Posts Tagged notation

I’m unfortunately averaging a post a month at the moment as I’ve had to prioritize finding more gainful employment (29 hrs/wk @ min. wage would do it), also Japanese class, which I could see myself teaching. But what about music? Never even considered teaching music. And yet I’m kinda doing it. For free. Oops. Well, you’ve gotta start somewhere.

But there’s not much of a market for a completely ground-level reinvention of musical notation. It just seems crazy. However, inventing this system has allowed me to teach myself how to explain regular music to myself, which really is crazy…..IS. IT. SO. “CRAZY”? Not really it’s all pretty boring, I’m just trying to be dramatic to keep your interest. You can give up now. It’s not interesting. It’s pretty dumb. But let me ask you a question: how do you feel about sleep? I’m ambivalent about the whole thing. I mean after work, looking for more work, and the occasional video game, sleep can really put a dent in the ol’ blog schedule.

Where was I? Oh right, proving the inferiority of an unjustly ingrained, non-intuitive note naming system. Here ya go:

I’ve been thinking about getting a 7-string for a while and using the 3rds tuning on it. The extra string not on;y offsets the loss of range with the tuning, it creates a something perfectly even and symmetrical. Which is just nice, it’s got nothing to do with anything. It’s just that with traditional 4ths tuning, to get the top string and bottom string 2 octaves apart, you throw in that 3rd. And that does make some chords easier to play, but it’s always bugged me. It’s tricky to name the notes in any particular chord right off the top of your head. (Which is real easy on the piano.) Playing the chords and scales is almost all about memorization, which is why so few guitarists use alternate tunings, even when the instrument is so easy to tune and retune to almost anything. The proof is right above. I did not do this on purpose, but I just wrote out this chart real quick, and I did it to show other guitarists so I’m using regular letter notes, and “steps”. Several guitarists (and one professional cellist!) saw the post and liked it with no comment. Later I noticed the number of steps I’m saying to move up or down is wrong in multiple places. This is because it’s not a standard number of steps that neither I or most guitarists have memorized.

Most common example is taking the E string a step down to a Dropped D tuning. But taking E up to F is only a half step. Because there is no E#. (There is, E#=F.) Likewise for B#. This should of course also be memorized to the point of not having to think about at all. But that’s not the same thing as an intuitive system. It’s the illusion of one. Create an unusual case that never comes up and even pros (even proams on the internet, who live to point out mistakes like this) can be fooled at first glance. (Which is the only glance most things on the internet get anymore.)

Instead, numerically:

Standard 7-string tuning (low to high):

2 7 0 5 2 7

3rds tuning starting on A:

0 4 8 0 4 8 0

3rds tuning starting on C#/Db:

4 8 0 4 8 0 4

You can immediately see the number of half steps you need to move then without barely even thinking about it and get some goddamn sleep already. %