Just a showcase of C Neutral, a weird little microtonal scale. CAN NOT ACTUALLY BE PLAYED ON PIANO IN CASE YOU DIDN'T KNOW!!! Try the interactive tutorial, or download the Sheet music here: musescore.com/user/36953239/s...
Microtones 😎 there are many tunings, this is 24edo. This uses 24 notes per octave as opposed to the 12 in most modern western music that you are probably familiar with. Lets say you have a C major chord. Lower the major third (E) by a half step/semitone (Eb) and you get a C minor chord. In 24edo, since you have double the notes you do in 12tet, there now exists an extra note perfectly in between that E and Eb. These new notes are called quartertones, since they are a quarter of a whole step/whole tone, or half of a half step/semitone. If you play a C chord using the quartertone in between Eb and E, the you'll notice it doesn't really sound major or minor. It sounds, unsurprisingly, like something in between. Hence, it's dubbed "neutral." The scale in the video sports neutral intervals. They're pretty neat!
@@O_168recurring 😂😂😂 i'm assuming you're saying you compose without even paying attention to the notes you're using. If you're not aware, this is microtonality. Wayyyy advanced shit to the uninitiated. Funny thing is that it's sometimes harder to learn this if you're an expert at traditional music theory. If you don't even know ANY theory, I strongly encourage you to explore the difference between a major 7, dominant 7, and minor 7 chord. Look up 'chords' to popular music, and add the '7' in yourself and try to understand the difference. That's how i got started when i was young at least. Despite what all the memes say, it's not super hard to learn a little music theory. It's hard to master all of it, but only a small fraction of popular artists have 'mastered' it. Even less in EDM/EM. Just trust me. The smallest bit of effort you put in now will be used in every song you compose moving forward.
@@O_168recurring about neutral chord you know that if you tranpose the third of a major triad chord(Example: C E G) 1 semitone down in 12 TET(standard modern tuning) it will become minor chord (C Eb(b(flat) means 1 semitone down ) G)? but with microtonality(/roughly more divison / smaller steps in pitch, usually more notes/extra/exotic intervals that is not found within our standard 12 Equally Divided octave) you can have inbetween major and minor chord, its like "semisemitone" or "half"-flattening the third of major chord and it becomes a Neutral chord, pitch between the root and third to third to fifth is same, its the neutral chord, chord inbetween Major and minor. i might be inaccurate since im not very familiar with microtonality either, correct me if im wrong or inaccurate.
the new microtonal playback is out on musescore 4.2! One thing I did is use the bagpipe and play a neutral 3rd at 60 bpm it really sounds like a car horn
Why have an Ab and not an A half-b? Makes it sound like some kind of detuned harmonic minor, or some middle eastern scale maybe. Wouldn’t it be a more neutral sound to have the A half-b?
@@zionfultz8495 iirc in microtonality sometimes you notate like that, for example in some tuning/notation system G# and Ab not same, (in terms of pitch (relative to root and anchor pitch ofc))
@@jeannotdenimes158 Both the A half flat and B half flat will give you the neutral sound, but B half flat has a stronger resolution because it is basically a leading tone similar to a how major 7 in western harmony works. It’s kind of like a major scale. A half flat with a Bb can be found in maqam Nairuz and its cognates in other cultures. This is by no means the only way to use these intervals in music, but you might find the following useful. Maqams use tetrachords, trichords and pentachords in a similar way to how chord progressions work. Often a maqam can be divided into two main tetrachords and smaller or larger derivations. In the neutral scale (Rast) with E half flat and B half flat, the two tetrachords (rast) are identical. C Rast+ G rast. CDEhalfFGABhalf Progressions (Sayr) often include modulations of the upper tetrachord of the scale, which might include the A half flat and Bb tetrachord. So C Rast+ G Bayati. CDEhalfFGAhalfBb. A cool modulation you can do is treat a natural note such as G as a microtone and flip all the other notes, which comes from Maqam Sika where the microtone is the tonic. I highly recommend maqamworld.com. Cheers
wow, they really clah against rach other. i guess a neutral chord performs the same role as augmented or diminished in 12-tet. Ie, you use it to quickly resolve the progression or to modulate to other keys/modes.
depends on the edo. you can have the same chord type but with the cent difference from JI of the 3rd and 5th shuffled and it can carry different emotions. in 17edo I wrote an entire piece based around the neutral chord (would have to do some digging to find it) and the general response from peers was that it sounded really beautiful. the neutral chord in 24 I would definitely call a tension chord.
How come, even though i dont have perfect pitch, have done 0 ear training and have 0 relative pitch, i can perfectly tell when a chord is using a microtonal note? Like it sounds fundamentally different for some reason. It sticks out like a sore thumb even to my almost tone deaf ears. Its like a giga tritone or something, even tritones sound less dissonant
It is because they aren’t just major and minor chords with microtones roots, but instead fundamentally different triads (for the third set). And microtones often create a lot of dissonance in these structures. So, it is the same way you can tell major and minor chord apart
How did you make that? As far as I know, there are multiple kinds of neutral scales. There is the 3L 4s scale, also called 'mosh', which stacks neutral thirds up and down to make a 7-note scale. There are also scales that take the average between a major scale and a minor scale. But due to the minor 6th note in your scale, it is neither. Without the minor 6th, it would be the 3L 4s scale, specifically the 4|2 mode. What is your methodology to make it? Pretty interesting scale.
@@pamplemoo dang now that you mention it, it kinda does. Makes me want to try writing something using this scale, even though I normally don't touch 24edo, since I've written a ton of 12edo stuff using mixolydian b6.
OK....I realize that I'm going to be the fly in the ointment here, but.....if you have the tonic, which is C in this case, remain as a "natural" C, the entire phrase remains in C. The issue I see with this "new theory" is that, although the scale is microtonal, the end result goes back to a "natural" tonic. Plus - with the chords and the scale, it isn't the odd sounding tonality that jars the ears but rather the upper partials and overtones that are clashing together. It's almost as if you're putting a slightly out-of-round tire on a car with 3 good tires. There's a reason why the tonal system that was created a few hundred years ago remains as it is today. If you were composing music for a movie score and wanted to use this as a way to emote a scene, then I could see this working. But on it's own it's just another way to be different, IMO.
Why should the root not be natural? You can have C major, C minor, C in all the modes, C diminished scale, C augmented scale, all of them have C as a root just fine. A microtonal scale should have no reason the root can’t be a natural note. Similarly all the scales you can put on C you could put on C half sharp, or A half flat, there is no limitations to what root you choose
31 Tet would have unique scales from 12 and 24 Tet. You can definitely make scales for it, but they’d have little relation to 12 and 24 tet as far as I can tell. Since 24 tet contains 12 tet. However 31 tet contains neither 24 nor 12. Not even sure if they’d share more than one note (ofc any two tets will always share at least 1 note). There may be scales on 31 with a similar feel to this one, but it is a lot different of a task than what I did here, as I have to start in essence from scratch
