let me into music theory youtube please - Spiral Staircase: • Spiral Staircase 12tone's video: • How Many Notes Are The... my other musics: patriciataxxon... follow me: / patriciataxxon support me: / patriciataxxon
Tritone substitution is when you transpose the V chord by a tritone. The chords are functionally identical because they still contain the exact same tritonal dissonance. G7 and C#7 for example both contain F and B, so C#7 would be the tritone substitution for the V chord in the key of C. What you described is pretty much exactly the same thing, but instead of substituting the V chord of C, you substituted the entire key around it, making the new key F# major. Pretty much the exact same idea, but one is a chord substitution, and the other is a modulation.
@@Patricia_Taxxon its good, tritone sub took me longer than i'd like to admit, since seemingly every theory resource is directed at people who have already taken 4 years of courses on it. music theory is probably one of the hardest things to learn on one's own, since all discussion on it is typically reserved for the bare minimum or the highly advanced. it's like trying to learn high level mathematics without a teacher of some kind. all in all it's pretty impressive you jumped straight into microtonal theory, and i'd love to see you attempt some other nonstandard tuning systems, like 19TET. also if you want to sound really damn smart you can call them *xenharmonic* tuning systems.
@@Patricia_Taxxon So I'm here like a million years later, but TBH I've looked and looked and looked for a good source for how the "tritone substitution" *actually* got its name, and I can't find one. It could be that it's because you move the incoming chord by a tritone (i.e., since G7 resolves to C, Db7 also resolves to C). It could be because, when you do this, it contains the same tritone (i.e., G7 and Db7 contain the same tritone). It could be because you move the resolved chord by a tritone (i.e., since G7 resolves to C, G7 also resolves to F#). Personally, I find the "contains the same tritone" explanation the most direct -- the tritone in the chord is the source of the tension (and therefore resolution), so to me that theory has the most explanatory power. Regardless, I don't *think* any particular explanation of why a tritone substitution is called a "tritone substitution" is wrong. I'd be happy to see a good source for where the term originated though!
@@Patricia_Taxxon funnily enough this isn't a what the "tritone" in tritone substitution refers to either, it's very confusing because tritone substitutions are just so tritone-y that it seems like a million different things could be why they're called that the real reason they're called tritone substitutions is because you're using the same tritone, just with another dominant 7th chord. each tritone corresponds to exactly 2 dominant 7th chords, for the tritone of B and F those chords are G7 and C#7. The 2 dominant 7th chords also happen to be a tritone apart which is neat but it's still not the important part. Basically you're just taking the tritone in your V7 and finding what other dominant 7th chord has that tritone, you're "substituting" the chord around the tritone.
Ngl I audibly went "oh shit" when I realized where you were going with the tritones and the quarter steps. I've heard microtonal music before and it's always seemed like an interesting but not widely-applicable concept, but resolving a tritone to a perfect fifth through contrary motion is fascinating and something I never thought possible, and my mind is kinda blown right now.
microtonal isn't very applicable? A lot of Toby Fox's music in undertale utilizes microtonality (which doesn't really disprove what you said, but I think applicablity shouldn't be what you look for in music imo)
Most of the music of non-western cultures would be considered microtonal. Microtonal just means not 12 tone equal temperament. 12 tone equal temperament is something very specific to western culture that became widespread due to colonialism/globalism. Even in western culture 12 tet was not all that popular until a few hundred years ago, with meantone and pythagorean tuning being much more common. 24 TET in particular is used in traditional Arab and Persian music.
I can't help but be reminded of the episode of futurama where fry has all the coffee and zoidberg asks for "one art, please" intending to pay $300 bucks for an art by the spider aliens that they knitted while being conquered by Zapp Brannigan. YOU'VE WATCHED TOO MUCH FUTURAMA, NOT ME.
@@ZodiacEntertainment2 3 years ago you couldn't play an instrument to save your life. Even with the worst practice schedules you'd be an intermediate player now had you started then. And 3 more years will pass after today, so you can either start or not Unless you have any of many health, money, time issues that prevent you from doing so in which case, that sucks but I wish you the best
@@soupisfornoobs4081 haha, thanks for this reply. I have actually been performing music that I've written live for about a year and half now on my 12 string guitar. I got better at singing and picked up the harmonica and banjo too, I even get gigs sometimes. It was extremely hard, I was right about that much.
@@binkusbonkus is that an autistic thing? I'm diagnosed asperger's and I have this weird thing where I often have no actual interest in a subject until someone who is interested explains it to me. I have no idea if that explanation made any sense but that's the best explanation I got.
There was a Japanese pop group called Syzygys in the 80s that wrote pop songs using microtonality. They were greatly influenced by Harry Partch! I recommend checking them out for anyone who's interested in this sort of music.
Spiral Staircase had to have been one of the most unique sounding songs I'd heard in a while when I first listened to it and now that I know why it seems even cooler. Like wow, it's an incredible song that has a story to tell AND uses interesting, largely unexplored musical ideas to tell it. Now that's some fun songwriting.
normally modern western music divides the octave (one doubling of frequency) into 12 steps, called half-tones. but that's basically just convention, tho a convention that works fairly well at at approximating pure intervals, that is intervals that have a simple frequency ratio like 2/3 or 4/5. Patricia is using a quartertone (so 24 steps per octave) scale here, specifically she's hopping between two 12-tone scales offset by one quarter tone whenever the background changes color.
Read Walter Piston's "Harmony" end to end, and you will understand it. This is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to microtonality, there's a whole jungle out there with a few crazy people in it, as well as some intrepid explorers. Very fun
@@saintburnsy2468 The book recommendation is appreciated, but how can someone understand music theory if they can't imagine what the sounds they're talking about.. sound like. Without ear training, what's the point of reading about harmony?
The reason these modulations sound so “outside” is because from a Meantone, diatonic perspective the two 7/12 generator chains are linearly independent; i.e. the tuning map has torsion. If you want to move like this while still feeling “inside”, 19-tone temperament will temper the syntonic comma 81:80, with a much more accurate fifth harmonic as the expense of a flatter third harmonic (the perfect fifth). 19 also gives you a nice seventh harmonic, which means you can use the consonant tritone 7:5.
Paul Johnson So I know exactly what you're talking about but you may need to contextualise your terms for the folks not knee deep in tuning theory. Also, I think how outside quartertone modulations often sound is in many ways part of the appeal, and also affords the use of neutral intervals which don't exist in either 12 or 19-although here 31 and 41 have a leg up on both, allowing for smoother major and minor harmonies, neutral intervals and very outré transitions, but I digress.
ConvincingPeople it’s tough because there’s not the right language in the field to make introducing it concise. I only learned so much because when other people used big words I asked a ton of questions and did a lot of reading. Kyle Gann’s book is a good starting point, and I’m working on some introductory papers, although I really only use JI and not EDOs
What's nice is that 19 TET has two different tritones so you could have a few different options on how to resolve it to a fifth; say you have the small tritone as in G B D Fb, they could resolve outward to form Bb and F, a perfect fifth (though a whole tone modulation isn't very alien), or if you have the large tritone as in a normal G7 chord, if both resolve inward you get a perfect fourth, B# and E#, which when inverted is E# to B#, a supermajor third away from the original tonic, C!
this is so cool, my fascination with microtonal music continues to grow each day, its like a whole new world of weird, alien sounding possibilities! I really like Spiral Staircase and you used to weird tri-tone modulation really really well
Really interesting! Gives off a really unique feel, the call and response part especially is so strange yet so satisfying. Really aching for the next album!
Interestingly enough I found Spiral Staircase to be one of your more accessible musical ventures, possibly because I already have an interest in microtonal music stemming from Sevish's channel. There's definitely a lot of play in the idea of resolving diminished chords (and by extension 7 chords) in this fashion. It opens up harmonic possibilities in a way that's more similar to quartal harmony in 12tet. Can you do anything similar with minor or major 7s, or does no longer having the tritone within the chord disable this while still having some dominant application?
I think you might be interested in the idea of just intonation- having different notes in a chord be tuned more finely than with 12 tone equal temperament, because there are some really cool ways to modulate in what is mostly unexplored territory! Like, to tune a C major properly, you would take the E down by about 14 cents, so if you use that E with some clever voice leading, you can use this chord to kind of swing your whole song 14 cents flat! Or you could treat an Ab as an inverted major 3rd, and tune it 14 cents sharp against the C, and flip the whole thing upside down. (Or use it to get back to your original key via a different modulation!) Loved this video breaking down your process for creating your own art!
I've made a few attempts at harmony with just intervals, but one thing that eludes me, actually, is the tritone. The whole idea of tritone substitution makes more sense in equal temperament than it would in just harmony. One possibility for the 7th degree of a chord in just tonality is the ratio of 7:4, something that isn't found in 12-tone equal temperament. It's actually closer to a "third tone" than a quarter tone. It's a very unique sound, but it does occur in many genres of music - it's sometimes referred to as the "blue note," although that term can mean other things at other times. I did a little experiment with the 7:4 "blue note" in this video: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-Jr6aGnxqbZU.html
I am but a humble talentless ear-haver and I do not understand music language so I have no idea what you're talking about but it's fascinating and I love you.
“It’s called a tritone substitution because we’ve ended up in a key that’s a tritone in distance from the key we would’ve arrived at had we done a perfect cadence as before.” ~Patricia Taxxon
note re: very major third: in microtonal jargon we call it a supermajor third, but it can also be called a minor/narrow fourth in the 450 cent case because it's the same distance away from P4.
I don't understand what any of this means, but I thoroughly enjoyed both the song and this video. I wish I could make my special interest talks as enjoyable as yours
This may be an uninformed question, but how did you even do this in your DAW???? Did you detune your instrument by the correct semitones? Great video by the way :)
I accidentally skipped to a new video at 2:04, so right after he said what if we try ____ the sound turned to this Jazzy synth wave and I lost my mm ind for a second before I realized
. so I've spent the last few months obsessively listening to the latest Will Wood album and now I can't watch the start of this video without doing that involuntary spasm you do when you hear the your favourite song playing somewhere it shouldn't be. amen
This kind of plays into another idea 12tone has talked about, which is Erno Lendvai's axis theory, in that we may extend the manner in which four chords at a minor third/major sixth remove my substitute for the same function in any given key-which serves to explain the dominant function of the tritone sub and the backdoor resolution-to those chords halfway between them, at each point one eighth of an octave (a neutral second) apart. Hence, in C, not only will G7, Bb7, Db7 and (somewhat eccentrically) E7 serve a similar dominant function, but so might Ad7, Cd7, Dt7 and Ft7. (Representing quartertone accidentals in plain text is vexing!) Maybe this is obtuse but it makes sense to me.
A “very major third” can sometimes be called a supermajor third (the opposite is a subminor third) but IDK if there are connotations I miss. Like, sometimes an interval is closer to the fourth and then it’s not appropriate to label it as a kind of supermajor third. Likewise with tritones vs. fourths/fifths, seconds vs. thirds… sometimes it’s more up to taste, other times it’s probably dictated by harmonic structure or likewise.
zhea erose calls the intervals sitting between supermajor thirds and perfect fourths "naiadics", and their octave inversions, "cocytics". notes sitting well between the fourth and tritone will pretty inescapably sound like the just ratio 11/8 (similarly, between the tritone and fifth, 16/11) and are usually referred to as approximations of such. between seconds and thirds are "semifourths". 😁
I understand none of this but the rhythm of your explanation is entrancing to my baby brain. I will watch this video a thousand times and learn nothing. I love to hear it.
fun fact if you want to make more microtonal music; some synths (including serum, if you have it) will let you give it some sort of tuning file (such as .tun) that can change the tuning to any system you want, even ones that aren't equal temperaments you might have (probably) already known, but I figured I would comment just in case
Follicles of destiny sounds like the multiple entangled potential worldlines you simultaneously occupy prior to state collapse bringing you to what actually ends up occurring. It's like seeing the road forking ahead of where you are as you approach, prior to deciding exactly which branch you'll follow.
Let's see how much of this I understand. EDIT: Okay, tritones and intervals I know, I don't get the actual terminology of "substitutions" but I get the mechanics, and also I like when upward key change.
Volume difference between music and comentary was bad, don't know if anyone else had this problem. Vid content was fine I just have some sore eardrums now because i turned the volume up so I could hear the softer voice and then got piercing midi tones.
V7 is good but basic enough, vii°7 on the other hand has a lot more possibilities, keeping in mind that any major chord can be diminished by rising the root note half a step, it could give way to even more modulations or semitone subtitutions (if that's even a thing)
Personally, the more distant cadence actually feels slightly less jarring. Maybe going further from the original key helps mask the shift into the quarter tone dimension. I wonder if it might also have to do with the fact that major thirds in equal temperament are already a bit wider than they should be -- like our ears are already trained to accept slightly spicy thirds, and this is just making the interval extra spicy.
Could you combine the II - V - I Progression and the second neutral staircase effect to create the musical equivalent of a torus in 7/8 time (to alternate which note ends a given section)?
I'm going to have to watch 12tone's video before I really understand what's going on here, but seeing as you do seem to understand it, I would really really love it if you did more microtonal music but with something other than quarter tones. How about 19 or 31 tone equal temperament? Or a temperament that isn't equal at all?
I've only heard small glimpses of what's possible with using a microtonal scale, and I found it to be alien, and far too "spicy" for my western 12-tet tuning ears. I had no idea it could be so powerful.
Aww man I thought this was gonna be like, Wendy Carlos' Beta scale level of microtonal or something. A non-octave-repeating scale, dividing the perfect fifth into eleven steps. Really exotic and mysterious... but I think it'd be too different for wide 'pop' appeal. 12x2-EDO is cool too
that's not a particularly better name, no. "neutral second" is shorter, already broadly used, and one would expect "half-flat minor" to be a minor second + a half-flat, summing up to a quarter tone. you could adjust the term to "half-flat major second", but the interval is just as much of a "half-sharp minor second"; so, rather than picking which it is, "neutral" is used. if you still want to spice it up, some people say "zalzalian second"
