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Date: Tue, 16 Apr 2002 08:46:56 -0700 (PDT)
From: Winslow Yerxa
Subject: Blues Scale Stuff

Comments on Patrick's thoughtful post"

I have a strong interest in theory and thought the
original post raised a good question.

>I'm sure Winslow meant to identify the D# and E# as
>an augmented 2nd and augmented 3rd, respectively.

Oops. Sorry. You're quite right.

I suppose the D# could be justified to my ears, since
it immediately follows the tonic,

Yes, and it's another way of having major and minor
third at the same time. We see this in the raised 9th
chord:

C E G Bb D#

which sound minor and major at the same time.

>Previous posts have mentioned that F# and Gb are
>functionally different. One person stated a
>preference for Gb, but didn't explain exactly why.

I tend to think of it, at least part of the time, as
simply a "tritone", that more or less neutral interval
that can be spelled either way. However, the
neutrality can be changed into a "hot" condition by
either leaning upwards into the fifth (in which case
it's an augmented 4th) or downward into the 4th (in
which case it's a diminished 5th).

>As I understand it, having two of the same letter in
>a scale means that one is an altered form of the
>other. In the up direction, the F# could be an
>altered F functioning as a passing tone to G. In the
>down direction, the Gb could be an altered G
>functioning as a passing tone to F. I.e, back to
>square one.

Exactly. This is an ourgrowth of treating this as a
chromatic scale fragment.

>I've always felt that using three different blues
>scales (based on I, IV, and V) with a 12-bar blues
>sounded better than using just one scale (based on
>I). If I randomly tried this with major scales over a
>major chord progression, each scale change might
>sound like an abrupt modulation. This effect does not
>occur with the amazing blues scale.

To me, using the blues scale of the IV chord always
sounds like an abrupt wrench, while the blues scales
of the I and V seem to go down smoothly. I don;t know
why that is.

>Does anyone feel that this scale-changing is
>preferable to using one scale? I'd imagine that
>really good jazz soloists would have to change scales
>constantly to fit in with Coltrane-type progressions.

Depends. Different approaches yield different results.
In his book "The Lydian Chromatic Concept", George
Russell contrasted Lester Young, Ornette Coleman,
JohnColtrane and Coleman Hawkins in their apporaches
to chromaticism and their use of notes specific to the
individual chords of a piece. The piece was the
Mississippi River, and the approach of each player was
a way of getting up the river.

Hawkins explored the harmoic chadings of each
indvidual chord (partly by superimposing various
scales over it) and Russell saw him as traveling on a
local steamboat that made all the small-town stops and
greeted the locals intimately.

Coltrane did essentially the same thing, but instead
of a boat, he went up into outer space and greeted the
Martians as well, but always came down at the next
local stop, then took off back into outer space again.

Lester Young took the express boat all the way from
New Orleans to Chicago, with maybe three or four major
stops along the way. He tended to use a few diatonic
scales and ignore local details. (This is what
prompted me telling this story).

Ornette Coleman use a rocket ship to blast directly
from NOLA to Chi-town, never landing on anything in
between.

>While trying to transfer my piano methods to harp, I
>noticed one other thing. I don't use the blues scale
>based on the tonic. I use the blues scale based on
>the relative minor of the tonic.

To some writers, the blues scale is the two combined:
the tonic blues scale:

C Eb F F# G Bb

and the relative minor:

A C D Eb E G

to get:

C D Eb E F F# G A Bb

This is the scale I was intuitively draw to when I
started playing, and you can hear it all over the
place, especially in blues that is influenced by
boogie woogie.

>If I were forced to use just one blues scale over a
>12-bar progression though (i.e. on an Orff
>instrument), I would use the tonic-based scale.

That's the stripped-down, no-nonsense straightahead
scale. And you do hear especially jazz players using
this when they want to sound simple and tough. Blues
players tend to use it less - it's really an
artificial construct that someone abstracted
(synthesized) from the organic blues.

Winslow

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