I would agree. He certainly has the strong upper range for it. I think Tenors are supposed to be able to go down to around low C or Bb. The low notes at the beginning of I Crush Everything ("I lie below") are only a D. I also remember reading a blog entry when he was on tour (the UK tour last fall, I believe) where he apologized for having a bit of a cold, but commented that the upside was that he could hit a low A. A good Bass should be able to go as low as G or F, I think.
Just kidding. But yeah, I'm taking a music class, and the subject of vocal ranges came up today. I just wanted to ask because he seems to be generally higher register in the man ranges. I know my voice cracks when I don't warm up enough to sing some JoCo.
I'm still terribly lost when it comes to music, but it's something I really wish I was better at.
JoCo is very definitely a tenor - or at least, he is if my singing teacher is right, because she says I'm a tenor and so far he's not sung anything I can't match. His effective range seems to be slightly wider - sometimes I'm pushing the edge while he still sounds quite comfortable - but he has been doing this a lot longer than me, and my range is still expanding under tuition.
I wish someone could tell me what my range is... maybe then I could figure out what songs I should be trying to sing instead of always trying to sing songs out of my range that wind up sounding terrible!
I keep thinking I should try at a few lessons with a voice coach, and maybe we could at least figure out what keys are better for me to transpose things into. E major (which seems to be the key of most heavy metal) seems not-so-good.
One of the first things my singing teacher did was determine what my range was. It's bigger now than it was then, but it's the same basic classification. Quite useful to know, really. Yesterday I was comfortably doing a two-octave Ab-Ab range, without really pushing the limits very far (I did go higher in one exercise, but it was mostly falsetto).
Yummy! So much to comment on! (And I'm so late in doing so.)
paulrpotts said:
I'm not an expert on theory by any means, but one of the reasons "Shop Vac" starts out with a little tension is that the opening chord is a B7 -- the 7th is a "leading tone" which makes it sound a little bit on edge, like it wants to go somewhere else.The notes in the major scale in B are B, C#, D#, E, F#, G#, and A#. In a B7 chord you have B, D#, F# -- the major triad -- and then a dominant 7th, meaning a flatted A#, or just A. This is a whole step away from B as opposed to the wider intervals you get between the intervals in the major triad, so it sounds a little more "tense."
Close, but not quite. :-) The 7th in a B7, as you said, is a dominant 7th. A leading tone would be a major 7th. More specifically, a leading tone is the 7th note of a scale rather than the 7th of a chord, in this case the D# of the B7 chord is the leading tone in the key of E. More broadly, a leading tone can be any pitch which has a tendency, in context, to resolve upward by half step.
I think I've mentioned this elsewhere, but the tension in a dominant 7th chord comes from the tritone between the 3rd and 7th of the chord, in the case of a B7, between the D# and the A. In the context of the key of E, these pitches each want to resolve by half step - the D# (ti) up to E (do) and the A (fa) down to G# (mi), which are the significant pitches of the tonic chord, E major. (I should say that, after hundreds of years of tonal music, our ears have been trained to want/expect that resolution.)
SpaceParanoids added:
And regarding ShopVac, even though the chorus starts with B7, it seems to me that the two intro bars really establish the song in E.
Which makes total sense, since B7 is the dominant of E. Now if he had started on, say, a C half-diminished, it would take some more work to establish the key of E!
Later, paulrpotts said:
I wish someone could tell me what my range is
I think you could do this yourself. Just sing scales upwards and downwards until you run out of notes! Not to sound glib, but that's basically all there is to it. You're a musician. I'm sure you can determine which notes you can and can't sing, and which sound better than others. :-) Do you mean classify your voice? Like baritone or tenor? Generally, a baritone voice will break into falsetto around middle C, a tenor maybe up around the G above that. Though a well-trained voice may not break at all. (How lovely!) Tenor voices generally start petering out going down towards the C below middle C. I think JC is a bari-tenor. I can comfortably sing in the tenor range, but he sings too low for me sometimes.
I was also gonna say something about Picardy thirds, but then I realized that I was thinking of Landini cadences, so never mind. :-)
P.S. On the subject of transposition: I am *so glad* that I don't have perfect pitch. I recently encountered a pianist with perfect pitch who couldn't play a piece transposed on an electric keyboard, because he couldn't bear hearing something different than what he was seeing. On top of that, he couldn't transpose at sight. How utterly useless! (To give some context, we were in a tight performance situation where there was neither the time nor the equipment to print out a transposed copy of the music.)
Landini Cadence! There's a term I haven't heard in a while! IIRC, a melodic progression of 8-7-6-8 over a bass of 2-1.
Here's a good series of pages I found recently introducing concepts in music theory, for those wanting to learn: http://musictheory.net/. What's really fun on that site is the ear trainers (Interval Trainer, Chord Trainer). Since they allow you to pick which intervals/chords to be tested on, you could use this as a learning device as well. For example, if someone wanted to learn the difference between major and minor chords, they could pick the chord trainer, and select only major and minor triads. After playing for awhile and listening closely (and having wrong answers corrected) they'd be bound to pick up the difference eventually. Telling all the 7ths apart (including half-diminished!) is quite a bit trickier...
That sounds like an interesting site. I'll check it out!
My singing teacher's been working on smoothing out the breaks in my voice. I've got two, as most people - between the low and high registers, and between the high and falsetto registers. Training lets you overlap them more than you would otherwise - I can hit the B above middle C in full voice on a good day, although admittedly most days it's only there in my falsetto.
In any case, the reason I mention it is that the way you might determine your range - by singing scales until you run out of notes - is the basis of a way to work on smoothing things out. Range determination is sort of a free side-effect of the warmup and exercises in my singing lessons, and it also helps you develop a bigger range.
Although right now I need to work on control in the falsetto register, as I might be needing it.
On the egotistical side, I'm going to even more completely hijack this topic and mention that I just got my grade 5 singing exam result, and I passed with distinction
that's a cool site voidptr. I had some freeware I downloaded that does something similar but this is nice too. So, on this thought. It's always nice to associate the intervals with certains songs to make memorizing them easier, take this partial list for example.
Ascending minor 2nd: Jaws theme Major 2nd: Happy birthday minor 3rd: Greensleeves etc. and then descending minor 2nd: Beethoven's Fur Elise Major 2nd: The Beatles - Yesterday etc.
So my challenge to you guys. Can we find interval examples all the way up the octave and back using only JoCo music?
Colleenky: you are right, I should be able to figure out what my comfortable range is. I was mostly thinking in terms of something I want to do anyway, which is to get some professional help training my voice.
Also, as a guitarist, the term "middle C" has no meaning to me. I just looked it up, though, and apparently it is MIDI note 60, or C4, which may vary depending on whether you are following Yamaha notation or not : P
A few more intervals from non-JoCo songs: Ascending Perfect 4th: "My Bonnie (lies over the Ocean)" Ascending Tritone: "The Simpsons" Ascending Major 6th: "NBC" chimes (first two notes. Not sure how well known these are outside the USA)
And now on to JoCo. A lot of melodies are mostly based on scales, so I'll get some easy ones: Ascending Major 2nd: - "Welcome to my (secret lair)" - "I lie below..." Descending Minor 2nd: - "All we wanna do (is eat your brains)" - "This was (a triumph)"
Songs are great for recognizing intervals out of context but not terribly useful for trying to recognize the same intervals in different contexts or in sight-singing, where the notes are flying by too fast to relate the intervals to songs. Just sayin'. :-) (I wonder if JoCo can sight-sing?)
Ascending perfect 4th: I'm so (into you/but I'm way too smart for you); 'Cause it's gonna (be the future soon) Descending perfect 4th: I drove (seven hours/all day to see you) Ascending perfect 5th: It's no (fair/It's no fun); One more blue (sunny day) Descending minor 3rd: Taupe mouse (top hat on his head) Ascending major 6th: Birds are (singing/Bees are buzzing)
Lady Ablerlin's Muumuu is kind of fun for intervals: (What) angels found (minor 3rd) then lost again (perfect 4th), so big and round (minor 6th) such rare and sen- (perfect 4th) (suous blue). Blue Sunny Day too: Birds are singing (major 6th) / Bees are buzzing (perfect 5th) / Sun shines (perfect 4th) (overhead)
Other stuff: Ascending perfect 5th: Star Wars (first two notes of main theme) Descending perfect 4th: Born Free (as free as the wind blows) Descending major 6th: Nobo- (dy knows the trouble I've seen)
Ascending/descending fourth, followed by ascending/descending tritone: "(at the top of a hill) there's a house (where) no one lives." (Bonus points to JoCo for using a tritone to evoke creepiness)
ETA: And I agree about intervals being harder to recognize when listening in context. It's usually easier to relate the notes to their scale degrees then derive the interval from that.
For sight-singing you have to get to the point where it's pretty much automatic to hop from the third to the sixth to the second above and then down to the original tonic. Can't do that yet! Practise, practise, practise. But if you can manage that, then all you need to do is spot the degrees (and then learn to deal with minors, augmented and diminished intervals, and the other lovely effects you get when composers start throwing accidentals at you).
One of the best things in music has to be how there's always something new to master.
It's usually easier to relate the notes to their scale degrees then derive the interval from that.
Yes, yes, yes! Solfege is your friend. (Numbers work fine too, but they're more clumsy when it comes to accidentals. I find singing "te" less cumbersome than "flat seven.") I think that the two most important things in learning sight-singing (if anyone's interested in going that route - why else would one be practicing intervals?) are having a system - be it solfege, numbers or what-have-you - and getting good feedback. I couldn't imagine learning sight-singing without a teacher. I mean, you can always check your pitch against an instrument, but the instrument isn't going to analyze what you did wrong and give you tips on how to fix it.
Speaking of solfege, I'm not sure this has been mentioned here before. Free eartraining software. I haven't compared it to musictheory.net, but it seems pretty similar.
Yes my best success with sight-singing has been using solfege - oddly enough, with my recorder teacher, not my singing teacher. I think it just goes better in my head than the system my singing teacher uses, which is much like it but without the solfege names. I don't always get the names right, but I do often get the right notes out.
The marks breakdown for my singing exam showed it was worth the effort - I got 20/21 for sight-singing, and without having worked on that my distinction definitely wouldn't have happened. I need to work on it some more, but the motivation thing to think is that if I can sight-sing to a reasonable standard, I can audition for a choir that's a reasonable standard, rather than a community free-for-all (although the latter's not necessarily unfun).
Amazing how even when you get to an instrument so obviously expressive and natural as the human voice, a good solid theoretical knowledge is still of enormous help in using it.
One thing I've found helpful for basic intervals from the tonic is singing do re mi fa so la ti do as a scale, then do re do mi do fa do so do la do ti do do a lot. If you can do it also basing off re, mi etc. that's even better. If nothing else it helps with your major intervals, which is helpful for all sorts of singing.
I just need to now remember what the solfege names are for the minor notes.
Ask and thou shalt receive! Here's the chromatic scale up and down in solfege (which I'm sure can be found online in several places). BTW, I use tick marks to denote upper and lower octaves, e.g., do' is an octave above do and do, is an octave below.
chromatic ascending (sharps): do di re ri mi fa fi sol si la li ti do' chromatic descending (flats): do' ti te la le sol se fa mi me re ra do natural minor: do re me fa sol le te do (Alternate "la-based" minor: la ti do re mi fa sol la. Same intervals, but reinforces the concept of relative minor.)
The exercise that Maw mentioned should be done backwards too. My students seem to have a harder time with the descending scale. Want some more solfege exercises? :-)
This is my favorite exercise for building familiarity with solfege (in even rhythm, with a rest at the end of each line). It should be done from memory, starting as slowly as necessary to avoid mistakes, then building speed over time as familiarity increases (i.e., not in the same sitting). do [rest] do re do [rest] do re mi re do [rest] do re mi fa mi re do [etc] do re mi fa sol fa mi re do do re mi fa sol la sol fa mi re do do re mi fa sol la ti la sol fa mi re do do re mi fa sol la ti do' ti la sol fa mi re do do' do' ti do' do' ti la ti do' do' ti la sol la ti do' do' ti la sol fa sol la ti do' do' ti la sol fa mi fa sol la ti do' do' ti la sol fa mi re mi fa sol la ti do' do' ti la sol fa mi re do re mi fa sol la ti do'
For fun, replace one (or two or three) of the pitches with rests. For example, if you take out re it becomes: do, do [rest] do, do [rest] mi [rest] do, etc, which forces you to think the pitch internally. For extra fun, my choir does this as a round (in two, three or four parts). For super-duper fun, as a round with missing pitches! (OK, my choir hasn't gotten to that level yet.)
Intervals in the major scale (ascending and descending): 3rds: do mi re fa mi sol fa la sol ti la do' ti re' do'; do' la ti sol la fa sol mi fa re mi do re ti, do 4ths: do fa re sol mi la fa ti sol do' la re' ti mi' do'; do' sol ti fa la mi sol re fa do mi ti, re la, do
Etc. for other intervals, though beyond a fifth gets a bit rangey.
And just for giggles, here's one we did in high school (in even rhythm): do [rest] do re mi [rest] mi fa sol [rest] sol la ti do' re' mi' fa' [rest] fa' mi' re' [rest] re' do' ti [rest] ti la sol fa mi re do
And when you're really cooking... do [rest] do re mi [rest] mi fa sol [rest] sol la ti do' re' mi' fa' sol' fa' mi' re' mi' re' do' ti do' ti la sol fa mi re do
Have fun!
Amazing how even when you get to an instrument so obviously expressive and natural as the human voice, a good solid theoretical knowledge is still of enormous help in using it.
When I performed for a year with a church band, our band leader would have us warm up by singing numbers (corresponding to major scale intervals). One, two, three, one, three, one, five, one, seven, ONE! Anyone else do that, or was he just weird?
Not that one specifically. I don't think I understand the exercise. The way you wrote it, I hear: do re mi do mi do sol do ti do. Is that right? If so, what's the objective?
I don't sing exercises per se, but I often find myself thinking the scale degree numbers in my head while I'm reading or singing. On certain notes that I find myself repeatedly messing up on, I'll even jot the number down above the staff. I never really bothered becoming fluent with the syllables. Like reading an old analog clock, I can work it out if I have to, but it takes time. I can't do it fast enough to be useful, and since I'm thinking numbers anyway, I haven't found it useful enough to practice it enough to become fast. It's a viscous vicious cycle!
I think if it works... don't worry about it. A lot of people use solfege, but it's just names. I suspect numbers may be just as effective in the long run - they just don't have that song from The Sound of Music.
I think the idea was to practice singing the intervals (root to 2nd, root to 3rd, etc.) It was mostly a warm-up... these weren't really formal lessons, just quick practice before we started working on that week's songs.
I think if it works... don't worry about it. A lot of people use solfege, but it's just names. I suspect numbers may be just as effective in the long run
Precisely. The important thing is to have some kind of system for making sense of the pitches.
Mike Lombardo has just created a new music theory explanation blog/website http://theorypages.net/ (with the tagline "Music Theory in Plain English"). People here might be interested.
Jeez, I'd like to go back and address some of the posts in this thread, as I'm a total nerd for music theory (I was a music composition major for a few years, after all), but I feel like I'm "too little, too late". Most of the comments I'd like to speak to are contained in older (possibly even long-forgotten) posts, and I'd feel entirely too pompous...perhaps, as if I were addressing "old news" just for the sake of attempting to sound like I know what I'm talking about.
It seems as though I have what I perceive to be a valid argument against a lot of what's been said...and I'm way too new here to want to start looking like a jerk all in one thread!
Oh, by all means, sound like a jerk if you have a new perspective (what does a jerk sound like? In which key? Major, minor, or unleaded?) The more perspectives I see things from, the more likely I am to understand them, and I won't know that you're being a jerk because I don't know what music theoreticians are supposed to think.
Hey Old Man- that isn't being a jerk, it is being a fresh new view point on a subject of interest to many people. I have little to no idea what y'all are talking about here. since I never took a music theory class that I can recall, but even >I< find this interesting to read about! Being a jerk is when you tell people that THEY are jerks for doing things or thinking things differently then you do or think. Bing insulting is being a jerk- makeing people think and defend why they think that way isn't. Around here we tend to enjoy intellectual brain stretching discussions and learning new things.
I'll start with one statement that doesn't even have to do with theory directly (ain't I a stinker?):
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.
One could make the argument, though, that Stravinski wrote the piece while he was living in Paris, and so fully expected it to be premiered by a French orchestra. And French bassoonists would almost unilaterally have been playing bassoons with Buffet-system keywork...an instrument that is somewhat smaller and significantly more facile in the extreme high registers than the Heckel-system bassoons with which most of us are familiar. So it's plausible that the intention of writing the solo to sound harsh never entered his mind, as it would certainly sound much less harsh on the Buffet-system instrument he was writing for.
Nonetheless, I still envision countless bassoonists singing that opening phrase over the words "I am not an English horn". (This last joke will, of course, only be funny if you know the solo in question and also know what an English horn is.)
I had to look it up, but I think he's referring to the opening solo here. An English Horn is an instrument in the double reed family which is intermediate in size and pitch between Bassoons and Oboes (and thus, the solo would fit "better" in it's range).
That he didn't use an English Horn would indicate to me that, for whatever reason, he was probably looking for the specific tone color of a high-pitched bassoon. Whatever that tone was on the historical instruments he would have used, I can't say.
(ETA: Speaking of bassoon effects... Despite not being a bassoonist, I did use one in my Song Fu entry for deliberate comical effect... What's that? Oh look, voting ends tomorrow night! See what I did there? ;-)
@OldManAP: I second everybody's encouragement. This thread dates from a rather short "music theory golden age" on the forum, and quite frankly, looking back at some things I wrote I see a lot of pomposity. Okay, pomposity, plus some feeble attempts to try and NOT be pompous. I think that's just the rules of the game. All in all, the more words and opinions, the better.
Speaking of the English Horn, it is one of my favorite instrument names for nonplussing (my word) nomenclature. It is neither English nor a horn, and more often than not it is named in French, as Cor Anglais. WTF!?
@Caleb: I did vote, and every time I get the feeling that it's as hard being a voter than it is to be a contestant. After a decent number of times listening to all the entries, I just looked down the list and clicked the first five that I thought deserve my votes, knowing that I don't have to explain myself to anybody. And then I was shocked to see what I did NOT vote for, but I could see no good argument for changing from the initial five. So I honestly don't want to trumpet to anybody who I voted for, with the exception of saying that I *did* vote for Paul, and that his relatively low ranking is no reflection on the song.
About voting in Song Fu, I really wish we could vote for one at a time (but still not vote for the same one multiple times.) There are often a few that I know I want to vote for early on, but I have to wait until I've decided on five, and by that time the voting's usually closed. But I guess this is the wrong thread for that.
I would like to see someone take apart Still Alive. There is just so much going on with the Uke, Bass and Synth at the same time that you have to listen to it more than once. Not to even mention the text painting he does. (Tore me to pieces, ^ glad I got v burned)...
Not that it is his best song, or most involved with theory, just some of the parts are very catchy. And seriously, whats with all the half diminished chords?
I was a little surprised by how low my second round ranking was, compared to my first round ranking. From my perspective, I put a lot more work into my round 2 song. There are even some non-triad chords in the bridge (for me, an accommplishment). Also, you don't want to know how many takes the guitar solo took... trying to sound carelessly bad required, paradoxically, being able to play a _good_ solo badly rather than the other way around.
It also leads me to believe that a good percentage of my votes in round 1 may have actually been votes for Joe. Thanks Joe?
Round 3 is not shaping up to be much of anything yet. I think it's great that Ken gave us an extra weekend, but unfortunately I was not able to make use of it. The whole family was sick. A 16-month old with a temp over 104 (and some vomiting), and two pre-schoolers with fevers themselves. And kind of a crisis of priorities in general. If it were just me, it would be easy to justify spending my free time working on this. As it is, it's more like "spending my free time on this instead of spending it with the kids is justifiable because ____" (fill in the blank...) OK, you've convinced me. But now convince my wife... and the kids...
Off-topic, sorry... anyway, in an attempt to be topical, what JoCo favorite chord did I use in the bridge for "War Criminal?"
In an attempt to further my jerk-like reputation... :
On the whole voice type thing, I'd argue for Jonathan being a baritone, based on voice quality throughout the range. Baritones can usually sing as high as tenors, they just have to jump into falsetto a little lower...but a baritone's falsetto is usually richer than that of a tenor. Tenors, on the other hand, can usually sing almost as low as a baritone, but they "peter out" in terms of the fullness of the timbre before they ever get that low. As JoCo's voice tends to sound very rich and dark on something like the beginning of the verses in "I Crush Everything", I'd call him a baritone. He also has to use some falsetto on certain tunes that aren't necessarily out of a tenor's typical head range ("Womb with a View" springs to mind), although he is adept enough at mixing registers that it makes it tough to tell exactly what he's doing physically.
But then again, I am that wierd exception to the male voice...because I am a countertenor (a male alto, to those who aren't familiar), I tend to think about these sorts of things a little differently. I can sing "I Crush Everything", but it's pretty tough for me to get the lower notes to "speak" unless it's pretty late at night and my voice is quite tired. On the other hand, I have NO accessible falsetto register (at least not one that I've physically found), but a head voice that goes up for days, and so the higher passages in something like "Womb with a View" require little effort for me...and they lose some of their most interesting timbral qualities as a result.
Comments
Just kidding. But yeah, I'm taking a music class, and the subject of vocal ranges came up today. I just wanted to ask because he seems to be generally higher register in the man ranges. I know my voice cracks when I don't warm up enough to sing some JoCo.
I'm still terribly lost when it comes to music, but it's something I really wish I was better at.
So yeah, every indication is that he's a tenor.
paulrpotts said: Close, but not quite. :-) The 7th in a B7, as you said, is a dominant 7th. A leading tone would be a major 7th. More specifically, a leading tone is the 7th note of a scale rather than the 7th of a chord, in this case the D# of the B7 chord is the leading tone in the key of E. More broadly, a leading tone can be any pitch which has a tendency, in context, to resolve upward by half step.
I think I've mentioned this elsewhere, but the tension in a dominant 7th chord comes from the tritone between the 3rd and 7th of the chord, in the case of a B7, between the D# and the A. In the context of the key of E, these pitches each want to resolve by half step - the D# (ti) up to E (do) and the A (fa) down to G# (mi), which are the significant pitches of the tonic chord, E major. (I should say that, after hundreds of years of tonal music, our ears have been trained to want/expect that resolution.)
SpaceParanoids added: Which makes total sense, since B7 is the dominant of E. Now if he had started on, say, a C half-diminished, it would take some more work to establish the key of E!
Later, paulrpotts said: I think you could do this yourself. Just sing scales upwards and downwards until you run out of notes! Not to sound glib, but that's basically all there is to it. You're a musician. I'm sure you can determine which notes you can and can't sing, and which sound better than others. :-) Do you mean classify your voice? Like baritone or tenor? Generally, a baritone voice will break into falsetto around middle C, a tenor maybe up around the G above that. Though a well-trained voice may not break at all. (How lovely!) Tenor voices generally start petering out going down towards the C below middle C. I think JC is a bari-tenor. I can comfortably sing in the tenor range, but he sings too low for me sometimes.
I was also gonna say something about Picardy thirds, but then I realized that I was thinking of Landini cadences, so never mind. :-)
P.S. On the subject of transposition: I am *so glad* that I don't have perfect pitch. I recently encountered a pianist with perfect pitch who couldn't play a piece transposed on an electric keyboard, because he couldn't bear hearing something different than what he was seeing. On top of that, he couldn't transpose at sight. How utterly useless! (To give some context, we were in a tight performance situation where there was neither the time nor the equipment to print out a transposed copy of the music.)
Here's a good series of pages I found recently introducing concepts in music theory, for those wanting to learn: http://musictheory.net/. What's really fun on that site is the ear trainers (Interval Trainer, Chord Trainer). Since they allow you to pick which intervals/chords to be tested on, you could use this as a learning device as well. For example, if someone wanted to learn the difference between major and minor chords, they could pick the chord trainer, and select only major and minor triads. After playing for awhile and listening closely (and having wrong answers corrected) they'd be bound to pick up the difference eventually. Telling all the 7ths apart (including half-diminished!) is quite a bit trickier...
My singing teacher's been working on smoothing out the breaks in my voice. I've got two, as most people - between the low and high registers, and between the high and falsetto registers. Training lets you overlap them more than you would otherwise - I can hit the B above middle C in full voice on a good day, although admittedly most days it's only there in my falsetto.
In any case, the reason I mention it is that the way you might determine your range - by singing scales until you run out of notes - is the basis of a way to work on smoothing things out. Range determination is sort of a free side-effect of the warmup and exercises in my singing lessons, and it also helps you develop a bigger range.
Although right now I need to work on control in the falsetto register, as I might be needing it.
On the egotistical side, I'm going to even more completely hijack this topic and mention that I just got my grade 5 singing exam result, and I passed with distinction
So, on this thought. It's always nice to associate the intervals with certains songs to make memorizing them easier, take this partial list for example.
Ascending
minor 2nd: Jaws theme
Major 2nd: Happy birthday
minor 3rd: Greensleeves
etc.
and then descending
minor 2nd: Beethoven's Fur Elise
Major 2nd: The Beatles - Yesterday
etc.
So my challenge to you guys. Can we find interval examples all the way up the octave and back using only JoCo music?
Also, as a guitarist, the term "middle C" has no meaning to me. I just looked it up, though, and apparently it is MIDI note 60, or C4, which may vary depending on whether you are following Yamaha notation or not : P
A few more intervals from non-JoCo songs:
Ascending Perfect 4th: "My Bonnie (lies over the Ocean)"
Ascending Tritone: "The Simpsons"
Ascending Major 6th: "NBC" chimes (first two notes. Not sure how well known these are outside the USA)
And now on to JoCo. A lot of melodies are mostly based on scales, so I'll get some easy ones:
Ascending Major 2nd:
- "Welcome to my (secret lair)"
- "I lie below..."
Descending Minor 2nd:
- "All we wanna do (is eat your brains)"
- "This was (a triumph)"
Ascending perfect 4th: I'm so (into you/but I'm way too smart for you); 'Cause it's gonna (be the future soon)
Descending perfect 4th: I drove (seven hours/all day to see you)
Ascending perfect 5th: It's no (fair/It's no fun); One more blue (sunny day)
Descending minor 3rd: Taupe mouse (top hat on his head)
Ascending major 6th: Birds are (singing/Bees are buzzing)
Lady Ablerlin's Muumuu is kind of fun for intervals: (What) angels found (minor 3rd) then lost again (perfect 4th), so big and round (minor 6th) such rare and sen- (perfect 4th) (suous blue). Blue Sunny Day too: Birds are singing (major 6th) / Bees are buzzing (perfect 5th) / Sun shines (perfect 4th) (overhead)
Other stuff:
Ascending perfect 5th: Star Wars (first two notes of main theme)
Descending perfect 4th: Born Free (as free as the wind blows)
Descending major 6th: Nobo- (dy knows the trouble I've seen)
"(at the top of a hill) there's a house (where) no one lives."
(Bonus points to JoCo for using a tritone to evoke creepiness)
ETA: And I agree about intervals being harder to recognize when listening in context. It's usually easier to relate the notes to their scale degrees then derive the interval from that.
One of the best things in music has to be how there's always something new to master.
The marks breakdown for my singing exam showed it was worth the effort - I got 20/21 for sight-singing, and without having worked on that my distinction definitely wouldn't have happened. I need to work on it some more, but the motivation thing to think is that if I can sight-sing to a reasonable standard, I can audition for a choir that's a reasonable standard, rather than a community free-for-all (although the latter's not necessarily unfun).
Amazing how even when you get to an instrument so obviously expressive and natural as the human voice, a good solid theoretical knowledge is still of enormous help in using it.
One thing I've found helpful for basic intervals from the tonic is singing do re mi fa so la ti do as a scale, then do re do mi do fa do so do la do ti do do a lot. If you can do it also basing off re, mi etc. that's even better. If nothing else it helps with your major intervals, which is helpful for all sorts of singing.
I just need to now remember what the solfege names are for the minor notes.
chromatic ascending (sharps): do di re ri mi fa fi sol si la li ti do'
chromatic descending (flats): do' ti te la le sol se fa mi me re ra do
natural minor: do re me fa sol le te do (Alternate "la-based" minor: la ti do re mi fa sol la. Same intervals, but reinforces the concept of relative minor.)
The exercise that Maw mentioned should be done backwards too. My students seem to have a harder time with the descending scale. Want some more solfege exercises? :-)
This is my favorite exercise for building familiarity with solfege (in even rhythm, with a rest at the end of each line). It should be done from memory, starting as slowly as necessary to avoid mistakes, then building speed over time as familiarity increases (i.e., not in the same sitting).
do [rest]
do re do [rest]
do re mi re do [rest]
do re mi fa mi re do [etc]
do re mi fa sol fa mi re do
do re mi fa sol la sol fa mi re do
do re mi fa sol la ti la sol fa mi re do
do re mi fa sol la ti do' ti la sol fa mi re do
do'
do' ti do'
do' ti la ti do'
do' ti la sol la ti do'
do' ti la sol fa sol la ti do'
do' ti la sol fa mi fa sol la ti do'
do' ti la sol fa mi re mi fa sol la ti do'
do' ti la sol fa mi re do re mi fa sol la ti do'
For fun, replace one (or two or three) of the pitches with rests. For example, if you take out re it becomes: do, do [rest] do, do [rest] mi [rest] do, etc, which forces you to think the pitch internally. For extra fun, my choir does this as a round (in two, three or four parts). For super-duper fun, as a round with missing pitches! (OK, my choir hasn't gotten to that level yet.)
Intervals in the major scale (ascending and descending):
3rds: do mi re fa mi sol fa la sol ti la do' ti re' do'; do' la ti sol la fa sol mi fa re mi do re ti, do
4ths: do fa re sol mi la fa ti sol do' la re' ti mi' do'; do' sol ti fa la mi sol re fa do mi ti, re la, do
Etc. for other intervals, though beyond a fifth gets a bit rangey.
And just for giggles, here's one we did in high school (in even rhythm):
do [rest]
do re mi [rest]
mi fa sol [rest]
sol la ti do' re' mi' fa' [rest]
fa' mi' re' [rest]
re' do' ti [rest]
ti la sol fa mi re do
And when you're really cooking...
do [rest]
do re mi [rest]
mi fa sol [rest]
sol la ti do' re' mi' fa' sol' fa' mi' re' mi' re' do' ti do' ti la sol fa mi re do
Have fun! Fuck, yeah.
2 a pair thats lots of fun
...
4, a pair of bouncing bums..."
5, it sounds a bit like fife,
6, it sounds a bit like sex
7 has too many syllables,
we should cut them back by
1, a lonely number one...
Mike Lombardo has just created a new music theory explanation blog/website http://theorypages.net/ (with the tagline "Music Theory in Plain English"). People here might be interested.
It seems as though I have what I perceive to be a valid argument against a lot of what's been said...and I'm way too new here to want to start looking like a jerk all in one thread!
Being a jerk is when you tell people that THEY are jerks for doing things or thinking things differently then you do or think. Bing insulting is being a jerk- makeing people think and defend why they think that way isn't. Around here we tend to enjoy intellectual brain stretching discussions and learning new things.
I'll start with one statement that doesn't even have to do with theory directly (ain't I a stinker?): One could make the argument, though, that Stravinski wrote the piece while he was living in Paris, and so fully expected it to be premiered by a French orchestra. And French bassoonists would almost unilaterally have been playing bassoons with Buffet-system keywork...an instrument that is somewhat smaller and significantly more facile in the extreme high registers than the Heckel-system bassoons with which most of us are familiar. So it's plausible that the intention of writing the solo to sound harsh never entered his mind, as it would certainly sound much less harsh on the Buffet-system instrument he was writing for.
Nonetheless, I still envision countless bassoonists singing that opening phrase over the words "I am not an English horn". (This last joke will, of course, only be funny if you know the solo in question and also know what an English horn is.)
That he didn't use an English Horn would indicate to me that, for whatever reason, he was probably looking for the specific tone color of a high-pitched bassoon. Whatever that tone was on the historical instruments he would have used, I can't say.
(ETA: Speaking of bassoon effects... Despite not being a bassoonist, I did use one in my Song Fu entry for deliberate comical effect... What's that? Oh look, voting ends tomorrow night! See what I did there? ;-)
Speaking of the English Horn, it is one of my favorite instrument names for nonplussing (my word) nomenclature. It is neither English nor a horn, and more often than not it is named in French, as Cor Anglais. WTF!?
@Caleb: I did vote, and every time I get the feeling that it's as hard being a voter than it is to be a contestant. After a decent number of times listening to all the entries, I just looked down the list and clicked the first five that I thought deserve my votes, knowing that I don't have to explain myself to anybody. And then I was shocked to see what I did NOT vote for, but I could see no good argument for changing from the initial five. So I honestly don't want to trumpet to anybody who I voted for, with the exception of saying that I *did* vote for Paul, and that his relatively low ranking is no reflection on the song.
Not that it is his best song, or most involved with theory, just some of the parts are very catchy.
And seriously, whats with all the half diminished chords?
I was a little surprised by how low my second round ranking was, compared to my first round ranking. From my perspective, I put a lot more work into my round 2 song. There are even some non-triad chords in the bridge (for me, an accommplishment). Also, you don't want to know how many takes the guitar solo took... trying to sound carelessly bad required, paradoxically, being able to play a _good_ solo badly rather than the other way around.
It also leads me to believe that a good percentage of my votes in round 1 may have actually been votes for Joe. Thanks Joe?
Round 3 is not shaping up to be much of anything yet. I think it's great that Ken gave us an extra weekend, but unfortunately I was not able to make use of it. The whole family was sick. A 16-month old with a temp over 104 (and some vomiting), and two pre-schoolers with fevers themselves. And kind of a crisis of priorities in general. If it were just me, it would be easy to justify spending my free time working on this. As it is, it's more like "spending my free time on this instead of spending it with the kids is justifiable because ____" (fill in the blank...) OK, you've convinced me. But now convince my wife... and the kids...
Off-topic, sorry... anyway, in an attempt to be topical, what JoCo favorite chord did I use in the bridge for "War Criminal?"
On the whole voice type thing, I'd argue for Jonathan being a baritone, based on voice quality throughout the range. Baritones can usually sing as high as tenors, they just have to jump into falsetto a little lower...but a baritone's falsetto is usually richer than that of a tenor. Tenors, on the other hand, can usually sing almost as low as a baritone, but they "peter out" in terms of the fullness of the timbre before they ever get that low. As JoCo's voice tends to sound very rich and dark on something like the beginning of the verses in "I Crush Everything", I'd call him a baritone. He also has to use some falsetto on certain tunes that aren't necessarily out of a tenor's typical head range ("Womb with a View" springs to mind), although he is adept enough at mixing registers that it makes it tough to tell exactly what he's doing physically.
But then again, I am that wierd exception to the male voice...because I am a countertenor (a male alto, to those who aren't familiar), I tend to think about these sorts of things a little differently. I can sing "I Crush Everything", but it's pretty tough for me to get the lower notes to "speak" unless it's pretty late at night and my voice is quite tired. On the other hand, I have NO accessible falsetto register (at least not one that I've physically found), but a head voice that goes up for days, and so the higher passages in something like "Womb with a View" require little effort for me...and they lose some of their most interesting timbral qualities as a result.