Note Counts in C Blues

[Larry F]

I have a project creating blues licks/gestures. Right now I have a little over 2,200 of these, all in Sibelius in conventional notation and tab. Some of these are literal copies from the greats, and some are inspired by them, but with my own flavoring. Basically, I would listen to YouTube live performances and whenever something caught my ear, I would head straight to the computer or guitar to either experiment with it, or just enter it as is. The greats that I refer to are: BB King, Albert King, Freddie King, Albert Collins, Otis Rush, Buddy Guy, Muddy Waters band, Clapton, Green, Mick Taylor, T-Bone, SRV, Jimmie V, Duke, etc. A couple of weeks ago, I started a thread asking what the most frequently used notes are. For simplicity, we discussed these in C. I didn't ask for favorites at all; instead I just wanted to know what everyone heard as the most frequent. Naturally, C came out on top. I asked for notes used in solos and fills, not in rhythm guitar accompaniment.

One of my students and I have been making plug-ins for Sibelius. One of these is a simple note counter. These are for pitches, where middle C = C4 (second string, first fret), and for pitch-classes, which are notes not specified by register. Here's my count:

[Budda]

If I'm understanding this right, you have a whole lot more Eb than E going on here. In C?

So, that minor 3rd. over Major is pretty common, as I would have guessed. I wonder how many are straight Ebs, and how many are "Tweaked" to fit?

[Ethical]

Root, 5th, 3rd, Dom 7th is pretty much the popularity you would expect from the genre. Isn't it?

As Budda mentioned how did you account for microtones?


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[boneyguy]

Originally Posted by Ethical

Root, 5th, 3rd, Dom 7th is pretty much the popularity you would expect from the genre. Isn't it?

As Budda mentioned how did you account for microtones?


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I'm guessing there really isn't a need to account for microtones. I would think it's enough just to recognize that a pitch is closer to Eb (m3) than it is to E (M3) so that it's more of a question of whether a minor or maj tonality is implied rather than what note is nailed exactly on the head so to speak.

That's my thought on the matter but of course I await to hear what Larry has to say on this.

[daves561]

Where's B natural on the pitch-class count?

[boneyguy]

Originally Posted by daves561

Where's B natural on the pitch-class count?

Yeah. Good point.

[daves561]

I made a quick chart graphing pitch-class count as a function of harmonic "strength." The strength of a note is the order of the harmonic that yields this note: C is 1, G is 3, E is 5, Bb is 7, etc. Interestingly, there is no gap in the harmonic sequence until the very last note. Each harmonic yields a new note up to F = 21, and then you have 23 and 25 yielding existing notes (F# and Ab respectively), and then the final note, A at 27.

I took one liberty in compiling the data. I decided because we're talking about blues, Eb and E have the same "strength," so I summed their usage count and used E's harmonic strength.

There is more work I'd like to do. G is stronger than just "3" because it also occurs on harmonics 6, 12, and 24, well ahead of even the first occurrence of many other notes. So we need to weight accordingly. However, I gotta do my actual paying job now, so I'll have to get to that later.

Dave

[Larry F]

Hey, what happened to pitch-class B. I'll have my team get on that. Also, notes a quarter-tone lower than E are counted as Eb. When I notated these, I always considered that note an inflection of E, not of Eb.

I think if I had been more influenced by the Texas/West Coast school, there would have been many more Es and fewer Ebs in this count. As it is, the three kings, the Chicago school and the Brit school all heavily favored Eb over E.

Also, if I had been focusing on piano instead of guitar, I'll bet there would have been more b5s.

I'm sorry about the unscientific method of writing down licks that I liked, but that's what happened. I was just doing all of this for me. There is a field of sound research called Music Information Retrieval that analyzes recordings in many ways. Pitch is very easy to identify in monophonic music, but more difficult when more than one instrument is playing. Musical instrument recognition by computer is generally better than by humans. These are orchestral instruments played monophonically. Real world research is the holy grail. Imagine being able to look at patterns of note choice, rhythm, guitar type, amp mic, mic type, etc. For me, the correlations of these parameters would be interesting to look at.

[Ethical]

Originally Posted by daves561

Where's B natural on the pitch-class count?

You wouldn't really expect the major 7th to figure in a blues lick. Well, I wouldn't I guess


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[Ethical]

Originally Posted by Larry F

... notes a quarter-tone lower than E are counted as Eb. When I notated these, I always considered that note an inflection of E, not of Eb.

I think if I had been more influenced by the Texas/West Coast school, there would have been many more Es and fewer Ebs in this count. As it is, the three kings, the Chicago school and the Brit school all heavily favored Eb over E.

This is the information I was interested in my earlier question. Thanks.

Re-reading my message, I notice that it could be interpreted as a little abrupt. That was not my intention, just poor word choices

Originally Posted by Larry F

... I'm sorry about the unscientific method of writing down licks that I liked, but that's what happened. I was just doing all of this for me. There is a field of sound research called Music Information Retrieval that analyzes recordings in many ways. Pitch is very easy to identify in monophonic music, but more difficult when more than one instrument is playing. Musical instrument recognition by computer is generally better than by humans. These are orchestral instruments played monophonically. Real world research is the holy grail. Imagine being able to look at patterns of note choice, rhythm, guitar type, amp mic, mic type, etc. For me, the correlations of these parameters would be interesting to look at.

Note choice is pretty much what I would expect, given the sources you quoted. What would be interesting would be if you performed the same exercise for some of the West Coast/ Jump Blues artists and published the results in comparison.


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[warmingtone]

Originally Posted by Ethical

You wouldn't really expect the major 7th to figure in a blues lick. Well, I wouldn't I guess


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Depends, it is the 3rd of the V chord and some players will use it a lot as a leading tone thing to the tonic, and also a passing tone between the b7 and tonic. Style or "school" will make a big difference.

I am not sure of what is or can be achieved by this kind of analysis...maybe I am missing the point. It doesn't take much to get the general impression of roots and fifths, that is the nature of things and can easily be simply heard...don't need the data to "prove" it. Even with "proof" what are you going to do with it!

Really though, the number of times a pitch occurs tells you little without the rhythmic placement, duration and dynamics...and the musical context, relation to the harmony (even in a blues 1-IV-V progressions).

IN fact, an analysis of the kinds of note placement, rhythms and 'swing' or lazy or anticipating the beat would perhaps be interesting, but really even that would be all over the shop with different styles and players and once accumulated like this, the details and effects would be lost.

[slowpinky]

Well the numbers favour the minor(ish) pentatonic - surprise, surprise!!

[Larry F]

Originally Posted by warmingtone

I am not sure of what is or can be achieved by this kind of analysis...maybe I am missing the point. It doesn't take much to get the general impression of roots and fifths, that is the nature of things and can easily be simply heard...don't need the data to "prove" it. Even with "proof" what are you going to do with it!

I was just having fun with this plug-in. I am not writing an academic paper with this. The plug-in is just a quick way of looking at note distribution in the kind of music I compose. The licks themselves were for my own interest and are not meant to prove anything. I just thought this would be an interesting little trifle on a Wednesday afternoon. It only took a few clicks to do this. Again, just fun. I certainly wouldn't present my actual research in a thread like this.

Sometimes I like to share something that tickled me, no more, no less, but increasingly find it not as fun as it used to be.

[warmingtone]

Oh...it's intriguing for sure...i can see how the plug in could be done...but transcribing a couple of thousand licks must have been more than a days work, let alone inputing them!

[Guran]

It would have been interesting to see how many of the notes that were "in transistion". For instance, how many of the m3 notes were steady and how many were moving, as in being increasingly bent during its duration, towards a M3?

I suspect that thirds, fourths and sevenths would be notes that most oftenly would be on the move.

Even with microtonic bends, the difference between a steady and a moving note is considerable.

[kp8]

I don't think the microtonal shadings matter in this illustration as one way we would experience pitch in this music is nodal (categorical) and that is what this is intended to show. The inflections are performing a different function (individual note event /getsure morphology and phrase shaping) In this case shades of pitch can be usefully thought of as related or falling under the same schema.

It would be cool to see some second order information about melodic tendency, that would already give you much much more of a feel of the pitch world of this musical language.

anyhoo... that was cool. As was Dave's chart.