writing melodies

  On 1/22/2022 at 11:13 PM, ArtificialDisco said:

It's a perfectly good beginning of a scale. If you add the fifth and the dominant 7 you have a pretty cool sounding symmetric subset of the diminished scale. In fact I discovered that four-note chord myself though my obsession with the diminished scale. I always thought of it as a 7 sus b5 chord. Like, when you're in regular major you can have a suspended fourth and move it down to the third, but if you're in the dim scale you have a augmented fourth instead. The move F7susb5 -> F7 was to me a very compelling sound and a sort of parallel reality version of the regular suspended movement.

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hey you know what? i'm on my keyboard playing the 4-note scale melodically and it doesn't sound terrible at all actually, i'd even say it sounds pretty hip! i didn't realize that the root was Gb, it's a Gb lydian dominant voicing, a lydian b7 sus4 voicing if you will, that resolves back to Gb7. 

yeah the diminished scale is super fun. and if you add the 5th and b7 as you suggested, you get Gb/C.

  On 1/23/2022 at 5:25 PM, brian trageskin said:

 it's a Gb lydian dominant voicing, a lydian b7 sus4 voicing if you will, that resolves back to Gb7. 

1 hour later: it's also a blues voicing that comes from the blues scale. you could say that and you would be correct. 

yeah once again i think i got carried away lol. i forgot that what matters is the root note, and if you play C in the bass, it does sounds very dissonant. it's a dissonant mode. mode 2 (Db in the bass) and 3 (E in the bass) are also dissonant. mode 4 (Gb in the bass) is the only one that sounds consonant, since it becomes a reduced blues scale.

  On 1/23/2022 at 4:07 PM, Brian Dance said:

I can imagine a cake but no one's coming over for tea unless I know how to bake.

lucky for them you saw the recipe in your mind

  On 1/23/2022 at 6:32 PM, Alcofribas said:

lucky for them you saw the recipe in your mind

Lucky for them my years of experience working at some of the finest patisseries on the French Riviera allows me to translate the delicious cake from my mind into the real world quickly and accurately.
Not to mention I probably wouldn't have even thought of such a unique balance of flavours and textures without my studies at the University of Dessert in Orlando, Florida.

  On 1/23/2022 at 6:27 PM, brian trageskin said:

yeah once again i think i got carried away lol. i forgot that what matters is the root note, and if you play C in the bass, it does sounds very dissonant. it's a dissonant mode. mode 2 (Db in the bass) and 3 (E in the bass) are also dissonant. mode 4 (Gb in the bass) is the only one that sounds consonant, since it becomes a reduced blues scale.

actually mode 2 doesn't sound that dissonant, since the 5th of Gb is in the bass, so you still get that lydian dominant sound.

somebody please put me out of my misery.

source: university of dessert, orlando, FL

  On 1/23/2022 at 8:03 PM, brian trageskin said:

actually mode 2 doesn't sound that dissonant, since the 5th of Gb is in the bass, so you still get that lydian dominant sound.

somebody please put me out of my misery.

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Yeah, man, it's all good. You can use it for all those things. It's pretty dissonant in general, but I'd say that's a feature, not a bug. Sometimes you want that.

  On 1/23/2022 at 7:49 PM, Brian Dance said:

Lucky for them my years of experience working at some of the finest patisseries on the French Riviera allows me to translate the delicious cake from my mind into the real world quickly and accurately.
Not to mention I probably wouldn't have even thought of such a unique balance of flavours and textures without my studies at the University of Dessert in Orlando, Florida.

gonna have to agree that years of hands on experience and study inform your ideas and shape how you execute them.

glad we cleared this up...? my melodies are about to get Quite Good

  On 1/23/2022 at 8:41 PM, Alcofribas said:

gonna have to agree that years of hands on experience and study inform your ideas and shape how you execute them.

glad we cleared this up...? my melodies are about to get Quite Good

I'm excited. Consider my breath bated.

  On 1/23/2022 at 1:40 AM, brian trageskin said:

all this to say that the dissonance in that scale has nothing to do with the presence of both the b2 and b5

yeah, this turned out to be half-right, half-wrong. i should have waited the next day to check that out on the keyboard. 

half-wrong for the 1st mode (the scale in root position), if you play the root as a pedal in the bass and you play the other notes melodically. then it doesn't matter what the 4th note is (you already have the tonic, the b2 and b5), you will always get the rub of both the b2 and b5 with the root, which is dissonant. not that dissonance is a bad thing, i'm just talking 4-note scales theory here. 

half-right for the other modes because you then lose the b2 and b5. 

literally no one gives a crap.

i forgot to add i'm talking about using only the notes from a 4-note scale here, and no other note in the bass. otherwise no scale would be dissonant per se, you just have to pick the right note and play it in the bass. yeah that's not my focus here (although that's also a great topic). 

  On 1/23/2022 at 10:21 PM, brian trageskin said:

half-right for the other modes because you then lose the b2 and b5. 

holy crap i managed to make a non sequitur and a self-contradictory argument at the same time, lol.

a non sequitur because the fact that the other modes aren't dissonant says nothing about why the 1st mode is dissonant, and doesn't invalidate the claim that the b2 and b5 are responsible for its dissonance (yeah i should add here that yesterday, when i said that the scale was dissonant, i meant the 1st mode - i was thinking of C as the root while playing the scale melodically).

it's also a self-contradictory argument because what i said clearly suggests that the b2 and b5 are responsible for the dissonance. 

logic 101

oh and btw, obviously the 1st mode is dissonant because of the b9 and b5, like i said in the first place. no surprises here. but yeah, it's only dissonant if you clearly outline the tonic, in a modal way. hence my confusion for a moment here.

yeah i'm sick of typing b2, it looks too ambiguous - are we talking about the stealth bomber here? b9 is pretty self-evident. 

/last post

lol

  On 1/24/2022 at 12:47 AM, brian trageskin said:

i was thinking of C as the root

i meant as the tonic. i always forget what root means exactly since the french use a totally different word, "fondamentale".

i swear to god this is my last post for today.

shit, i just looked up the definition of root very quickly and it's not much different from the tonic apparently. for some reason i always thought the root was the note in the bass, which isn't necessarily the tonic (could be any interval from a chord that's inverted). turns out i was wrong apparently. same shit for "fondamentale".

root vs tonic: same shit? y/n

/last post

root = tonic of a chord 

tonic = tonal center of a scale

?am i doing this right?

/last post for real

  On 1/24/2022 at 1:52 AM, brian trageskin said:

root = tonic of a chord 

tonic = tonal center of a scale

?am i doing this right?

/last post for real

Yes, sounds about right. And the tonic chord is the chord whose root is the tonic.

Yeah, English mixes up the terms somewhat...

In my language the tonic (tonika) refers to the chord only, as related to the subdominant, the dominant, etc. 

  On 1/23/2022 at 4:44 AM, yekker said:

Has theory for boards of canada been brought up in this thread? Maybe it deserves it's own... Like can someone examine some of those hazy melodies and technically describe what's going on?. Cause I can't and I'd like to know.

Yeah this sounds fun, what about the melody for the start of the Wildlife analysis? seems to be in C major (all the white notes? right?) and goes like this:

A4 B4 E5 D5 B4 A4 B4 G5 E5 D5 A4 B4 D5 E5 D5 E5 B4 A5 E5 D5 A5 G5

the timing doesnt seem to be able to be written accurately with with constant bpm, to me at least

what does theory say about what is going on here? there is something special about this melody and if you can explain it with theory I will be impressed

  On 1/24/2022 at 3:14 AM, ArtificialDisco said:

Yes, sounds about right. And the tonic chord is the chord whose root is the tonic.

  On 1/24/2022 at 5:19 AM, psn said:

Yeah, English mixes up the terms somewhat...

In my language the tonic (tonika) refers to the chord only, as related to the subdominant, the dominant, etc. 

yeah, the irony is i know what the word root refers to when we talk about chords in root position. for some reason i mistook the word root with the word bass note. the bass note is the lowest note of a chord (duh), whether the chord is in root position or inverted. yeah and the tonic chord is the same in french, "accord de tonique". i learned music theory in english though, not in french.

  On 1/24/2022 at 7:07 AM, vkxwz said:

Yeah this sounds fun, what about the melody for the start of the Wildlife analysis? seems to be in C major (all the white notes? right?) and goes like this:

A4 B4 E5 D5 B4 A4 B4 G5 E5 D5 A4 B4 D5 E5 D5 E5 B4 A5 E5 D5 A5 G5

the timing doesnt seem to be able to be written accurately with with constant bpm, to me at least

what does theory say about what is going on here? there is something special about this melody and if you can explain it with theory I will be impressed

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the melody plays the E minor pentatonic scale over an E major drone. the G in the melody is where all the spice is, it functions as the #9 interval over that E major chord, which typically sounds bluesy. and the A gives that E mixolydian pentatonic tonality. the harmony sounds halfway through different musical traditions as a result, i'd say - western, african-american and indian.

  On 1/24/2022 at 12:14 PM, brian trageskin said:

halfway through 

i meant halfway between. 

  On 1/24/2022 at 12:14 PM, brian trageskin said:

the harmony sounds halfway through different musical traditions as a result, i'd say - western, african-american and indian.

but to be clear, the tune sounds typically indian, not european or african-american. by isolating the intervals, we can see the similarities with other types of harmony, but the structure of the tune has nothing european or american.

it's a modal tune, it explores the sound of a scale that's commonly used in india - unlike european and american tunes which are tonal in nature, meaning they have chord progressions that use different modes.