How Sheet Music Lies To You
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- Опубліковано 17 бер 2022
- Sheet music is everywhere these days. As musicians, we all learn to read the little dots and lines that translate into notes and chords, but we don't really think about what those dots and lines are actually doing. The process of turning music into notation and then back into music is hazardous, and while it's still a very useful tool, we should really talk more about the things we lose along the way.
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Some additional thoughts/corrections:
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I really can't stress enough the extent to which everything cool about those two pieces was entirely on them. I debated including more requests, like giving them more specific tempos or vibes or something to put my finger on the scales a bit and make sure they were different, but ultimately I just explained the project and sent them the notation and they made all the artistic decisions. I deserve zero credit.
2) That said, to be clear, I didn't run the script by them, so if you disagree with anything I said please don't take that out on them. They're both wonderful.
3) Did I forget to write the last B chord symbol while notating Aimee's clip and then paste it in from later in the video to make it look like it had been there the whole time? The world may never know.
4) On Nashville Numbers, I should note that there is at least one element I left out, which is that there's a handful of symbols for some common playing techniques, like the staccato stab and the push chord.
5) When I played the out-of-tune B, you may not have noticed that it was different from a normal B. That's fine! In fact, it demonstrates my point: Recognizing those sorts of microtonal nuances is much easier if you're used to music that uses them systematically. If most of what you listen to uses the same 12 pitches, you're more likely to just adjust whatever you hear to fit those. I promise you, though, that B was 29 cents sharp, which is, in principle anyway, pretty far above the just noticeable difference.
6) Additive meter doesn't necessarily have to not repeat, as in the Dream Theater example. That's the easiest way to demonstrate the concept quickly, but you can certainly establish patterns and sit in them for an extended period. It is, after all, a concept employed by multiple folk dance traditions, and dance musics tend to call for some level of repetition.
7) There are also cultures with no real metric practice, at least not one invested in a consistent, identifiable pattern of pulses. In those cases, neither divisive nor additive meter really describes the music meaningfully, and any notation systems that arise don't prioritize conveying rhythmic information. These are outside my area of expertise so I didn't feel comfortable getting too deep into them, but I wanted to at least acknowledge it.
8) On the G/G# thing, yes, I'm aware that Ab exists. I considered going out of my way to explain why I was excluding it (on possible reason is that you also need some other form of A? a scale like G half-whole octatonic needs G, G#, A#, and B.) but I decided to not bother and just hope that people don't decide they'd rather prove how smart they are than listen to the point I'm actually making. Let's see how that goes.
9) On the guitar tab thing, I should note that how much of the difference between the two ways of thinking about music is down to the notation itself and how much of it is down to the different needs that lead to those notations in the first place is up for debate, but is also not super relevant. Notational perspective isn't an argument that notation directly controls musical thought. Rather, it's an argument that notation is embedded within musical thought, and thus both shapes and responds to other elements of that thought. It's a feedback loop, and deciding which side of the process is "responsible" for that loop is missing the point.
10) I don't think anything I said implied this, but just in case, I want to be 100% clear that when I'm talking about cultures that haven't developed a notational tradition, I'm not saying that's a bad thing. It's just a thing. Not all cultures have a conception of music that makes it reasonable to want to write it down for later, and in those circumstances, developing notation anyway would be pointless. It's easy when talking about this sort of thing to wind up implying that these cultures are less "developed" or more "primitive" or whatever, but that's nonsense and I want to make sure it doesn't sound like I'm saying that.
11) On that note, I do want to acknowledge that limiting myself to notation systems that I'd expect to be familiar to much of my audience probably wound up implying a smaller range of possible differences in notational perspective than actually exists if you consider other cultures as well. I decided to do that partly because more familiar systems require less explanation, and partly because I'm not an expert in other musical cultures so I didn't want to risk misrepresenting their practices. But, for example, while pretty much every system I talked about has some way of representing rhythm/duration, that's more a reflection of our musical culture's obsession with metric patterns than it is proof that duration is a universally fundamental musical characteristic. Some cultures don't care as much, and their notation systems don't incorporate that information nearly as prominently. Bhagwati, for instance, mentions Chinese notation as prioritizing pitch and articulation while leaving the nuances of rhythm up to oral tradition and performer preference, but I don't know enough about Chinese notation to feel comfortable discussing it at that level of detail.
Yeah? Well, but instead of writing G/G# you could always use G/Ab. Video refuted!!!! /j
#3 ahahaha
Did you really just call The Dance of Eternity "Dance of Eternities"?
It's pedantic sure but considering you said you got into music education via metal I think you lost just a hit of screet cred :P
@@bmac4 I mean, I'm a big DT fan so that annoyed me slightly too, but in fairness they've also said before they were more into the Rob Zombie type metal than the more prog genres. Based on that and other videos/podcast episodes/comments, I'm going to assume that Cory respects prog musically but doesn't really go out of their way to listen to it often (barring Jethro Tull, crossover hits like Carry On Wayward Son, and what if any Pink Floyd whoever reads this considers to count as prog). So I'd believe it was simply a misspeak due to a relative lack of familiarity that simply didn't get caught in editing, which honestly just happens to every UA-camr at some point. They've done it before, will probably do it a lot in future videos, and I'm not about to let a tiny nitpick get in the way of a good video that seems to get what The Dance of Eternity was going for more than most people seem to.
Have you ever looked into the notation for DJ work in hip hop?
There have been a few papers and attempts to codify it over the years. Might be worth a look!
Man, it's certainly taken a lifetime of practice to not smear the ink with your hands whilst writing. I'm right handed and I manage to smear ink all over the place. Mad props.
At about 15:40 he actually writes two words right-to-left as well. I had to watch it again in slow motion.
@@aaronchristie8940 that was horrifying to watch ngl
I spent the whole time admiring that, as a left handed person I spent my whole life struggling with that issue 😶😶
@@aaronchristie8940 I'm left handed, and I will sometimes do that to avoid smears because of how fed up I am
You all should check out Uniball's Jetstream line of pens. They're not perfect (they occasionally skip), but you can't smear them if you try.
This reminds me of a famous saying in statistics: “all models are wrong, but some are useful”. In order to be able to analyse a system, you have to abstract it, and in doing so you have to decide what elements are “useful” to the purpose in mind, and throw away a lot of other information that might be vital for other purposes. I’ve often felt that the most interesting parts of music were everything that the familiar song notation throws away when focusing on melody+lyrics+chord symbols: i.e. arrangement, performance and production. We so often think that melody+lyrics+chords are the essence of what a song *is*, but when people play at guessing a song from its intro alone, it’s clear that we can often identify a song from a split second of audio before anything “notatable” is even heard.
I think this is also true of science and knowledge in general
@AD Shyn Notatray
Notasofa
14:23 there are actually 8 ways to play that E on a 6-string guitar! There are 6 places that the note can be fretted, plus it can also be sounded as the 3rd harmonic on the E string, or the 2nd harmonic on the A string, for two more unique timbres of that one pitch on the same instrument.
A pinch harmonic could probably be added, as well, although it’s basically just a natural harmonic but on the bridge end of the string.
I think you could keep adding to this if you tried.
Does bending the string counts as another way? Lmaoo
Wellll......ya know....there are 12 ways to play each note on a piano....
@@peterharrison5833 In separate octaves
Something worth understanding about tablature is that if it's *good* tab it drastically improves communication of which position and fingerings were used to play the song in question. A guitar in standard tuning has 5 middle Cs. It's not always obvious which one is implied by standard notation, but if you see a 10 on the D string, there's no doubt.
This sounds like it might not matter but sometimes it is crucial to understanding the music you're playing. Find a tab of EVH's Eruption that was transcribed before anyone knew he was tapping. It's hilariously unplayable at tempo by all but the most exceptional pickers and even if you manage it, it'll sound *so* different that it'll be clear you're doing it weird. Sometimes we just need more information than notation provides!
I always explain it this way:
Standard Notation tells you *what* has to be checked, but *not how* exactly you achieve that (declarative), just like a mathematical problem. It only represents the properties of a state. It makes you a *better musician* overall and *communicator* and improves your *abstract abilities* to think and *theorise* and to quickly adapt and process new *concepts* .
Tabulature/Fingerings tell you *how* to produce a sound step by step as in a recipe or computer algorithm (imperative). It makes you *fluent on your instrument* and focuses on improving your *technique* and how comfortable your *intuitive ability* to play is.
but you can notate Positions in staff notation .....................
@@A.B.H_da-goat sure but it's superimposed on top of the music in an awkward way. I can get pitch and string information out of a tab with a single marker, the fret number of the desired string. It just communicates the same data more simply v0v
@@TypingHazard what's awkward about just writing the position once for a whole run of notes? It's _efficient._ Tab notation is needlessly specific in most situations - nobody would play a simple C D E F G scale run constantly jumping between positions like A3 E10 D2 A8 G0, it's fully sufficient to just suggest a position once and then have the player do the obvious thing. The redundant information clutters tabs. (Not to mention that the numbers are generally worse to read - in standard notation, a whole motiv can often be read in a single glance by looking at the _shape_, without actually focussing on any of the individual notes.)
Also, if the position is just superimposed, it's much easier for the performer to move a passage e.g. in a higher position because she has too small hands to play it the way the composer would have.
I like when both standard notation and tablature are provided together, Standard notation is quicker to read and is much better at representing rhythm but if I'm really struggling with a part I like to see exactly the way it was played by the original artist, and that's best achieved with tablature. Both together make it so you can really know a piece inside and out.
It's like my professor always says. "Why do we notate music like this?" "Because it's the best we got."
It may not be universal, but cultures that don't translate well on staff notation, aren't worried about staff notation. A lot of cultures don't use notation at all, but instead they learn by ear.
And a lot of cultures have their own notation. (There are lots of Japanese music notations, for instance, though they're generally instrument-specific - there was no 'instrument-nonspecific' notation in Japan until contact with the West.)
It seems to me like those limitations are not specific to music. A speach script or a theater play pretty much have the same issues. You know the words, their sequential order, punctuation gives a very basic idea of rythm, but different people reading them will give very different interpretations that are not "hard coded" in the written form. It's also very culture specific, the script created for one language will suck to transcript another language.
This kind of extends to all forms of communication- how many times have you had to think about how you word an email to not seem passive aggressive? Even spoken language has this limitation- hearing somebody describe an emotion they're feeling to you is not the same as experiencing that emotion yourself. Every method of communication will lose some information for the sake of clarity
Honestly, the fact that we should include punctuation in our written language is a super-non-obvious idea. And the way we go about it is very strange. It _roughly_ corresponds to intonation and pacing, but _very_ loosely. (If we were to tear it down - 'it' meaning our system of punctuation - and start over again, would we invent it the same way?)
He's forgetting entirely about speed and feel directions in music..
Allegro, Andante, Adigitto, Forte, Pianissimo, Mezzo-forte etc... 👍
@@columbus8myhw In most languages, punctuation is more about grammatical structure than intonation or pacing itself. Periods, commas, colons and semicolons are grammatical pauses, and doesn't really express intonation in most of cases. And there are exclamation and question marks that roughly express some intonation.
i think of sheet music the same as writting in a book, you can read both many ways, but they are not the story or song, they are a way for us humans to transfer the music and words from one to another
i feel like it's kind of like a recipe. you can follow it 100% or change some things and even add your own frosting
In a way your comparison does draw a fitting way of saying, musical notations are ona way just lamguages, not meant to be spoken by human mouths, but by different musical instruments. As such it also makes sense that different musical traditions have wildly different forms of notation due to the way diffent traditions 'speak' andthe differences in how and instrument is played. Guitar tabs emphasise the wheres of the notes seeing other details from a song that are evenly important can be gotten via different means. Stem notation prioritizes other elements from how those instuments are usually played. Heck iirc tjere's a few instruments in asiathat have such hyperspecific notation that there's a japanese instrument that pretty much fully notated in kanji (not 100% sure it was japan but i knowthere's an asian instrument in which notation is done that way)
Amazing video! Thanks for letting me help out a bit! I had fun with it!
That rendition was hauntingly beautiful. Props, Aimee!
You really are the sharpest tool in the shed.
Something I find nice about tabs, is that they're built from the semitone, where sheet music feels more based around the tone and more forced into the most common keys. Tabs are naturally chromatic, with every semitone being equivalent
this remided me of a discussion i had with a friend of mine. she insisted that there were only 7 notes, and that the other 5 were just alterations of those seven, while i had always thought of western tuning systems as 12 fully distinct notes. she was classically trained on piano and used to reading staff notation, while i was a guitar player with focus on modern music and used to reading guitar tabs online
@@paulamarina04 one could argue that there's only really three (maybe four*) notes, and that the rest are inferred
Consider: octaves, thirds and fifths can be "naturally" found through harmonics
(*-as can an interval somewhere between the sixth and seventh, but we don't use it directly)
So from your starting note, you now have a fifth and third
Extrapolate more fifths and/or thirds from there and you get twelve notes
*-that other interval doesn't get used as a note per se, but its mathematical value as a ratio relative to the root will occur as one of the ratios when you analyse minor chords in just temper
There's also some debate to be made that it's the "blue note", but I'm really digressing on this thing
Re: guitarists and their more functional approach - please note how the most popular guitar related software like GuitarPro does actually focus on those unfixed elements of performances - with best tabs meticulously replicating amp settings, pickup configurations and techniques like bending (last of which can be *theoretically* replicated in staff, but wilder and more random bends are incredibly messy to note, e.g. that dive in Slipknot's Vermilion).
I also really support your argument about tabs - and can expand on it, as even theoretically the same notes can have different timbres on different strings, not to mention muted strings and other harmonic thingies happening in funk strumming patterns that are responsible for so much of the flavour of any given track.
Having read this, I would say that codifying those "unfixed elements" isn't necessarily a worthwhile pursuit.
Like, who really wants to live in a world where your tabs tell you where on the string to palm mute, or exactly how long your fingernails should be for that clean part to sound right? Or how many pounds of force you need to strike each piano key with?
When I was in music school, my professor had talked about a disagreement within music scholarship regarding whether early baroque players would play with dynamics and tempo shifts, because the sheet music from that time didn't include those details. He was firmly of the position (it was the "duh" position for him) that they inferred the dynamics etc, or otherwise supplied their own interpretations, and people simply got obsessed with notation of every detail as time went on. Also consider that folk music relies heavily on flexibility in interpretation of their source material.
Notation is useful, but I definitely think it's a situation where you can have too much of a good thing.
@@davidjairala69 well, that depends on what you expect from a tab - should it be a starting point in learning a song or a complete rendition.
Also it probably depends on complexity/feel of the music - just like in case of swing example in video, where it really is better to just write down eight notes and annotate them; you would find similar shortcuts in many thrash metal tabs where not every single palm mute is written down, usually it is just a note about 'aggressive/constant pm'.
And finally - are you looking for a Billboard 200 tab or the convenient way to communicate something over DMs to your bandmate.
That last part is the main reason why I believe that writing my music down in tabs offers me a) medium that is inherently suited to the instrument b) that do not require specific education in case I need to collaborate with people from more punk background c) that still has tools to include little quirks inherent to the way I play guitar, without making me miserable about fitting every single little syncopation and dotting eights and sixteens.
Re: baroque and folk - great points! I believe I also saw a theory that increasing detail of notation was also related to the fact that at that time music professionals were getting, well, more professional - going through official education, different environments, travelling not between cities but regions and countries - which meant that a lot of this unspoken context was lost on them and required composers to be more specific. And even then all those baroque musicians would be from European circles, so I can imagine that using e.g. tab with my funk example would have different level of detail based on the fact how much reader is accustomed to the specific genre.
@@sz5001 Ironically i didn't even consider a modern song-writing band situation (been some years since I've been in one seriously) and it's def really nice to be able to bounce highly accurate midi clips to your bandmates. Also that point about why the conventions around the level of detail in notation is really interesting
I have considered sheet music as the means to creating music, it isn't music itself. It is the tool you use to create great sounding noises, but you have to have the passion and understanding of your instrument to know how to interpret what is written to implement it to the instrument. As a percussionist I am fully capable of cranking out rhythms at max volume, but that isn't very musical. Sheet music only comes alive when someone reads it and uses their musical perspective to create something wonderful.
Sheet music is a set of instructions for someone to recreate music. Music can be very easily created without sheet notation.
The interesting part is in the phrase "how music works". It seems to be an academic term to say "You got to know the song before you play it".
This is the reason guitar tabs/chords are so popular. This is also the reason there are so many arguments over classical pieces. No one has the "original recording".
Just wanna say, you're totally spot on about tablature and it's relationship to the physicality of the instrument in a way that I never really thought of.
When I need to think about music in terms of things like scales and chords, I visualize them in terms of shapes and boxes, to the point where conceptualizing intervals themselves is done by thinking in terms of the physical distance between those notes on a fretboard, either on the same string or on an adjacent one. A 4th to me is a straight line, where a major 3rd is diagonal, almost triangular in concept, and a minor 3rd is like an upside down power chord.
What never really occurred to me though is the way these shapes inform how I think about the relationship between notes and chords. Playing a barre chord rooted on the 3rd fret then playing the same chord shape on the 6th fret feels different than if I'd moved the chord shape from the 3rd to 7th fret, and that difference is a bigger part of how I conceptualize music than the individual notes in those chords, or in some cases, the chords themselves.
I know enough rudimentary theory to know what those notes and chords are called, but that's not what I'm thinking about when I write or play music on a guitar. I'm thinking about the physical space between them on a fretboard. And that's why even if I'm writing an electronic piece on a piano roll, I often have a guitar in my lap while doing so.
Anyway, wonderful video, as always.
For sure, I started learning music though electronic means and it still sticks with me. Where pianists have keyboards and guitarists have frets I learned the piano roll.
To me a basic minor chord is, counted up from the root: a note, 2 spaces, a note, 3 spaces, and then the last note. When I first tried out piano it felt so foreign because I wanted to count up equidistantly, but you can't do that because the notes aren't distributed equally through space. When I tried guitar later on, it made much more intuitive sense because I'd internalized counting up by semitones so deeply.
Of course with time you can get accustomed to any system and I understand piano better nowadays but I'll still always think of it as a transpose of the piano roll.
"...and a minor 3rd is like an upside down power chord."
I didn't notice this; I love this. Thank you for saying this, you beautiful being 😂😂
I felt the guitar in your lap part so deeply. When learning Nothing Else Matters on piano, I literally played it note for note on my guitar and tried to find out what those notes were on the piano😂
I'm currently applying at some music schools for composition and the problems with staff notation got really obvious. You're expected to turn in your pieces as sheet music and in some cases they even only accept PDFs. I make mostly ambient music, writing a Dm9 add13 that is held for 20 bars is not exactly a good representation of my work. Composers compose music, not notation.
"writing a Dm9 add13 that is held for 20 bars is not exactly a good representation of my work"
lmao
I'm imagining your piece as the musical equivalent of a Barnett Newman painting. "Yes, professor, that is indeed a giant canvas painted completely white, with one irregular off-center strip of slightly darker white. Yes, the paint is applied so evenly that the only hint of texture comes from the weave of the canvas itself. No, I will not be taking questions at this time."
I hope you get in to one of your schools, if for no other reason than to show those profs the limits of staff notation.
THIS IS GOLD. I'm a guitarist, I started as a classical one and always struggled with staff notation - not because I couldn't read it, but because I always felt It simply "didn't fit the experience". I was (I have been?) convinced I was simply wrong and incapable of reading music, and actually gatekept myself from guitar tabs. Now i have a way better understanding, and feel liberated. Thank you so much.
The no-hear note to signify no specific time is also fairly common in older Catholic Church music
Thank you! I've struggled with these concepts for the last 15 years.
People have this tendency to canonize paths to ideals. They should learn how to communicate but not depend on that type of communication, so communication itself can change.
Weird thought: a lot of what staff notation fails to write is the stuff that's impossible to play on a harpsichord or piano or organ.
It's not really that weird of a thought at all! It makes sense, given popular Western music's emphasis on those keyboarded instruments.
@@juni6886 That's true - I just felt uncomfortable being too definite when it didn't come up in the video at all.
Then there's organ tablature (used by composers such as Buxtehude and sometimes Bach).
This just made me realize why I so often feel amazing while playing something that I visualized in my head and when it comes to talking about it to others I feel like I am unable to convey what I envisioned.
I am writing music from a perspective of a poet - as in, someone who started with writing poems, then tried to write some lyrics and find a melody and harmony to fit them.
I didn't even realize that what I was doing, is trying to find a feeling, an emotion or a thought, put it into words and then embellish it with music.
E.g. - I wrote a song about called "Wave of Sorrow". Now I want the music to sound like the waves of the ocean, flowing back and forth.
It is really hard to put that "feeling" into notation... and makes it hard for me to convey to others what is the most important part of the song.
Thank you!
How fun! I was thinking a few days ago about how music in the Chinese orchestra from one or two thousand years back would be notated, as they do use quarter tones, which as you’ve shown is something not so naturally notated in western staff notation. Found what I’m studying today; thanks!
There’s also ancient Greek notation to look at. The rhythm of the song can be derived from the natural rhythm found in the spoken language, while the tones are marked above the words to be sung. A video on that topic is “Rediscovering Ancient Greek Music” on Armand D’Angour’s UA-cam channel (a little more than 10 minutes in, but the whole video is worthwhile). Duration markings (lines with notches) were also possible, as shown the first few pages of Gardner Reed’s “Music Notation”.
You also got me to realize a purpose of guitar tablature. Thank you. =)
Guitar isn’t my main instrument, so I didn’t understand what the benefits of tablature might be until you just explained it to me.
Ancient notation, that's fascinating.
Music notation is like a language. One common adage in linguistics is that languages aren't limited in what they can express, but are limited by what they must. Similarly, staff notation _can_ convey a lot of information outside western traditions, but most of it would get in the way of what it must convey, what it's designed to convey.
You could probably argue that they are languages. Fairly specialised ones, but still languages
I always found that the beauty of staff notation was that it allowed interpretation of the piece. It laid down all the necessities and left the rest up to the performer. No two performers would produce the same product. And even the same performer may reinterpret it. It's part of the fun of music, for me at least.
Brilliant episode, puts me in mind of “Phaedrus’ knife” from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, wherein complex systems are broken down into simpler ones by assumptions about the former, including form, purpose, material, etc. For me personally, real creativity begins with with a novel approach at the level of those assumptions. If one can ‘see’ those assumptions themselves, they become a playground for creativity.
This is an absolutely great video that, funnily enough, helped me realize how easy it is to read thirds on sheet music.
Well thought out video. You did a great job of communicating your points. It reminded me of when I was teenager. Having been brought up reading sheet music and seeing tabs for the first time, I remember turning my nose up at first thinking it was too simple and sheet music was the end all be all. I eventually learned that they were just an imperfect tool and sheet music was as well. Both have pros and cons.
This is why instrumental, performance, tempo and stylistic directions are incorporated into most modern sheet music. And especially where they aren't, familiarity with applicable genres is helpful in carrying out a good performance.
I started learning music theory via guitar tab software. It means my understanding of melody and harmony are a little more... mathematical? than my peers who were learning in music lessons at school or something.
It also means I can read tabs on other instruments pretty easily 😂
I'm glad you got to the TAB caveat:
It is implied that TAB will be used alongside of the recording.
Obviously that informs the ear of the guitarist.
I absolutely love this! Only - I think staff notation has been moving away from the base unit measuring pitch against time to "sound" against time. (It's just that we use cleffs to define what the base symbols sound like) Considering drum sheets, it is assumed that you know which sounds are meant by which combination of symbols as not all drum sheets are marked using the same symbols and degrees for each sound (for example if you have 2 kicks or more than 3 toms) and only deviations from an expected norm is explicitly defined.
I appreciated the way that you circled back and urged people to check out the two artists who contributed to your video near the end. This one was a thinker and I had completely forgotten them. It shows that you respect the people you collaborate with. Good man.
I've definitely seen the black noteheads without stems used in real scores, usually modern music that wants a sort of plainchant flavor (like mensural notation, but more familiar so you can read it easier). I think I've seen it in Arvo Pärt, for example.
Great video, and great points all around! As a fan of prog music, including Dream Theater, I really appreciate the thoughtful analysis of The Dance of Eternity, because it really gets at a big issue I have with the way prog gets perceived, both by its fans and its detractors. ...I don't really know if this comment is going anywhere, other than tossing around some ideas I'm trying to fit into a whole video on why I love prog in response to Polyphonic's suggestion that people do that for the music they love most, but I just feel like nerding out a bit about this example in particular.
When people discuss prog, they often refer to it, either in praise or derision, as being extremely musically complex, with The Dance of Eternity often serving as a poster child for this. (Discussions of more old-school prog generally use something by Yes, either Close to the Edge or Tales From Topographic Oceans, depending on the stance being taken... but joke's on them, I genuinely love both albums, fight me.) And it's not hard to see why, because in conventional terms, both academically and in more casual senses, it often _is_ complex. But where I think this goes wrong is where people start bringing in auter theory stuff and ascribing intent to the choice of making complex music. Because usually the intent they arrive at is "it's complex because they wanted to show off their ability to compose/perform it", and from there people jump in with the old "it should only be as complex as it needs to be" adage and deem the entire thing "bad music" as a result. And I really feel like that... misses the mark in a lot of ways that I'm still figuring out how to articulate.
With this song, the way you analyzed it in the video is illustrative in my mind; Mike, Jordan, and Johns (Petrucci and Myung) probably didn't go into the writing process planning every meter change out in advance, they probably felt out what sounded good in an additive sense (regardless of if they were conscious of that label or not) and it just turned out to have a lot going on if you try to transcribe it. (I know that there's that video of Portnoy counting out the meter of the later parts, but even that feels more like they transcribed it after the fact as a way of solidifying it and making sure everyone was on the same page rhythmically.) But I also don't think the choice to make it so disjointed and complex was just a "let's show off the amount of raw technical skill in this lineup of musicians", especially considering the narrative of the concept album that the song is part of, _Metropolis Part 2: Scenes From a Memory._ (Spoilers naturally follow, if you care about that and don't already know the album's plot.)
The story focuses on a man named Nicholas, who after having strange dreams that seem to be trying to tell him something, discovers through hypnotherapy that he had a past life as a young woman named Victoria who was murdered in 1928 and attempts to find out what happened to her. At the point that the song comes in he's found out that she had been upset by her boyfriend Julian's gambling addiction, and subsequently started an affair with his wealthy politician brother, Edward. Based on this and the final line of the band's earlier song "Metropolis Part 1 - The Miracle and the Sleeper" ("Love is the dance of eternity"), many people interpret the instrumental track as the equivalent of an implicit sex scene between Edward and Victoria. I do think that's part of its narrative role, but you also get a rather more explicit depiction of such in the bridge of the previous track, "Scene Six: Home". What I think it depicts more completely is Victoria's turbulent mindset through all this - she still loves Julian, but she's upset by his actions and finding comfort in the stability Edward offers. Meanwhile she finds Edward attractive and tempting, but also likely put off by his sexual obsession with her. All of this leads her to decide to break things off with Edward in the next track and second half of Scene Seven, "One Last Time". (Though the hypnotherapist withholds the details enough to mislead Nicholas into thinking the opposite, and only the listener finds out the truth in the album's closing track, while Nicholas never does.) In this sense, I think the chaotic, disjointed, and tumultuous instrumental carries across the feelings she has about everything going on but wouldn't be able to express as words. And I think reducing all that to "they wanted to show off how good they are at their instruments"... does a disservice to any semblance of critical thinking, whether you're praising their skill or dismissing the songwriting as "meaningless". ...I have more thoughts but I'll put away my soapbox for now. I hope any of that made sense beyond just trying to make excuses for why I like the music I do.
It's been a long time since I've been to a prog rock concert, but it was held at Berklee College of Music. I didn't understand why there, of all the venues in Boston, but the trope about prog being "show-off" material probably has something to do with it. Anyway, I agree that "they just wanted to show off" is reductive to the point of being wrong. I play taiko, and my friend composed a piece with a lot of additive meter in it. I know when my friend is trying to show off, and this isn't it. As with your Dream Theater example, it's usually to express something, like the monotony of waiting in line to buy a slice of pizza when you're hangry, and I'm glad someone wrote that music!
And... how do I put this... having spent 2 years practicing the piece, I'm no longer sure that it's improving my "raw technical skills" so much as helping me solidify my part. But I'm open to changing my view on this. Still, I'm no virtuoso, and if you give me another piece like this, I feel like I would be back at square one. Sure, I've built up tools to help the process, but it's not clear to me what would generalize.
With my principle instrument being guitar, and playing in a number of different idioms, I always found it difficult to convey everything I’m trying to in one notation system and this video does a great job of explaining exactly why. It was rough while I was in college and doing composition classes and realizing that while the musical concepts were helpful the notation was really not relatable to my music or instrument. When I write now to I have a tendency to mash together 4 or so different ways on notation just to give myself references and it makes it difficult to give to other performers working with me because invariably 1 or more of those systems is unfamiliar to them.
I have not touched an instrument in years, but this hit me in the heart somehow.
Thank you.
As someone who doesn't know much about music theory,
The midi notation just seems like an easier way to visualize staff notation.
It's like a music box wheel, but digital.
You'd think that, but it's a pain in the ass if you're playing with multiple people. If your drummer is off by 1bpm, the whole system falls apart
@@loganricherson3749 Interesting,
I wouldn't think that it'd be all that different,
But I also cannot read sheet music in a timely fashion,
So I guess I don't have much to go off.
@@BramLastname basically, as soon as you introduce human error to the it, piano roll falls apart because it's too correct. You also don't think about it in musical terms but, instead, simply play the notes as you see them like a machine
@@loganricherson3749 how is staff notation more flexible than that tho?
It's up to the player to correct mistakes is it not?
@@BramLastname correct, but a piano roll is set to a specific speed. You can't change that speed in performance. If you have sheet music of any other kind (even just chords laid out) you can look ahead. Piano roll works fine by yourself but it also essentially removes the concept of a bar. Besides, in most cases where someone would be using piano roll with someone else (such as comping with a band) a chord based layout makes more sense anyways without even bothering with sheet music
Very cool video. I always struggle to explain this to my guitar students, who are sometimes a bit lost about why the conservatoire make them learn staff notation while most of the internet use chrods written above lyrics, tablature, and so on.
This video is so liberating. This is how I've always heard and played music.
This is why it is extremely useful to use recording technology to help communicate the nuances. It's something not available to all, and certainly wasn't available in the past, but the best way to understand musical intent is to hear it.
I've been hoping for this video! People so often refer to "the time signature of a song" as if that's meaningful, but the time signature doesn't describe the song, it explains how the notation is meant to be interpreted. Sure, there's some aspect of the song that caused the person doing the notation to choose that time signature versus a different one, but "convenient to notate using the filled-in circle with stem to designate one beat" isn't really an attribute of the song itself. Further, putting aside Turkish music or swing, I contend that staff notation simply cannot convey the essence of any modern rock/pop song. That is, if someone did a cold sight read of, say, "Satisfaction" by the Rolling Stones from standard notation, they might get the melody and lyrics right but the heart of the song - that iconic Keith Richards riff that truly defines the song - is going to be absent, unless the sheet music includes the appropriate "rhythm figure" to describe the strumming pattern - but that's an additional notational element. In fact for guitar music it may well be the only truly important element - get the strumming pattern right, and the rest follows, but then again, what about the drums? Or the effects, for that matter, which are often core elements of what makes a rock song distinct? Anyway, thanks for discussing this topic!
I... Did you forget dynamics can be notated? Or that rubato is a thing that exists?
Ps im not being a cheeky dick.Intentionally.
Im genuine; Im really asking.
@@ivanl.c.1862 I certainly agree that it's possible to create some notation that is able to indicate anything you like, but the video is about "standard" notation.
The thing about tab being used alongside a recording is interesting to me from my own musical history. I remember in the late 90s pulling down a bunch of text-based guitar lessons with some intro blurbs and then lots of tab, but it was all stuff I had no access to recordings of. For instance, I remember having a transcription of the arpeggios from Yngwie Malmsteen's "Demon Driver," or actually a tapped guitar arrangement of the opening keyboard line from Dream Theater's "Awake"...but with no idea of the tempo or anything else I didn't get anything out of it (well, except in the latter case, the idea that you could tap more than one note at a time).
I use written music, sing, accompany other singers, and actually realized a rare Handel opera. I once worked with a composer who never wrote anything down. He played (and composed) on piano, guitar, trumpet, and banjo. He would always teach me on his original instrument, regardless of the fact that I would be performing on piano (or, in one case, accordion). His piano music was tricky to learn, but his guitar music was almost impossible. On the other hand, as he was learning to use an early music writing program (this was very far back, and I hadn't used any yet), he was having trouble notating a tricky rhythm (for him). I asked him if he had any Schumann books. He did, so I showed him how Schumann would, in a ritard, notate rhythmically free ornaments in small notation. Since he had quite a jazz/etc background, many of his rhythmic patterns (this was for theatrical music), were almost impossible to figure out, and he couldn't talk about them. One left hand pattern drove me crazy. I tried dotted quarter, dotted quarter, quarter, but it wasn't right. Finally, I wrote down triplet half notes. I played it, and he was satisfied. He then remarked to his creative partner, "If she can understand it, she can play it". Talk about different worlds.
I play guitar, and I have often been asked if I can read music notation. I can, but not very well. Non musicians, and sometimes musicians who don’t play guitar, are surprised by this and ask me why. It’s because traditional music notation isn’t that useful to guitarists. Studio guitarists are typically expected to be able to read music, but they also need a lot more information about the music being played in order to be able to read a chart. The notation only tells guitarists which note at which pitch should be played, but, as mentioned in this video, it doesn’t tell them where to play it on the guitar since the same note can be reproduced in several different locations on the guitar neck. Even though the pitch of the note will be consistent the timbre will vary quite a bit as the location on the fretboard changes, as will how comfortable it is to play a particular combination of notes. I have often had difficulty playing certain passages when learning music by ear. It really helps to see the guitarist who recorded the piece actually play it so that I can see where and how they played it. There’s often a lightbulb moment when I see what the original guitarist did and it becomes much easier to play the passage in the correct position. That’s why so few guitarists bother with learning to read music and just rely on their ears and tablature, when it’s available. A great deal of guitar tablature, however, is written by other guitarists who learned a song by ear and, all too frequently, it’s just plain incorrect or it’s played on a different part of the neck which makes it much more difficult to play. A good ear and access to decent video recordings of a song being played by the original artist are a guitarist’s best resources for learning a song. Even so called professional transcriptions of songs in guitar tablature books and magazines are all too often dead wrong. It’s a crazy instrument in that regard, but I still love it, and I wouldn’t trade it for anything else.
So true. To me, audio and video recordings take away so much of the unnecessary mystique of prog Rock/metal. Like, take for example Dream Theater. To me, DT is not a band you ought to be reading notations for, even for the keyboard parts. Notations help me know what they're playing(on some level) but after learning what chord I never knew to play before, I just dumped it and moved on to watching the artists actually play(or even covers).
I would really love to hear a full version of “Candlelight” All-Star
I imagine that song must have played at Shrek's wedding.
I played in a lot of (rock and pop) bands and we always used notations that aren’t mentioned here. The most important notations that we used were the absolute chord-notation like C, Am, and D7, sometimes complicated to Csus9 or alike. The relative notation of I, IV, V and vi is also frequently used. When you play covers, the best notation is of course an mp3 of the piece you want to play. If you are composing yoiurself within a group, you can play the vital aspects of the song for the other members of the group which they can remember or of which they can make a small note in handwriting.
Most of the notations you mention are based on a pre-1900 way of making music, when music was “a melody and lyrics” as the law states, an old-fashioned and extremely limited definition of what music is, and things have changed considerably over, let’s say, the last century. Nowadays melodies aren’t stand alone items anymore, but are supposed to fit in a chordscheme or a chordprogression. The first half of the solo of “Abracadabra, I want to reach out and grab ya” consists for instance mainly of just one note, but within a changing chord scheme, it still remains interesting as the same notes have different functions within different chords. The US law doesn’t recognize this and I miss this aspect in your video as well. As most classical thinking musicians, you treat melodies as stand -alone and core items and you miss the context of the notes of the melodies within their chords.
New members of an existing rockband will first of all ask “what are the chords I have to play in?” and will rarely ask for the written down melodies in sheetmusic. So I think your whole presentation, how very well done it may be, represents once more the vision of a classical musician who was trained in pre-1900 music and here and there tries to obtain a grab on jazz, blues, pop, rock andsoforth by applying his knowledge of the classical approaches. My experience is that the real way jazz and pop are composed differs greatly from all the possibilities you mention.
Your point that sheet music isn’t music is completely correct, but the way you try to prove that is the classical way of looking at music and you seem to lack the feeling or knowledge of how music is composed today. Besides the things I already mentioned above, any electronic item is missing in your presentation. The exact settings of synthesizers, distortions, guitar amps and even guitar or string brands are lacking, while these are nowadays vital items.
It’s interesting how music is interpreted differently ways. I started taking a jazz studies in school, we play the head of the tune and then take solos. We have 5 horn players [saxophone, trumpet, and a bass clarinet(myself)], since we have so many horn players we play the heads mostly as written. There’s a lot more say on how we want to play the head, solos, and overall form of the song compared to playing in ensembles whether it be jazz or concert band. Swing is definitely more the feel than anything else, some songs may specify medium swing or straight eighths. I find if you listen to it first then you get an idea of the feel of the song. For example blue monk would be weird if you played it straight and cold duck time or little sunflower would sound weird swing.
Very interesting video! It got me wondering about a tangentially related topic, Hebrew Cantillation. It is a notation written in prayers, among the lettering, indicating the tone and intonation of how it is sung.
As somewhat of a guitarist myself, it's true: anatomy matters.
A pianists spreads their fingers in more or less one dimension: horizontally.
Meanwhile, guitarists work with the depth of 6 strings, and the caveat that each string can only produce 1 sound.
This means that a great many suggestions about spreading, concentrating, adding, and inverting notes to achieve certain chord voicings are great, but wholly unviable to convert the idea onto guitar without retuning for that specific purpose.
This is gonna be cool! Keep up the good work, mate!
Very interesting video! I just thought I would mention that in early Lute and renaissance guitar tablature the rhythmic durations were typically always included in the manuscripts. But giving only the flags above the staff and making the eighth note flag indicate a quarter duration. Several different traditions of tablature also used letters rather than numbers. But there's also something even of the physical nature that tablature often fails to be able to indicate, which fingers to use with either hand. With either the numbers or letters it would become slightly messy to put numbers for the left hand fingering and the traditional letters classical guitarists use for the right hand. Either way I tend to prefer staff notation for guitar and let fingering choices or position indications tell me which iteration of the note I should play or make different choices based on what I think would be best for orchestration which is why I love the guitar. I've been in many master classes where a teacher will completely rework a kids fingering for either one hand or both, then another masterclass with a different teacher with the same student they give totally different advice. There was even a large part of time in classical guitar in the 20th century where they avoided playing open strings, perhaps because of the transition to nylon strings from gut, but my teacher would regularly see a fingering and tell me well you can play it open they just did that because they didn't like open notes back then.
I’ve had decades of exposure to western sheet music - piano and the great highland bagpipe from childhood - but only recently had the epiphany that the written score is not the be all and end all. Your “piano roll” discussion is how I looked at music, particularly in a competitive band setting where we are jud
I've played several instrument in both treble and bass clef including trombone in a swing band and I always used staff notation. Currently when I play piano, I always use staff notation... for guitar, I always use tab. For bass, I prefer tab but I can play from staff notation if I have to. For guitar/bass I just find tab more convenient and it allows me to spend more time thinking about the music rather than where I should play it. I also think that staff and tab have different purposes: staff you generally are going to be playing from, like you're reading from a book; tab is often an aid to learning a piece that you're going to play from memory, something that makes it easier than just ear learning the piece.
When I use tab, it's generally hybrid tab or tab in conjunction with staff notation. My second choice on bass would be to just give me a chord chart and I'll play my own bass line.
I know someone already said this, but I'm left handed, and I'm very impressed at how you didn't smudge the ink of he pen at all.
If you can, check out the notation system developed for the Chapman Stick. It's a hybrid of grand staff and tablature. The note head shape changes for fingering. Its pretty wild.
Another example of additive time (I'm not familiar with Dance of Eternities) is the famous Promenade from Pictures at an Exhibition (Mussorgsky) which changes time signature pretty much every bar (first bar 5/4, second bar 6/4... right through). I've always thought this is in imitation of the way a person wanders in an art gallery, sometimes pausing, sometimes pressing on. Without once coming across as anything but a natural, casual pace.
Hey, this is an awesone video... but just for U to know, the piano roll and scoring system in Logic, and also the integration between sibelius and Pro tools, with pro tools piano roll, are way more advanced, the actually do let U handle a lot of this things easelly, and we havent talked about Ableton... All of them allow you to create any sort of tuplet easely, swing, behind beat behaviour, radomize time and velocity to humanize ETC... they have actually become industry standards because of this... The rest of the explanation was pretty awasome and complete, not only I know you're right I loe how your videos portrait some musical realities to non mucisians...
As a vocalist, pianist, AND guitarist I can confirm that I think about guitar playing more in terms of physical action than other instruments. In fact, I would say I think of all three of these "instruments" (don't know if you would call vocals and instrument or not) almost fundamentally differently. It is only when I'm trying to write a song that uses all three that I even try to use a universal terminology for what I'm doing with them. On guitar I think in terms of frets strings and chord shapes, on vocals I rarely try to name what pitches I'm singing because I learn them in an intuitive way and spent more time thinking about breathing and technique if I use sheet music in singing it's usually just a guideline to help me remember where the big jumps are, only on piano do I really get deep with the staff notation and think about the music in the technical terms we most commonly use in western musical study. I think a lot of other musicians in my area are like this
You brought up a few issues I've personally had with notation being treated the way it is in some circles. Like even early on in learning music given my exposure to diverse music types from different non-western musical cultures thanks in large part to my grandfather who's an Anthropologist/Sociologist I noticed there where entire styles that are near impossible to notate in a reasonable fashion in western staff notation. Hell there are growing traditions here in the west like ambient where staff notation makes zero sense to use but it's a non-issue given how ambient pieces are made as it's not something where directly sharing something like notation is even really required.
I occasionally write bgm tracks using a DAW and thus a piano roll. At some point, despite having been taught with sheet music, I got so in the mindset of the DAW that I stopped thinking in "notes" and just started thinking in "lengths". The result was that when I tried experiment with converting some of my pieces to sheet music, I ran into one that I honestly couldn't figure out the time signature or tempo for. I had written it in 4/4 at 140 BPM, but listening to it again I didn't feel like each "measure" had 4 beats. I ended up stuck wondering if 2/2 "andante" or 1/1 "grave" would be more appropriate. It also didn't help that one specific part was definitely 3/4 time. And by then I'd forgotten if the polymeter was intentional.
The comments on rhythm at about 9:55 apply to a lot of the music written by one of my organ professors. His way of making it easier to understand was to beam note groupings. Once you start looking at it as groupings of notes, it gets so much easier to read.
4:23 "And computers need to be told exactly what to do."
*Draws Spacechem logo*
I love the amount of references in your doodles.
Yeah, the form of an instrument you play can have a heavy impact on how you conceptualize music. As a guitarist, I think of music very much in semitones and fret numbers. If I need to transpose a song up from say a G to an A, the thought process will be something like "ok, so G is 3rd fret, A is 5th fret, so that's two semitones, so if this chord is to be a C, that's 3rd fret on the A string, so add 2 frets puts us on a D"
That was interesting. Haven't thought about notation like that as of yet. Cheers, man!
Your videos are always great but this is one your best yet.
It's also interesting that there are more ways to notate chords with letters and those expressions change how we analyze those chords. For example, the notes D, F, Ab and C would be usually written as Dm7b5, but I'd write it as Fm/D because it's clearer for a pianist. But there's a big difference in them from harmonic perspective. It reminds me that the concept of a root note in chord analysis is also kinda arbitrary.
My senior thesis topic (almost 20 years ago now 😬) was JNDs for tempo, note duration, and intonation. I compared novices to musicians and the JNDs depend heavily on musical expertise.
God, this explains why I’ve always had so much trouble with “standard” notation, theres not really a way to shove my understanding of music into the western traditional notation, leading me to writing stuff in ways that have actually made theory nerds cry, everything to making “fake” key signatures, using bar lines as abstract phrasing not a grid, hell even drawing where the staff should be and just playing the image. Writing down my music in standard notation to share always leaves it sounding hollow and well, I’m glad to know that I’m not making “broken” or “bad” music
I hit like the very second you said you use Reason 11... take that as you will. Great video, as always!
To me, when I play, I take music notation as guidance to performance. I read very little of the music and rarely count out notes and rests. I will take a look at what the notes are and relative lengths of the notes but it is only a guess at that point. Typically, I have no idea what it is all about until I start playing the music. Initially, I'll note the key signature, dynamics, and relative speed of the piece and then just start doing it. Then as I go along, I make adjustments based on other instruments that are in the group or to the quality of sound and flow, etc. And while playing, I'll peak at the next measures coming up to compare how I am playing the current measure to what is about to be played. Then every practice do the same and eventually, I will know the piece, how to start, how the dynamics work, and key features in the body of the work.
Very thought-provoking. Some brain-dump:
Paul Beaver and Bernie Krause were two Moog Synthesizer artists who predated Wendy Carlos. They developed some notation extensions to describe things like multiple oscillators tuned to intervals triggered by a single key press, filter cutoff frequency, and keyboard rescaling.
In my experience, albeit unschooled, I’ve noticed that different swing “duty cycles” (50% would be “straight eighths” and 33.33% would be perfect-triplet-based) appear in different contexts and tempos. Many years ago I added drums to a recording of a country song my brother sent me and my sensibilities based on what I was hearing suggested a very tight (
For the swing it's interesting that the 16th note swing in funk follows the same rule. For example faster tempos tend to make notes almost even.
One interesting thing about notation is if someone plays a rock guitar solo only from notation it will sound wrong even though the notes are correct. There are things about playing or phrasing that aren't there in musical notation. And it's true not only for guitar solos (although it's more noticeable), it can also be true for riffs and other parts of the song.
This is an excellent example of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, or linguistic relativity- the idea that the language we use is a major influence on how we think.
Like, I think the difference in perception between the musical languages of staff notation and guitar tabs is very similar to that between English and American Sign Language.
I think the perceptions of both guitar tabs and ASL are very centered around the physicality and spatial relativity, while staff notation and English are more interpretive/figurative.
Some ~90% of the guitarists I've known in my life (myself included) can't read sheet music and use tabs if they want to see something written out. They approach the guitar as you describe, defined by frets and finger positions, thinking of chords and scales as geometric shapes with specific anchor points. In ASL, when describing a scene, the signer uses very clear spatial signals to tell the listener exactly where things are in relation to each other; if speaking about another person who is not present, you point to somewhere near you in space to designate that as "them," creating an anchor point for the rest of the conversation. Both are also more directly expressive in that, with tabs you get clear technique cues like hammer-ons, pull-offs, bends, strum patterns, and whatever your tuning is at the top- standard, Drop D, Open G- and in ASL the nonverbal facial expressions of the signer are just as relevant as the signs themselves. I think staff notation and English are both more interpretive of expression, and abstraction.
I'd be curious if anyone else has thoughts about this!
DT shoutout! Wooo!! That song does have lots of meter changes but some can be perceived differently rhythmic wise. The band though has written the meters as they are transcribed on staff paper. Anyone else performing may break it up to where it’s easier for them to play though. Kinda like you said, some things sound or look more difficult than they really are, even though that is a pretty damn hard song.
There's a couple of things that seem to be missing when you're discussing the constraints of staff/stave notation. First, it does at least allow for analogue movement from one pitch to another - it's the glissando. It's mainly a vocal technique, but any clarinetist who's good enough to nail the opening line of Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue will serve as a case in point.
Second, the terms you use to divide notes rhythmically (half note, quarter note etc.) are the *American* terms. What I learned was a system in which notes of differing lengths have names. Semibreve, minim, crotchet and quaver. Anything shorter than a quaver is subdivided with a prefix - semiquaver, demisemiquaver, hemidemisemiquaver (which you might call a sixty-fourth note). It may take a little longer to learn, but it's then a bit easier to talk about dotted crotchets and dotted quavers than dotted quarter-notes and dotted eighth-notes; and it doesn't give the appearance of being illogical in anything other than 4/4 time.
4:40 notatling THE LICC in MIDI roll is such a flex
I love the James Webb Space Telescope drawing. Kudos on that!
You're an All Star
Fantastic work as always.
A little context for the Real Book charts. The melody is intended to be interpreted as well. On a tune like All The Things You Are for example, you need to add ornamentation or it is pretty lifeless. The chords are also open to embellishment.
It's all intended as a bare bones way to fake your way through a song you don't know on a gig. Thus the name "Fake Book" that the Real Book is derived from.
A terrific clip.
I enjoyed the expansion on swing definition and guitar being sideways…
and that Cory does actually have 2 🙌 hands.
Cartoons are fantastic and inspire curiosity.
A happy Eeyore perhaps.
It's not just notation, though. The very way we name notes - with 7 named notes and a set of flats/sharps that make it seem like they're subordinate - and intervals also makes assumptions regarding fixed seven-note scales.
So much so that the markings required to represent those other notes are called "accidentals," and every key but one includes at least one such "accident" per octave.
The CD was the mp3 of its day. The tape was the CD of its day. 8 track was the tape of its day. The vinyl record was the 8 track of its day. Sheet music was the record of its day. Literally. The record industry was the sheet music industry back before there was a microphone, there was a megaphone. If they had chosen tablature instead, the war would have gone the other way and all of us would be morlocks, evolving into gray aliens only breaching the Earth's surface at night, due to our ongoing battle against nature. If they'd instead adopted Nashville numbers, the industry would've died right then and there, on the spot, because people could just copy that on the back of a cocktail napkin, and so nothing would've gotten done, and life now would be just like it was back then, including singing thru a traffic cone, or into a spinning fan. So, whether you choose notation, tabs or Nashville, it's either "actual 2022", "wasteland of a dying planet", or "the ignorant pill from The Matrix". That's why I'd recommend a piano roll or waveform display - for a brighter future for the children. It has nothing to do with I suck at reading notation.
Standard notation or tabs, nothing notates when or how much to turn the filter cutoff knob, or how to wiggle the vector stick, or even where to connect the patch cables, and it doesn't say which modules to use. There's tons of musical info it doesn't convey. How to set the delay? That's kinda important for the very first musical example in this video, and the notation shown doesn't account for it in any way.
The waveform display is pretty,, but is really only adept at conveying the volume envelope thru time, and perhaps the partial complexity of the timbre thru time. I mentioned it above just to be cheeky.
I do wish there was an easy notation that could convey bendy slidey electronic music, including weird stuff, just for one example what about where the partials aren't necessarily tied to the fundamental in the same relationships that we've come to expect in typical acoustic instruments? Someone suggested to me an events list tracker, as if that's a new attempt to visually organize music. Participation trophy for whoever came up with that - probably an ancient caveman - but they're not winning design awards. The new system I'm imagining will need to be 4 dimensional, at minimum. On a 2D surface, that can mean updown, leftright, color, and brightness (which can coincide with opacity). Dolomuse has "polychromatic" music, but it should also intuitively represent pitch and timbral movement. I'll have to sleep on it, for a few years. And research, more long time. I know we already have too many standards, and yet it seems like we have no standards. That's the paradox. Electronic screen technology has developed since most of these standards were designed to be written on static paper. A 120fps screen has already allowed visual notation such as synthesia or whatever it's called, with the visual keyboard and the falling bars to show which keys to play, and for how long. But it doesn't really represented non-12edo intuitively or often in any generally meaningful way, and it doesn't represent bendy pitch or evolving timbre, or non-keyboard instruments, though it might be a good template for Haken Continuum notation, actually. Anyway, thanks for the food for thought, 12tone!
The map is not the territory - Alfred Korzybski
Ceci n'est pas une pipe. (This is not a pipe.) - from René Magritte's The Treachery Of Images.
This reminds of of when I learned about writing systems when I was a linguistics student. They described writing as a blurry picture that generally represents human speech. Writing isn't speech, it's just a 'good enough' representation for speech. Different systems form due to historical circumstances and are influenced by syllable structure. I like to think about notation as a rough idea or suggestion, you have to use it to understand the actual idea of what the writer truly meant.
What an extreemely comprehensive and eloquent account of the idea that music notation is not music! P.S. 19:27 JWST
2:10 As a guitarist I use guitar tab a lot, but it's my strong opinion that tab only lacks important information, most important the duration of notes, and needs to be combined with standard notation. Together it's vary strong because you have the best of both worlds. Not only does tab help you were on the guitar to play a note (which definitely does make a difference! The 12th fret on the low E string E sounds has a different sound (not pitch) then a the 7th fret of an A string or 2nd fret on the D string, because of the thickness of string) but tab has also a lot of devices to notate guitar specific techniques (like bending, hammer on, pull of, tap etc. etc.). When there's also notation available other musicians would still be able to play it (apart from the fact it's not always playable the exact same way due to possible limitations of that instrument). A good tab also shows the tuning if it's not standard. Especially when a guitar is tuned down or has a capo, the standard notation is often as if it is played in standard tuning (but not always, I prefer to notate it as it sounds). And of course, your initial problem should be partly solved by just mentioning the tempo ;-).
I'm also a huge hater (yes, it's a strong word, but I don't care) of these so called text tabs you can find all around internet. Not only do they lack note duration, they also lack time signatures and sometimes even bars. It's horrible. While with a good tab + standard notation (+tempo ;-) ) you should be able to play a song or riff without hearing it, these awful text tabs can't often be played if you haven't heard or are hearing the song.
Yep exactly. I think staff notation + tab with rhythm is the best notation for guitar and what I use mostly. Pianists get to have 2 staffs anyway, why can't we either?
But plain text tab is a horrible tool, tab + rhythm should be the absolute minimum
In Jr. and High School I was in band played trombone. So many of us were bad at reading music, you would often find us writing slide positions under the staff notation
We need to figure out an extended staff notation that can support scales other than the traditional heptatonic diatonic scale, including support for more notes per octave, but it needs to retain ease of use of existing staff notation.
Very cool video. I THINK I still have in my posession the piano course my GRANDMOTHER took to learn piano... It was basically piano roll! I don't remember where I stashed it, but I'll root around. This would have been turn-of-the-(20th)-century.
What's the notation symbol for slowly pushing up the modwheel while similarly dialing up the resonance? And if I notate the bassline just as it's programmed in the sequencer, then how do I indicate for the bass player to play as if she's being sidechained by the kick drum? Is there a symbol for that, like you could put a little daft punk symbol above the bar, and a bass player might then get the idea, or something else? IDK...
Cool video! A couple of things I don't think you got 100% here: Tablature predates recording by hundreds of years. They had tablature for lutes in the middle ages and Rennaissance. So it was not intended to be heard with a recording (at least originally). Also, you seem to suggest earlier in the video that staff notation doesn't require separate music for different instruments. As someone who's original musical training was in a transposing instrument, I find that suspect. Anyway, besides those minor points I agree and think you have a very nice perspective to share. Also the illustration of the James Webb telescope is great! Thanks for the video :)
The timing of this video is so funny for me. I just wrote a paper in english comp that briefly touched on this topic.
my eight year old self needed this video. thank you 🙏
The midi in the piano roll was the elephant 🤣
Really nice and important vid!
I’m fascinated by the art
However you gotta mark your music to make it good depends on the kind of songs you want to write. No one really cares if you have 80 different notations so long as you write a great song that emotionally resonates and demonstrates remarkable rhetoric of the cultures you're talking about.
Being open to many different notations opens up your musical horizons tremendously!
''No one really cares if you have 80 different notations''
i mean, humans also need to be able to read it clearly and understand it.
It’s all about trade-offs:
I recently picked up a 15-string/8-course Renaissance lute, so I’ve looked at lute tablature. Coming from a Classical background, I look at a composition new to me, in tablature, and I’m like, *I have no freaking idea what this music sounds like!*
Looking at it in traditional notation, I can hear almost instantly in my mind how it’s supposed to sound, but with tablature, it’s really hard to tell.
I don’t think it’s about familiarity either: Tablature is just not optimized for seeing the big picture of the music; it’s optimized for the mechanics of playing that specific instrument.
2:40 Guitar tab's downsides include no key information and poor rhythm information (it does, as you say, occasionally borrow elements from staff notation but it is rarely nuanced). great video!
Keep in mind, every symphonic band and orchestra has pencils; To write changes.
Also, your extreme simplification of sheet music is, well, simplified. A composer would add in things like, tempo, feeling, etc. It's up the conductor to interpret a lot of things - and at times they have additional notes (cliffnotes, not pitches/rhythms) the band doesn't get.
Source: me - I've spent 16 years (2020 would have been 17) playing with various symphonic and orchestral groups, as well as marching bands and drumlines.
13:05 I recommend "Raga Music" by John Mayer. Great piece, but the final movement actually makes almost exclusive use of that notation.