See, I agree with you and the nice “slides” certain piano keys have for blues. (I actually was writing a long post earlier that I deleted that had exactly what you stated, because it was running a bit afield of the thread). Like you, I like keys where you can slide from a black key minor third to a white key major third. That said, I also like key where you can do the same with the flat 5 and the 5. So, basically, two blues keys: C and G, with G being the one far preferred by guitarists, IME. So G is my favorite blues key when I’m doing something very chordal and incorporating major and minor thirds. If I’m doing something more monophonic and pure blues scale, I like F, because you can just blaze runs on F Ab Bb B C Eb F.
Oddly, though, I prefer E blues to E flat blues. Something about having my thumb and pinky (ETA: actually, I would use the third or fourth finger on the fifth if my thumb is on the tonic most of the time) on the black keys with the third on the white in the middle makes me feel cramped. Although the nice thing about Eb blues is you just jam on any black key and you’re in the blues scale.
I agree with Eonwe re: Jessica. The key of A feels really nice under the fingers for that major pentatonic kind of stuff, with those 2-3 and 5-6 “hammer-ons.” (Plus I actually like playing the blues in A; I don’t have the major-minor third black-key/white-key slide, but I still have a nice b5 to 5 slide in there. Most of “Jessica” is major pentatonic, anyway, with the blues scale coming into play at the peak of the piano solo.)
Agreed. I believe that when we listen to a song in our mind’s ear, we are hearing it exactly the way it was recorded, non-transposed. People say I have perfect pitch, but I’d prefer to think I just remember things really well. I believe anyone can do it, too, if they can just remember accurately what they hear. If I want to hear an E, I think of the opening note of Roadhouse Blues or Day Tripper, or I remember that G is the opening chord of Take It Easy and work from there. Bridge Over Troubled Water is in Eb, as is She’s Always a Woman to Me. Absolutely these individual notes have colours that can be heard clear as day if you listen carefully.
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If you can do that accurately and consistently, you pretty much, by definition, have perfect pitch. This is not something I can do at all. I think I hear a song perfectly in my head, then find out it’s off by several semitones. I don’t think you understand how difficult it is to us who don’t have this ability at all. It’s like telling a color blind person, that color is red and that color is green. If you try hard enough, you can see it! No. No we can’t. I tried many years ago when I was a naive youth to study and give myself perfect pitch. I saved up my money in high school doing janitorial stuff so I could buy a collection of cassettes that promised to teach me this perfect pitch; this ability to recall or identify a note with no reference. It was $150 down the drain. I trained religiously for months, and nothing approaching perfect pitch or a sense of “color” appeared to me in these notes. Nothing.
Do you have proof of that? Old habits die hard, and I suspect the muscle memory for Billy, not to mention the placement of black and white keys, after so many years of playing a certain way would be hard to change. Plus I think I saw his fingers on the right keys on the big screen, even though the sound was a whole step lower. Some songs just don’t translate well to new keys either.
And to further my frustration with that stupid fucking ripoff of a series it’s that it started out with the notes of F# and Eb, describing F# as “twangy” and Eb as “mellow.” And, soon enough, I really started believing that I heard this “twang” of F# and that “mellowness” of Eb. But it was all a load of horseshit; if I was away from a reference pitch for long enough, and thought of that F# “twang” and heard it in my head or sing it, checking it against a piano I might find out that I’m actually singing a G to myself, or an F, or even an Eb, which it is supposed to be contrasted against (as if I were trying to imaging red and imagined green instead). Just fucking frustrating and useless. I should have gotten the relative pitch series at the time; at least that is truly learnable (much I learned over the years, anyway, but it would have been great at 13 to concentrate more on aural skills.)
That was Frank Sinatra’s advice to singers as they aged; go down. I think the only singer nowadays still singing in his original keys is Paul McCartney. (I hear it’s quite noticeable, and not always pleasant.)
DooWahDiddy, I appreciate the clarification, but rest assured I knew you were referring to (say) the “key of C Major,” not to the note C.
Eonwe, I think we mostly agree on everything. Your post #99 was right on. It’s the “key of E-flat major is heroic” idea that is pure woo.
Biffster, I just tested your assertion on myself. I listened to four Beatles songs in my mind, songs I’d heard the standard recordings of many times. On a piano, I found the first sing note of each song as it sounded in my head. I then compared these to the recordings:
Song My guess Actual Difference (in whole steps)
Strawberry… E C# to D 1.25
Penny… D B 2.5
Baby… B B 0
I Am… A-flat E 2
Average difference: 1.4
So, I concede you’re pretty close to being right about this, but you exaggerate how accurate a typical person is. I know anecdotes aren’t data — but, as pukykamell said, the kind of accuracy you posited is essentially equivalent to perfect pitch, which few people have (granted there is a continuum of ability).
Highness and lowness have no meaning in a self contained repeating system. Citing a person saying “boy that’s high” is not going to be convincing. It could have been sung low. It is perfectly possible in another fact pattern that the key of Landslide was originally in the dixie chicks key and they changed it to stevies. But they could still have raised the pitch.
Things that are indistinguishable to the human ear are by definition less important than things you hear, in music anyway. Differences that exist are not necessarily meaningful.
Timbre, and other aspects are not relevant here. They don’t involve transposition for one thing. The topic here is music notes being transposed. Notes are the building blocks of melody, which is the “identity” of a song for many purposes. That’s why they are special. Is anyone really arguing against the primacy of notes in music?
Different pitches “sound the same” to me, in the context of: the same song played at a different time.
Nice.
Yeah, it would have helped had Biffster just stated in his/her first post, “I have perfect pitch.” Pulykamell and I might be a little envious now, but I’ve read that, as the ear ages, it’s shape changes so for people with perfect pitch, EVERYTHING starts sounding a little off as they get old.
I just wish I could remember one pitch consistently. Though I somehow got 2 out of 3, I got lucky today. If I could just accurately recall one pitch, I can figure out any other pitch by relation.
Right, but this thread is like saying “I’m colorblind so you must be, too”. I’m not sure why I’m having to argue the fact that to me, different keys have different flavors. Maybe they don’t to you, but that doesn’t make it woo and it doesn’t make it wrong.
Also, I don’t agree that Biffster has perfect pitch. He might lie somewhere close to it on the spectrum, but if he truly had perfect pitch then he would be able to pull an E flat out of his ass any time he wanted, and/or be able to tell a song is in E flat instantly, once he heard it.
Billy is the reason I play piano, and I do it professionally so I’ve had some experience with it. I suppose it’s possible he was on a hybrid piano, which looks like a piano but acts like a keyboard, and everything was transposed down a step, but that wouldn’t help the band; they’d still have to play in the new key. Also, on the 2,000 Years album, one of the band members suggests a song (“Dance to the Music”), and Billy can be heard shouting “What key? What key?”. Which, I mean, could have totally been planned, but I’ve worked with enough musicians to see it happen in person, where someone transposes an entire song like they were changing coats. Me, I’m not wired that way, although I wish I was.
But it does sound to me like he could produce an E flat reliably, the way he’s describing it. I have no doubt you feel differences between the keys. I don’t think this is a usual ability for someone without perfect pitch. A lot of musicians associate certain keys with certain moods, but if I play a melody for them, they can’t tell me what key it is, based on the mood it evokes.
Perhaps. I’m just saying I’ve known people (believe me, I wish I were one of them) who could hear a 4-note chord and name all the notes in one go. And these weren’t just ordinary major or minor chords, either. I remember playing a B, D#, F, Ab (in ascending order) all at once, and the guy named them all. Pretty impressive, but to him it was just another headache, as he couldn’t hear much of anything without equating it to music.
Wow. Crazy. Showed this to my 7-year-old (a year of piano lessons under his belt), and he was blown away. “What if it was just CGI?,” he just now surmised!
Enlighten me: what is woo? Also, I can pull a pitch out of thin air, most of the time. Many years as a band teacher threw me off a little though, with transposing instruments like trumpet, saxophone and French horn.
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