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KoRMaK
Jul 31, 2012



interesting, yes yes yes thats better - but what does dominant mean here? Does it mean that the current chord and the next chord share 1 or 2 of the same notes?


Is that why the 5th chord in a harmonized major is a dom?!

e: i was sort of wrong - i expected 2 notes to be the same. its only 1, but it is the 5th of that triad, so now i see how the progression is going. you could also do that with thirds or 7ths i guess too right?


Ina 7th, they share the G too, i didn't highlight it because I was just focusing on a normal triad. In a normal triad, i guess I still dont get what makes the 5th the next most important note, as desribed on the wikipedia page
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominant_(music)

quote:

it is called the dominant because it is next in importance to the first scale degree, the tonic
why is it important? Like, what about it gives it that quality?

KoRMaK fucked around with this message at 15:03 on May 27, 2020

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Penguissimo
Apr 7, 2007

KoRMaK posted:

interesting, yes yes yes thats better - but what does dominant mean here? Does it mean that the current chord and the next chord share 1 or 2 of the same notes?

Is that why the 5th chord in a harmonized major is a dom?!

so bear in mind this explanation is very much coming from a Western perspective...it'll apply most directly in classical and jazz, but there are plenty of traditions to which it'll be relevant.

in harmonically driven music, there's this notion of a chord progression, where certain chords "lead" to others. the most basic chord progression: you have a "home" chord (the tonic) which is the chord built on the key you're in, and the dominant, which leads back to the tonic. this progression is what centers our ear on the tonic as the "home" chord. the "default" dominant is built off of the fifth note of the scale built on your tonic note, which these two chords do happen to share.

for example, if you're in C Major, C is your tonic note, your tonic chord is C-E-G, and your basic dominant chord would be G major (G-B-D). try it out: play C major, then G major, then C major again, and it'll sound very naturally like a departure followed by a return. (you've been hearing this progression your entire life--it's the foundation of "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star", for example.) you can make the dominant lead even more strongly to the tonic by adding a seventh to the chord; try the above progression with an F added to the dominant (G-B-D-F) and hear how the added tension on the dominant leads "pulls" you back to C major.

btw in classical music these chords are typically denoted with Roman numerals corresponding to which note of the scale the chord is based on--the tonic chord will be I and the dominant will be V (or V7, to indicate the seventh that we added). in jazz you'll usually just see the name of the chord (C, G7).

obviously there's only so much you can do with just these two chords (although you can still do a hell of a lot), so any music more advanced than children's songs will go to a lot of different places along the way, but you'll always end up with motion from the dominant to the tonic.* this can all get pretty crazy pretty quickly...like if you want to change keys (either briefly or long-term), you create the sense of the new key as tonic by progressing to the dominant of THAT key before moving to your new tonic, and also chords other than the one built on the fifth note can function as a dominant in certain situations.

* if you want to see this idea taken to its absurd conclusion, look into Schenkerian analysis, where a guy (Schenker) basically posited that any Western classical music can be reduced to a single motion from tonic to dominant and back to tonic**

** it's more complicated than this but trust me you don't want to know how


KoRMaK posted:


why is it important? Like, what about it gives it that quality?

from a physics perspective, the 5th note is the first unique overtone in the overtone series, and therefore the strongest-sounding one other than the first overtone (which is the fundamental pitch an octave higher). in music this translates to a very strong leading relationship that you can hear without even playing chords--just try playing C, G, C, G over and over again. you'll probably recognize this as the bass line in a billion different pieces of music. start building chords on top of that and you start getting some serious stuff.

Penguissimo fucked around with this message at 16:04 on May 27, 2020

KoRMaK
Jul 31, 2012



ah so the quality I was looking for is less an objective quality and more a subjective "it just sounds good" and a bunch of people agreeing - although there is a physics quality to it with the overtones that explains it too. I can get with that

Even just naturally I noticed that I go from certain degrees of the scale to others - just something feels good/natural about it if you know nothing about the fretboard but just play around for hours and hours (while also being exposed yo western music)

Thanks for the explainer!

KoRMaK fucked around with this message at 16:15 on May 27, 2020

Penguissimo
Apr 7, 2007

KoRMaK posted:

ah so the quality I was looking for is less an objective quality and more a subjective "it just sounds good" and a bunch of people agreeing. I can get with that

Even just naturally I noticed that I go from certain degrees of the scale to others - just something feels good/natural about it if you know nothing about the fretboard but just play around for hours and hours (while also being exposed yo western music)

yeah you got it exactly...at best you can occasionally trace your way to a connection to some natural law (for example the overtone series also explains why major chords make sense to us, since the third scale degree is the next unique overtone after the fifth, and if you keep working your way up, you can cover basically the full range of notes used in any musical tradition)*, but at the end of the day any explanation for why a certain tradition chose to emphasize one element over another will boil down to "it sounded good and a bunch of people agreed". different traditions will approach this very differently--Indian music for example has basically no notion of harmony, but an unbelievably sophisticated system of rhythm and...something that we would call scales, but are a little more complex. same with Arabic and Turkish music, and they also divide the scale much more finely, so you have notes that are between the notes on the piano keyboard.

KoRMaK posted:

Thanks for the explainer!

hey my pleasure, this is fun poo poo and i pissed away enough of my life in school studying this stuff that it's great to be able to actually discuss it again


* for a much more detailed and intelligent explanation of this, check out Leonard Bernstein's lecture on musical phonology:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MB7ZOdp__gQ

Helianthus Annuus
Feb 21, 2006

can i touch your hand
Grimey Drawer
one more thing about the dominant 7th chord:

it has a tritone (aka diminished 5th interval) between the major 3rd and the flat 7th of the chord, which is a dissonant interval. the ear wants to hear that dissonance resolved, and this is what creates the musical "gravity" pulling you from the dominant chord to the tonic chord.

so when people talk about the dominant chord "resolving" to the tonic, what's specifically going on is that dissonant tritone in the dominant chord changing to a consonant major 3rd in the tonic chord

in your example, the Eb dominant 7th chord's major 3rd is G, and the flat-7th is Db. when it resolves to a Ab major 7th chord, the G -> Ab, and the Db -> C,

G to Db is a tritone (spooky)

Ab to C is a major 3rd (ah, much better)

Penguissimo
Apr 7, 2007

and what's cool about the tritone is that it's so spooky that it was actually avoided by medieval composers because it sounded like the devil

http://www.diabolus.org/explanation/explanation.htm

toiletbrush
May 17, 2010
This theory chat is really useful, I've literally just given up writing music for my lockdown produced iPhone game. It started off sounding retro computer-gamey but sounded totally inappropriate so I just turned it into a regular track. I'm quite chuffed tho as it actually has a proper tune!

https://soundcloud.com/djfireextinguisher/s3a-0

Helianthus Annuus
Feb 21, 2006

can i touch your hand
Grimey Drawer

KoRMaK posted:

the circle of fiths always kind of confused me becuase as you go clockwise - the natural direction you'd think you would go - it seems to be 4ths


aughhhh dammit (╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻

its called the "circle of fourths" if you go one way, and its the "circle of fifths" if you go the other way. this makes sense, because the perfect fifth inverts to the perfect fourth. you can think of them as the same interval, but from different directions.

e.g., C -> G is a perfect 5th, and G -> C is a perfect 4th.



the tritone exists right between the perfect fifth and perfect fourth, and it inverts to itself. it's the only musical interval that inverts to itself (except maybe the octave / unison)

and check this out: remember the G and Db tritone interval we talked about? from the Eb dominant 7th chord? look at how G an Db are on opposite sides of the circle. you can find the tritone of any note by drawing a line thru the center and onto the other side

Helianthus Annuus
Feb 21, 2006

can i touch your hand
Grimey Drawer

reminds me of FTL soundtrack

KoRMaK
Jul 31, 2012



ugh, ive been reading tritone and thinking it was a synonym for a triad until right now


Penguissimo posted:

yeah you got it exactly...at best you can occasionally trace your way to a connection to some natural law
its like the fun part of doing math proofs! i hate memorizing stuff, and was always bad at it, but im good at remembering the process to figure it out, in high school i would most of the time just re-work out the proof during an algebra test to remember how to figure out the problem

Suspicious Dish
Sep 24, 2011

2020 is the year of linux on the desktop, bro
Fun Shoe
theory gets crazy at high levels

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mog5DDWLDdc

4lokos basilisk
Jul 17, 2008



my theory about any theory is that it always ends up being exactly as complex as the smartest bunch of theory guys can handle, so the winning move is to figure out what level of theory guy you want to be: do you want to start applying the theory at some point or ascend into meta-theory guy status where your existence is so full of theory that whatever you produce mostly makes sense for other high level theory guys

that said, i wish i were bit more of a theory guy. and also a bit more of a guy who actually practices the instruments regularly

Jonny 290
May 5, 2005



[ASK] me about OS/2 Warp
i would rather be a dude that knows three power chords and has an impeccable sense of rhythm. that being said i do look at a scale now and then

4lokos basilisk
Jul 17, 2008


Jonny 290 posted:

i would rather be a dude that knows three power chords and has an impeccable sense of rhythm. that being said i do look at a scale now and then

take my post with a huge grain of salt as i have around 11 years of classical piano studies in my distant past

but welcome to weight watchers too, i guess

KoRMaK
Jul 31, 2012



I wanna be able to understand why the stuff I seem to find naturally by stumbling around works, as a means to then try to figure out what my style is. I seem to have a pattern but it takes forever to adapt it to a new key or whatever.

if slash can do it drunk hosed up I should be able to too

Ruffian Price
Sep 17, 2016

I fear not the man who has learned 10,000 chords, but I fear the man who can play the same chord 10,000 times on beat.

echinopsis
Apr 13, 2004

by Fluffdaddy
i love riffs. loving amazing riffs for the win

Jonny 290
May 5, 2005



[ASK] me about OS/2 Warp

KoRMaK posted:

I wanna be able to understand why the stuff I seem to find naturally by stumbling around works, as a means to then try to figure out what my style is. I seem to have a pattern but it takes forever to adapt it to a new key or whatever.

if slash can do it drunk hosed up I should be able to too

slash is amazing. he has absolutely no chops but vibes so hard he pulls it off

echinopsis
Apr 13, 2004

by Fluffdaddy
hmm wish I had no chops too

Achmed Jones
Oct 16, 2004



I finished my plugin.

it lets you pick a scale for the white keys and then pick a chord progression and chord types for the black keys. im happy with it

I had to sign the binaries to get everything to work on OSX cause "open anyway" doesn't actually work for plugins. so to avoid doxing myself, send me a PM if you're interested and I'll hit you with the website

Zam Wesell
Mar 22, 2009

[Zam is suddenly shot in the neck by a toxic dart; Anakin and Obi-Wan see a "rocket-man" take off and fly away, and Zam dies]
just ordered a model:samples. never used an elektron before, but this thing looks hella fun.

goal is to make enough tracks (patterns) on it for a live show later in the year.

4lokos basilisk
Jul 17, 2008


fighting the urge to get a hardware sequencer by building crap in live with midi effects

https://soundcloud.com/trent-hawkins/sun-7-jun

toiletbrush
May 17, 2010
another penisface banger. Really nice!

about two weeks into lockdown I moved all my gear down into my front room, the reason being I live by myself and was going stir-crazy looking over my rapidly overgrowing garden all the time and wanted to be by a window where I could see actual humans going by and feel less isolated. The trouble is now I haven't touched any of it (including a bunch of new modules I bought) since cos I don't want to attract any attention to anything potentially theft-worthy in my house :(

So I've got a room where I can't use my stuff because I'm paranoid it will get stolen, one where I get depressed being in there, or one that's probably the nicest but it adjoins the room my neighbour sleeps in when he's had a row with his wife so three hour modular acid jams would be a strict no-no.

anyone got any tips on making your music room nice to be in for someone who rapidly gets anxious/depressed if they can't see other people?

Achmed Jones
Oct 16, 2004



you already solved it but you're afraid that people are going to watch you turn some knobs and then steal your synth. they aren't. if they do, insurance will cover it.

explain exactly how you think playing your synth would lead to theft - I think about halfway through you'll realize that it won't :)

toiletbrush
May 17, 2010
you don't realise how totally rad I look playing it!

it's just that the modular bit is tall and wide and really conspicuous looking particularly with all the blinkin and cable dangling going on.

you're probably right, though.

Achmed Jones
Oct 16, 2004



ngl it _does_ sound badass

4lokos basilisk
Jul 17, 2008


toiletbrush posted:

another penisface banger. Really nice!

about two weeks into lockdown I moved all my gear down into my front room, the reason being I live by myself and was going stir-crazy looking over my rapidly overgrowing garden all the time and wanted to be by a window where I could see actual humans going by and feel less isolated. The trouble is now I haven't touched any of it (including a bunch of new modules I bought) since cos I don't want to attract any attention to anything potentially theft-worthy in my house :(

So I've got a room where I can't use my stuff because I'm paranoid it will get stolen, one where I get depressed being in there, or one that's probably the nicest but it adjoins the room my neighbour sleeps in when he's had a row with his wife so three hour modular acid jams would be a strict no-no.

anyone got any tips on making your music room nice to be in for someone who rapidly gets anxious/depressed if they can't see other people?

thanks

i think achmed jones is right, it probably won't get stolen.

however, have you considered setting up a kraftwerk mannequin with cameras for eyes in the front room, and streaming that "view" onto a screen in the back room where you tinker with the synths?

Helianthus Annuus
Feb 21, 2006

can i touch your hand
Grimey Drawer

toiletbrush posted:

it's just that the modular bit is tall and wide and really conspicuous looking particularly with all the blinkin and cable dangling going on.

i wouldn't worry about it until someone backs a u-haul up to your house

4lokos basilisk
Jul 17, 2008


Helianthus Annuus posted:

i wouldn't worry about it until someone backs a u-haul up to your house

what if they sneak in every other night and just jack the modular 1 module at a time

Zam Wesell
Mar 22, 2009

[Zam is suddenly shot in the neck by a toxic dart; Anakin and Obi-Wan see a "rocket-man" take off and fly away, and Zam dies]
more space for new modules. gas cured

KoRMaK
Jul 31, 2012



wow p crazy couple of weeks

i finally touched my keyboard again and i think next im going to plug the e-kit in and do drums to this. thats why i got it after all!
https://soundcloud.com/macro_bulk/couple-riffs-a-week-002

echinopsis
Apr 13, 2004

by Fluffdaddy
cool

LuckySevens
Feb 16, 2004

fear not failure, fear only the limitations of our dreams




community goals

LuckySevens fucked around with this message at 10:45 on Jun 10, 2020

echinopsis
Apr 13, 2004

by Fluffdaddy

echinopsis
Apr 13, 2004

by Fluffdaddy
never replaced a pickup before. this is the kind nile use and the dude was like “this is our sound” :smugmrgw:

now i gonna learn how to do this

Jonny 290
May 5, 2005



[ASK] me about OS/2 Warp
yeah read the manual closely it looks like a 4 wire pickup so you might have to connect two of those wires together to get proper humbucking

polarity matters, coil split or not also matters

good luck

echinopsis
Apr 13, 2004

by Fluffdaddy
cheers bro. word is this is about as high output you can get in a passive pickup, and i’ve never really paid attention to pickups before so the difference in tone will be worth checking out

i should leave guitar rig on a certain patch and record some riffs before and after and see the difference

Jonny 290
May 5, 2005



[ASK] me about OS/2 Warp
you absolutely should

also note that if you want to get super leet with the wiring you can get a pull pot to replace your volume control and split those coils. lots of tones available

even just doing it with a stock 2wire setup should crank though

KoRMaK
Jul 31, 2012



i had to do a whole bunch of aiso4all + voice meeter banana poo poo to get this to work in an organic way, eating up 90 minutes or more of playing time


but i did it, i can record live the drumset through stereo in. ill figure out midi later.


anyway, here's the same track as before but with more pops and clicks but with DRUMS from an alesis nitro ekit stereo out run directly into my mic front jack into fl studio
https://soundcloud.com/macro_bulk/couple-riffs-a-week-002b-plus-drums

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KoRMaK
Jul 31, 2012



my iteration time is 2 days for that riff now, which i gotta be honest is probably my fastest turn around ever. pathetic as it may be. but i got the drumset to be able to play and riff live with myself, and there's the first one. really fuckin fun!

the bonus is that anyone that stops by that can casually play drums or keys or guitar can now join in since all instruments can be turned down so my neighbors arent pissed off. its wild, best of all worlds!!

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