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> Conjunct melodic motion. Melodies tend to move by short distances from note to note. Large leaps sound inherently unmelodic. I wonder about this. Many folk m

> Conjunct melodic motion. Melodies tend to move by short distances from note to note. Large leaps sound inherently unmelodic. I wonder about this. Many folk musics have independently arrived at the pentatonic, and music in pentatonic is really quite jumpy. Listen to some jigs or reels and you'll be startled by how much the melody jumps around. In contrast, if you want to find very smooth melodic motion with long scale passages, approaches by semitone and so on, you'll find it much more in Bach than in folk or modern pop. So smooth melody might be more of a minority taste. Or consider the song Axel F. It's pretty much the perfect pop hook, all producers dream of creating something like it and all listeners can instantly latch onto it. Yet it consists mostly of jumps, including a third, a fourth, a fifth, a sixth, and an octave.

smcameron 3y ago
> Many folk musics have independently arrived at the pentatonic The way I had the pentatonic scale explained to me (embarassingly recently) explains why this is so. If you take all the chords of a given key, and then examine all the notes, and remove any note that sounds discordant with any chord of the key, the notes that remain are the notes of the pentatonic scale. (That's not 100% true, but it's close enough to true for rock 'n' roll.) What this means is, if you have a backing track that sticks to chords within the key, you can kind of noodle around in the pentatonic scale however you like, and it'll sound alright. For guitarists, this is like adding training wheels to your bike... suddenly, you're effortlessly making music, without crashing and burning, and all you're doing is sticking to the pentatonic scale. (Yeah, there's targeting chord tones, and following the changes, etc. but for a beginner/intermediate guitarist, the pentatonic scale is magic.) Before youtube, the above information was rather hard to come by, I found. I played guitar for approximately 30 years before figuring it out via to youtube. I made a youtube video[1] covering what I deemed to be the salient points... I'm not aware of another single youtube video covering all these points, (though all the points are covered by many combinations of other multiple youtube videos). [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HEH-9N7Yx5U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HEH-9N7Yx5U
- cousin_it 3y ago
  I'm not sure that's right. The pentatonic is the most popular scale in folk musics, but folk musics usually use very few chords. The basic 12 bar blues has 3 chords, and they're usually played as major chords or dominant 7th. But soloing over it with the minor pentatonic sounds great.
pierrec 3y ago
I'm also not convinced. That said, the author is suggesting that large intervals tend to get their power when we identify smaller intervals emerging from the broader composition. For example, when hearing an arpeggio of a chord progression, the literal intervals are large, but we easily identify the "higher level" small intervals appearing between chords, and those smaller intervals become melodically important in the listener's mind. This might occur more subtly in your examples.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
vixen99 3y ago
'Short distances' ? Plenty of exceptions. 'Be my love' - a massive hit in 1950 popularized by Mario Lanza (and used in the film Heavenly Creatures) begins with an absolutely characteristic leap from C#/D to the C almost one octave higher. Similar leaps occur later in the piece. Ask someone if they know it and you can bet they'll hum this bit. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EQz1McBv0fw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EQz1McBv0fw

smcameron 3y ago

> Many folk musics have independently arrived at the pentatonic The way I had the pentatonic scale explained to me (embarassingly recently) explains why this is so. If you take all the chords of a given key, and then examine all the notes, and remove any note that sounds discordant with any chord of the key, the notes that remain are the notes of the pentatonic scale. (That's not 100% true, but it's close enough to true for rock 'n' roll.) What this means is, if you have a backing track that sticks to chords within the key, you can kind of noodle around in the pentatonic scale however you like, and it'll sound alright. For guitarists, this is like adding training wheels to your bike... suddenly, you're effortlessly making music, without crashing and burning, and all you're doing is sticking to the pentatonic scale. (Yeah, there's targeting chord tones, and following the changes, etc. but for a beginner/intermediate guitarist, the pentatonic scale is magic.) Before youtube, the above information was rather hard to come by, I found. I played guitar for approximately 30 years before figuring it out via to youtube. I made a youtube video[1] covering what I deemed to be the salient points... I'm not aware of another single youtube video covering all these points, (though all the points are covered by many combinations of other multiple youtube videos). [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HEH-9N7Yx5U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HEH-9N7Yx5U

cousin_it 3y ago
I'm not sure that's right. The pentatonic is the most popular scale in folk musics, but folk musics usually use very few chords. The basic 12 bar blues has 3 chords, and they're usually played as major chords or dominant 7th. But soloing over it with the minor pentatonic sounds great.

pierrec 3y ago

I'm also not convinced. That said, the author is suggesting that large intervals tend to get their power when we identify smaller intervals emerging from the broader composition. For example, when hearing an arpeggio of a chord progression, the literal intervals are large, but we easily identify the "higher level" small intervals appearing between chords, and those smaller intervals become melodically important in the listener's mind. This might occur more subtly in your examples.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

vixen99 3y ago

'Short distances' ? Plenty of exceptions. 'Be my love' - a massive hit in 1950 popularized by Mario Lanza (and used in the film Heavenly Creatures) begins with an absolutely characteristic leap from C#/D to the C almost one octave higher. Similar leaps occur later in the piece. Ask someone if they know it and you can bet they'll hum this bit. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EQz1McBv0fw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EQz1McBv0fw