Real Piano Players here?

There’s some good stuff on here, someone posted it on facebook recently, visualises the euclidean concepts you mention, really interesting stuff! https://roelhollander.eu/en/blog-saxophone/Coltrane-Geometry/

You are sure about this?

According to Wikipedia harpsichords go back to about 1540 and earlier, the first spinet could have been around at 1631 and the first circle of fifth like document is dated around 1670.

Well, my impression could be wrong, but I think the piano has developed from the early harps, which have been diatonic and have been tuned typically in a major scale. Also modern concert harps are built like this. To play them chromatically there is a complex and expensive mechanism, which is used to stretch single strings from natural to sharp. Like having it all in Cmaj, stretch the F and you have Gmaj.

Harpsichords, spinets, and later the early pianos are more or less harps, which have been laid down horizontaly and have been upgraded with additional strings, which are required to achieve the 12 tone chromatic scale. So all 12 tones are available in parallel. If you open a piano, those additional strings correspond geometrically to the positions of the black keys. This layout is a kind of compromise. It maintains the logic of the seven tones per octave of a diatonic scale and tries to get the new keys placed in between and stay as close together as possible.

BTW … it’s the same with the flutes, which have been diatonic for ages until those instruments got new holes and covering pads/keys to play 12 tones of the chromatic system without “special tricks”.

There are alternative layouts, example would be the family of isomorphic keyboards, where specific tone intervals definitely have been the baseline to achieve a better playability and to try to overcome the fact, that the classic black & white keyboard requires for each key of the chromatic scale it’s own special fingering :wink:

1 Like

The Circle of Fifths will help you a lot, for sure. Most Western chord progressions are built on top of it.

I personally didn’t get it, though, until after I’d learned how to play various songs and easy classical pieces.

The music of JS Bach in particular opened up a lot of stuff for me. All of his music was composed using the Circle of 5ths. Learning how to play some of the Two Part Inventions resulted in greater freedom for playing melodies on the piano keyboard. Mastery of the pieces is not even required - simply practicing only the right hand part by itself, or just the left hand part is all that is needed.

2 Likes

And there is a reason, why one of the first recordings of the electronic instrument age was “Switched-On-Bach”, by Wendy Carlos :wink:

Thought I’d add that I only had a teacher for about 6 months or so, and the theory he thought me was very basic and could be picked up easily from the right book or Internet site, but helped tremendously.

Bach’s stuff works really well for sequenced music.

Just about all the great composers who followed him studied his compositions, in the process of developing their own craft.

If you pick just one melody line in any of his compositions and study it ( listen to it, play it, listen to it again, etc.) you can learn a lot about creating a melody line, as well as how it can change direction, harmonically-speaking.

I think “Air on G String” would be a great place to start - it’s a slow moving piece and the voices in the harmony are easy to pick out. And yes, Wendy Carlos recorded it on her famous album.

3 Likes

Indeed, I have almost every piece of J.S.Bach and his son P. E. Bach on records and love their music.

I think, composing for an orchestra and sequencing is just the same thing, from a composers persepctive. All the sheet music is in prinicple not much different from a piano roll in a DAW with many tracks or a hardware sequencer … the difference is that the events are carried out by human beeings, which gives the piece of music a special touch.

1 Like

I kind of think the same way. :slight_smile:

Traditional sheet music includes markings for tempo, time signature (track length), dynamics (velocity, gate time, etc.), because there’s typically no machine to do the rhythm for you in a traditional orchestra, so you have to provide instructions for the humans performing those roles. :wink:

One neat thing about a piano-roll type sequencer is, you can see the individual voices in the harmony in a plainer-looking, graphical format - less confusing to someone without a music theory background. I think that to start to really understand harmony, one has to stop thinking of chords as “blocks” and more as snapshots of voices playing in harmony.

If we look to classical sheet music (all the tracks are there in the score) and then listen attentive, we can see in the notes all those repeated patterns and motions, which often are typcal for a composer, his era, and the various groups of instruments. The use of repeated pattern in music has a long tradition and is not an invention of modern electronic musicians using sequencers.

For an example, in classic baroque or philharmonic music percussion instruments have only minor significance. Drums and percussion are often used only to create a climax, bump or crash once very loud, get every body’s attention for a second, and are quiet most of the time. There is no kick/snare/hihat beat. But there is beat. The only difference is that the beat is created by melodic instruments, which are playing specific “beat-creating-pattern”. In philharmonic concerts this is often performed by string instruments.

I would recommend to listen to classical music from time to time and try to embrace how a classical piece of music breaths, grooves, and sings. There is a reason, why those classic pieces of music are performed and loved hundreds of years after having had their premiere. They are master pieces of “beat”, “arrangement”, “mixing”, and “mastering” without the help of electronic or digital tools. AND at those times new instruments have been invented in scales of 50 to 100 years … if at all… just a side blow remark to all of us, who are suffering GAS :wink: … ahhm … me included :wink:

1 Like

I’m taking weekly lessons. It felt wrong to own musical instruments with keys and not be able to play the most basic things. I started last year being 40 yo and it’s amazing to learn that your brain and body can rewire itself even at this age. I highly recommend it.

James Rhodes said it best.

7 Likes

My reasoning came from intuition of cycling major scales through the cycle of fifths, I was rash to jump to the conclusion that the keyboard as we know it is based on these principles, but when I look at the keyboard I can’t see any other way logically it was put together (maybe I am putting the horse before the cart). It’s amazing that the cycle of fifths were written about that late after the development of the keyboard, it’s possible that it took that long to reach the printing press, or maybe that it’s just a pattern that instrument makers picked up on at the time and didn’t explicitly quantify it with theory?

The C major scale is a diatonic scale made up of all of the successive tones of the cycle of fifths, but with an F (the 4th before the first C). Rotate the cycle of fifths from C clockwise once and you get all the tones of the C major scale successively.

The only scale that is more related to the cycle of fifths than the major scale is the Lydian scale, all notes of which from 1 to 7 succeed through the cycle of fifths.

The thing in my mind connecting it all together is the harmonic series, which is the cycle of fifths expressed though ratio’s. I just reread your comment and realised I’ve not considered some of the other statements about earlier limitations of the mechanisms at the times, really interesting! Have also been reading about isomorphic keyboards and it led me to this! Thanks for the info :slight_smile: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harmonic_series_(music)

2 Likes

The circle of fifths only became possible once well-tempered keyboard instruments were widely adopted. Before Bach’s time, meantone keyboards ruled the Western music world. Circle of 5ths was impossible because of the comma problem (cannot close the circle).

J.S. Bach grew up with meantone-based keyboards, longing for a tuning scheme which would allow him to write music that would sound not too badly out of tune when modulating to different keys. His wish came true with the invention of well temperament.

http://www.kylegann.com/histune.html

The keyboard layout, for whatever reason, is centered around the C major scale. The white keys are that scale, and the black ones are the notes that are not in it. From what I understand, this dates back to the meantone days.

5 Likes

vinyl classical would be fab.

leaving the car radio on the classical channel during driving also is a cool idea to gain a deeper appreciation of the complex angelic power of the piano

subscribed to his channel

Be happy about your intuitive approach. If there is something you see in a pattern or layout and you can connect this with the keyboard and with the circle of fifths, great.

As @GovernorSilver writes about the different tunings of this era, the topic is very interesting by it’s own right.

It still shocks me to read this lol. When i first learnt of this tuning workaround as a student a few aeons ago, I found it difficult to believe. And yet, Well Temperament is indeed a slight distortion of the “proper” tuning, it sounds in-tune (to musical ears of this time as that is what we are accustomed to), and is fabulous in that it means that a separately tuned piano is not required for each of the different key bases.

Interestingly enough to mention, the Monomachine has a machine type that does chords and the temperament tuning of that machine is calibrated (digitally) to the original Meantone tempering tuning (non adjusted tuning) “settings” (for want of a better word).

I learned basic music theory on an accordion with buttons. Instruments like that are much easier to learn on than the convoluted piano key layout. The reason is that you only need to learn to play each chord and scale once. A Cm7 will be the exact same “finger shape” as a C#m7 or any other root note. Same with scales. Basically 1/12th of the work learning the same on a piano.

The same goes for many of the modern expressive controllers like Eigenharp, Linnstrument, Haken Continuum, etc. So if I didn’t know anything about music theory and wanted to learn that today, I’d much rather sit down with a Linnstrument than a piano.

I know how to read music notation, but that also strikes me as ridiculously overcomplicated. It took me years to read it reasonably well. In comparison, I recently came across a logical, modern notation system called DODEKA. That took aprox. 15 minutes to learn.

2 Likes

DODEKA seems to be more logical, at first glance, but the system has also some disadvantages.

The notation becomes particularly difficult to read, if there is more complicated context as the home page shows off. The examples are IMHO very simple. Example … for chords with more notes on top of each other, let’s consider here typical diminished or augmented chords including punctuation, it becomes a dense chunk of black rectangles. For a trained reader of the classic notation system it’s quite easier and quicker to live with “sharp” and “flat” rather having FOUR different positions like on-the-line, sitting-on-top-of-line, sitting-in-the-middle, sitting-below-of-line. The representation of note-length requires a kind of assessment, how long the bar is, I think it’s more easy to have a hollow note, a hollow note with a stem, a full note with a stem etc., a dot.

The advantage to use DODEKA notation with a corresponding keyboard is obvious, particularly if we consider somebody, who is not trained in the classic system and starting to learn to play. I tend to believe that the learning curve might indeed be flatter.

But there are so many other music instruments coming along with their own logic, which does not have a representation in DODEKA that I think, a more generalized system like our classic notation will not be replaced by DODEKA. I would compare DODEKA to the tablatures for guitars, which I often use, to get it done quick. It seems to me to be another compromise, which is not ideal and having it’s own strengths and weaknesses :wink:

If it works for a musician, fine. Here is not right or wrong :wink:

3 Likes

Thanks for the link and your insights :slight_smile:

1 Like

I remember the mixed reviews for “Switched On Bach 2000”, in which the pieces were redone using the tunings (all some variation of well temperament) that Bach likely used in his time. I think those who didn’t like it, didn’t like the sound of the well-tempered notes. I can only imagine today’s equal temperament (which didn’t exist in Bach’s time) would have sounded a bit unpleasant to audiences of his time.

Ab major triads sounded particularly bad in meantone temperament. Bach was frustrated at not being able get good-sounding Ab major triads on his meantone harpsichord, and so he took it out on his harpsichord tuner by Ab major chords when the tuner arrived to work on the instrument. So he must have composed his Ab major pieces after well temperament was invented.

1 Like