D Major Scale: D - E - F# - G - A - B - C# - D
A Major Scale: A - B - C# - D - E - F# - G# - D
Look for the pattern…
Found a program. Free, works on Windows, like Guitar Tab Pro, but, well, free.
C Major Scale: C - D - E - F - G - A - B - C
8 10 12 8 10 12 9 10
A Major Scale: A - B - C# - D - E - F# - G# - D (Not A?)
5 7 9 5 7 9 6 (12? 7?) (7)
F Major Scale:
F - G - A - A# - C - D - E - F
Except the F-Major scale is listed as
F = F - G - A - Bb - C - D - E - F so I’m not doing something right. But Bb is A#, right?
Why do I have a two octave scale of C Major that goes
C - D - E - F - G - A - B - C - D - E - F - G - A - B - C listed in the section of book I’m working on now?
8 -10 - 7 - 8 -10 - 7 - 9 -10 - 7 - 9 -10 - 8 -10 -7 - 8
The book you’re working from is showing you particular box positions that you can play the scales. But you have to realize the scales continue on past what you’re being shown (and below it as well) more or less to infinity.
I’m guessing the book is just showing the most convenient sequence of notes which you could play without having to move your left hand. That’s all. Don’t read any more significance into it than that.
Blithering mother of sh!t - yes, of course it should be A, not D.
Enharmonic equivalent - when the same pitch can be described by two different names. This is a prime example. A# and Bb are found at the same confluence of fret and string, producing the same pitch, but rather like the difference between ‘they’re’ and ‘their’, the spelling makes a huge difference. We’re dealing with key signatures here - with a Bb in the key signature, there would be no need of any accidentals to play all the notes and chords to be found in F Major. If you wrote it as A#, you would have to switch accidentals back and forth. Also, your chords would all look wrong in the notation - FAC for F Major would be fine, but A#DF is misspelled - it looks like some sort of alteration of 2nd inversion d minor. BbDF, the correct spelling and looks like exactly what it is supposed to represent.
Misspelled chords in notation are as annoying as misspelled words in writing, and they can vary from the irritatingly faux cute (like using ‘z’ instead of ‘s’ to look hip) to the odd (like using ‘f’ instead of ‘ph’ for ‘phone’) to the completely unintelligible (like ‘ghoti’ for ‘fish’ - ‘gh’ like in ‘cough’, ‘o’ like in ‘women’, ‘ti’ like in ‘nation’).
The scale fingering you’ve got there means that you neither have to shift nor stretch your hand. One fret per finger (first finger on 7th fret on all strings, 2nd finger on 8th fret on all strings, 3rd on 9th and 4th on 10th). The fingering you mentioned above requires a 2 fret stretch between fingers or a shift, plus assuming you used 2 for the notes on the 10th fret, you have to shift 2 to the 9th fret on (4) and 3 to the tenth fret on (4). You could put the 2 fret stretch between fingers 3 and 4, but I doubt you’d find that very comfortable, esp. in first position.
Today, rectifiers and negative feedback, are you sitting comfortably?
Rectifiers. It’s a bit strange how EE terms get hijacked as guitar “cork sniffing"(tm WordMan) descriptions… but anyhow.
A rectifier is simply a bunch of diodes connected up to convert AC from the wall socket to the DC that all the amp’s working bits need (ignoring valve heaters). The diodes can be valves or solid state. Solid state diodes are pretty nearly perfect devices, they just don’t have any characteristics that would alter the sound of an amp at all. So… boring.
So why use valve rectifiers? Because they’re crap. They have ‘internal resistance’ which means as you try to pull more current through them they lose voltage across themselves, lowering the rail voltage supplied to the power valves. The voltage sags. This give a (sort of) compression effect where the initial transient is squashed (because the power supply can’t cope) and then builds up again. I think this is where the triple rectifier option comes in. If you use valve rectifiers for a really big amp then using just one isn’t an option, so you split the supply three ways and use a separate rectifier for each section. Nothing magical about having three of the things.
Negative feedback sounds like a something for nothing cheat, but it’s fundamental to a lot of electronics. A perfect amplifier’s output should just be a bigger version of its input. But doing things like those AB push-pull shenanigans and the fact that valves are not totally linear in their amplification means that the output has deviations/distortions from a perfect copy of the input. The trick is to take a sample of the output, invert it, and apply a small amount of it to the input. This does cause a loss in gain (the amp is now quieter for a given input) because we’re cancelling out some of the input signal. But here’s the payoff. Any distortion at the output is by definition not present at the input at all, you have applied a signal at the input that cancels out some of the input signal but all of the distortion - sneaky.
As it happens guitar amps don’t tend to have a lot of negative feedback (some have none) but it is a factor in how clean an amp is and how it feels (negative feedback also has effects on speaker damping and flattens out the frequency response).
As a demonstration, the ‘presence’ control on a Marshall isn’t a tone control, it lessens the amount of negative feedback at high frequencies letting more of the amp’s ‘natural’ output through.
As for the major food groups: Online research indicates that Marshall and Fender style amps use global***** negative feedback Vox style don’t (and may be a sort of class A, I haven’t got to the bottom of that)
***** global meaning that the actual power amp output is sampled (Marshalls tap the output transformer).
Good explanation, Le Ministre. Also, you can only use each “note letter” one time per scale (and you have to use each one once). F Major spelled F - G - A - A# - C - D - E - F has 2 “A’s” and no “B’s”.
And thanks for starting the ball rolling. OK, E-Sabbath, you’ve got E and B.
Kim made a good point about the scale continuing lower and higher. There’s many ways to play scales…across the neck, up the neck, combinations…
Here’s a good pattern for a major scale starting with the root on the E string. Starting on the 3rd fret gives you a G Major Scale.
E A D G
| | | |
| 3 6 |
1 4 | |
| | 7 |
2 5 8 |
Here it is starting on the A string. Starting on the 3rd fret gives you a C Major Scale.
E A D G
| | | |
| | 3 6
| 1 4 |
| | | 7
| 2 5 8
The fingering I use is 2 - 4 - 1 - 2 - 4 - 1 - 3 - 4, but there are other ways to play it.
And here I was, these days, swearing that my pinky isn’t stretching far enough for the 10 fret on this. It kinda hooks up sideways and bends up on low E.
This is, by the way, exactly where I am in learning guitar: practicing the hell out of the C scale and playing in position.
Bravo, Small Clanger.
Anything to say about class D or H amps? (Are those even used for guitar amps?)
Also, what can be said about what style amps are what class (like you said you suspected of Vox amps, above)? Tweeds are generally class AB, right? From your description, Blackface sounds like AB+negative feedback = clean, is that a good guess? Guessing again, Marshalls are basically tweeds (AB) with different tubes then? You see where I’m going: how does what we learned about amplifier classes map to tone? I suppose I can live with “I don’t know exactly” if that’s what you’ve got, and you surely know more about this stuff and have shared quite a bit of worthy stuff already, so that’s fine.
:: post snipped ::
I wanted to comment on the scooped mids. Being a metal head I know all about scooped mids. Mids are evil. Well, actually, they aren’t evil which is why metal guys go for scooping the suckers out. Metallica, especially on Master of Puppets and And Justice for All, have the prototype metal tone. Scooping out the mids makes the heavy chordal stuff, well, heavy. To get the nice Chug for palm muted riffs, you gotta yank out 1k. 1K is the tinny, a.m. radio frequency. It makes things sound thinner and tinny-er. Metal is, at its base, a very bass heavy style. With scooped mids, a low E riff is a punch in the face. With 1 k added it is a slap.
Of course, the downside to this is that for a great tone for riffs might not be the best for leads. Yanking out the mids is great for lower ends stuff. However with higher notes it can start sounding a bit harsh if you yank out all the stuff around 1 k. Yanking out the mids can also make extended chords (think 9ths) sound way different. It pulls out the middle overtones and leaves the bass and higher end which comes across cleaner and heavier.
Slee
Mids are for wimps 
That’s a very elegant way of putting it - thanks, I’ll steal that.
Two other ‘scale cells’ that do the same thing for one octave major scales -
Scale Cell #3 -
E A D G B E
| | | | | |
| | 2 5 7 |
| | | | 8 |
| | 3 6 | |
| 1 4 | | |
fingered 4 1 3 4 1 3 1 2
Scale Cell #4 -
E A D G B E
| | | | | |
| | | 1 3 6
| | | | 4 |
| | | 2 | 7
| | | | 5 8
fingered 1 3 1 2 4 1 3 4
All four of these Major Scale Cells are covered on pages 13 - 15 of Jeffrey McFadden’s Fretboard Harmony, which I recommended in an earlier post.
Hey - when did this get here?
Just catching up after a week away from work. I look forward to reading this when I come up for air…
Yeah - recto’s are the amp equivalent of, say, a Dodge Hemi - your average Joe doesn’t know that Hemi refers to a hemispherical combustion chamber above the piston in the cylinder head - they just know it connotes power.
As for Negative Feedback - hmm, so you are saying that, while we like tube/valve amps because they distort the tone in a way that is pleasing to our ears, amp designers like to “tune” how much distortion they factor in - and, in fact, sometimes allow the player to do it via on-board control. Further, you say that the tool of negative feedback is used to clean up the signal - it starts off by injecting in a “negative profile” of the output signal, so when the circuit does its thing, the overall input is “out of whack” in exact opposite proposition (-X influence) to the “out of whack” that the circuit will impose (X influence). So if you feed -X into the input, then the circuit’s X influence serves to pull the final signal to a neutral state. How’s that?
Hmm, if so - then, ideally, you’d end up with a “flat” response - i.e., the signal would be a true reproduction with few artifacts. Since that doesn’t really happen, it must imply that makers use negative feedback in small amounts to clean it up.
How’m I doing here? I swear electronics makes my head spin. I mean, jeez, it’s juice through a wire - how can it cover certain frequencies or be inverted - it’s still juice in a wire! Damn my non-electronics brain!!
Hey, Wordman. I’ve got some books you might like.
Just finished this.
Dave Hunter: Electric Guitar Sourcebook - How to Find the Sounds You Like
which is awesome because, among other things, there’s a CD with examples of 90+ guitars.
And just got this
Dave Hunter: Guitar Rigs: Classic Guitar and Amp Combinations
which is pretty much everything you’re trying to talk about right now. I think.
Want to borrow 'em? I’ll want them back.
Oh Cool. I have his book on Effects and have linked to it before here - I remember explaining the difference between overdrive, distortion and fuzz based on what I came to understand from that book. Hunter knows his stuff.
I couldn’t borrow - I need stuff like this in my permanent collection 
Let me check those out…thanks for the recommendations.
I believe your linking his book on Effects made me go ‘hm. What else has this guy done’ and going ‘I could use that book, but I could use these books a heck of a lot faster.’ He’s got one on tube amps, too, but that’s not for a year or two for me.
I just wanted to say ‘Happy Anniversary’ to everyone and to take an opportunity to thank you for all of the stimulating discussion that’s gone on for the past year.
[QUOTE=squeegee]
Also, what can be said about what style amps are what class (like you said you suspected of Vox amps, above)? … here I’m going: how does what we learned about amplifier classes map to tone?
[/QUOTE]
This guy seems to know his stuff
I could have used some of this advice back when I was gigging with a non master volume 100Watt amp
A Laney Klippand I did used to overdrive it. It was a teeny bit loud.
Agreed; that’s one of the best write-ups on tube/valve amp wattage and loudness I’ve ever read.
My ears are ringing just thinking about it. But - civilians just don’t understand how physical the playing becomes when it gets that loud. Your interactions with the amp just feel…different. You can often feel the air moving around the speakers and the wall of sound vibrates your body - it sets up a feedback loop when you hit big power chords that…well, there’s nothing really like it.
A year. It’s been a year since I started this thread.
I’ve learned a lot, gotten two more guitars, an amp, some non-amps, a bunch of instruction books, and really not gotten much better at playing. Except that I have. Slowly.