Hey guys, it's Marc back here again with you. So in this video I want to show you how to build an entire scale or the entire scale from purely physical principles. So it's going to be pretty
hands on guitar,
using the harmonics on the guitar and the overtone series to show you number one. Why blues and the sound of dominant chords is very fundamental to the physical reality.
Well, it's sort of my thesis on it, at least. Number two, I'll show you how to avoid chords that may sound muddy when they're too on the guitar. I show you the recipe to do that. Well.
And three,
we'll see why minor triads are sad, quote unquote. And bonus points if you want to stay until the end, we'll have a quick discussion about tone.
You know, we talk about pedals and amps and processing of the sound. So we'll see how overtones and the whole harmonic series, plays a role in giving you. That's perfect jazz tone. So let's get going.
Okay. First off, kudos. so credit where credit is due. I'm using a book that I bought probably 15 or
20 years ago by
Gordon Delamont. And on screen here, Gordon is a fellow Canadian, is of course passed away by now
was, if I'm not mistaken, University of Toronto professor. His name is Diliman de la monte, and this one's called Modern Harmonics Technique, volume one I love when you have two volumes of volume one.
Is that sarcasm? Is. This is hard enough already. And I do have volume two. He wrote books about counterpoint, about melodies. And when I first opened the book, that's, actually page one, it's called scales. When I saw the author start to build scales around the principles of using fifths, I'm like, okay, we're starting with fifths, and we're building in sits on top of one another pretty much.
And like in my previous video on pentatonic scales, but saying we can get the 12 tones by building fifths on top of fifths, I'm like, okay, we're up against something a bit different
because he's looking at it for,
the value of the overtone series further in the books around page 25, when there's the discussion about intervals, he goes into the building of the harmonic series.
So this is where I'll show you why I think the blues scales and the blues stuff is more fundamental in the way it's built from the ground up from like from the Earth, essentially. So I have my go there and let's look at the bottom string. This is not a mistake. In this video I have a C note, which I'm going to tune down on the bottom string.
Make sure I'm in tune. So if I stream a C or if you play the C major scale, we're aligned with that big string. So what I'm going to do is talk about what's in the title. So harmonics and overtones. What's that. So when you hit a string and you've probably done that as a guitar, just experiment with say putting your finger on top of the 12th fret and just stroking it, but then removing the finger.
That sound is called a harmonic. Of course. Then we have like natural harmonic and pinch harmonics and this and that. So it's a natural phenomenon that occurs when we look at a string and we split it into if I have scientists watching, so bear with me, I'm going to like skim over a lot of the details. But mind you, this stuff occurs when we look at a piece of string and we make it ring a Pythagoras is had done that, of course, and the same process will apply if we we have a musical tone coming out of a tube.
So say a flute, and if you have a different length of tube, the same physical phenomenon occurs. It's it's a wave. It's a frequency. Right. So my my frequency here is a C. And if I go to the 12th fret and I go finger on top, I'll get another C. So it does mean that in what we have I'll just show you page 25 quickly.
And that's a it looks like a lot of gibberish is that we can build overtones
on
what's their order of appearance in the physical reality. So the first overtone is C, so it's one is the fundamental. The second one is I'm just going to tell you doubles and halves. It will be the same pitch. So C is one, two, four, eight, 16, 32, etc..
Right now if I keep going I go one two. And I go three.
Okay. Anyone care to guess what this note is? It is a G. I go g. And also, by the way, if you want to get a better tone on using harmonics, I recommend using the bridge pickup. They will sparkle that will sound. This is a much drier sound. It's more sparkly, but it will. It will outline your harmonics.
So one one sorry 123I have a G and four I have a C again. So so far what we've done and I'll do it visually. Here we have a C. We've doubled it with another C number two. Number three is a G note. Number four is a not again. Anyone care to guess what's going to happen with the fifth harmonic.
We're going to have a major triad. So we're going to have a C major. All right check this out. So 1234. More. What's that. No c d e. So right off the bat if we look at a piece of string and we split it in the ratios which I'm not going to get into right now, but we're going to get it within the first five notes.
We're going to get this major triad, which is why it's the prettiest, most happy, beautiful, sitting sound in modern harmony. Right? It's a it's a major triad. Now, what's going to happen when I add my sixth one? So I told you guys that one, two, four, eight, 16, all doubles are the same. So my sixth one is the same as three.
Remember with three was it was a G note. So we have a G again. So I'm going to put this to the test. You know grab your guitar and follow along with me and double check my answers. I go C is one, C is two, three is G four, C five is E. No that's another. Is okay. Oh sorry.
Another G.
No that's another G. And then seven.
Might pick up your guitar. Found that what that note is
the seventh overtone or the seventh harmonic. When I keep subdividing my string like this is a B-flat, it's a darn B-flat, guys. So that's a so I get really excited about this. I'm like, look, it's a C chord. It's our blues chord.
So after and no surprise with the number eight, it's the same as one as as four and two and doubles and half right.
So within seven tones that I subdivide on my good old C string.
And again oh gets I get another C. So within the first eight harmonics I get a dominant chord, I get a good old C7, I don't get a C major seven. I don't get a C minor. I don't get a C diminished. I get AC7, a C dominant seven. In the classical nomenclature, we don't get the B natural until like the 16th overtone.
I'll get into the discussion. Why? Why it matters because it's the way we hear notes. The way we hear harmony is also when there's a subtraction of frequencies, pretty much as in when you mix colors that are light colors. Right. So that's a to me really fascinating. So if I were to continue, I'm not going to do it with the string.
But we could put them on the screen. So you clearly see one, two, four, eight and 16 are see notes
three, six and 12 are G notes. This is the five okay. five, ten and 20 are the E notes. Again, equal temperament does not work. If I'm physicist watching you get to know. But actually I know, I know, but we're not going to get the detail of this is now then we go to the of course, three, six and 12.
We've already covered. We're going to look at the seventh as being the B-flat. The ninth is the D natural, and the 10th we covered. The 11th is an F-sharp. Gotta be kidding me, man. Yeah. So I go seven. All right, change the tone here. Seven. My then my 13th interval. So 12. We covered. My 13th interval is the note.
And 14 is the same as seven. So B-flat again. And then 15 I get a B natural and 16 I get another C. So I get if you will, I get the C dominant seven scale, I get an F-sharp.
Within the first. Within the first 16 overtones of the series, I get a dominant bebop scale with an F-sharp that the F-sharp is the blue note.
Right. It can't get any more raunchy than this. So my point is that the harmonic series has more to do with the sound that was brought up by, I don't know, you know, all the jazz players, all the New Orleans guys, Hendrix and B.B. King, more so than, say, Mozart and J.S. Bach, which is my my thesis on this, which is why, blues is such a fundamental part even of pop music, because we hear it because it's very grounded.
It's very close to the fundamental of the harmonic series. And point being, the further and further we get. And I'll get to this in my next points, the further we get from the harmonic series, the harder it is to hear these things. A perfect instrument to demonstrate this one would be a grand piano, which I don't have in the studio, but if you have a grand piano or a friend that knows these things, you can ring a note and press the pedal and realize that the other notes, as part of the overtones series will start vibrating in them.
They call it in sympathy, sympathetic, vibrations. So that's that's the point. Okay.
one one of the main things, we'll have later is why all we stack all of these notes and why they matter. And that's going to be in our discussion about tone, which is our bonus at the end of the video. So first off, I think we've uncovered that, Tom and seven Blue Note is really funky and it's not like dirty or a we shouldn't be doing as far as classical harmonies, it's actually down to earth.
Very good. Number two, I will show you how to avoid chord sounding muddy, because you guys might have learned your drop twos and go like, oh yeah, you know, I can do the these different things and then let me do them on the next set of string. Right. And then maybe my now my C string is tuned down.
But you'll get to a point where you want to do these voicings very low on the fretboard and go. And it doesn't sound, it sounds like mud.
here's a quick distinction. I'll make it out. Don't want to spend too much time on this
when we have two notes together. So that's the the chapter in Gordon's book, which is called intervals, which is the second chapter.
He just shows the harmonic series like this, just like one staff and go, oh, you know, I could study this thing for six months. Go, why is the F-sharp there? Like, why does this occur?
Sort of a natural phenomenon.
when we have two notes together, it's called an interval. So if I play,
a C-Note followed by another C-Note, namely, I'll go.
Or maybe I'll go even higher if I go.
Somewhere over the rainbow. I know there's so many tunes, so I start with octaves as well. Like, if I Should Lose You and a lot of really good tunes starts with an octave. But the thing is, in our ears, there's going to be a subtraction of frequency such that we hear, is that that one or that one?
I forget, but there's a there's a ratio that makes us hear the other tone. That's the fundamental. So with an octave, it's easy. But when I do say a fifth, I do these two notes, I do. If I do c g our ears implicitly hear this one. So there's a subtraction of frequency. And the, the weirder the interval, the higher it is on the overtone series.
Overall, the further the acoustic root, the implied acoustical root is. Right. So I'm not going to get into how does it happen when I combine 2 or 3 notes to get a triad, etc.? But for sure, when I hear C, E, and G there's a natural, a physics phenomenon that makes us hear that other note. That would be the implied root.
And it's the same process if I only have two notes, like if I have, the E and the say the C, the E, which is a major third, there's going to be another one and another one. The more notes I stack up, the more it's abstract and the more these intervals are close by on the harmonic series, because they get they get closer and closer and closer as we go.
Like you've noticed, when we took up our string, the these intervals get smaller and smaller the further we have to go to get to the root. So the short answer is, when I have a chord that has a subtraction of frequencies that's lower than a certain pitch, we don't hear it anymore.
Go to a piano and piano and play a C major triad CEG versus A, C, E flat G, and under triad and do it very low and eventually you go.
I can't distinguish you know how a dog will hear a whistle like super high with the little
Doesn't even work. Oh, what the hell?
or cats hear higher pitches. Like for us that note that is the limit is the A that I forgot the frequency, but it's the lowest note on a traditional grand piano. Right. So that A is our hearing limit. So it means that if I play an interval above that A and it's substract lowered and that A, we will hear it as mother, it's going to be undefined.
It's fine to dip in and to get back in, but if most of your tune or your chords, your music is bass there, we don't hear it. We don't hear the qualities, we don't. It's almost like we have, musical myopia when it comes to these tones that are too low. We can't distinguish between the half steps, just a phenomenon.
also, the more convoluted or the more smaller intervals we have, the further it takes us. That's why I said, you know, we need to wait until the 15th overtone before we get to be natural to the seventh of the scale. We have a B-flat as the seventh. So the be like to hear I say the note, see the B, for instance, this guy.
There's a certain crunch to it, and we would need a C that's actually an octave lower than this to get it. So if I do a seven to level or seven to do like this one is still clear, this one's still clear. But check this out. I played C to B.
Something's happening. Right. So it's it gets muddy. So that that's the trick on how to not get your your your chords muddy. All right. Long convoluted video I'm sorry I get really passionate about this. So the overtone series gives us a dominant seventh chord really early on. Number two we can avoid having chords that are undefined when we're too low by moving up the register, figuring out which notes we want.
The good old basics like octaves and and fifths tolerates getting really low in the register and we still hear them. But the fancier the intervals, the higher we have to go to maintain them. Clearly. Now, why are minor triads sad? Okay. And then we'll talk about tone. So when and again if I physicists in the room just bear with me when I sound a major triad.
I have seeing there is a phenomenon that dictates what the acoustical root is and regardless, I can play CEG and have the C and it's it's clean. I could even have. And the acoustical root is dictated by the subtraction of frequencies. If I do a minor triad like this, people will say, it's sad, right? Or I have a song in minor, it's a sad song or the, one of the reasons that that happens.
And if you were to write on a paper with the ratios of intervals and such, we, we realize that there is a component of, I don't want to say distortion because like, like distortion, overdrive pedal, but there's an ambiguity as far as which of the notes is, is actually the root. So the root could either be.
It could be a C with 66% certainty, or it could be an if an A flat. Oh, it's an E-flat note. And that's a physical, physical phenomenon. And what we hear culturally we've been used to saying, oh, it's sad. You know, it's a sad tune. But what's actually occurring is that because there's a an ambiguity as far as which note is the acoustical root, it's like, oh, 66% this one, 33% this one, or 66.266%, this one over 33.3 right.
One third, two third. That vagueness leaves us that feeling, that emotional quality of, oh, it's sort of weird and diminished chords are even worse because they have one third, one third and one third. If I play a,
We could have this one as the root, get this one as the root, or this one is the root. So it because it's so unstable, we like, we don't know what it is. That vagueness feeling is we translate it into like, I don't know, it's weird. It's tense. It wants to go somewhere. It's versus this. This is pure a resolve.
While the C diminished has, pure ambiguity because any of its root notes, any of the notes could have been the root acoustically, mind you. All right. So that's the reason we have the the sadness of the minor minor triads. Not because they're sad. It's because, in effect, the vagueness is translated in this uncertainty. And our ears sort of pick it up.
And because it could go both way, we interpret it as sad, culturally at least.
All right. Quick discussion about tone. So if you're here and you've watched my entire rambling on the harmonic series, I'll tell you, what why we we we think of the holy grail of jazz guitar tone in a certain way. And I'll tell you why.
notes and chords are actually fractals of everything. So here's, here's the the main takeaway.
Whenever we have a tone such as if I'm playing that scene out whenever it sounded, the pitch contains all of the other overtones. Okay, so it doesn't mean that you hear the note itself, and then you hear the the first harmonic as a root, the second, the third, the fifth, or whatever, and they're all there. So it's fractal in that this node contains all of the other notes.
What differs is the blend, the twitch. These things will occur almost like it's the the notes DNA. And when I say the note, I don't mean the pitch, I really mean that sound. And the word in French we use is timbre, timbre, timber, timber, timbre. So the timber is the difference between me singing that note and the guitar singing that note.
Or I hear a trumpet playing a C note or clarinet. I'll be able to distinguish between the tone of these different instruments by the timbre, timbre by the blend of overtones. So if I get a really pure synthesizer, it has zero of the other overtones, and it just gets that one note, or maybe two, like it's going to get the C in the C and that's it.
It's pure. But all other instruments have timbre. That's how we're able to recognize voice. You know how you can have, voice identifications like, the computers are able to hear a pitch and go like, yeah, it's Mark speaking because we have this blend and it's totally unique. It's like a fingerprint. So each instrument's got these fingerprints. What does it mean for guitars?
Well, you have to think that whenever you are seeking for tone, you're seeking for that blend of overtone and that DNA of the sound. If you want to use a pedal, you want to process that sound to change its DNA. All right. like a compressor, right? It would, it would do something to the tail end of the note or D attack of the note.
if I use a delay, it's just going to extend the time. That's not really changing the timbre. but one thing of note for guitarists, we're looking for the perfect amp. Either that is completely transparent or that has certain traits of personality. It will emphasize certain of these overtones. While we play. So I'll go on a limb here.
And for anyone still watching these pretty long video, I tend to prefer using good old guitar strings like the nickel strings. And here's why. They have all that spark fullness that's already included. Any note I play contains all these overtones, and my my game is to rule out rule off the tone knob so that I will be as if I'm speaking with my hands in front of my face a little bit.
Right. It will, it will mute a bit of these other sparkly things. Although sometimes if I play rock, I want to have all these overtones that that sparkle from every single note. Guys that are watching this, if you're in doubt, flat one strings chromes are dead. Basically. That's the thing. They're already dead, and they're closer to producing a pure tone without a lot of harmonics sprinkling out on top the most neutral amps.
The most transparent amps also don't have that. If you pick up and it's like, I don't know, it sounded like it's a cheap amp and I'm not sure it's because it's it's tweaking with that, that tone, with that DNA. that said, tone is in the singer. So of course you got to work on how you produce the sound and the attacks and everything.
And if you get really, really used to the guitar, you'll be used to attacking the string in a way that that brings up the overtones that you want to hear and the attacks that you want to hear. But that's all we're doing this. We're we're playing with the DNA of the sound itself, which gives it gives its time, it's timbre.
also, when we attack chords, you may prefer a certain voicing you personally versus me because the blend of overtones and these subtraction of frequencies give a certain acoustical root, and it sounds pleasing to your ears. And then we fall into the it depends on how you were brought up. If you heard a lot of classical music, certain voicings will not fit for you.
Don't gel with you. Well, if you you heard, like me, like free jazz in my in my 20s, I'm like, oh, yeah, I can tolerate different realms of things. Or I'll find, a certain esthetic to be. It's beautiful, but I find it's, say, to blend for my taste. So that's, that's it for the discussion on tone.
Basically, I wanted to to bring, bring to you this, this whole, like, fractal nature of it. So the best the the best tones, the well, any notes contains all of the other ones. So that's fractal. But also our quest for tone means that we're we're looking for that blend. And unfortunately, unless we do with a computerized version, anyone has a link for that, please post in the description or in the comments.
we can craft the perfect tone, from a synthesizer by using these overtones, these fractals, as faders. And typically as we go up in the overtone series, we have less and less and less and less. So it may be that, I think someone with perfect pitch told me that clarinet has a really hard shift overtone.
That's what's giving it this woody flavor. And I think when I hear really, really good singer and they have that fifth overtone that's coming in really cleanly, it gives me shivers. I'm like, oh, cool. but maybe not. It maybe not the same for for anyone. So that's it. On that note, I will let you guys go. That's been a really off tangent.
Sort of jazz guitar physics, blues slash overtone harmonic series. Please pick up the Gordon book. They're not cheap. I don't know if they still have it. Have them on Amazon's but this is, you know, a cursory understanding of how the harmonic series work, why it works for our blues is so fundamental how intervals subtract from one another.
What's the what's the name of the game when it comes to major versus minor triads versus augmented or diminished triads? What's the physics of it? I'll see you soon on the website. Jazz guitar lessons on that, and I'll see you in the next video. Thank you, thank you. Bye.
