[billy16]

i noticed this earlier, but i made no mind of it. now i'm curious.

why is there no such chord, or note such as Cb or B#?

same with E# or Fb.

i don't know any theory whatsoever. i've tried to figure it out myself and after 5 minutes i gave up. if someone would be so kind as to explain that, that would clear some confusion.

[GilmourIsGod]

i noticed this earlier, but i made no mind of it.    now i'm curious.

why is there no such chord, or note such as Cb or B#?

same with E# or Fb. 

i don't know any theory whatsoever. i've tried to figure it out myself and after 5 minutes i gave up. if someone would be so kind as to explain that, that would clear some confusion.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

i have wondered before...

[LedZepAgain]

an E# is an F, an Fb is an E. same theory with the B and C. that's begginner stuff.

[Graeme! Yes, Graeme!]

C flat does exist. It's called B.

[GilmourIsGod]

C flat does exist. It's called B.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

but why is there no semi-tone in between?

[Graeme! Yes, Graeme!]

Why does the only scale that has no flats or sharps start on C? A would be more logical. The reason is that in the octave there is only room for so many notes, and those are the names that were chosen centuries ago for some arbitrary reason. It doesn't matter what names are given to the notes though, music is all just emotional aural mathematics.

[GilmourIsGod]

did you know that non-western music there are different ways of dividing up the octave. like instead of 12 equal semitones there will be like 8 or 52 depending on where you look. i learned that the other day, thought it was fascinating.

[billy16]

i figured it was begginer things, but i've never had anyone tell me anything. so i had to figure it out myself. it does make sense now that i see it this way.

[dadfad]

did you know that non-western music there are different ways of dividing up the octave. like instead of 12 equal semitones there will be like 8 or 52 depending on where you look. i learned that the other day, thought it was fascinating.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

And in some cultures the original aboriginal folk music might actually contain notes not even on the Western scale, they would fall mid-way between two chromatic western notes. This is part of the origin of the blues. Music from a culture with an eight or five note musical scale with several of their scale notes not even existing in the Western scale blending with Western folk music (largely Celtic folk) and becoming American blues.

And sometimes you actually will CALL a C-note a B# (and other unusual "enharmonic" note-names). Because in a theoretic sense (not common sense, just theo-retical sense! ), every Tonic note MUST have the notes of its major scale containing each of the seven letter-names A through G (or C through B, or whatever), even if it means calling a note by an unusual "enharmonic" name like Cb or E# or whatever.

Yeah, the seven note major scale was just arbitrarily chosen because they sounded pleasing to the European culture way-back-when and so eventually became the dominant method of musical notation world-wide. Anyway.....

[goldrush]

Plus some of those old blues guys (like Lightnin' Hopkins and John Lee Hooker) used to play not tuned to "concert" pitch.

John brought up a good point. Western music got set into the seven note scale. If you listen to other music (Mid-Eastern for example) you hear alot of note combinations that sound unusual to western ears. Imagine playing a sitar using only an anatonic scale!

[dadfad]

Plus some of those old blues guys (like Lightnin' Hopkins and John Lee Hooker) used to play not tuned to "concert" pitch.

John brought up a good point. Western music got set into the seven note scale. If you listen to other music (Mid-Eastern for example) you hear alot of note combinations that sound unusual to western ears. Imagine playing a sitar using only an anatonic scale!

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Robert Pete Williams, an absolutely phenominal bluesman who began begging and playing on the streets as a seven year-old orphan, did not even know a guitar needed to be TUNED until he had been playing for years. When the rest of his family died from smallpox, he just took his father's old guitar off the wall of their shack and started to learn to bang off tunes on it to beg on the streets. As he got better, he would just strum it slowly, make all the necessary mental re-calibrations and adjustments in his head (as great an example of natural musical genious as Beethoven composing while deaf i/m/o) and begin playing. Later on, he learned that they should be tuned and how to tune and usually played in tune, but of course an out-of-tune guitar, or a string he thought was in the "wrong place" for one of his tunes and should be tuned to another note never was a problem for him! (That's why Robert Pete's tunes are often extremely difficult to figure out. And even if you can, no one can play them like him anyway. He called it his "air-music".... music he heard just floating through the air, and couldn't understand why everyone didn't hear it too, until he played it for them.)

Our Western musical concepts are just arbitrary and, as Goldrush pointed out, using another concept is what makes some music seem foreign or exotic sounding to us.



Robert Pete Williams