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What is Music?

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Hello from Tamborine Mountain. Not much news from this part of the World, other than the unrelenting drought. We need rain!

I've written many articles on various aspects of music, but never looked at the subject as a whole, so I'll give it a go in this one, with the disclaimer that I am self-taught and I sometimes use terminology that is more intuitive than the orthodox methods.

What is music?

Music is a system which uses rules and regulations. Its raw ingredients are sound and time. The basic units of sound are notes. The basic units of time are beats.

There. That's it. Consult my other articles for the details... Just kidding.

I think one of the things that attracted me to music in the first place is the fact that it needs a chunk of time to exist. The average pop song uses about three minutes worth, symphonies require much more, but for any piece of music to have any identity, a stretch of time is required. For it to make sense, we (humans) have divided time into equal beats, and then grouped those beats into bars. The number of beats per bar depends on the composer, but fortunately the number per bar rarely exceeds 4. Anything over 4 starts to sound less and less musical, and so becomes less and less popular. These beats can be subdivided into smaller units of time, either in halves, thirds or quarters. The time aspect of music is very evidently mathematical.

The sound aspect of music is also based totally on mathematics, but in a less obvious way. It all has to do with sound waves, and sound waves are measured against ... time. What makes an "A" note an "A" note is the number of waves per second: 440. Or 880. Or 220. In other words, if you double or half the sound waves of any note, you wind up with the same note in a different octave. Over time, musicians and scientists came up with a way of subdividing octaves into 12 "equal" semitone intervals, which gives us the ingredients with which we make our modern music.

The process of subdividing octaves gives rise to the major scale, that do re mi thing. That scale, which is a sequence of intervals, not notes, gives rise to ALL music. As it turns out, intervals are the ruling force when it comes to the sound aspect of music, not notes. Notes are just the markers which indicate the junction of the intervals, and of course they are what we hear, but it's the "distance" in pitch between notes, the intervals, that make music work, that makes one piece distinct and recognizable from another. For example, the melody of the words "Somewhere over the Rainbow" can be described as:

First note (some...),
go up one octave (...where...),
down a semitone (...o...),
down a major third (...ver...),
up a wholetone (...the...),
up another wholetone (...rain...),
up a semitone (...bow...)

the point being, the notes aren't important; singers have different ranges, starting notes can be any note depending on the comfort of the singer, but once that note has been chosen, all others must follow the intervals to become that tune. Naturally, we remember the notes, not the intervals, because instruments are designed to make notes and we can name them and locate them, but really, it's the intervals that are making us recognize the tune. Music is context.

The system we call music is made all the more complicated by the fact that the natural divisions of half, third, quarter etc, give rise to 7 unequal intervals (one of the only things you must memorize: tone tone semitone, tone tone tone semitone) which allows for 7 notes (A B C D E F G) but in fact there are 12 semitones underlying everything (the chromatic scale). These notes also needed a name, but to keep the relationships correct at all times, new letter names can't simply be added, like H I J K L, so the "in-between" notes were given a "sharp" or "flat" quality.

The next level is that of chords. Chords are made from scale notes using a simple formula, being "pick any three alternate notes" and play them together. If you think of the 7 notes as days of the week, we're talking Monday -Wednesday-Friday. That's a chord; Thursday-Saturday-Monday -- that's another chord; or Friday-Sunday-Tuesday. You can see that there are 7 chords in all. The fact that, unlike the days of the week, the scale is uneven, makes 3 of the chords major, 3 minor, and 1 half diminished.

Complicated enough? Hardly, let's now introduce the guitar into the mix. The guitar has six strings, 15 or so usable frets... that makes 6 X 15 = 90 places to find notes! Not only that, when we look into it further, we find that there are only about 40 that are unique notes -- the rest are repeats!

The landscape of music seems hopelessly complex to anyone starting out, but the fact is, the structure of music is so tight and reliable and repetitious that before long you start to peel away the layers of complexity to find a perfectly logical, sensible realm seething with possibilities and potential. Once the mysterious layout of the fretboard comes clear, music can be viewed as a kind of cosmic chord that moves through time, shifting in flavour and pitch as it goes. All other details, such as riffs, solos, lead lines, double stops, harmony etc., are inseparable parts, all following strict but open rules.

The hardest thing is being able to "see" the music on the fretboard, but once you do, it's just a matter of making your fingers do what tell them to. There is a "trick" to achieving that aim. There are probably many, but I came up with a way after a couple decades of playing (that was a couple of decades ago). The trick solves the problem of the irregular tuning of the guitar, that "kink" where the 2nd string relates to the 4th fret of the 3rd string, not the 5th. That wrinkle causes more problems than anything else when it comes to finding a reliable guide to the fretboard. My "trick" erases that problem completely. It's also is the key to being able to improvise, to invent as you go, using the whole of the fretboard.

Find out all about it here It's all revealed in my book PlaneTalk which has been selling on the Internet for 5 years now. It comes with The Guitar Slide Rule, which will teach you more about the guitar in 10 seconds than you'll learn in a decade of poking around. I've now turned the book and slide rule into a Members Only site too, so there's no excuse for fumbling around in the dark. Get enlightened. (Phew, what a sales pitch!)

All the best, never stop twangin'