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Why 13th Chords

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Re: Why 13th Chords

#11

Post by jtauber »

mml wrote: post #9
dextorious wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually it's a perfectly succinct and easy notation. Not many musicians have a "hard time" getting it, except for those that never cared to study it. In fact, in the history of jazz piss poor black kids that never went to school managed to master music theory just fine. And an enormous amount of people all around the world. The particular example you mention (chord naming) has something like 1/100 the difficulty of…

I'm afraid you miss my point. I'm not sure who the article was for, people who already know its contents perhaps? Anyone else would have to have a solid background in theory to understand much of anything in it. "I find not only the 13th chord a great substitute for a 7th now, especially when it's the dominant resolving to the tonic, but I also love the 7th+3rd+13th/6th way of voicing it too."

It was for people who know music theory but not jazz

Re: Why 13th Chords

#12

Post by ericflo »

mml wrote: post #9
dextorious wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually it's a perfectly succinct and easy notation. Not many musicians have a "hard time" getting it, except for those that never cared to study it. In fact, in the history of jazz piss poor black kids that never went to school managed to master music theory just fine. And an enormous amount of people all around the world. The particular example you mention (chord naming) has something like 1/100 the difficulty of…

I'm afraid you miss my point. I'm not sure who the article was for, people who already know its contents perhaps? Anyone else would have to have a solid background in theory to understand much of anything in it. "I find not only the 13th chord a great substitute for a 7th now, especially when it's the dominant resolving to the tonic, but I also love the 7th+3rd+13th/6th way of voicing it too."

It's no different than an article about some Rails or Node.js technique, which appear on HN frequently. That is, lots of jargon and techinal foundation that the reader is assumed to know, but within that context some instructive text.

Re: Why 13th Chords

#13

Post by dextorious »

mml wrote: post #9
dextorious wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually it's a perfectly succinct and easy notation. Not many musicians have a "hard time" getting it, except for those that never cared to study it. In fact, in the history of jazz piss poor black kids that never went to school managed to master music theory just fine. And an enormous amount of people all around the world. The particular example you mention (chord naming) has something like 1/100 the difficulty of…

I'm afraid you miss my point. I'm not sure who the article was for, people who already know its contents perhaps? Anyone else would have to have a solid background in theory to understand much of anything in it. "I find not only the 13th chord a great substitute for a 7th now, especially when it's the dominant resolving to the tonic, but I also love the 7th+3rd+13th/6th way of voicing it too."

"""I'm not sure who the article was for, people who already know its contents perhaps?"""

No, just anyone who already knows a bit of music theory. Not even a great deal of it. Something that can be learned in a week, tops.

Tons of articles on HN have titles like: Djikstra's algorithm, advanced types in Haskell, currying and memoization in Scala, A Graphical Notation for the Lambda Calculus, and similar content.

Is someone expected to understand those without knowing the underlying naming schemes, theory, basic domain knowledge etc?

Or do people seeing stuff like "^[ab](foo)^[k])/i complain that:

"that pretty much explains why people have a hard time "getting" computer science theory. Gibberish.Goobeltygook$"?

There a logic behind regular expressions, and there's a logic behind chord/interval notation. And the second is a lot easier, too, and it's used because it's succint and it works.

Urban legends about qwerty keyboards ( http://www.utdallas.edu/~liebowit/keys1.html ) and railroad gauges ( http://www.snopes.com/history/american/gauge.asp ) aside, bad solutions don't last 400 years.

"""Anyone else would have to have a solid background in theory to understand much of anything in it."""

The naming scheme used in the article takes like 10 minutes to grasp --and requires no great background in music theory. 7th, 13th etc are like numeric indexes.

As for dominant / tonic, those are are like music theory 101. Similar to knowing what "Objects" and "Interfaces" mean when discussing OO programming.

Re: Why 13th Chords

#15

Post by chrisguitarguy »

> C9, C11 or C13 respectively instead of, say a Csus2, Csus4

That's actually not correct. sus, as in "suspended", implies that the third is absent from the chord. Cadd2 or Cadd4 would be more correct. A major chord with an added forth is kind of a weird sound, however -- too unstable, the fourth wants to resolve. add2 chords are fairly common, though!

Re: Why 13th Chords

#17

Post by dextorious »

mml wrote: post #9
dextorious wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually it's a perfectly succinct and easy notation. Not many musicians have a "hard time" getting it, except for those that never cared to study it. In fact, in the history of jazz piss poor black kids that never went to school managed to master music theory just fine. And an enormous amount of people all around the world. The particular example you mention (chord naming) has something like 1/100 the difficulty of…

I'm afraid you miss my point. I'm not sure who the article was for, people who already know its contents perhaps? Anyone else would have to have a solid background in theory to understand much of anything in it. "I find not only the 13th chord a great substitute for a 7th now, especially when it's the dominant resolving to the tonic, but I also love the 7th+3rd+13th/6th way of voicing it too."

Actually, the part I found difficult about music theory, is that that there are tons of stuff you're supposed to remember.

They are not difficult to understand, and they are even easy to derive from some basic rules.

But you do have to remember them, not derive them at will, to be able to think musically and play fluently.

I think that's my problem with Chemistry too, as opposed to Physics. There was always tons of stuff to remember when studying chemistry, while just remembering a few basic rules and deriving everything else was possible in Physics (I talk about High School grade material, of course).

Re: Why 13th Chords

#18

Post by juiceandjuice »

kabdib wrote: post #10
diN0bot wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ironically, the situation is very similar to math. It's relatively easy to read music theory notation, so that the Gibberish and Goobeltygookus make sense, similar to learning mathematical notation. (I personally believe this is easier than learning the alphabet, but that's a different story) However, understanding what the abstractions mean is difficult. The difference between memorizing formulas and intuiting patte…

The problem I always had with math (when it came to integrals, anyway) was the whole 'dx' notation, where you apparently just had to "go with the flow" and understand what was being expressed. It ain't "d times x", it's this other thing that's syntactically similar to saying "ab" which means "a times b". Someone on HN is going to hammer me. I just muddled through the ambiguity. Then again, what I used to think was th…

One thing you learn in math/physics is all the different ways you can denote a derivative. It makes a lot more sense when you get into Lagrangian mechanics, ODEs/PDEs, QM, complex variables, your first analysis class, etc... classes where you learn why they denote operators and variables in certain ways because other ways don't make much sense given the context.

Re: Why 13th Chords

#19

Post by jtauber »

chrisguitarguy wrote: post #15

> C9, C11 or C13 respectively instead of, say a Csus2, Csus4 That's actually not correct. sus, as in "suspended", implies that the third is absent from the chord. Cadd2 or Cadd4 would be more correct. A major chord with an added forth is kind of a weird sound, however -- too unstable, the fourth wants to resolve. add2 chords are fairly common, though!

yep, I'll tweak it to say Cadd2 / Cadd4

Re: Why 13th Chords

#20

Post by alanfalcon »

dextorious wrote: post #17
mml wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm afraid you miss my point. I'm not sure who the article was for, people who already know its contents perhaps? Anyone else would have to have a solid background in theory to understand much of anything in it. "I find not only the 13th chord a great substitute for a 7th now, especially when it's the dominant resolving to the tonic, but I also love the 7th+3rd+13th/6th way of voicing it too."

Actually, the part I found difficult about music theory, is that that there are tons of stuff you're supposed to remember. They are not difficult to understand, and they are even easy to derive from some basic rules. But you do have to remember them, not derive them at will, to be able to think musically and play fluently. I think that's my problem with Chemistry too, as opposed to Physics. There was always tons of s…

This is exactly why Math was Good for me in High School and History was Terrible. And the thing is, with an understanding of history a lot can be derived, or at least worked out, yet history class was all about memorizing names and dates and the relationships and flow of history was often something that felt coincidental to what was being taught.
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