Musician help, sharinng tips and techniques - Beginner friendly but also advanced musicians feel free to share techniques, all instruments welcome

[dick brain]

Assuming you mean:
1 2 b3 3 4 5 6 b7 1 ?
As mixolydian is 1 2 3 4 5 6 b7 1
And Dorian is 1 2 b3 4 5 6 b7 1

Correct

That would be a new term to me (though I can be shit with remembering names), and somewhat of a (to me) unique use case, as mixing a major and minor third is generally heard as a unpleasant sound, especially considering you dont have any other "strong" resolutions (ie 7-1, #4-5).

It's a not-uncommon scale for blues improv. I've mostly heard it described as an evolution of the BB King box: 1 2 b3 4 5 6. BB King employed a lot of mixed thirds, and it's generally played over dominant 7th chords, so the de facto scale becomes 1 2 b3 3 4 (T) 5 6 b7.

But I was thinking the other day about how you can get away with improvising in a either a major or minor tonality over a major progression, and that lead me to realize that mixodorian is just the sum of the major and minor pentatonic scales: 1 2 3 5 6 + 1 b3 4 5 b7 = 1 2 b3 3 4 5 6 b7. So in addition to thinking of it as an extension of dorian or mixolydian, you can also approach it as a sort of like... micro mode mixture I guess. A superimposition of two very familiar scales. I haven't had time to play with it but the idea tickled me.

If you like those kinds of scales though, check out my favorite:
Bebop-blues scale
1 2 3 4 #4 5 6 b7 7 1

I've used this a fair bit by accident just because I'm a sucker for line cliches and descending chromatic motion, thanks for telling me the name. I can't stand lydian by itself though, it sounds like someone having a manic episode to me. I talked about it in the other thread:

Another useful way to think about it is in terms of brightness, i.e. number of sharps/flats, correlating to mood
Lydian = 1 #, manic, too happy
Major = 0 #s, happy
Mixolydian = 1 b, wistful, bittersweet, happy with a tinge of sadness
Dorian = 2 bs, bluesy, commiseratory, there's a problem but it's manageable, e.g. Use Me, Feeling Alright
Minor = 3 bs, sad, there's a problem and it's unmanageable
Phrygian = 4 bs, melodramatic, too sad
Locrian = 5 bs, lovecraftian existential mindbreak

In my experience major, mixolydian, dorian and minor cover the range of normal emotional expression, while lydian and phrygian are mostly the realm of theatrics.

 

[Canuck Breaker]

I've mostly heard it described as an evolution of the BB King box

See, now that I know, interesting to see a "new" take on it though.

For your modes, if you love locrian, you'll love super locrian (altered dominant I mentioned)

1 b2 #2 3 #4 b6 b7

Sound of nightmares when played alone, incredibly interesting when played with over certain chord structures.

 

[Butwhythough2]

@Honk I would have never been able to get away with the stuff you and your friends did in school. My folks were strict and would beat my ass with either a belt or a thin but really flexible switch. Besides when me and my friends first started playing we were lucky enough that our drummer's dad was a pastor and they lived in the pastorum, and we had keys to get into the church and play. We didn't even have to bring any amps or speakers as long as we didn't mess with any settings of the ones there, besides volume. We did have 2 guitarist but I left one out as he just sucked (worse than we did, I guess it just wasn't for him) but his dad was a lawyer and he had the Fender Strat and this nice Marshall amp but he was just awful. While everyone else worked and saved to buy our own instruments and equipment. I remember saving my lunch money for more than half a year and then combining it with my birthday money to get a Johnson P bass, luckily my friend's brother let me have this 15watt practice amp for $20. And it was the same for everyone else they worked and saved to get their stuff. What got us to be better musicians, is that our drummer had a brother who had been learning guitar since he was 5 and he was older than all of us by 6 or 7 years. I mentioned him in the guitar and bass equipment thread. He'd play with us at times and playing with better musicians teaches you a lot. Our early attempts at a band we called ourselves "Aryon and the Sons of Apollo" then when our guitarist moved away and a few years later we found a new one we didn't bother naming, we just jammed. Now days it's just me that's still making music. I'm also of the opinion of finding your own style, I've leaned more on guitar, and I learned mandolin, and have enough understand of the keyboard to get around, as well as ukulele. My style that I've developed is blues, blues rock, psychildellia (like you'd hear from the Siamese Dream era of Smashing Pumpkins), dreamy, and most of its bass focused. I always try to find ways to incorporate a good sounding bass line when applicable. It's cool to hear about your experiences. I know I started the thread to talk about theory and techniques but hearing others stories on what inspired them to get into music is nice to hear too.

 

[Nero Fiddled]

He'd play with us at times and playing with better musicians teaches you a lot.

A bit of an unprovable statement, but I'd say that once a beginner has got the basics, playing alongside other musicians will teach far more valuable lessons than books or videos alone.

 

[Butwhythough2]

A bit of an unprovable statement, but I'd say that once a beginner has got the basics, playing alongside other musicians will teach far more valuable lessons than books or videos alone.

Well maybe improvable but he did teach as we played between songs, and I agree playing with others really teaches you a lot.

 

[Canuck Breaker]

Well maybe improvable but he did teach as we played between songs, and I agree playing with others really teaches you a lot.

I feel like playing with better musicians is like momentum in sports. There is no quantifiable evidence it exists, but you can just tell when it's there.

 

[Butwhythough2]

As manic as the Lydian mode can sound, if used right it can sound almost dream like. That raised 4th is dissonate and can be resolved back to the Root, 5th or 2nd and 6th.
Edit: it resolves best to the 2nd and 6th. I wasn't around my instruments when I made that statement. I kinda assumed because a lot of notes resolve well to the 5th and root. It can but it's a little dissonate, but that's not always a bad thing

 

[El Microwave]

Do you guys know where I can find copyrighted sheet music, full scores more than anything? It's easier to download bootleg Cambodian rock than, for example, a big band arrangement of Bronislau Kaper's Invitation, one of my favorite jazz standards. You don't need an account or money and have access to millions of recordings, millions of movies and shows, yet sheet music is either transcribed by amateurs (I'm sick of using bad Real Book quality stuff) or paywalled. With ebooks being easier to find than ever what with libgen and Anna's Archive and formerly z-lib, it just baffles me that I haven't found sheet music yet. Am I blind?

Also, any bassoon players around? I've always wanted to own one but they cost as much as a car. Maybe it sounds insane but are there any DIY instrument kits for amateur craftsmen? Do you know of a good book that handholds slow in the minds like me through the process of building at least primitive instruments? Should I try to learn physics and acoustics first or is it unnecessary?

 

[Butwhythough2]

Do you guys know where I can find copyrighted sheet music, full scores more than anything? It's easier to download bootleg Cambodian rock than, for example, a big band arrangement of Bronislau Kaper's Invitation, one of my favorite jazz standards. You don't need an account or money and have access to millions of recordings, millions of movies and shows, yet sheet music is either transcribed by amateurs (I'm sick of using bad Real Book quality stuff) or paywalled. With ebooks being easier to find than ever what with libgen and Anna's Archive and formerly z-lib, it just baffles me that I haven't found sheet music yet. Am I blind?

Also, any bassoon players around? I've always wanted to own one but they cost as much as a car. Maybe it sounds insane but are there any DIY instrument kits for amateur craftsmen? Do you know of a good book that handholds slow in the minds like me through the process of building at least primitive instruments? Should I try to learn physics and acoustics first or is it unnecessary?

Maybe this will help https://musescore.com/user/37430255/scores/8956042
You have to create an account to download the pdf to print it. Just give a throw away email. I can't read notation without transcribing the note names below the notes so I can't vouch for the accuracy of the piece.
As far as DIY instrument kits, there are guitar and bass kits that include everything but the soldering iron and screw drivers. As far as bassoon goes my high school band didn't even have one, I played sax in 6th grade but quit because I didn't want to march the next year. I hope I helped some. I wouldn't worry about learning the physics and acoustics of it unless you're gonna make a home studio and want to shell out the money for professional soundproofing and all of that

 

[Canuck Breaker]

Also, any bassoon players around? I've always wanted to own one but they cost as much as a car. Maybe it sounds insane but are there any DIY instrument kits for amateur craftsmen?

As someone who's worked on them from cheap student to actual symphony player's instrument, I mean this in the nicest way:

You (as in you personally) cannot build a bassoon. You do not have the tools, skills, or experience. You do not have the capital.

I knew the owners of Fox/Renard. They had a specialist just for parts questions. I had to remake keys by hand if they broke. If one cracked, you sent it in.

It is literally cheaper to buy a fleet of bassoons than to buy the tooling to make one. The closest I've known anyone to getting to build one starting from no experience is currently on a 5 year apprenticeship contract in England to start by building oboes.

I'll have to dig out my old cross-section diagrams sometime, but even the open holes are not only not at 90° angles to the bore, but also they can be variable diameter.

A good project would be to look into bamboo flutes. They're simple enough, require almost no tooling, and are as proven as Japan. They also require almost no training/tooling and I'm sure you can find guides on youtube.

 

[El Microwave]

I knew the owners of Fox/Renard. They had a specialist just for parts questions. I had to remake keys by hand if they broke. If one cracked, you sent it in.

That is really cool actually. I'm a little disappointed but amazed too. I figured the high price meant quality craftsmanship but wow, that's something. Individual parts having specialists! Their price makes total sense now. I will try my hand at a bamboo flute, a shakuhachi or whatever they're called. Also, do you have any cool stories of your repairs you don't mind sharing?

Maybe this will help https://musescore.com/user/37430255/scores/8956042

This is really cool and a very good starting point. I'm gonna have to work on it myself though because already, early on, you can see the alto sax part reaching a low G below the staff which is impossible on the instrument, because the arranger didn't transpose the keys. Still, I had no idea this existed. Musescore also has another long sought-after score for Tones for Joan's Bones (Chick Corea) which is actually high quality from a glance. Thank you! Also I feel you on marching man, it was a pain when you just wanted to play music or run around and be a kid/teen.

 

[Canuck Breaker]

That is really cool actually. I'm a little disappointed but amazed too. I figured the high price meant quality craftsmanship but wow, that's something. Individual parts having specialists!

Not individual parts, but there was a parts specialist and a bore specialist. I would have to specify which key needed replaced and then properly assemble/silver solder it to fit the instrument, as each one is ever so slightly different.

If anything was wrong with the wood, the bore specialist would help me determine if it was something that could be patched, or if it needed to go in for proper reconstruction.

Also, do you have any cool stories of your repairs you don't mind sharing?

Nothing incredibly major comes to mind as "cool". Once you've worked on a number of $10k plus instruments, they all feel essentially the same. It's the horror stories that all techs share with eachother.

My most satisfying was the first chair clarinetist for the symphony in the major city I lived near, that I did a big job for that told me it felt great. Then brought it back the next day and screamed at my boss that I ruined her horn because a tiny bit of bore oil had leached out of the wood (as is expected to happen with porous material such as wood) and was causing a pad to stick. I brought it to the back, ran a q tip around the hole, worked on another horn for 10 minutes, then played it, brought it back, and she told me it was the best it's ever played.

I also had a hand in making the prototype of a tool that's become a staple on workbenches around country.

Oh, I almost got the head of Yamaha's professional trombone manufacturing to have to honor kill himself due to a customer lying about dropping a $5k horn he just bought and ruining the rotor. They shut down production for a day to investigate their entire process. Then I found a very well hidden dent and the customer confessed.

I'd share horror pictures, but that would max powerlevel me so fast. Some of my favorites are actually so unique that descriptions would do so as well.

I think the best I can do is tell you the time I had to handmake a trombone slide for a client because there were no replacements, and it came back less than a month later completely ruined. I told them they would have to just buy a new horn, because I wouldn't go through that again.

 

[Butwhythough2]

This is really cool and a very good starting point. I'm gonna have to work on it myself though because already, early on, you can see the alto sax part reaching a low G below the staff which is impossible on the instrument, because the arranger didn't transpose the keys. Still, I had no idea this existed. Musescore also has another long sought-after score for Tones for Joan's Bones (Chick Corea) which is actually high quality from a glance. Thank you!

I'm glad I could help, I used to have to transpose keys when I played in a church band. They played in GMaj (capo 2nd fret) that was their comfortable vocal range and I only had chord sheets to work with. As a bass player, I didn't use a capo. It wasn't difficult to transpose, unlike how you would an actual piece of sheet music, I would imagine that to be more difficult. I didn't enjoy contemporary worship music as it was musically boring. Anytime I tried to add a bit to liven things up I'd be told "it wasn't appropriate." Gospel is way more fun to play.

 

[Canuck Breaker]

It wasn't difficult to transpose, unlike how you would an actual piece of sheet music, I would imagine that to be more difficult.

I will never forget having playing in a pit orchestra for a local musical theater and having the Reed 2 book:
Piccolo
Oboe
English horn
Clarinet
Alto sax
Tenor sax

My oboe reed broke, and I couldn't get a hold of an English horn, so I had to transpose oboe to clarinet on the fly in G# major, then English horn to alto sax in Gb Major. Fucking kill me.

But it actually gets pretty easy once you start getting good at sight reading and scales. You just start thinking in scale tones or even just intervals. At a certain point you just have to have your fingers go on autopilot in one key and your brain focused on the notes on the staff. It's weird to explain, and I'm sure it's different for others. But I can kinda just put my fingers into "F# mode" but be thinking in G#, and the rest just kind of happens lol.

 

[Butwhythough2]

I really wished I had listened to my uncle when I was a kid, he tried to teach the children at church how to read standard notation. I still remember some stuff like rythyms and time signatures and the mnemonics of learning the staff. When I was in school band I wrote the note names under each note. I switched schools a little more than halfway through the year and chose band over PE. So I was behind everyone else, they taught me most of the shapes, but some I didn't learn in time for concert. So I'd play the songs I knew but only could play certain sections of one song because I didn't know some shapes. I stated in an earlier post that I didn't want to march so I didn't do band the next year. If I was going to continue playing sax, it was gonna be for concert band and not marching. We didn't have a concert only program, hell we didn't even have a jazz band until the year after I graduated. I would have loved to be the bass player for jazz band.

 

[El Microwave]

We didn't have a concert only program, hell we didn't even have a jazz band until the year after I graduated. I would have loved to be the bass player for jazz band.

That's a shame. I think music and arts funding should be higher across the board. Considering how high school budgets already are in many places, there's no excuse. Did you ever find a nice gospel church to play in? I dislike churches with drab, modern worship music too. For me it has to be gospel or traditional organ works and hymns. If you ever feel like taking up the sax again, there's no harm in a used beater (Conn, Selmer, Bundy, Yamaha, Yanagisawa, Jupiter, etc) which you can likely get fully repaired for under $100 or so. I got a C Melody sax from the 30s for a few hundred, fixed for the same price, and it's awesome to play in the key of C now (flutes, piano, violin, etc). You also will probably remember a bit of it from before. It's like riding a bike.

My oboe reed broke, and I couldn't get a hold of an English horn, so I had to transpose oboe to clarinet on the fly in G# major, then English horn to alto sax in Gb Major. Fucking kill me.

Incredible. The worst I had to do was play Eb alto sax parts on a tenor for a day in class (no performance), which was an easy 5th up and down. I got a C Melody sax for this reason, so I wouldn't have to rewrite all the music I've been playing.

Also, here's a really amazing Youtube channel taking segments from a TV show of organist Diane Bish. She travels the world playing all the organs and it's just stunning.

https://yewtu.be/channel/UCOFCOn0yS2vihl92hSxR40A

 

[Butwhythough2]

That's a shame. I think music and arts funding should be higher across the board. Considering how high school budgets already are in many places, there's no excuse. Did you ever find a nice gospel church to play in? I dislike churches with drab, modern worship music too. For me it has to be gospel or traditional organ works and hymns. If you ever feel like taking up the sax again, there's no harm in a used beater (Conn, Selmer, Bundy, Yamaha, Yanagisawa, Jupiter, etc) which you can likely get fully repaired for under $100 or so. I got a C Melody sax from the 30s for a few hundred, fixed for the same price, and it's awesome to play in the key of C now (flutes, piano, violin, etc). You also will probably remember a bit of it from before. It's like riding a bike.

I don't really go to any church around. My old one is dying, nothing but old people. I was once the boys youth pastor. I tried getting them more involved and bring in new people by having little events. Like a game night where we'd hook up a game system to a big TV and we'd get pizza and have a good time. I do enjoy the hymns, they don't do contemporary, our pianist doesn't go by the book when playing. She'll add fills and put some swing into it. If there were more musicians at that church it could be considered gospel music. When she's sick and another pianist comes in the difference is so noticeable because they'll play what the notation says. Back when I was 16 I took a couple months of bass lessons to work on slap and speed, my bass teacher invited me to go play at a gospel convention it was like a revival. It was a state over and I didn't have the money to get a hotel or food and I had to decline. But it did boost my confidence that he thought I was good enough to hang with those guys.
I've kinda got my hands full on instruments I'm learning, even though 20 years of bass there are still things I'm learning, I've gotten more serious about guitar and I'm learning more there too, in the past 2 years I've picked up mandolin, ukulele, and keyboard. I'm still having trouble with making my hands do separate things on keyboard. But when I start getting a good knowledge on those, I might go back to sax.
By the way are there any mandolin players in the thread?

 

[Canuck Breaker]

I got a C Melody sax for this reason, so I wouldn't have to rewrite all the music I've been playing.

While that was one of the 2 intended purposes (the other being Adolph Sax desperately trying to get his instruments into the orchestra), there's a reason those and their Tenor counterpart - the F Melody - were doomed to die.

Just on the physics alone, the horn doesn't really work. It will not play in tune to save its life. The harmonic nodes just absolutely do not line up with where the keys must be placed to be playable. This is mostly true with the standard range of horns, but the C and F just take it to an extreme.

I hated working on them. They were awful to play just because they fought me a ton compared to my personal horn. They were awful to work on because they're usually poorly taken care of, there are no replacement parts, and the craftsmanship of the originals varied immensely. They were awful to estimate because there was no way to know what all was wrong without a complete disassembly.

The last one I ever did was a total overhaul that ended up requiring me to fill and redrill the entire lower stack because I needed to fit an entirely different rod due to a previous hack doing a shit job causing irreparable damage to the rod, and almost the same to the keys. That was about a $1500 job on a horn worth maybe $200. It came out as fantastic as one of those could, but that's a week for my life I'll never get back.

 

[suckfest]

I’m new to guitar (and love it). My teacher really stressed the importance of learning as many “cowboy” chord songs as possible - which I’m doing. I’ve also been practicing different scales.
Is there anything else you all would recommend picking up? I usually do focused practice for 15 min a day, and then an hour of just having fun with it and messing around/experimentation.

 

[Butwhythough2]

I’m new to guitar (and love it). My teacher really stressed the importance of learning as many “cowboy” chord songs as possible - which I’m doing. I’ve also been practicing different scales.
Is there anything else you all would recommend picking up? I usually do focused practice for 15 min a day, and then an hour of just having fun with it and messing around/experimentation.

Learn where all the notes are located on the fretboard, so if something or someone calls out a note, you'll know exactly where it is on every part of the fretboard. Did your teacher give you the spider walk exercise? That's good for dexterity in your fretting hand. Here's a demo, there are more complex exercises but this is pretty basic.

https://youtu.be/62K1dZ9lK7w?si=1xlJjYnbYh8V8CBX

Also aim for 30 minutes of intense practice, but playing around is a great way to practice. It let's you discover sounds on your own, and if you come up with something, write it down using tabs and show your teacher what you came up with.