Hey GHP or other music ******-*******s...

[GDC]

can you explain to a not very musically inclined person about the tri-note and fifth scale and their transistion from classical to contemporary heavy metal music? TIA.

[critical_phil]

learning yngwie malmsteen?

[GDC]

learning yngwie malmsteen?

I wish. I watched a documentary yesterday about heavy metal and it mentioned these things but didn't go into much detail. Where else could I turn for info but the SO? It's worth watching just for the interactive "geneaology" of metal bands it has.


http://www.soonerfans.com/forums/showthread.php?t=72358&highlight=headbanger%27s+journey

[Getem]

You got Randy Rhoads to blame for this crap. Shoulda just stuck with pentatonic...

[GDC]

I bet Fugue could help out here.

[85Sooner]

lostsa hemidemisemiquavers

[LoyalFan]

lostsa hemidemisemiquavers

Stop that! Ya' done gimme de quivers!

Etaoin Shrdlu

[Oldnslo]

Just push play!

[Fugue]

I bet Fugue could help out here.

GHP and the other pros will have to help with the scale details. My take on the transition is a little different though. I think that heavy metal began with the Baroque era(1600-1750ish) and simply was revisted beginning in the 1980's.
The devil's triad(dissonant 5th, I think) is a really interesting deal as the notes were thought to summon the devil and were forbidden in places.

[GDC]

GHP and the other pros will have to help with the scale details. My take on the transition is a little different though. I think that heavy metal began with the Baroque era(1600-1750ish) and simply was revisted beginning in the 1980's.
The devil's triad(dissonant 5th, I think) is a really interesting deal as the notes were thought to summon the devil and were forbidden in places.

Part of what confused me was they were showing Eddie Van Halen playing Eruption I guess as their example. I was thinking more of some of the Scandinavian metal bands and of course Yngvie Malmsteen.

[Soonerbabeinbama]

I majored in music - what was the question again?????:confused:

[apusooner]

the tri tone is the augmented fourth not really a diminished 5th because you can lower the fifth in a triad to change the quality of the chord as long as the third is lowered also, i think. if the third is not lowered, it's considered an augmented 4th. i think. it's known as the devil's interval. i think when enharmonically spelling it, it is the augmented fourth. GHP would know, he was a theory teacher. it's used in jazz progressions alot, especially in chord substitutions,and some european catholic churches still won't allow jazz inside because of its devilish reference. a common usage of the tri tone is the opening to the simpsons. " The Simp-sons..." fun fact

[LoyalFan]

If it ain't in the Myxolydian Mode (sp?), it ain't nuttin'!
It's all in how you mix yer Lydians.

Jim Bob Sousa

[GottaHavePride]

OK, watch out, I'm gonna ramble. Don't know how much of this is what you're looking for.

The big thing about the tri-tone (augmented fourth, diminished fifth, 6 half-steps) is it splits the octave in half distance-wise. From C to F-sharp is 6 half steps up, and it's 6 more half steps up to return to a C. Acoustically, though, it doesn't line up as well. A perfect fifth (C to G, or 7 half-steps) is a 3:2 ratio if you're looking at the frequencies of the notes. The tri-tone is a much nastier fraction.

It's a very dissonant interval (that's why they use it for train whistles) and because of that it was associated with the devil and very early church music prohibited its use. Once harmony started evolving they found that the dominant to tonic pull (So-Do, or V-I, however you know it) could be enhanced by adding a seventh on top of the dominant chord (so, in the key of C the V-7 chord is G-B-D-F, the F is the seventh of the chord). So in that chord you get two notes pulling you to the C chord (C-E-G) - the F pulls down very strongly to the E (only a half-step away) and the B pulls very strongly up to the C (also only a half-step).

The tricky part is that the interval between the B and the F is a diminished fifth, or tri-tone, so it had to be treated very carefully so that you could get away with it. Later on composers started doing whatever they wanted, but at first it was still a touchy interval.

Anway, on to jazz and/or rock: if you want to start messing with any of the standard harmonic progressions, as long as you maintain that tri-tone that leads to the next chord you can substitute a lot of different chords in there. Say, instead of your G7 (G,B,D,F) you wanted to throw in a different chord. As long as you keep the B and F you can still get back to C. So you could use the G7, G-sharp-diminished-7 (G#,B,D,F), B-diminished-7 (B,D,F,A), an E-minor-9 (E,G,B,D,F) and so on and so on. It really opens up the possibilities.

That flexibility - I think - is why it's such a big thing in jazz and rock circles, because you can get some really crazy sounds by substituting in different chords that way. I hope that helps and/or makes sense. :D

[GDC]

I knew I was asking the right person, thanks GHP, and to the others for their input.

[49r]

I think Strongbad (http://www.homestarrunner.com/sbemail36.html) can explain it better than anyone.

[tbl]

You got Randy Rhoads to blame for this crap. Shoulda just stuck with pentatonic...
No crap. I either play minor pentatonic or the major scale, and that worked for Hendrix, Clapton, Page, Allman, etc. I flippin hate those classical scales incorporated into rock. I mean, they work on the stuff that they're being played with, but it seems to be in all the souless rock music.

IMO, there's no worse guitar players than Yngwie or Vai. Extremely fast, but extremely awful.

Was the documentary on the Doc Channel, made in the 80's? I've seen that a couple of times the past month. Not bad, but they start focusing way too much on the 80's stuff towards the end (for obvious reasons).

[GDC]

Was the documentary on the Doc Channel, made in the 80's? I've seen that a couple of times the past month. Not bad, but they start focusing way too much on the 80's stuff towards the end (for obvious reasons).


http://www.metalhistory.com/

[GDC]

from Wikipedia


The appropriation of "classical" music by heavy metal typically includes the influence of baroque, romantic and modernist composers such as Bach, Paganini, Wagner and Beethoven rather than Mozart or Haydn. Though Deep Purple/Rainbow guitarist Ritchie Blackmore had been experimenting with musical figurations borrowed from classical music since the early 1970s, Edward Van Halen's solo cadenza "Eruption" (released on Van Halen's first album in 1978) marks an important moment in the development of virtuosity in metal. Following Van Halen, the "classical" influence in metal guitar during the 1980s looked to the early eighteenth century for its model of speed and technique; notably, classically-inspired guitarist Yngwie Malmsteen, whose technical prowess inspired a myriad of neo-classical players[1].

Musicologists and metal musicians have--as seen in the anthropological documentary Metal: A Headbanger's Journey--made much of the role of the tritone, a dissonant interval consisting of a root note and a augmented forth/diminished fifth, e.g., C and F sharp, which ostensibly results in a "heavy," "evil" sound, so much so that its use was supposedly banned in medieval composition as "Diabolus in Musica" ("the devil in music"). The evocative tritone was exploited by Romantic composers and is definitive to the blues scale (as opposed to the pentatonic scale), part of metal's heritage and fundamental to its solos and riffs, e.g., the beginning of "Purple Haze" by Jimi Hendrix or "Smoke on the Water" by Deep Purple.

The late Baroque era of Western art music was also frequently interpreted through a gothic lens. For example, "Mr. Crowley," (1981) by Ozzy Osbourne and guitarist Randy Rhoads, uses both a pipe organ-like synthesizer and Baroque-inspired guitar solos to create a particular mood for Osbourne's lyrics concerning the occultist Aleister Crowley. For the introduction to 1982's "Diary of a Madman", Rhoads borrowed heavily from Cuban classical guitar composer Leo Brouwer's "Etude #6". Like many other metal guitarists in the 1980s, Rhoads quite earnestly took up the "learned" study of musical theory and helped to solidify the minor industry of guitar pedagogy magazines (including Guitar for the Practicing Musician) that grew during the decade. In most instances, however, metal musicians who borrowed the technique and rhetoric of art music were not attempting to be classical musicians.


Iron Maiden — PowerslaveThe Encarta encyclopedia states that "when a text was associated with the music, Bach could write musical equivalents of verbal ideas," and Progressive rock bands such as Emerson, Lake, and Palmer and Yes had already explored this dynamic before heavy metal evolved. As heavy metal uses apocalyptic themes and images of power and darkness, the ability to successfully translate verbal ideas into music is often seen as critical to its authenticity and credibility[citation needed]. An example of this is the album Powerslave by Iron Maiden [citation needed]. The cover is of a dramatic Egyptian scene and many of the songs on the album have subject matter requiring a sound suggestive of life and death, including a song entitled "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," based on the poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Iron Maiden bassist Steve Harris has cited progressive rock bands [2] such as Rush and Yes as influences, and it should be noted that the 1977 Rush album A Farewell to Kings features the twelve-minute "Xanadu," also inspired by Coleridge and pre-dating the Iron Maiden composition by several years.

[BlondeSoonerGirl]

Fugue's pants are getting tight.

[GDC]

Fugue's pants are getting tight.

He and GHP were right on the mark.


http://www.union.edu/Scholars/soph/kirk.htm

[Fugue]

Fugue's pants are getting tight.

pants?
I'm out there Booty and I'm lovin' every minute of it

You are correct, I do love this schtuff.