What is a Lower Interval Limit? | Q+A #52

hey everybody my name is Adam Neely I'm here answering all of your questions about bass and music in general so let's get started [Music] Valentina Conte writes hi Adam I've been reading about something called the low interval limit is this real or is it just an old theory love your videos okay so you have to think of Laura interval limits as a series of guidelines and not really rules nobody thinks of them that seriously but they're a series of guidelines governing how intervals behave when you play them really low if you play two notes too close together but really low what happens is that the overtones between the two notes start clashing and the audible spectrum and it's hard for the ear to create any sort of harmonic relationship between those two notes so the net result is something that's fairly muddy sometimes percussive and not really harmonic what's important to note is that there is no right or wrong here Stravinsky violated lower interval limits in the Rite of Spring for example it sounds great super percussive I dig lower interval limits loose guidelines as they might be are still a useful idea for describing how we actually hear chords consider this F major chord and then compared to to this one down an octave this one sounds a little bit muddier because it contains a major third which violates the lower interval limit for major thirds now what are the lower interval limits for all of the intervals it's a little bit of a tricky question answer different sources will cite different limits for different intervals and it's not really standardized but from my personal experience I would recommend this general limit for a minor 2nd major 2nd minor 3rd major 3rd perfect 4th Augmented fourth of diminished fifth perfect fifth and you might notice that it's actually a lot lower than the other interval limits because generally speaking you can play perfect fifths a lot lower than the other intervals before they start being too muddy minor 6th major sixth minor seventh major seventh and then there's actually no interval limit for an octave you can voice octaves as low as you'd like one way you can simplify this even further is to try and not write chords or intervals where the top note of the intervals goes below roughly the D in the middle of the bass clef this is kind of an oversimplification of it but it's a good rule of thumb these guidelines are very useful for arranging especially if you haven't done arranging before so if you have a lot of strings or a lot of horns and you want to give them different notes to play lower interval limits can help guide you in the right direction for what notes might go well together and what notes might sound a little bit too muddy voiced certain ways again I want to stress this these are just general guidelines lower interval limits are teaching tools first and foremost really they're just a means of distinguishing two different kinds of sounds harmonic sounds and muddy percussive sounds that's all you should really use them for and take that for what you will Geoff five-10 writes going back to one of your old videos you talked about ah da ssin how can I improve my ah da ssin are there any exercises to help so just the same way that you can visualize where you go to school or where you go to work or your childhood home in your mind's eye you can Adi 8 music that you know well in your mind's ear so take like the Star Wars theme for example try humming it in your head without actually humming it for real chances are if you know the Star Wars theme you'll be able to do that no audio in like visualization is very much tied to memory so if you know a song well and have heard it a million times before in the past chances are you'll be able to Audie it better than something that you don't know quite as well so let's try this take a song that you know very very well and try and recreate the recording in your head try to Audie eight it chances are you'll be able to recreate certain details like the lyrics to the song the vocal melody of the song the tambour of the singer's voice but certain details might elude you for example what specifically is the bass player doing or the guitar player or the drummer if you aren't able to recreate these details as vividly as the vocal melody it's because you never created memories of them in the first place so if you're going to Audie 8 a more complete picture of this recording that you supposedly have heard so many times before you're going to need to go back and listen to this recording and pay closer attention to what other instruments are doing in case you are wondering yes I am telling you to go listen to all-star games so that I want to get stuck in your head you may recall the subtleties in much finer detail with this exercise should teach you is that critical listening and observation of detail is very important for the process of audio most visualization exercises will have you focus the details of a scene to try and get as vivid and bright and alive of a picture as you possibly can when you're trying to visualize something athletes will often use visualization exercises before they play their sport so my recommendation for all musicians is to practice aa d--ation before you play your sport of music Husain Mazarin poor rights is there any historical reason why the Ionian mode was chosen to be the major scale and the Aeolian to be the minor scale in western music why didn't Lydian become the major scale or why didn't Phrygian become the minor scale are these two modes somehow more harmonically sensible or Pleasant than the other modes or that it just kind of happened so there are a lot of historical reasons why that might be with the development of tonality the five chord resolving to the one chord but I want to take a look at a really interesting property of the Ionian and Aeolian modes that are unique to them among the modes of the major scale so if we take a look at the one major chord of the Ionian skin let's say at the C Ionian scale C major in this case we find that the notes in C major a C major triad don't form a tritone with any of the other notes in the C Ionian scale C doesn't form a triad with anything II does n't either and neither this Genie this property of the notes of the tonic chord not performing track tones with other notes in the mode means that the tonic chord of a particular mode is going to feel super comfy super relaxed super at home you're gonna feel super resolved when you hit that tonic triad chord now in order to create tension within this mode you're going to need to go to another chord so for example with C Ionian and the key of C let's say you go to F now F major in itself doesn't contain a tritone in it but the note F forms a tritone with B so what this means is that even if you're not talking about going to one in high Union you still have this engine of tension release built into it this is not the same case for the other modes let's take D Dorian for example take a look at the one chord in D Dorian D minor that F the flat three forms a tritone with B the sixth degree of D Dorian and so the D Dorian tonic triad is not going to feel as relaxed and as rested and as resolved as say C major does in see Ionia is the same case with Phrygian the five the tonic minor chord forms a tritone with the flat two it's the same case with Lydian the one of a one major triad forms a tritone with the sharp four it's the same with mixolydian the three of the one major triad forms a tritone with a flat seven this is not the case with the Aeolian mode the one the flat three and the five of the one minor triad of the Aeolian scale do not share tritones with any other notes in the Aeolian skill so this is somewhat speculative but it might help to explain why Ionian and Aeolian have become the dominant major and minor modes in western music their tonic chords are the most stable and the most conducive for a tension and release scheme ROS guy crazy writes ok question what is the thing that the drummer is playing they get some screen time at the beginning of the song the little pad that's to the left of the drum kit I don't go to live shows all that often but I've started to see them pop up a lot is it some sort of synth or sample pad yes this is the roland spd-sx drum pad it has become very popular among drummers for a number of reasons the first and the most obvious one is that you can play electronic drum samples on it which is enormous ly useful for any contemporary kind of music and for any kind of contemporary live situation the other useful thing about it is you can use a drum pad to trigger live playback through Ableton Live so you can hit a certain pad that means next scene you can hit a certain pad that means stop song it's basically the easiest way for a drummer to control a laptop while still playing drums now there are other companies that make these pads but from what I've seen it's really the spd-sx which has become kind of the gold standard over the past five or so years while oeg 10 rates I know you've talked about octave pedals that shoot notes an octave down but what about similar pedals that shoot notes an octave up does that have potential for lead lines with bass that mimic those of a guitar what's your opinion yeah that can be kind of a cool sound I've heard Michael League of snarky puppy do a couple bass solos with that sound I think he uses the POG in order to get that octave up but what I've found at least with the pedals that I've tried is that if you electronically shift the with a bass guitar up an octave it's they're sounding rather thin and rather sterile and rather unmusical e sharp so the best way that I know to kind of create around a useful tone is to mix in maybe like 50 to 60 maybe 70 percent of my original bass signal along with the upper octave to get this much bad or sinful sort of sound I like it it's not for everybody and it's not perfect for every musical situation but it has been done and I encourage you to experiment with it Zuka pests women rights would you please do a video on the super annoying latina rhythm that's been popping in every single pop song in the past two years you know the despedido rhythm is the reggaeton rhythm I've heard it called Dembo I have no idea why it's called Dembo but it's the reggaeton rhythm growing up on the east coast of the United States we had a lot of Caribbean people a lot of Central American people and so you would hear a lot of that sound just when you're walking down the street so when you say it's like just in the past couple of years to me that's kind of funny because I've heard it my entire life but yes and like newer Latin pop tunes bailando des besito it's kind of like entered on the grand international arena so if you want to check out more of that check out reggaeton okay I know I know that's besito is not daddy Yankees best work Jordan Buck writes from the perspective of a music educator defending the education of music in school mostly on the primary level what argument do you think is more appropriate utilitarian music is good for other academic means or aesthetic music is good for music question marks so as much as I would like to wax poetic about the intrinsic value of music to school administrators who are looking to cut music education programs I don't think any of my arguments would sway them and this is why utilitarian arguments are so common in this debate like well we should keep music in our schools because music improves math scores of course I really dislike this argument because it devalues music versus other fields of study but I still think you can have a utilitarian argument for keeping music in schools here it goes if you study music as a young musician you learn one of the most important skills that any human being can acquire the delay gratification in the beginning when you're studying music you suck and in order to get better you have to delay gratification for long enough in order to get that skill to be able to play an instrument is incredibly rewarding and the only way that you can the only way that you can is through hard work this skill and its application are normally viewed through a financial lens if you work hard then you'll have money this way if you study music you will view it through an entirely different lens on artistic lens something that is not based upon the vagaries of the financial system instead purely based upon what you can do music is not the only extracurricular activity that teaches the value of delayed gratification lots of practice equals cool skill that you can use to show off to all of your friends you can think of athletics through the same light for example but the study of music teaches this value in a pure way so you can have a utilitarian view of music for sure and this would be the one that I would argue delayed gratification can be taught in no better way than through the study of a musical instrument [Music] please

Channel: Adam Neely

Views: 226,850

Rating: 4.9802046 out of 5

Keywords: adam, neely, jazz, fusion, bass, guitar, lesson, theory, music

Id: iW6YeDJklhQ

Length: 12min 15sec (735 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 30 2018