For when I get bored and want to talk about music...

[Maniakkid25]

Don't know where to put this, so HERE IT GOES!

You should make a topic, Maniak! I'd love to read up on what you wrote

Beware what you wish for, for it may come true... Anyway, I like music. Music is fun. I was a band kid for 7 years, and the music never really left me. As such, I am a person who knows enough about music theory to be dangerous. Yet, I realize that such a concept can be incomprehensible to someone outside of music, especially if they don’t know how to read sheet music. So, before I can begin to complain about whatever it is musically that’s bothering me, I need to start with some 101 courses. I am firmly a believer that you can teach someone how to read and understand music in about 30 minutes, SO LET’S PUT THAT TO THE TEST! This is gonna require A LOT of images, though, so just be warned of that!

So, we need to start somewhere, and that somewhere is gonna be the notes! There are 12 notes in Western music (we are not getting into Tuning Theory here; this will be good enough as it is!), 7 of which are normally named, and 5 being modified versions of those notes. The notes are named after the alphabet A-G, with the modified versions being raised up, called “sharp” (notated as #), or lowered down, called “flat” (notated as b). Sometimes, you will also see a “natural” symbol (notated as ♮, looking like a box with a line poking out the top and bottom). Those just mean “play the unmodified version plz!” So, starting at C (I will get back to why later), we have C, C#/Db, D, D#/Eb, E, F, F#/Gb, G, G#/Ab, A, A#/Bb, B, and back to C. Why do some notes have multiple names? HISTORY! This goes back to Tuning Theory, and we are MOVING ON!

Now, this doesn’t help us if we don’t have a place to read it on, and that’s where music staff comes in! This is a piano staff!



It has both the Treble and Bass Clefs. Clefs just let you know how the notes are arranged on the staff. You may hear of an “Alto” and “Tenor” Clef; ignore it if you do. The piano staff ranges from G2 to F5, with notes technically able to go above and below these points, but we aren’t worrying about that right now! Now, first we will get orientation, then we will explain where the notes go on the staff.

So, our orientation points are F3, C4, and G4 (we will come back to the numbers in a moment). F3 is easy: look for the line in the Bass clef in between those two dots. That’s F3. G4 is a little harder to explain: look for the line where the Treble clef intersects the staff 4 times. This will be the second line on the staff. That is G4. Bass and Treble clefs are known as “F” and “G” clefs for this reason (and they kinda look like those letters, too. If you squint hard enough.). C4 is known as Middle C. Middle C is life, the universe, and everything. Middle C is why we start everything with C. C is Love; C is Life (I’ll stop). Middle C is called this because it happens to exist in the exact midpoint between the two clefs. And from there, we can start reading the actual lines.



Starting with Bass clef, the lines are – from the bottom – G, B, D, F, A, and the spaces in between are A, C, E, G. The handy way to remember these are the phrases “Good Boys Do Fine Always” and “All Cows Eat Grass”, respectively. Treble Clef is slightly different: E, G, B, D, F and F, A, C, E. For Treble Clef, “Every Good Boy Does Fine” and “Face”, because…well, the spaces spell “Face”. You can have “Braces” above and below the staves. These are notes above the staff with lines through them, indicating how many levels above or below the staff they are. Just count up like you would normally. For orientation, Middle C is always 1 line above the Bass staff and 1 line below the Treble staff.

So, now we can actually read that crap! Now, what about those numbers? Well, that would bring me to an actual piano, so we’ll get back to that! How about actually writing, you know, music? Well, for that, we need notations for how long to hold these notes, aka “rhythm”. Don’t worry, it’s very easy! Just like English, we read from left to right. As for the “words”...



This is a Whole Note. A Whole Note is four beats in 4/4. What the hell is a beat? Well, let’s make this a practical example. Lightly whack a surface with something. A stick, a pencil, your finger, whatever. Repeat this with a steady pattern; speed doesn’t matter, just make sure it’s steady. Now, every 4 hits, hit with the first whack just slightly harder. CONGRATULATIONS; YOU ARE NOW A METRONOME COUNTING IN 4/4! Time signatures later. Now, each one of those whacks is a beat, so a Whole Note is 4 of those!



This is a Half Note. Half Notes are half of a Whole Note, so they are 2 beats in 4/4. You’re probably already noticing a pattern, and you’d be right! So, here’s the rest of them!



Note that each kind of note down the line is half the length of the one previous. This is kind of “baked into” music; it revolves a lot around powers of 2 (You bring up tuplets, you die).

Now, how do we know how MANY beats there are to count? After all, in the example, I asked you to do it groups of 4, but that’s not always true! That’s what time signatures are for!



While on the staff they are just written as two numbers, one on the other, in written parlance it is generally accepted that you can write it as a fraction. So, reading this is actually VERY simple. The top number is telling you how many beats there are in a phrase (known as “measure” or “bar” in written music). The bottom number is which kind of note gets the beat (pretend the number is the denominator in a fraction). So, 4/4 is four quarter notes per phrase. So, 3/4 is 3 quarter notes, 5/8 is 5 eighth notes, and so on. Oh, do be careful; if the top number is a multiple of 3 (so, 6, 9, etc), then they usually follow special rules that I will get into another time. Just be aware of that.

Last thing: Key Signatures. I need to explain this now so I don’t need to come back later. So, sometimes, you have a lot of flats or sharps in a song, and rather than noting each individual note in the song, you can just “front load” them by labeling which lines and spaces in the staff will be flat or sharp ahead of time, and that basically says “unless it says otherwise, play the sharp or flat version”. There is a specific order to which lines are noted, but that is NOT IMPORTANT RIGHT NOW! Here’s an example of it in action.



Now, there are all sorts of symbols and jargon I could get into, but that’s NOT IMPORTANT RIGHT NOW! That’s all you absolutely need to read a piece of sheet music! Congratulations; you can now read Mozart! That’s not a joke; you could literally do that right now. NOW! For the actual THEORY.

So, lets start simple: scales! There are many, many scales, but we are going to ignore them all and focus on the big two: Major and Minor. We’ll come back to Minor, let’s look at Major.



That’s C major and…and…crap, this isn’t gonna work. OH! Wait! The piano!



BEAUTIFUL! First off, reading a piano is easy! The piano is actually a repeated pattern of keys, so we can just zoom in on one section. Oh, those numbers! Those are “octaves”, and now you understand why I waited till now to explain that. See, when you double the frequency of a pitch, you end up with a pitch that sounds, to our human ears, exactly like a higher version of that note. So, for easy reference, we just call those two pitches the “same” note, just one octave higher, hence the pattern of keys. Why octave? “Oct-“ means 8, and there are 7 distinct notes in the Major Scale before you hit the octave! NOW, Zoom in!



So, this is all we need to concern ourselves with right now. Our C major scale is actually really easy: it’s all the white keys! This allows me to talk about intervals now! YAY! So, we have a lot of intervals (12 in total), but they can be subdivided down into two types of movement: the Half Step and the Whole Step. A Half Step is just two keys that are directly next to each other – INCLUDING BLACK KEYS! A Whole Step is 2 Half Steps. Why note “Whole Step” and “Double Step”? GOOD QUESTION!

So, we can actually list the scale as a list of Whole and Half Steps. This becomes important for Modes, WHICH WE ARE NOT DISCUSSING RIGHT NOW! So, a Major scale is Whole, Whole, Half, Whole, Whole, Whole, Half (or W-W-H-W-W-W-H). The Minor scale is a related scale, but very different sounding. In the layman’s parlance, Major is “happy” and Minor is “sad”. So, to get a Minor scale, just lower the third note, the sixth note, and the seventh note a Half Step. So, in our C example, that’s the E, A, and B, and it looks like this!



Now, each of these notes in a scale is often referred to by number, since we define the scale we are using as the “key” of the song we are in. AH! Now you know why I mentioned Key Signatures before. So, In the C scale, the first C is 1, and then D is 2, and so on up the scale, until you get to the ending C, at which point you are back to 1. You may know this from Sounds of Music as “Do, Re, Mi” etc. (“Do, a deer, a female deer…”) Same idea, that’s something called “Solfege” which we don’t need to worry about right now!

Now, numbering the intervals is good and all, but what about all the notes that are missing! Don’t worry, we can cover those too. All the notes in the Major Scale are “Major” intervals, and the notes in the Minor scale are “Minor” intervals. Great! But the 2, 4, and 5 are the same in both scales. Well, 2 is special, so it gets a Minor 2nd that’s just a Half Step down. 4 and 5, however, because they are the same in both scales, are “Perfect” intervals. But wait. Minor 2nd, Major 2nd, Minor 3rd….that’s only 11 intervals if you include the octave! Well, there is technically an interval a half step above the Perfect 4th and below the Perfect 5th. That’s the Tritone, and we don’t talk about the Tritone…I kid; it has it’s importance, but that would bring me to Modes, so we are MOVING ON!

And that should be it! A crash course in music and music theory, with just en—CHORDS!

SO! Take a note. We’ll use C again. This is actually a lot easier to understand if we go back to the sheet music. So, Middle C, help us out!



Okay, so we got a Middle C. Skip the space, and go to the line above it, which is E. Do the same to get to G. We now have the Triad, the basis of virtually all chords. For intervals, these are a “Major 3rd” and a “Perfect 5th". Because we have a Major 3rd, we have a “Major” chord. In our C example, if we turn the E into and Eb, we have a “Minor” chord. Much like scales, Major is “happy”, Minor is “sad”. Speaking of scales, we can actually do this with every note in a scale, using the other notes of the scale to make 7 different chords. Here they are for the C scale!



So, with these “Diatonic” (meaning “notes in the scale of the key we are in”) Chords, we typically label them with Roman Numerals, with uppercase being Major and lower case being Minor. So, we have a I, ii, iii, IV, V, vi, and…oh, yeah, the 7th chord. Um, yeah, the 7th one is weird. It’s not Major or Minor. See, remember that Tritone I was talking about? Yeah, that replaces the Perfect 5th in the chord, which, with a Minor 3rd, turns it into a Diminished Triad, which is…unsettling, to say the least. They don’t sound “sad”, they sound… “wrong” is a good word for it. But, Diminished Triads rarely ever come up, so you can safely ignore them! There is another triad I’m skipping (Augmented), but those aren’t diatonic to ANY SCALE unless we start doing some trickery.

There you go! Everything you didn’t want to know about music! You may refer back to this post as I go on my ramblings about whatever is bothering me about music when I start bitching. Feel free to post here to ask questions and the like; I will do my best to answer them. Just don't ask me to write an original song; I can't write original music to save my life. Transcribing OTHER people's work, however...

[Moonface]

So, starting at C (I will get back to why later), we have C, C#/Db, D, D#/Eb, E, F, F#/Gb, G, G#/Ab, A, A#/Bb, B, and back to C.

I'm still trying to get through and wrap my head around all the other stuff, but I'm curious on this part and have a question. How come C and F lack a b tone, and why do E and B both lack # tones? Are they sounds that simply can not exist in any way, or is it that there's just no use for them in music, or is it some other reason?

[Maniakkid25]

You can actually write Cb and E#. It's just those are the same as B and F, respectively. Those notes are known as "enharmonic", meaning they are the same note, but written differently because of context. The big reason why is history, and that requires me to go on a big thing about Tuning Theory, but short version is that under modern tuning theory, B and C are half-steps, and E and F are half-steps. The long version is Just Intonation, and I hate Just Intonation -- not because it's hard, just as a concept it's crap because of all these weird edge cases that crop up!

[ShiraNoMai]

You mention Diatonic, but what does Pentatonic mean?

I've listened to a few of my boss' jam tracks over the years and obviously not knowing about music, I'm unsure what playing "in E minor Pentatonic" means

[Maniakkid25]

Penta: 5
Tonic: Note

Literally, it's a 5 note scale. I didn't want to mention it, because it confused me until someone explicitly explained why the notes are what they are, and I had the "A-HA!" moment. In order to explain that moment, I'd need to go into modes, so for a very quick shallow dive: All Major scales have what's known as a "Relative Minor". This Relative Minor is the answer to the question "what if you started your major scale on the 6th note of that scale?" So, for C Major, it's Relative Minor is A Minor, because A is the 6th note of C, and they otherwise have all the same notes.

Pentatonic is very similar in concept. See, there are really only two Pentatonic scales: Major and Minor. Pentatonic Major is the answer to the question "Let's take the Major Scale, and take out the half steps." So, the only scale degrees from Major preserved are 1, 2, 3, 5, and 6. So, sticking with C Major, you would play C, D, E, G, and A. Pentatonic Minor is also a mode of Pentatonic Major, just like the regular Major and Minor scales. So, starting on the 6th note of C Major, A Pentatonic Minor would be A, C, D, E, G (1, 3, 4, 5, and 7 in scale degrees [edit: should note, those scale degrees are technically incorrect, but I'm using those for simplicity's sake]). And to answer your next question: E Pentatonic Minor is E, G, A, B, and D in that order (now look at standard tuning for a guitar, and suddenly a lot of things will make sense...).

Again, I didn't want to mention them because they are confusing compared to regular scales until you get that sudden click, but I probably should have because they are so deeply ingrained into the Blues and, therefore, modern American music in general. You wanna solo? Just slap it with that Pentatonic Minor scale, and everything will be fine. It doesn't help that Blues in general has its own ideas of how notes work together that doesn't exactly mesh into standard descriptions...

[Karo]

So Cricket after reading this introduction to reading sheet music and its notes I feel like I don't quite fully get it, and I kinda have a vague concept, but the thing is I am an awful student so I got a few silly questions to ask:

1. For the Do Ri Ma if I sang those would my pitch actually go up an octave as I sing it?
2. Clefts are a bit confusing so in the sheet where they are in the pitch is determined by the line that they are on?
3. Clefts seem to exist in multiple spaces in the sheet music, but so do chords but I'm assuming for a chord you strike the notes rapidly, but do clefts also use the same function?

PS: I am sorry if I am using these terms wrongly.

[Maniakkid25]

1. Not until you hit the next Do. Actually, a practical example; going back to the Sounds of Music example (the song is Do-Re-Mi, btw), each note is its respective pitch in the A Bb Major scale (so Bb is Do, C is Re, and so on). You can listen as the pitch slowly climbs each line, hitting that octave at the "And that brings us back to Do!"

2. I think you mean "notes", not "clefts". Yes, what line or space each note is on determines its pitch, and we can figure that out with those orientation points I mentioned earlier on. So, if you were playing a piece in a Treble Clef, and you saw a note on the second line, then the third line, then the fourth line, you would know to play a G, then a B, then a D.

3. So, this is something I overlooked. As you move from left to right on sheet music, you play each note in succession, like how in a sentence you say each word one after the other. But when you stack notes on top of each other, like in a chord, you're actually saying "play ALL of these at the same moment in time". So, for example, if you saw a C chord coming in the sheet music, you'd play a C, E and G note all at once. Outside of very advanced techniques or very weird instruments, this is really only possible on instruments that are played exclusively on the fingers or hands (stringed instruments, pianos, xylophones, etc.). I still needed to bring them up, however, because chords run at the heart of basically all music theory; if you hear someone referring to the "Harmony" of a song, they are referring to what chords are used in the song.

[Karo]

Ahh okay I'll have to actually listen to that the only song I remember from song of music is Farewell So Long!

[Moonface]

You can actually write Cb and E#. It's just those are the same as B and F, respectively. Those notes are known as "enharmonic", meaning they are the same note, but written differently because of context.

Huh, I never knew that.

I don't know if you'd know the answer to this, but are certain notes more common in particular genres/styles of music than others? For example, maybe there are more X notes in metal music and more Y notes in pop music.

[Maniakkid25]

Yes and no. Specific notes aren't necessarily more common than any others, but specific INTERVALS or MODES are. Like, for example, you see a lot more Major intervals in Pop music, because you tend to see Major keys in pop (especially bubblegum pop and dance-pop), where as you see a lot of Mixolydian in Rock because of the unique properties of that scale, and you see more Minor and Phrygian in Metal music, along with intervals like Minor Seconds and Tritones. Ah, crap, I'm gonna have to talk about Modes now, aren't I? Before I go down that road, as far as specific notes are concerned, you tend to see more E keys and that sort of thing in Rock and Blues music, and that's purely an artifact of the tuning of the instrument, making the E major and E minor chord an "open string" chord. An "open string" chord means that at least one string that's played doesn't have a finger on the fret, and is therefore "open". It should be noted, though, that many "Harder" forms of music are noted for their use of downtuned guitars, meaning that the tuning is lower in pitch than E Standard tuning, so you can hear a lot more D's, C#'s, or even C's. Now, feel free to ignore the rest of this post unless you want me to dive into Modes.
 

---

Now then. Modes. First off, you have to understand what a "Tonal Center" is. Unless a song is explicitly Atonal (and you tend to only see that in experimental styles), the song will have a point of rest. That is the Tonal Center. It's the place that the song wants to resolve to, or, as the analogy goes, "it feels like home". This Tonal Center is how we define the intervals of a song, so that we can better notate and describe what is happening in it. For example, going back to our C Major scale, that C at the beginning and end "feels like home", often called the “tonic”. The scale wants to resolve to that point, and it feels incomplete without it.
 
So, take the Major scale, with its order of intervals being W-W-H-W-W-W-H (W is Whole Note, and H is Half Note). But, you don't have to start on that interval set. See, we could, say, take C Major scale, and instead of making its tonal center C, we make it the D right after it. This leads to a completely different sounding scale, and a new set of intervals, which we define as a "Mode". You might think that just changing the note we start on in a scale would just lead to an incomplete version of the major scale, but if you focus hard enough, than your brain will have no choice but to hear that particular note you start on as "home". So, there are seven distinct intervals, meaning there are seven distinct modes. The next picture of them is all the modes starting on C, so you can really see the differences in all of them, but I will take each mode in turn.


 
Mode 1: Ionian (Major)
 
This is our default mode. It’s noted as being the “happy” scale, sounding bright and sweet and cheerful in most of its applications. As mentioned, the intervals are W-W-H-W-W-W-H. The list of songs in Major is innumerable, and picking one out is child’s play. Generally, if a song sounds “happy”, and it’s not a Rock song, it’s probably Major.
 
Mode 2: Dorian
 
This is the second mode of Major, known as “Dorian”. Relative to Major, this would be starting on the Major 2nd of the scale. It’s a Minor-ish scale, having a “tonic” or “home" chord that is minor. Our intervals are W-H-W-W-W-H-W, leading to a very interesting sound. We have a Minor third and a Minor 7th, but unlike full-blown Minor, we have a MAJOR 6th. This actually gives the scale a bit more of an adventurous or wistful sound than full-blown melancholy. This makes it great for songs that want to be dark, but more mysterious than sad, or funky. Funk music and its derivatives in general actually uses a LOT of Dorian, which helps gives the genre that distinct flavor. Examples of songs using this Mode are Uptown Funk by Mark Ronson, Mad World by Tears for Fears, and Get Lucky by Daft Punk.
 
Mode 3: Phrygian
 
Now we’re starting to get crunchy. The third mode of Major, “Phrygian”, would be starting on the Major 3rd of Major, with an interval set of H-W-W-W-H-W-W. Another “Minor-ish” scale, having a Minor tonic chord. What splits this from standard Minor is we now have a Minor 2nd, and that gives it a much darker, edgier sound. The sound is sometimes called “exotic”, but I don’t really agree with it too much. Still, that Minor 2nd is one of the most dissonant (“bad-sounding”) and “evil” intervals in music, really killing any light that might be in the scale. This makes it a natural fit for Metal music, especially the harder forms of Metal like Thrash, Black, and Death Metal. Examples of songs using this mode include Harvester of Sorrow by Metallica, Gin and Juice by Snoop Dogg (!?), and Would? by Alice in Chains.
 
Mode 4: Lydian
 
And now we’re starting to get weird. The fourth mode of Major, “Lydian”, is on the Perfect 4th, and has an interval set of W-W-W-H-W-W-H. This actually leads to a weird situation: this is a Major-ish scale with a Major tonic chord. In fact, it’s almost identical to Major aside from having a Sharpened (or “Augmented”) 4th. UH...THAT’S A TRITONE! If the Minor 2nd is not the most dissonant interval in music, the only other interval that has a shot at that claim is the Tritone. It’s called the Tritone because in the British system, a Whole Step is called a “Tone”, and you get to a Tritone by going three Tones up from a note. Three, tri, you get the point. If you want an example of how dissonant it usually is, the first 4 seconds of Purple Haze by Jimi Hendrix has you covered. In it, Hendrix’s guitar plays a Bb over the bass guitar playing an E, and it seriously sounds like death itself is creeping into the song, making you expect a much harder and scarier song than what it becomes.
 
So, you would expect that words like “happy” are out the window with Lydian, and you’d be right, but the keywords to look for are actually words like “spacey”, “dreamlike”, and “uplifting”. See, the trick with using Lydian is actually abusing that Tritone. You don’t want to let it hang out there, though. What you do is you let it resolve where it wants to go to: the Perfect 5th. Doing this is actually a lovely sound, in spite of the dissonant interval, and really leads to tracks that are not happy, but still gentle or glorious depending on the point of the song. Examples of songs using this mode are Maria from West Side Story (the “Maria” about 30 seconds into the song is when you’ll hear the resolution I’m talking about), The Simpsons theme song (“The Simpsons” at the beginning), and Yoda’s Theme from Star Wars.
 
Mode 5: Mixolydian
 
Ah, this is much more familiar territory. Starting on the Perfect 5th of Major, we have “Mixolydian”, with an interval set of W-W-H-W-W-H-W. Again, a Major-ish scale with a Major tonic chord, this one is almost identical to Major as well, but instead of the change being a raised 4th like in Lydian, we have a Minor 7th. This leads to another interesting scale, where we are sort of happy, but not really? One of the descriptions I’ve heard to describe Mixolydian is “Major’s cooler, younger brother”, because it’s a little bit darker and edgier than Major, but not so dark that it feels like it has no pep. Examples of songs using this mode are Clocks by Coldplay, You Really Got Me by The Kinks, and, well, to be honest, most Rock music in general. If a Rock song sounds Major-y to you, its almost certainly in Mixolydian instead.
 
Mode 6: Aeolian (Minor)
 
Ah, we’re back in familiar territory! Starting on the Major 6th of Major, we have the “Aeolian” scale, better known as the “Minor” scale. This is the default “sad” scale, with intervals of W-H-W-W-H-W-W, and having a Minor 3rd, 6th, and 7th, along with a Minor tonic chord. Examples using this mode are too numerous to count; chances are, if a song is dark, foreboding, or otherwise sad, it’s probably in Minor. It’s a really easy scale to use once you get a handle on it, so it’s the default for “sad” music, though that’s not to say it doesn’t come with kinks. That, however, is another tangent for another day.
 
Mode 7: Locrian
 
Oh, goddamn it! Well, I guess this was inevitable. Starting on the Major 7th of Major, we have the “Locrian” scale, with the interval set of H-W-W-H-W-W-W. This one is neither Major, nor Minor. Instead, it’s tonic chord is Diminished. We have a Minor 2nd, 3rd, 6th, 7th, and a Flattened (or “Diminished”) 5th -- ANOTHER TRITONE! Unlike Lydian, though, this use case has no redeeming qualities. It’s basically completely unusable as is, and that’s the opinion of MOST composers. You do not compose in Locrian to make music; you do it as an exercise to explore its properties, which can be described by keywords as “unstable” and “unwieldly”. It’s not IMPOSSIBLE to make music with the scale, just very, VERY difficult. Examples that use this mode are Digging Graves by John Kirkpatrick, and Pascal’s Prison by Jake Lizzio.
 
I’ve actually been itching to do this one for a while, but I just haven’t had a good excuse for it. Hope this wasn’t more confusion piled onto confusion.

[Maniakkid25]

...Okay, normally, I'd wait for someone else to post because I don't like double posting, but this is my rant topic, so I'mma do what I want. I'm about to do a smash course applying the limited knowledge I've already explained on a song (well, two songs, but we'll get there) that was bothering the hell out of me, keeping me up at night with the question: "WHAT KEY ARE YOU IN?!"




The song is "Music" by Mystery Skulls. If you recognize that name, it's probably because they went viral a few years ago with their song "Ghost" in a Rhythm Heaven-esque music video with a heart-crushing story. That's not important right now. I'm just hear to listen to the song and figure out what chords are here. So, listen along, let's pull out a trusty piano app. What often happens for me is that, when I'm listening to music and trying to find the underlying chords, I single out a note and work from there. That's slightly more difficult with this song, because the chords are actually distorted voices, but we can still make it work! So, let's just listen to that first chord over and over, and see if I can make out anything...and it should sound a little like this.

(WARNING: Lower your volume! This hurt my ears just from my TV!)



Awesome, so our trusty piano tells me our note singled out is an E. Let's see if we can single out a bit more. Just so I don't have to go through every single note, just take my word for it that the next note I single out is a G# above that E, and a C# below that E. Ah, that's a C# minor triad, so we'll note that down. NEXT CHORD, I single out a F#, then a D#, then a B: B Major. The third one gets a bit spicy. See, the first two notes I single out right there are G# at the bottom, and F# at the top. Without even needing to look for it (though you can hear a B if you listen close enough), that's a G# minor 7th chord.

I didn't talk about 7th chords, before, so let's quickly go over them. While Triads are the basis of every chord, you can add "extensions" on top of them by just continuing to stack thirds. So, you can have the 7th, the 2nd (called the 9th in context), the 4th (or 11th), and the 6th (or 13th). Each of these adds a little flavor to the chord, but without changing the overall chord (though some are more stable than others -- looking at you, sharp 11). If you want to get real fancy, turns out you can just skip the 5th in a chord that's not diminished, and it will still "sound" like the normal chord. This is called a "shell" voicing -- useful if, say, you're writing an arrangement that limits you to three notes at a time.

So, C# minor, B Major, G# minor 7th, and then it turns out with a bit of digging, the next chord is C# minor. Usually, the chord at our beginning or end is considered the "tonic" chord, so we should be in C#, right? Well, normally, yes, but that doesn't explain the melody line, so let's check that for a moment. Now, noodling around on the piano, what notes are in the melody?



...Well, that doesn't friggin' help us! See, the problem is we don't know the mode it focuses on: this could be E Pentatonic Major, but the C# Pentatonic Minor scale uses all the same notes, and it turns out the melody line kind of uses both! See, the first half of the verse kind of hangs around C#, popping above and below it before resolving back to it, but then the second half of the verse emphasizes the E, so we're kind of in a halfway house, here. So, with no other options, generally it's best to default to what the chords are telling us, and that's C#, specifically C# minor. Okay... But this investigation led me down a different rabbit hole, because I found a song with a similar chord progression that messed me up until I sat down and just analyzed this song myself.

See, if you throw the song into Chordify, you won't get this chord progression. You'll get the progression A, B, E, C#m (well, actually, you'll get quite a few progressions because the melody is screwing it up, but when the chords are playing by themselves, it settles to that), and while I was able to throw out the E pretty quickly because that F# is so obviously playing (G#m7 is just far more likely than an Eadd9), the A stuck with me because those chords, if you play them on a piano, sound harmonious with the song. And the problem was there is a song with that EXACT chord progression that was throwing me off into thinking it was the same thing!



Listen to that opening riff! If you look up a guitar tab, they will all tell you the same thing: the underlying chords are A, B, G#m, C#m (with an ornamental C#sus4, but don't worry about the sus4, it's not important). Now, when you search up "God Knows key signature", you'll quickly get an answer: C# Minor. That, however, MAKES NO SENSE! Sure, our VERSE section hangs on that C#m chord, but we start on an A in the chorus, and the singer is clearly going through the E Major scale, all but droning on that E when not climbing through it. In fact, she only hits that C# 8 times before she hits that bridge! And that's not even talking about the Truck Driver's Gear Change right at the end! So what key is God Knows in? Probably both E Major and C# Minor at the same time; it's not unheard of for a song to be Minor in the verse section, and Major in the chorus, but usually those are parallel keys (C# Major and C# Minor), not relative modes (E Major and C# Minor)! At least I only have one of these songs driving me insane now, though.

[Moonface]

I'm still trying to get my head around everything you've posted since I last commented in here (it's just a lot to take in when you have zero musical knowledge XD) but I did want to talk about something I saw the other night on SGDQ. So they were playing a game called K-Shoot Mania, and I have no idea if this is the fastest song in the game but one of them had a BPM of 275, and would it be right to assume that playing any song at that speed is impossible unless you're using special equipment like the controller the person was using to play the game at the time?

[Maniakkid25]

...SORT OF!

Under most circumstances, the human maximum for BPM is around 240-300 BPM. Yes, there are some psychos out there who can play way, WAY faster than that, but most composers will max out their music there on account the fact that that approaches the maximum for human HEARING, as well.

See, past about 250 BPM, you stop hearing individual 16th notes, and start hearing just a single tone. This limit is fundamental to human hearing, and is similar to the way that CRT TVs work for the human eye -- the brain can only decode its information so fast. Probably the "most famous" (i.e. an actual popular act did this) use case of this is Moby's "Thousand", which peaks around 1000 BPM.

Now, to put all this in perspective, Flight of the Bumblebee is 16th notes at 144 BPM. That's the kind of insane speeds we are talking about. So, is it humanly possible? Yeah, because people have done it before (16th notes at 275 is only about 18.3 notes per second. Dragonforce's "Fury of the Storm" hits and sustains 20!) But most professional musicians will take one look at 16th notes at 200 BPM, and probably faint. It's POSSIBLE, but definitely not NORMAL!

[Moonface]

So since anything beyond 250 BPM stops having discernable notes for humans, what's the point for a song like "Fury of the Storm" being played with actual notes above that number? Couldn't you just take the singular tone that the human ear will take from that and just play the one note across however long is necessary and get the same effect?

[Maniakkid25]

This assumes that the tone remains the same. In Fury of the Storm, that tone is constantly changing in 16th note triplets (6 16th notes per beat), because that corresponds to the crazy tapping section. While the individual notes may start to bleed, its at just the right point that its still possible to detect distinct notes and rhythms. And plus, abusing that functional limit of human hearing is the entire reason the genre of Extratone exists, so the short answer is "it's not that simple".