
The left pedal is usually called the soft pedal. On grand pianos it's sometimes called the una corda pedal. It shifts the entire action to the left so each hammer hits only one string. However on uprights, it just moves the hammers closer to the strings (and ruins the action, in many pianists' opinion).
If there's a middle pedal, it's usually bass sustain on uprights (fairly useless), and sostenuto on fancy American-made grands (Steinway, Baldwin, Mason & Hamlin, etc). The bass sustain pedal lifts the dampers for all the notes below E3, and the sostenuto pedal holds up the dampers on whatever keys are currently being pressed. I've never had a piano or keyboard with a sostenuto, so I've never learned to play that way.
One minor nitpick -- on most pianos, each hammer hits three unison strings for most notes, but only two strings in the lowest octaves.
I can now figure out how much flatter a pure major third is from an equal-tempered major third.
5/4 = 1.25 (pure)
2^(4/12) = 1.2599 (equal tempered = 4 half-steps)
How many half-steps are in an pure major 3rd? It's a matter of solving this equation:
2^(x/12) = (5/4)
x = 12*log2(1.25) = 3.86
So a pure major third is only 3.86 (equal-tempered) half steps above the tonic, instead of 4. Wow, that is pretty flat!
In fact, it's impossible to get a guitar to play pure (Pythagorean) intervals in all keys. You'd need movable frets. Guitar is made worse by the fact that all the intervals are the same -- 4ths -- except for 1. That interval between G and B is always sounding out of tune compared to the others. There are some elaborate workarounds -- instruments with angled frets, kinked frets, etc. One that works pretty well is the Buzz Feiten tuning system -- there is a very elaborate and very interesting (well, interesting to a certain kind of music geek) patent you can read describing this system of tuning offsets and corrections in excrutiating detail. But the upshot is that you have to use a compromised, approximate tuning on guitar the way you do on piano, and kind of hope for the best. This is true especially if you're trying to play along with a group that includes a piano. In that case you'd better tune to the piano, and hope the piano is pretty well in tune across the keys.
This is another reason why a lot of the best-sounding chords on guitar contain open strings and wide intervals: intervals of a 4th or more between strings on guitar while those seconds and thirds (as opposed to 9ths and 10ths) tend to emphasize the "rounding error." The same is true on piano, actually, and I'm always cringing at pianos (typically in churches with heaing/cooling problems, instruments that get moved a lot, or just anywhere, really, where they don't get the keyboards tuned regularly). This is one of the reasons that violins are tuned in 5ths, I think (wider), and also the incentive for things like the New Standard Tuning (guitar craft) that uses mostly 5ths, and Chapman Stick intervals. And some keys just tend to sound better on guitar because you have more voicings that sound cleaner. A lot of the church music is in Eb or Bb which is a little frustrating for guitar -- you're often having to chose chord voicings that just don't sound very sweet, and using a capo often tends to exaggerate tuning problems (because it puts pressure on the strings).
Not being able to have one set of pitches that sounds Pythagorean-perfect in all keys is one of those fundamental weird things about the physics of our universe. It seems like it ought to be simple, just like if you draw a triange with two sides that are one inch long, the length of the third side seems like it ought to be some kind of simple ratio. But far from it! It's like a little practical joke the Creator/anthropic principle/laws of physics left for us, and somewhere he/she/it is still giggling while we curse and try to tune our guitars!
Last night I was working with my son Isaac a little bit on the guitar part for "My Monkey." (It is frightening how quickly a 14-year-old learns, compared to fast how I learn; also, I think he has more native musical talent than I do). We were talking about how that is a deceptively simple part: that is, the chord fingerings are pretty easy (the correct chords are actually _easier_ to finger than the ones I had learned from the incorrect tab). But there are some barriers. The first is that you have to be able to jump to the right chord fingering practically instantaneously. The only way to get this down is just to practice those moves. The second is that you have to play it with a steady rhythm (foot-tapping or whatever you do to maintain the rhythm) since that part kind of _is_ the rhythm part to the song. The third is that you've got to play it with a little character (personally I like a bit of string squeak and twang; it humanizes the performance a bit). And the last is that you've got to focus part of your brain on making the bass notes you are picking flow together to form a coherent walking pattern.
So then if you try to sing the vocal on top of it, you are actually playing: a "rhythm" part (hitting the beats), a bass part (getting those picked notes to flow together), an accompaniment part (the major, suspended, major 7th, and other chords you are finger-picking), and the melody too. All together.
It's no wonder I occasionally find myself with my mouth hanging open (or actually drooling) while I play! And it does help to try practicing with eyes closed.
ETA: I should add that we're talking about the sustain/damper/right pedal here. The left pedal is not used that often by most people unless they are specifically told to, and music that requires it will gladly tell you ('una corda' and 'tre corde' respectively - please correct me if my Italian is wrong). As alluded to above, the "proper" implementation of this pedal on a grand piano involves shifting the whole key mechanism to the left by a few millimeters, which has two effects. For the high strings with three strings per note, it shifts the hammer off one of them. And for lower strings (also really part of the effect on the high strings) it merely shifts the hammer off the "calloused" compacted area where it normally hits and onto a fresher bit of felt, resulting in a more woolly tone. Uprights generally fake it by bringing the mechanism closer to the strings and thus reducing the arc that each hammer can travel - this tends to regulate the impact velocity and thus volume.
The middle pedal on grands that have it is pretty nifty, but the chance to learn to use it properly isn't given to many. There are some pieces that simply can't be played properly without that pedal, but one can always fake it.
For the sake of completeness, some uprights have a middle "practice" pedal with a completely different function, namely to reduce noise by dangling a sheet of felt between the hammers and the strings. This one normally has a locking mechanism so you can set it and take your foot off. Rather icky to play with though...
The idea of singing and playing an instrument at the same time confuses me hugely. It's theoretically possible to play the viol while you're singing, but I have to concentrate so much on one or another that to do them both at once is asking for disaster. I guess if I was better at viol playing and better at singing, it wouldn't be so difficult.
the first thingone of the first things I'd buy after my wife's clothing and car shopping trip would be a Yamaha Silent Piano. Those things are amazing in being Real Mechanical Instruments with all the benefits of digital. In the meantime, I have an ageing Roland digital piano and nothing else...Sorry, this is getting further off-track. Must restrain myself or pay a suitable penance.
@Maw: You've never tried singing into a recorder? Try it, it's fun! :-D
Actually, this is one of the reasons that I bought a uke. I'm not fluent enough at piano to play and sing at the same time for more than a few notes (especially if I'm also trying to simultaneously read music from two staves and read lyrics), but I wasn't sure that I really wanted to commit to a guitar and become a guitarist. After hearing Still Alive, then watching Kristen and Molly on the Uke, I thought that it would make a fun (and cheap) compromise. After a minimal amount of practice, I find that I am able to sing while playing.
One thing that really bugged me when I started thinking about fretted string instruments playing chords -- like guitars, ukes, and the like -- was voice leading. I've done a bit of baroque and classical composition, and the cardinal rule is no parallel octaves or parallel fifths. Sometimes I have to make several concessions and rewrite harmony parts to obey this rule, but guitars just play chords, with little concern for individual voice leading. Basically, I just have to get used to tossing the old rules out the window, which makes me shudder a bit, but there's no helping it.
Re singing and playing: This scares me a little, though in college, we had to do sing-and-play exercises as part of our theory training. Other than hitting the right notes at the right time, I don't think that my singing or playing was particularly good on those. ;-)
P.S. Going to see my mom this weekend. She's gonna teach me some uke basics. :-D
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iKwBpIZMQxI
Blog article notes with new tab:
http://geekversusguitar.blogspot.com/2009/02/my-monkey-tabbed-out-and-demonstrated.html
I will see if I can get that new tab into the Wiki. It would be nice if it could be corrected in the song detail page too.
The only other thing I can think to say is that I'm glad the movie is blurry enough not to show the huge pimples on my nose in high resolution. 41 years old and my nose still breaks out like I was a high school student living on chocolate and pizza... sheesh...
@Colleenky - a much belated response: This may sound arrogant, but it's not often that I hear a piano-related piece of wisdom that I ought to have known about, but never came across before (as opposed to trivia, of which there is an infinity of factoids out there!). Thanks for jolting me.
three08: Quite literally -- when I'm just browsing the forums casually, as I do about twenty times an hour
Or select Cmd-C Cmd-T Cmd-V Enter if you're on a Mac.
I prefer "Open in background tab", but really what makes all the difference is not having to select.
ETA: and there's an option to set it not to immediately focus on that tab.