Wednesday September 5, 2007

Good evening! I'm back with more info and fun for this fine late-summer night. The topic for tonight is music and the focus will be on music theory. I recently got a refresher course on musical scales during my weekly piano lesson with my niece Anna, and that reminded me of how useful the simple scales can be. The C major scale can be played on a piano or keyboard using all the white keys. Most of us are familiar with the 7 note sound of the major scale. You can also play an A minor scale by using the same white keys and starting on “A”. The tone changes from cheery and bright to dark and serious when you change modes from major to minor. If you play up and down the black keys on a piano/keyboard, then you're able to play a major or minor pentatonic scale. The pentatonic scale is so called because it has just 5 notes. One use of pentatonic scales is in Blues/Rock improvisation. An aspiring lead guitar player will often learn a set of “box” patterns for playing major/minor pentatonic scales, which can then serve as the basis for creating guitar riffs or solos. This has just been a brief taste of the scales. Scales are a topic of sufficient breadth and depth, that entire books have been written about them. I'll leave off until some future post to discuss more about the humble yet oft-employed scale.

There's no picture this week. Instead I've uploaded a short video from a summer day at the beach.



The loops of the week are still on hold while I search for another place to store them. Let me know if there are any good hosting services to recommend.

The site of the week is a gallery of 3D computer generated artwork at the CG society.

And that's about it for this week. I'll be back in roughly a week with more good stuff to share.

Send your comments and feedback and I’ll read it all and respond to some of it.
Bye for now!