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Thread: Is a# the same as bb?

  1. #76
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    Quote Originally Posted by (JeffD @ Nov. 15 2006, 18:38)
    There is no music on the page. Just dots and lines. I noticed that when you take a piece of sheet music, roll it up and stick it in your ear, the sounds it makes are not the musical at all.
    Isn't calling printed notation "music" analogous to calling a recipe "food"




  2. #77
    Martin Stillion mrmando's Avatar
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    I've seen a few mandolins with microfrets ... and there are several bending & sliding techniques mandolinists can use to get at the pitches between the frets. On bowed strings I go back & forth between classical and folk, and have to really watch what I'm doing sometimes.

    Even if A# and Bb are enharmonic equivalents, that doesn't mean the symbols are interchangeable, as some people have pointed out. I remember a quick pickup rehearsal where the bass player was trying to bring me up to speed on the progression. He said it was "F D A# C" or something like that, pretty standard I-vi-IV-V. But he SHOULD have said "F D minor B-flat C."



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  3. #78
    Martin Stillion mrmando's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by (JeffD @ Nov. 15 2006, 19:38)
    There is no music on the page. Just dots and lines. I noticed that when you take a piece of sheet music, roll it up and stick it in your ear, the sounds it makes are not the musical at all.
    Well, you have to set it on fire, and then if IT doesn't make a musical sound ... YOU will.

    Notation is an incredibly useful tool. Sure you don't learn everything you need to know about Irish tunes from O'Neill's, but part of the reason for that is that it's incredibly bare-bones notation. It's at least theoretically possible to write down much of the interpretation a player might bring to a tune, but it's not very efficient.
    Emando.com: More than you wanted to know about electric mandolins.

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  4. #79
    Innocent Bystander JeffD's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by (mrmando @ Nov. 15 2006, 21:35)
    Notation is an incredibly useful tool.
    I quite agree. And I love perusing tune books looking for a gem to share next jam. But I can only do that because I have done a whole lot of listening, and have absorbed the genre, be it Celtic, or ole timey, or bluegrass, or country waltz,so that I can "look at a tune" on the page and "hear" how its supposed to go.

    Being "paper trained" myself, I came to it somewhat handicapped - I knew my E# from my F, and my hemi-semi-demi-quavers, but it was a while before I could play music.
    A talent for trivializin' the momentous and complicatin' the obvious.

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  5. #80

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    [QUOTE]Nobody has mentioned Harry Partch?

    You mentioned him

    Anyone interested in microtonal music should read Genesis of a Music and listen to CDs of his work. A true American genius! I've also read a great biography about him by Bob Gilmore.

    Seth

  6. #81

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    This was probably answered already. A# and Bb are technically exactly the same (no kidding). However, theoretically they are very different. First of all A# and Bb have different uses and key signatures and (forgiveme if I am wrong) scales and chords and sounds. Just remember because it sounds the same doesn't mean it is. The perfect example is in chords or arpeggios. If you play a 7 chords then just because the 1st and the 8th are the same it doesn't mean you can ligitimately play the 8th and have it sound the same. Actually, try it out it will sound bad.

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    I liked the point about the string-bending gitbox players. I always loved the way BB does that thing with the deep bend that never *quite* gets there. It has the same effect as the sus4 chord where you wait for the resolution. With BB the resolution doesn't usually happen, and you really do end up feeling blue. Kinda gentle tension.

    A friend told me a story which I assume is very old. At a formal party in a music college, one of the students was playing the piano to entertain the guests. During one piece he was playing, someone interrupted him to ask a question and he stopped playing having just struck a sus4 chord. A minute later, the door was flung wide, and an annoyed-looking professor stormed into the room. He marched over to the piano, thumped out the major chord to which the hanging sus4 should have resolved, then stalked back to bed without a word.

    Apocryphal, but it made me laugh.

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    Look at a piano. Find the A note and the B note. The black key between them is both A# and Bb.
    Alan

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    everybody knows you can tune a piano, but you can't tuna fish

    True story



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    John -- Oh, I dunno. I have tuna fish all the time. They sell it at the grocery store near where I live.
    EdSherry

  11. #86

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    Quote
    According to Robert Fulghum, refrigerators hum in B-flat. "The electrical motor of the refrigerator gives off a sixty-cycle B-flat hum, as do all motors that run on 120-volt AC current. The washing machine, dryer, electric heater, blender, hair dryer, coffeepot, and all the rest are B-flat appliances."

    Yea when I first started my tuner would always read B-flat and it took me quite a while to figure out it was the heater humming along...lol.
    Look up (to see whats comin down)

  12. #87

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    Remember seeing an old instrument with the fingerboard scalloped like a rip saw set to cut towards the nut.

    It gave me the impression that fretting hard immediately behind the fret (where the fret board is deeply scalloped) could produce a higher pitch than fretting just in front of the previous fret (where the fretboard was all but level with the crown)

    I can't remember where I saw this, unfortunately, but perhaps this was indeed an attempt to allow just intonation on a fretted instrument?

    Steve

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