In music theory we learn that what makes a minor scale different from a major scale is that the minor scale contains a flat 3rd and, depending on the type, sometimes a flat 6th and/or a flat 7th. So to make an 8-note major scale minor, you lower the pitch of the third, sixth and seventh notes by a half step. A half step translates to one fret on the guitar, or one key on the piano. Understanding the technical theory and the shapes to make with your hands to play the scales and chords on your instrument is one thing, and congratulations to you if you're at all proficient with that aspect, but the further (and maybe more valuable) challenge is to be able to hear and recognize the different intervals.
This may be a fool's errand, but let's see if I can talk about what the intervals sound like: The notes in a major scale are typically described as consonant or resolute. When a note deviates from this consonance, it is described as having dissonance or tension. It is from this tension that we interpret the feeling the music gives us. Minor scales and the chords derived from them are usually associated with a kind of sad or dark mood. You may have heard the phrase "blue note" that frequently characterizes blues and jazz music. The literal note that creates that feeling is very often the flat 3rd or flat 7th of a minor scale. I'm not sure how else to describe these sounds but as feelings. I don't know if people who are skilled (either naturally or by training) at differentiating intervals in music "feel" the notes or just recognize them like faces. (I know some people literally see them as colors.)
I tell you all of this by way of explaining why the songs on MajorScaled TV sound weird. According to its Facebook page, MajorScaled TV digitally modifies minor scale songs to major scale. You may not be trained or practiced at recognizing minor intervals in music, but boy is it glaring when they're taken away. Metallica's "Nothing else matters," above, for example, loses its gravity. The one drawing some viral attention lately is modified REM called "Recovering my religion," oddly drained of its melancholy. Music on anti-depressants.
Ok music geeks, the comments are yours. Do your worst.
[Not quite related: That choral version of Nothing Else Matters that we hear all the time in the Zero Dark Thirty commercial that airs during the Maddow show (but not in the actual movie?) is by Scala & Kolacny Brothers who do some other fun covers as well.]
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if this is true, you sound surprised that the "too-many-notes" people would do such a thing. Look at it this way - there are a lot of no-talent, jealous, ambitious idiots who are unaccepting of their own idiocy for lack of humbleness and modesty. So rather than gaining the virtues of modesty and humbleness by admitting stupidity, foolishness and such, one need only suck up to those thieves who would pay them to do their bidding and then turn around and lie to their families and friends and countrymen and brand themselves as successful. That's unusual?
Duane Allman's solo on Stormy Monday from Live at the Fillmore East is considered one of the best guitar solos ever, for the very reason that he weaves back and forth from the major pentatonic and minor pentatonic scales. It's a good test for whether or not you can hear the difference between major and minor intervals. Take a listen (Duane's solo is the first guitar solo).
After Eduard Khil (the Trololo guy) passed away last year, I went around singing Trololo in a minor key for weeks. (Really... not being ironic... I was a big fan of Eduard's... )
ok my question why are they doing this?
Remember when Turner tried to "colorize" all the old movies? This won't work any better than that did.
Music is entirely personal - we gravitate towards that music that elicits some type of emotion in us (that makes us "feel") and MajorScaledTV is probably going to remain a VERY SMALL company if it survives at all.
I couldn't tell you whether a given piece uses major or minor scales by listening to it, but I can tell that the new "Nothing Else Matters" is different in a bad way.
So what if they feed Stravinsky or Schoenberg into this beast, something chromatic? Or Indian music with its complex raga modes? Or Beethoven's 5th or 9th Symphonies? Can they do it in reverse, make major minor?
Yes, they could do that. What would be more interesting is if you put traditional Mexican music like a Mariachi band through it. I discovered once at a birthday party that everything in those songs are always in minors.
Yeh, third notes are pretty much where the emotion comes from. Minor = sad. Major = happy.
I've always seen notes as colors myself. When I play an E chord on a guitar I visualize the color blue. A is red. B is purple. C is light yellow. D is green. F is a cheese yellow. G is orange.
"Blue notes" are typically notes that happen between pitches. So for instance, in blues, guitarists do a lot of string bends with solos. Those bends typically note incorrectly, so it's a note between notes.
I've often thought that it would just be better to organize music by number notes instead of letter notes, and I suppose one could make the argument that we do. For instance, the A of a guitar is 440 Hertz. A B note would be 493.88 Hertz. I've often thought what would happen if you designed an instrument so that the notes would be separated out so that you'd have a decative instead of an octave.
Centuries ago some classical composer (I think Mozart) discovered that certain notes will ring sympathetically. So if you pressed the pedal on a piano that allows the strings to vibrate freely, if you played a C note, higher octaves of C would also ring softly without being played. When musical instruments became electrified, this became a problem because it would create feedback. An interesting aspect about this is that feedback is far more prone to happen with distortion.
Even if the distortion there is very slight, so that you might not even notice it, it's still more prone to happening.
Many audiofiles to this day will prefer playing music on equipment with electron tubes, saying it sounds "richer". Even today, guitar amps use tubes because they sound leaps and bounds better than a solid state guitar amp. In music production electron tubes are used on all kinds of things, from microphones, to mixing boards, to various pieces of studio equipment. All because the electron tube will impart a kind of pleasant distortion (or what is sometimes called "color") to the sound.
Wondering why this is, an audio engineer set up an experiment to find out why this is. He set up a reference microphone (a microphone designed to accurately detect all musical pitches in an unbiased manner) and it compared the sound coming from the same source, with one going through a tube circuit and one solid state.
As it turns out, the notes coming from the electron tube circuit did impart "ghost" frequencies. They were so slight, that unless you have a very well trained ear, you can't detect them. However, the ghost frequencies created a perfect major chord! A C note through the electron tube would artificially create the major third of the C note, as well as it's 5th.
Pretty neat, eh?
That is really interesting. Thanks for sharing. I wish I could see notes as colors!
Of course there is a way to see notes as colors... ask Alice.
Alva
The composer you're thinking of is Johan Sebastian Bach. The piece of music he was referring to was his Toccata & Fugue in D minor for organ. I wish I could remember which bar it is but it's towards the beginning which he said was a combination of chords that crates a feeling of awe for the listener. The Toccata and Fugue in D minor is the first piece in Disney's Fantasia. You know the piece with all the abstract colors it it? ;-)
I tend to like minor keys myself. most of the fiddle tunes I play are in minor keys.
There are many minor diatonic scales. The major diatonic is the doe, a deer scale from the sound of music. C is naturally a major scale, because in C, the intervals between the notes fall in the right pattern to make up a major scale, which is determined by the intervals between notes rather than the notes themselves. This is because there are flat notes in between some notes, but not others. For instance, there is a "whole" step between D and E - so there is a D sharp or E flat (they're the same note) between D and E. That's the black key on a piano between D and E notes. E and F are only a half-step apart, as are B and C. That's why some white keys on a piano don't have a black key between them.
So there is no B sharp/C flat, and no E sharp/F flat. The major scale is C (whole step) D (whole step) E (half step) F (whole step) G (whole step) A (whole step) B (half step) C. The major scale is defined by having a half step between the 3rd and 4th notes and 7th and 8th notes. If you start from D instead of C, the half steps are in the wrong place, and you're on what's called a Dorian scale (D for Dorian) which is a minor scale. If you wanted to play in D major, you'd go from D to E, but then E to F sharp/G flat to get the second whole note interval, and follow the major interval pattern from there (half step to G, then full step to A, etc), but if you just go D, E, F, G, A, B, C, D with no sharps or flats you're in Dorian mode. If you start with A and don't throw in any sharps or flats you're playing in Aeolian mode, another minor scale.
All notes can be flatted or sharped. And double flatted and double sharped. Mind bending.
Why?
As a musician, I've had a lot of fun with music. Metal arrangements of Bacharach tunes, jazz versions of punk songs, etc. Re-harmonization is one thing, but this idea warps the melody and, therefore, the harmony too (I'm just guessing that they did this because if they didn't, it'd sound real bad). At that point, is it even the same song? If you have to be told the identity of the otherwise familiar song, is it a good arrangement?
This sounds like a geek experiment by someone familiar enough with theory to cause serious damage, but without enough talent to create art.
Yes, I think it's a geek experiment too.
It's funny you mention the question of whether it's the same song because it also turns out to be kind of a legal experiment. Vimeo made them take down the REM version at first. But is it infringing on the copyright if they change it this much? How far do they have to go?
I definitely think that it draws into question the arrangement of a lot of the music. For instance, the mandolin outtro on Losing My Religion just sounds pointless unless it's in a haunting minor. If these songs had been written as a major I certainly would have suggested to rework some of the arrangements.
But, oh well. This is a super cool experiment regardless.
The real winner here is advances in fourier analysis that allow sound engineers to go in, and pick one note of chord and then change only that one note and nothing else. Just take a moment to think about how complex the sound wave is, you have the other 2-3 notes of the chord, other instruments playing that are all mixed into one complex sound wave that is then separated into dozens of constituent parts.
In 20 years we'll probably look back at this moment in music history in the same light as Cher using auto-tune in Believe. What used to be dirty little secret of how engineers fixed things in post is now being transformed into a legit thing performers do in the open to neat effect.
The technology is fairly straight forward. All you'd have to do is figure out before hand where all the minors are, and then put each instrument through a very selective hi pass and low pass filter, isolate the minor notes and then adjust the pitch by a half step. It's using the same technology as auto-tune uses right now.
Just for yucks:
http://www.koreus.com/video/ingenieur-son.html
This is stupid. The mode (major/minor) creates a mood. Composers for chorale works as well as orchestral & symphonic wind music will also choose a specific key (C, F, E flat, G, D, etc., or their relative minors) to attain the right sound and mood - some major keys sound brighter or duller than others (I don't have the expertise so can't explain, I've just been told this, but suspect it has to do with the "color" of the particular instruments and the actual pitch as I believe not all half steps are created equal).
Anyway, MajorScaled: leave it alone!!!
Sharing this with my musically educated friends :)
I have been messing around with my guitar. I learnt guitar through:http://www.guitarists.net/guitar_scales/I want to know the chords for the song "Straight Up" by Paula Abdul for my practising guitar scales. Can you help?? I'll remain grateful. Thanks!