Message 11/29
Date: 15-Apr-00 @ 11:01 PM -
RE: what scale is this? - Pt_2
The tag you use for a break is one of these:
<
one of these:
br
and one of these:
>
all typed together. Or you could use the paragraph tag which uses a "p" instead of a "br"... You need to type the break tag twice for a line of white space, the paragraph gives it to you automatically. You can always "View Source" on any web page if you're curious about how the html that's there works.
The scale or key is usually an agreed on convention by the musicians performing a piece before the performance of the piece begins, at least in my experience. And usually those scales will be fairly conventional -- majors, minors and modes thereof. Granted some crusty old jazz guys might start playing a Bb Javanese, an A Pelog or an E Hindu (the three scales I posted in the last thread) if you're trying to sit in with them and they want to let you know you're not worthy.
Kid Dik, the best way to start out on this stuff is learn to play some songs. You learn by osmosis if you feel like you're actually playing music. Nobody should start out the journey worrying about the more complicated or esoteric theory behind modal improvisation or composing in modified scales. You pick stuff up as you go along. Maybe take some lessons. There's a reason piano teachers start kids off with "Chopsticks" and not Scriabin.
I don't think keyboard makers are going to get away from the current key layout any time soon. Millions of people have come to terms with those black keys and you can too.
I started in a basement punk bands in the early '80s playing bass & guitar knowing a moveable major scale and 2 forms of barre chords. And everything I've picked up in the meantime has come through
nice people showing me things (and correcting me), reading and experimenting. I've been involved with music semi-professionally since '84 and
almost everyone I've had the pleasure to work with shares up their knowledge unconditionally. Only a few would choose to belittle people they felt weren't as far along the journey as themselves. We've got a name for that sort of person, now don't we. Oh, and anyone who tells you they're figured everything out is lying. You stop learning about this stuff when you die.
BTW, in a Keyboard mag interview in the early '90s, one of the guys in Coldcut said something along the lines of "We've found that if you put three fingers on white keys, each one separated by a white key, they make this thing called a chord. But that's about as far as we want to go with that." Draw your own conclusion.