What is the basic tonality of the guitar? Here's an idea.

[boneyguy]

So I'm surfing around and I come across this site.http://www.guitar-theory-in-depth.com/guitar-tuning.html

The main idea is this. The piano, for example, is a tonally symmetrical instrument and as such has no tonal centre because of that symmetry. The guitar on the other hand is not a tonally symmetrical instrument and in fact does have a tonal centre. The basic tonaliy of the guitar is minor pentatonic.
Here's why.

Look at the open strings on the guitar in standard tuning. E-A-D-G-B-E. If we rearrange these letters to follow eachother alphabetically (like spelling a scale) we get E-G-A-B-D-E. Hey it is a scale!! An E minor pentatonic scale.

No wonder the guitar lends itself so naturally to pentatonics. It's in the very nature of standard tuning.

Anyway, check out the website, it's an interesting idea.

 

[MondoGuitar]

No wonder the guitar lends itself so naturally to pentatonics. It's in the very nature of standard tuning.

Definitely why the most ubiquitous scale on earth is Am Pentatonic box 1.

The pentatonic scale has been identified in every society we know about and as such is/was prevalent on every melodic instrument within them. You name them, they had octaves and pentatonics. So in the grand scheme the ubiquity of it within humanity has nothing to do with the instrumentation -- humans beings just appear to be intrinsically tied to that pattern somehow.

Pentatonic scales are very common and are found all over the world, including Celtic folk music, Hungarian folk music, West African music, African-American spirituals, Jazz, American blues music and rock music, Sami joik singing, children's songs, the Greek traditional music and songs from Epirus, Northwest Greece and the music of Southern Albania, the tuning of the Ethiopian krar and the Indonesian gamelan, Philippine Kulintang, melodies of Korea, Japan, China, India and Vietnam (including the folk music of these countries), the Afro-Caribbean tradition, Polish highlanders from the Tatra Mountains, and Western Classical composers such as French composer Claude Debussy. The pentatonic scale is also used on the Great Highland Bagpipe.

 

[weelie]

Of course it'll spell out the G major pentatonic too... then, no?

People sometimes ask what the dots are for. I say it's for playing blues in E on the thin string. Of course most guitars have the dot on the 9th fret (why?), not the tenth, so it's actully not minor pentatonic there...

Of course the 3rd, 5th, seventh and tenth frets have the places of least accidentals too, if you look at it: http://guitarsphere.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/10/fretboard.jpg

So, there are people who say guitar is C instrument (no sharps, no flats on open strings). Like they might say of the piano too (the white keys).

 

[GoodwillHunter]

Interesting idea. Can you explain this part a little better though?

The piano, for example, is a tonally symmetrical instrument and as such has no tonal centre because of that symmetry.

The piano has it's own obvious pentatonic scale built into it as well.

 

[MondoGuitar]

The piano has it's own obvious pentatonic scale built into it as well.

Aaaah, the classic doodle-oop dee dee doodle-oop dee dee, deedle-eep doo doo deedle-eep doo doo -- where would we be without ye?

 

[jhundt]

E-A-D-G-B-E. If we rearrange these letters to follow each other alphabetically (like spelling a scale) we get E-G-A-B-D-E.

in what language?

In English (my native language) you would rearrange those letters alphabetically and come up with A-B-D-E-E-G.

 

[jazztele]

i'd argue that the overall tonality of a piano is C major/ A natural minor, but that might just be for sake of arguing...

 

[JayFreddy]

So, there are people who say guitar is C instrument (no sharps, no flats on open strings). Like they might say of the piano too (the white keys).

Guitar is considered a C instrument because when you write a "C" on the paper, the note the player plays is actually a "C".

In the case of trumpet, which is a Bb instrument, if the note on paper is a "C", the note that you hear is a concert "Bb", hence the term "Bb" instrument.

http://cnx.org/content/m10672/latest/

 

[Larry F]

Interesting idea. Can you explain this part a little better though?



The piano has it's own obvious pentatonic scale built into it as well.

Yes, the black notes: F# G# A# C# D# = the F# major pent.

 

[klasaine]

in what language?

In English (my native language) you would rearrange those letters alphabetically and come up with A-B-D-E-E-G.

In Germany, a place where quite a bit of decent music has been made (and Poland too) B is written 'H'. Bb is 'B'

I would agree that with modern 'standard' guitar tuning (which is relatively recent - mid 19th century) the tonality is E minorish if you just whack the open strings. Though it, as well as the piano, will never be known as anything other than a "C" instrument. Because they're non-transposing and that's how we classify them.

*The pentatonic scale is equally related to the music of Asia, Native American cultures, Debussy and Ravel (very bluesy ), and of course Africa ... It's (the penta scale) pretty much everywhere. Blues, jazz and rock are probably the LAST (latest) musics to utilize it.

I think that standard guitar tuning (genius system by the way) evolved to facilitate a wide pitch and tonal range in order to play complete pieces - melody and accompaniment at the same time. Even in the classical repertoire there's still a fair amount of tuning your E's to D, G to F# (lute) and B to A.

 

[JayFreddy]

...a "C" instrument. Because they're non-transposing

That's what I was trying to say!

However, to my ears the sound of a guitar strummed open in standard tuning is Em11, which has the same notes as Em pentatonic, which has the same notes as G major pentatonic.

 

[klasaine]

Yeah, I definitely hear it 'open' as an Em.

But that can be deceptive too. A trombone (standard tenor T-bone) played with the slide all the way in (closed) is a Bb note but we call it and it reads in "C". Bass clef generally but non-transposing.

 

[Donnie55]

That's what I was trying to say!

However, to my ears the sound of a guitar strummed open in standard tuning is Em11, which has the same notes as Em pentatonic, which has the same notes as G major pentatonic.

That being the case why is standard tuning referred to as A 440. . Not trying to be funny , I am really curious. Cool thread.

 

[klasaine]

The A-440 thing is actually used as standard reference for all instruments. Just a mean point for where all of our A's should be.
A lot of instruments tune slightly sharp though. Vibraphones and marimbas are usually at A-442. A piano is tuned in 'stretch' wherein the high and low registers of the piano are tuned higher and lower, respectively ... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stretched_tuning (very interesting). And most of the time everything is referrenced from an A-441 at least. Highland Bagpipes, though called a Bb instrument, their A (if they had one - they don't it's a mixolydian modal inst) is at A-449.

 

[boneyguy]

Interesting idea. Can you explain this part a little better though?

Quote:
Originally Posted by boneyguy
The piano, for example, is a tonally symmetrical instrument and as such has no tonal centre because of that symmetry.



The piano has it's own obvious pentatonic scale built into it as well.

All the available notes (strings) inside a piano are equally spaced from eachother a semi-tone. It's symmetrical. In other words there's no bias toward any one particular note as a result of the design of the keyboard. All notes have equal importance and therefore there is no tonal centre.

Where's the tonal centre of a chromatic scale? It's symmetrical. No one note has anymore tonal importance than another. In the major scale, an asymmetrical scale, the tonic has the most tonal gravity and there are other notes as well that want to pull you toward them.

(Play a major scale and end it on the 7th degree, then try to go to bed and sleep.)

However that's not the case on the guitar.

Here's another way to see it...
If I accidentally bump into a piano and make the strings vibrate there is no prediction as to what tonality the piano will make as a result.

However if I accidentally bump into a guitar in standard tuninig I can predict with precision that that guitar will produce an Em tonality, specifically the notes of the Em pentatonic scale. That's the guitars tonal centre.

Since the basic underlying structure of the fretboard is minor pentatonic that kind of paves the way for that minor pent tonality to spring from the guitar very easily along the whole length of the fretboard.

At least that's the way that I understand the idea.

 

[jazztele]

That being the case why is standard tuning referred to as A 440. . Not trying to be funny , I am really curious. Cool thread.

A above midle C's frequency-- A note on the fifth fret on the 1st string. Basically a standard reference for tuning...not all instruments are tuned to A 440...

edit: well, i got beat to that response by a few minutes, eh?

 

[klasaine]

...not all instruments are tuned to A 440...

Good point. I should make it clear that I didn't mean that we all tune to A-440. Just that as a standard reference our A's should, in theory, be at the same hertz. Brass and wind players (regardless of whether they're Bb or Eb or C instruments) will tune to a concert Bb.

Why "A" was picked?
Who knows, maybe because it's the first letter of most western alphabets - ?

*By the way it was in 1926 that 440 Hz was standardized for that 'A'.
Pitch has tended to drift ever higher. Prior to 1926 'A' was generally around 435 Hz. (This is of course just a western thing)

 

[Donnie55]

Thanks, that makes perfect sense.

 

[Alex Cortes]

Hi all:

So, I'm surfing around and I come across this forum post ;-)
My name is Alex; I'm the author of www.guitar-theory-in-depth.com , the website boneyguy pointed out.
I'll address some points that came up in the discussion:

in what language?

In English (my native language) you would rearrange those letters alphabetically and come up with A-B-D-E-E-G.

The idea is not really to rearrange the notes alphabetically, in English, or German ;-)

The idea is that if you take the notes as they show up : E-A-D-G-B-E...

and rearrange them into a single octave, you get E-G-A-B-D-E: E minor pentatonic (which is the same as a G major pentatonic, of course, as weelie pointed out)

Of course it'll spell out the G major pentatonic too... then, no?

In my article http://www.guitar-theory-in-depth.com/guitar-tuning.html, I argue that as there is an E at the bottom, and then one at the top again, the "temperament" of the instrument is E minor, and not G major... if you just strum the open strings it sounds so much more E than G!

Going back to weelie's post:

So, there are people who say guitar is C instrument (no sharps, no flats on open strings). Like they might say of the piano too (the white keys).

...yeah, no sharps or flats. But still, you need to stop several -or all- strings in very specific places if you intend to get anything close to a C sound.
If you play only the white keys on a piano, the strongest mode out of the 7 (in gravitational terms) is Ionian, C. So I'd say that the piano's basic temperament is C. (Unless you play the black keys, in which case, you'd get either F#M, or D#m as there are no real "pentatonic modes" other than the major and minor: no other "pentatonic mode" contains a complete triad).

This whole issue is completely unrelated to the topic of transposing instruments, even though the guitar is a transposing instrument... in this sense, the piano is a C instrument, of course, but we should always bear in mind that it transposes an octave down. When you play a middle C as it shows in guitar notation, and stop the 5th string on the 3rd fret, or the 6th string on the 8th fret, what you get is C one octave below middle C. So guitar music is not actually in treble clef: it is written in tenor clef!

This article http://www.guitar-theory-in-depth.com/guitar-notes.html talks about that, and other important points...

I think that standard guitar tuning (genius system by the way) evolved to facilitate a wide pitch and tonal range in order to play complete pieces - melody and accompaniment at the same time. Even in the classical repertoire there's still a fair amount of tuning your E's to D, G to F# (lute) and B to A.

As to the reason standard tuning evolved into its present form, I believe, but this is mere speculation, that it serves to facilitate playing triads with doubled octaves, and little else. What I mean by this is that by simply placing a Barré on any fret, you automatically get the root doubled two octaves above. Or, if your root is on the 5th string, you at least get the 5th. Very handy when it comes to playing accompaniment!
And that was the main function of the guitar for quite a few centuries.

I hope this is helpful!

Cheers, and all the best!

Alex Cortes

PS. Check out the article, though, as there is a whole lot more, regarding the symmetry of the layout based on E-A-D-G-B-E... it always seemed pretty strange to me: 4th, 4th, 4th, 3d, 4th. Until I realized there is an underlying symmetry to that too, that is! (http://www.guitar-theory-in-depth.com/guitar-tuning.html)

 

[boneyguy]

Hey Alex. Thanks for dropping by. I really enjoyed your site and in particular the article that this thread was initially about.