That’s a good find!
I have a Casio VL-5 that I keep handy near my desk. That’s the less cool but polyphonic VL model.
Until that recent spat of shows, I kept all my actual gear hooked up and ready to go in my bedroom, and it was great to just pop in there and see what I could do in a couple minutes.
it’s nice to see clear progress in my bass-playing. in the first couple days it felt like my fretting hand physically could not move in a way that reached the places i wanted it too; i had no idea how my whole body, actually, should act while playing (“where should my elbows be? and my shoulders? how much force should i be exerting from these body parts?” and so on)
now, i can at the very least see myself playing. i felt like a genius when i whipped out the feel good inc bass line, lol
one issue though is that my lower (thicker) strings are now making a weird rattling noise when i pluck them. i don’t think it’s a case of me not using enough strength on the frets / not placing the finger right before the fret ends or anything. the thinner strings feel fine. i recently did change the G string because it broke, so i wonder if that has anything to do with it
Fret buzz or are you just about to become the next Fieldy?
i had to look up what both of these things mean but yeah, seems like its the first one. thanks! i’ll search online if there’s a way i can solve this by myself otherwise i’ll just look for a technician to help out
(im definitly pressing right at the end of the first and second frets here)
Yeah that’s fret buzz. I always liked that sound because I never really graduated past playing literal garbage guitars. But there’s folks who can do “set ups” to fix that.
quick troubleshooting for people who don’t want to be guitar techs but also don’t want to pay a guy
causes of fret buzz: string is too close to frets
this can be because… (0) strings too floppy (1) truss rod too tight (2) saddles too low (3) frets uneven
just thought i would mention this off the bat, if your strings are too light gauge for how you are picking/plucking them, then they will flop around and bang against your frets causing fret buzz. solutions are just to play lighter touch (turn the amp up) or play heavier strings. may or may not apply to you, just thought i should mention.
with the guitar in playing position, capo/fret the lowest string at the first fret and the 12th fret.
ideally there should be a very small gap between the string and the fret. if that’s the case then skip to step 2. otherwise if it looks like the right side of this picture, string touching the frets… see spoiler below
the truss rod is a rod that goes through the guitar neck and bends the neck away from the guitar body (this is called “neck relief”). it will need to be adjusted depending on humidity and temperature. it’s very easy to adjust using an allen key, usually there’s a slot at one end of the neck or the other.
very small adjustments (1/8th of a turn) go a long way, look up a guide on doing this for your model of guitar. on most guitars i’ve seen, counterclockwise will loosen the truss rod and allow the neck to bend back toward the body, which should relieve fret buzz. you can technically mess up a guitar neck if you go too crazy with this so just work with a guide and you should be fine.
if the truss rod is fine then next place to look is the saddles. these also need an allen key, usually a much smaller size. the saddles are where the string meets the body, there’s usually a little metal piece for each string, or for multiple strings together.
the little holes on either side of the saddle have tiny screws or allen screws, clockwise will usually elevate the string slightly, make sure to elevate both sides so the saddle is level. elevate them just enough to where the fret buzz is no longer apparent. (you also want the strings to be in approximately the same curvature as the fretboard - this is called ‘string radius’ - but no need to obsess over this.)
if some frets or some notes buzz and others don’t, that’s where you will probably need a guitar tech. frets wear down over use and sometimes they wear unevenly, especially common on older instruments. fretwork can unfortunately be a bit pricey.
I have only one thing I would add to this: before you start, tune, and every time you make an adjustment like changing the truss rod tension or moving the saddles, retune before making a new adjustment. The change in string tension that comes from tuning will also change the angle of the neck and so on, so if you wait to retune until you’ve done everything, you may discover that it ends up not the way you wanted once you retune. It’s a gentle, gradual, methodical kind of process. On that note, it will go better if you have an accurate tuner, and you want to do it with the sort of strings you plan to use long-term.
Also, it seems like this is rare with basses, but if you so happen to have a tremelo bridge (the kind where you can use a whammy bar), you can change how stiff the bridge is by removing or adding springs in the back of the instrument. Generally you want to do this first, with no strings on the instrument, then put on strings, then do the initial tune, then the rest of the setup. It seems like almost no one has a bridge like that on their bass though so probably this doesn’t apply to your situation I guess.
tapping is a lot of work to make me think of duane from home movies
i guess if i use an open tuning it’ll sound less cheesy
you have to get callouses on the pads of your fingers! but i finally got good sound after using a scrunchy to help mute
i never liked the sound of tapping but stanley jordan seemed to really love it
I play bass in a band now? pretty neat, I haven’t done that in a few years. the leader wants to do late 70s joni type stuff so I’m brushing up on my jaco-isms.
sicc and badd, best joni era
Am fully in piano mode lately - realized I like guitar and I like jazz, just not together. So just focusing whole hog on jazz piano, it’s very intimidating since I’m starting 30 years later than everybody else and it’s honestly hard to find support for adult beginners. I’m blazing a path or something I guess.
I’m in a jazz discord server where I guess half the people are literal high schoolers shredding in their respective instruments and it makes me feel pretty bad. The more hours I practice in a day the further behind I feel by comparison, it’s like the more I think about playing the more the feeling of having wasted X years creeps up on me.
Just keeping going I guess
I’m back into trying to learn piano, after lots of starts and stops over the past few years due to life events. I have yet another new piano teacher (a third one!) and he’s very different from my previous two. My first two teachers had me going through the regular piano teaching books, Faber Adult Piano Adventures and Alfred Adult Piano Course. I finished Faber book 1 and appear to have gotten halfway through Alfred book 1. Those book alongside instructors felt like they had a big focus on teaching you fingering, learning to play notes in succession in different patterns using extremely simplified arrangements of existing music; not music you’d ever play by itself, but arrangements created for instruction. And they eventually got to teaching some basic chords as well, and one of my teachers wanted me to practice scales and that I-IV-V7 (?) thing with chords.
But I never felt like I understood any of it. I was being how to play music, but not understand music, or understand what or why I was playing and learning the things I was. Like, why do these three notes count as a chord? Why am I learning these IV and V7 chords that apparently are valid chords but have funny names and don’t have the same positional relationships between the notes? Why can you change the note positions like that? What do the names mean? I didn’t feel like I was learning what any all of this meant.
My new teacher seems much more casual in his method. Piano isn’t his main instrument, and I think he said he didn’t have formal musical education in piano although it’s still his most common lesson type. And he has a background in playing in bands, particularly jazz. And so I just started with him a month ago, and there’s obviously a period of him trying to figure out my skill level and what he should be teaching me, but he started off with giving me a guitar lead sheet for the Beetle’s song “Misery”, a song neither of us had heard of before, that he found while flipping through a book he had just to find me something to play. And man, I feel like I’m understanding way more about chords and musical theory that an I did the past few years.
One, I had never read a lead sheet before so it’s useful to now know what I’m looking at. But something about seeing the chord names instead of just the musical notation and playing it to an actual song has helped me understand what chords are and how they function in music, and how to jump between chords in a way that’s practical for actually playing modern songs. He showed me how you can invert chords and helped explain to be a bit about why that’s a thing you can do, and why you do it. He’s been showing me different ways to improvise, and add bass lines, and how to build the bassline.
By starting with a very basic pattern of chords and slowly building the complexity, I feel like I’m learning so much about how music works and why music works that those Faber and Alfred books never bother with that it’s piecing together so many disparate questions I had but didn’t know how to vocalize. It’s been really great, and has also been helping me nail down my memorization of musical notation in a way going through the piano instruction books didn’t either.
The way the chords constantly make me jump up and down a staff has made me more aware of where the notes fall, while the melody-focused practice pieces in Faber/Alfred had me kind of zone out and focus more on the patterns of the fingering rather than consciously thinking about the notes I’m playing (I was also very annoyed and how all the pieces told you fingering for every note, so my eyes would read those and know what note to play based on my hand position rather than having to think about which key that note is). I think that technical foundation was still important for me to be able to play the lead sheet though; I already have some basics on how to move my hands.
All of that was preamble to make a joke though, because this week he printed out a couple of pages of Bach’s “Prelude and Fugue No. 1 in C Major” from The Well-Tempered Clavier, saying it would be good technical practice and give me something new to work on. And I realized I’ve become one of Those Gamers because I practiced it a little bit then went on YouTube to listen to some Bach pieces, and my first thought was “you know, his work sounds a lot like the soundtrack from the NES game 8 Eyes.”
I’m not entirely sure why so much “general musical instruction,” at least here in the U.S., seems to leave out almost any explicit theory or only the barest suggestions of it kind of, because it makes it much easier I think not only just to compose music but even just to play it as an instrumentalist. I think like, for any musician in any sense, it’s helpful to have a lot of conceptual tools at hand you can apply to some musical context to answer those kinds of “why?” questions. I started playing music seriously in some sense around the age of like 9–11, but even though I took lessons and played in bands and the jazz ensemble at school at things, the most theory I ever learned was basically like, sets of random chords and scales without any description of their function or the logic behind them or anything—even in the jazz context I just knew things like, “I should play the solo in E mixolydian for the first two bars because that’s what the teacher told me” or the like. It wasn’t until I went to college that I actually got a sense of the reason for an idea like “E mixolydian”—it was just “some scale” to me before that point, like I knew the notes and how to play it but didn’t have a very well-formed idea of “why”.
Anyway, it sounds to me like you may have found a teacher who goes at things from a more theoretical or composition-focused angle like that. If you like that kind of information, I thought I might also pass on some of the specific answers I learned as a music theory major to the questions you’re posing there, just like for your interest. Your teacher may have already told you some of these things but you might find it interesting to compare at the very least.
why do these three notes count as a chord?
At least as I was taught, any set of three or more notes sounding simultaneously makes some sort of chord. A set of two notes makes an interval, and one note is just a note. This is all conventional and I’ve heard other people talk about it in other ways—it just helps to have some kind of language to use to talk about “chords”, and in a way it makes sense to call them “three or more simultaneous pitches”, because like, at least in a vacuum, when you have at least three notes sounding at once you can make much stronger implications about the surrounding harmonic environment than with only two (for instance, because first inversions of many chords serve almost the same purposes as the chord in root position, as it sounds like you may have learned already).
valid chords
Any chord could be valid in some sense from this angle, I just want to note that—it really depends on the effect you’re going for I would say. I just want to note that in passing—like, if your theory can’t give a rationale for what you’re doing, you could just develop it more in that direction or w/e. This kind of analysis is more about characterizing music than giving fixed instructions for how to write it. Some chords are hard to give names to, but that doesn’t always matter necessarily. Naming a chord is a way of expressing your view of its function or role in the piece, what it’s “doing”; with names like “IV” or “V⁷” it’s usually in a diatonic sense. There are other ways of talking about harmony too (and other aspects of music to consider, like counterpoint or texture). Also, even in a given piece of specifically tonal music some chords may be kind of ambiguous in function, with a variety of reasonable interpretations. Some passages in traditional tonal music (and even in early Baroque and Medieval music) are greatly clarified by considering the counterpoint as opposed to only the vertical harmony.
Why am I learning these IV and V7 chords
These chords are useful and commonplace in diatonic music (music based around the set of notes in a major scale and its rotations, so to speak). They have a more specialized role in tonal music, a special form of diatonic music that permits notes from an entire chromatic scale but retains a diatonic character overall, deems the V-I progression to be the most “stable” progression, and treats the major/minor third as distinguishing between two different “keys” based on the same tonic note. This was the form of music that was mainstream in the European classical tradition from roughly 1650–1900 or so. What I would personally say is like, in jazz, it’s common to use seventh or even ninth/eleventh/thirteenth chords in place of triads and there’s a higher degree of comfort with “angular” progressions where the voice leading is less “smoothed-out” than in traditional tonal music (although jazz also has the character of being “chromatic music with a diatonic foreground” like European-style classical), American pop and folk music is often somewhere between pentatonic and diatonic in character, sometimes with some chromaticism often as a kind of special effect, modern classical is kind of all over the place, etc.
The IV, also called the “subdominant,” often has a “pre-dominant” function, progressing next to the V (you see this in jazz, classical, and pop music, as in the famous I-IV-V progression). However, it can also return directly to the I, which creates a sense of resolution (“cadence”) but in a less definite way than V-I (in the context of classical music IV-I is often called a “plagal cadence”, as opposed to the “perfect authentic cadence” of the V-I or V⁷-I).
I think comparing the sound of these two cadences gives a nice sense for the difference in character between the IV and V:
perfect authentic cadence (V-I)
plagal cadence (IV-I)
You can hopefully hear that the IV-I sounds a bit less “definite” or “final” than the V-I. This is especially easy to hear if you start from the I:
I-V-I
I-IV-I
The V⁷ or “dominant seventh” tends to play a similar role to the V. Both tend to either return to the I or set up for a “deceptive cadence” by moving to something else, often the vi or VI (“submediant”). However, the V⁷ requires more careful handling than the V in traditional tonal music because the added seventh almost always resolves downwards. V⁷-I was a very popular form of perfect authentic cadence in the Classical and early Romantic eras.
perfect authentic cadence (V⁷-I)
have funny names
The jargon has a weird character that dates all the way to late antiquity/early Middle Ages in some places (many of the terms are borrowed from Latin originally). Boethius’s De Institutione Musica gives an interesting perspective on this since he wrote it in the early 500s or so and it had a lot of influence on Medieval music writing. Some of the terms are preserved (“major”, “minor”, “semitone”, etc.) although they often mean something somewhat different today than they did to him.
Pretty sure the basic idea is the way they do math instruction in grade school, just learning rote systems without doing proofs or explaining the theoretical underpinnings that produce the systems. They want proficiency first, then theory later. Just like in math instruction, I think this is a big mistake.
This is really fantastic, thanks so much! It does help explain a lot. I think my new teacher touched on some of this, but it’s nice to be able to read and re-read it again with your write up. Do you have any recommended reading I could pursue for understanding theory, terminology, and concepts (Boethius’s De Institutione Musica a good place to start or is too out of date/esoteric in modern day)? My previous teacher suggested I could pick up Alfred’s Piano Theory book, but frankly, it didn’t seem vastly different in practice from Alfred’s regular piano book.
Okay, this makes a lot of sense with how I’ve been trying to intuit how these chords are utilized in all the wide variety of kinds and style of music you hear. I always wonder how much I’m getting bogged down trying to understand something that doesn’t have definite answers, which leads me to another question.
One thing I’m still wondering about is that a lot of things get explained as (by my teachers too, not just your post):
When I ask why we play notes/chords in certain orders, I’m told that it is because it gives these kinds of feelings, which I do hear. But is there… any kind of logic as to why it creates those feelings? Is there actually no more theory or logic to discuss as to why certain sounds or progressions of sounds create certain feelings other than “that’s just how people’s ears are”? Or is this something that changes with culture or musical styles? I’ve seen videos where people describe making arrangements or songs, or maybe it was improvising in songs, as “just math”, and I still don’t completely know how “math-like” it all really is.
I’ll also go ahead and say that what finally pushed me into finally picking up piano is this video I saw called " 7 Levels Of Jazz Voicings | Twinkle Twinkle Little Star", and not only was it cool to see how much you could transform a simple melody, I wanted to be able to understand, play, and create arrangements like the seventh variation which sounds like the final boss theme of a Romancing SaGa game.
yeah my whole idea of harmony is kinda screwy cause i never learned pop or classical theory or whatever just jazz. so the idea of like ‘staying in a key’ feels very optional in a way
jazz theory is like. well there’s a 5 dominant chord to 1 major chord because that’s a normal thing, dominant to tonic, it sounds nice blah blah. but what if we embed a 5-1 progression into the 5 chord, call that a 251 (2 is to 5 as 5 is to 1). what if we take the 5 of the 2, call that a 6251… the 5 of the 6 chord, makes it a 36251. and then what if we do 251 to a minor chord. or what if we use a 2-5 to modulate to a completely different chord that has nothing to do with the key… etc. and eventually
so like “music theory” doesn’t help as much as like, understanding that “rules” are kind of made up and these are more like “harmonic techniques” composers use to make a certain vibe happen. If you sit at the piano and play a simple 2-5-1 progression and look at what notes are moving where, you can kind of try and figure why it sounds good, i.e. there are certain note combinations that produce a tension but then move slightly and the tension is resolved, which we tend to hear as interesting or nice etc.
Yes, absolutely. Other cultures have very different approaches to tonality and their music carries very different default assumptions about what sounds “in tension” and what sounds “resolved.”
There are ways that you can objectively analyze music as a physical phenomenon, but interpreting these analyses through their effects on a listener gets you fairly immediately back to subjectivity again. You can say that the intervals that sound most “consonant” to the Western ear are those that are produced by small integer ratios (e.g. an octave is 2:1, a perfect fifth is 3:2, a perfect fourth is 4:3), but it is not at all obvious why our brains would care about literally invisible integer ratios. Something something wave interference something something overtone series production.
