Intonation Intonation poll

[rhysonsax]

On the subject of playing flatter during recording I’m sure we are all aware that headphone volume can result in hearing/playing flatter.

I'm not sure we are all aware, but this sounds interesting. Can you spell out what happens and any thoughts on why ?

Rhys

 

[Pete Thomas]

During the held note under discussion, there is little solid pitch info going on apart from the bass,

Yes mostly a very choppy organ. something more stustained could have been more of an issue.

 

[Pete Effamy]

I'm not sure we are all aware, but this sounds interesting. Can you spell out what happens and any thoughts on why ?

Rhys

It’s just something I have observed Rhys (plenty of scientific explanations online) . In fact I might have it the wrong way around - when you have phones on and take them off whilst music still playing the perception of pitch changes.
So, depending upon how loud your source is, your tuning might be swayed?
But the outcome of the original question (pretty flat note) setting no alarm bells ringing among any of us really, suggests that the answer is non-scientific - like my post earlier about snare placement way behind the beat in certain styles. That shouldn’t work!

 

[DavidUK]

Apologies for not being at all up to speed with the technical side but...

What if the other instruments in a piece were all playing 30 cents flat and then you came in spot on?

In that situation, I'd expect a pro player to either try to convince the others they were off or quickly adjust to suit.

So Pete, were they all spot on or were the others flat too?

 

[Pete Effamy]

Apologies for not being at all up to speed with the technical side but...

What if the other instruments in a piece were all playing 30 cents flat and then you came in spot on?

In that situation, I'd expect a pro player to either try to convince the others they were off or quickly adjust to suit.

So Pete, were they all spot on or were the others flat too?

I asked Pete that - he said that it was difficult to check the band part as notes short - but I answered myself by saying that Pete comes in on beat 2 of the next bar and his ears would surely have reset having had the Hammond and bass in on beat 1.

 

[Pete Thomas]

So Pete, were they all spot on or were the others flat too?

I don't know about spot on sounds OK to me.

there is little solid pitch info going on apart from the bass,

Here is a mix with a sustained organ c7 chord

 

[Pete Effamy]

I don't know about spot on sounds OK to me.



Here is a mix with a sustained organ c7 chord

Screw it - it sounds great. Really funky. “Print”, as a friend of mine used to say.

 

[Veggie Dave]

There is something else to consider here - how was the note artificially tuned?

There are two basic ways that I know of:
Isolate the offending section and change it's pitch properties.
Use a tuning plug-in.

The first is very simple, retains all of the note's character but can be very time consuming and can be difficult to then make that note sit in with the notes around it.

The second is what I believe is the most common and quickest ways of artificially tuning a note. However, having recently discovered this option in Reaper (having never had the need to look before) I've found that auto-tuning is a skill in itself. Simply auto-tuning something is easy. Auto-tuning something so that it sounds natural, on the other hand, can be remarkably challenging. It could very well be how the note was retuned, and negatively affected by the process, is what's being discussed here as much as pitch and genre.

Also, as Pete Effamy raised in the off-shoot thread, context is everything.

You can get away with murder if what you're playing is not being played by another instrument and/or there are no other instruments in your tonal 'space' (yes, that is dreadfully written...). Throw another horn into the mix that's playing harmonies and your margin of error shrinks ... a lot. Another horn playing octaves and that margin shrinks much more. My experience is that the horn section may not sound out of tune when the intonation isn't as good as it could be but it doesn't sound quite right, either.

Play octaves or harmonies with other instruments, such as guitar or keyboards, and your error margin shrinks to almost nothing. Even 10 cents can sound painful ... as I've discovered over the last 12 months recording stuff with the Lockdown Jams where I'm often playing harmonies and octaves with artificial instruments. So much so that I was starting to think I couldn't play in tune at all. Utter confidence destruction. The same instrumentation but independent horn melodies and suddenly my tuning is perfect.

As said by jbt in Pete's other thread, context dictates what you can and can't get away with rather than genre. And how a note is retuned probably makes more difference to how a note sounds than it being in pitch.

 

[turf3]

It's all about the context, people.

The bit of the tune we can hear is a very James Brown like tune. Note the big scoop in all the horns just before the big hit and short descending line that opens the solo. The first long alto note is a fifth. One of the most stereotyped licks in this music would be F#-G-C; what you're hearing is essentially the F#-G part of that lick only played as a single note kind of in between. The fact that right at the end of the note he pulls it up to pitch indicates that he's basically using that long flat portion to do the same thing that playing F#-G would do. Then he pops up for a little short C - the stereotyped lick.

There's another aspect here which is that the "tonic" chord is actually a C7. In blues based music the tonic is often a 7 chord, which has a certain amount of tension in it that a straight C major doesn't. The F# as in a tritone substitution is always kind of implied in a C blues (I'm getting beyond my theoretical background here to explain why this is so) and that's why now 80 years later the beboppers' flatted fifths just sound funky and bluesy to us. Pete's playing a flatted fifth over a C7, sort of, he's just doing it by bending and not pulling it all the way down, rather than fingering an accurate F#.

It's one of the oldest tricks in the book for African-American improvised music - to play a note in between two standard notes to split the difference between the functions of those two notes. The fact that most of the harmonic background drops out gives him more ability to make his statement in those four or so beats. I have trouble imagining any player with experience in this music who, if they chose to play a long held note to start that solo there, WOULDN'T scoop into it. Do you think Johnny Hodges would have been content with a mere 30 cents?

I mean, people have been writing about blue notes in jazz since the 1920s.

If you were to travel back in time to 1885 and play this for John Philip Sousa, who had never yet heard a blue note or fonky rhythm in his life, would he have said "that's out of tune"? Or would he have said "What an interesting new sound"?

If this were a passage in a Mozart concerto, we would expect that note to come in right on pitch. But in a Mozart concerto you wouldn't have had a huge scoop in the horn section leading up to a big hit to open the solo section, either. Nor would you have the fonky rhythm section back there either.

 

[turf3]

...

You can get away with murder if what you're playing is not being played by another instrument and/or there are no other instruments in your tonal 'space' (yes, that is dreadfully written...). Throw another horn into the mix that's playing harmonies and your margin of error shrinks ... a lot. Another horn playing octaves and that margin shrinks much more. My experience is that the horn section may not sound out of tune when the intonation isn't as good as it could be but it doesn't sound quite right, either.
...

I'm willing to bet that if you took two experienced musicians familiar with this type of music and had them BOTH play that concert G in unison at that point, they would easily BOTH pull it flat and they would do it the exact same amount. I'm talking about real time, not about tracking them separately and putting them together after the fact. I don't know whether those are real or synthesized horns on the tracks in question, but you can hear a big horn section scoop right before the big hit. Real horn sections do this ALL THE TIME and it sounds great.

 

[Pete Effamy]

Scoops/lip slurs are irrelevant - we know that they come from below pitch, into pitch.
This is the 5th as you say, but not a blue b5. It may well start with a small scoop but it is functional as a 5th - which is why Pete has questioned his own tuning here.
Yes, horn sections do all sorts of things, most notably the “un-resolved” dip - playing real under the pitch - very James Brown as you say, but in this tune the section is playing a line, ending in b7, 7, 1. These are not to be played intentionally flat.
In blues music rather than jazz, I question the implication of the tritone substitution too, especially on the 1 chord.

 

[turf3]

As I said, I hear the stereotypical lick: F#-G-C except he's making that one long bent note serve the purpose of the F#-G. Not consciously, of course, but as a player familiar and experienced in this kind of music, he's pulled the note down at the beginning, then pushed it up to pretty much a true G, just before popping up to C to complete the stereotypical lick.

I would point out that blues doesn't really follow Western harmony completely, as evidenced by the fact that most of the time that "I" chord is actually a I7 chord. When I'm playing over a C7, I hear F#s (or Gbs?) all over the place. When I'm playing over a pure C major, not so much.

 

[Pete Effamy]

I would point out that blues doesn't really follow Western harmony completely, as evidenced by the fact that most of the time that "I" chord is actually a I7 chord. When I'm playing over a C7, I hear F#s (or Gbs?) all over the place. When I'm playing over a pure C major, not so much.

The I chord being a I7 is immaterial. It happens to be a C7 as you say, not an F#7. And superimposed chords are a different matter altogether.
This note is a 5th in function and intention.
And whatever lick that you interpret is just your own creative mind sparking on what you might play in this example, but it isn’t there - it’s a held 5th with a small scoop to start.

 

[turf3]

At any rate, what we're discussing here is

"WHY does the note that starts out somewhat flat and finally comes up to pitch, actually sound BETTER (to ears that have heard this type of African-American improvised music all our lives) than the one that starts and stays dead-on pitch?"

I've given my ideas on why this might be so. What are yours?

 

[Pete Effamy]

At any rate, what we're discussing here is

"WHY does the note that starts out somewhat flat and finally comes up to pitch, actually sound BETTER (to ears that have heard this type of African-American improvised music all our lives) than the one that starts and stays dead-on pitch?"

I've given my ideas on why this might be so. What are yours?

If you read through the thread nobody understands it. Theories have been put forward but nothing explains it logically.
I wasn’t aware that the note in question actually reaches pitch - again, this is why Pete has questioned it - it starts flat because of the scoop but that’s an effect, a portamento start to the note, I wouldn’t call that a flat start (though of course it is in reality - but it’s meant to be).
Would you say that Billie Holliday is flat on every note before coming up to pitch? No, it’s just a stylised part of how she sings and used by many.

 

[Pete Effamy]

(to ears that have heard this type of African-American improvised music all our lives)

This is many of us on the cafe. Certain notes in a certain context can be really flat, and also move around. They can also live somewhere between pitch too. But not any note at any point, or the actuality is merely a player who has tuned flat and consistently plays flat.
This is a held 5th...

 

[turf3]

I looked at the tuner again, the G doesn't really hit 0 cents but right at the end of it, it gets close, then he pops up to C. The majority of the duration of that note, it's 30 cents low. Right at the end it goes up, hard to say if that's just part of the transition to the higher note. So I'm not sure if it's a version of F#-G-C or not.

Maybe it's a sort of "blue note" in the original meaning of that term, which means a microtonal note, not a flatted note.
The general theory is that blue notes (which aren't only present in African-American music; old time fiddlers also do this as a result of fingering methods) represent an attempt to avoid the half steps inherent in diatonic scales. Unfortunately the C major scale or C7 scale have whole steps F-G-A, so I'm not sure how the theory applies to the common use of a blued fifth.

 

[Pete Effamy]

I looked at the tuner again, the G doesn't really hit 0 cents but right at the end of it, it gets close, then he pops up to C. The majority of the duration of that note, it's 30 cents low. Right at the end it goes up, hard to say if that's just part of the transition to the higher note. So I'm not sure if it's a version of F#-G-C or not.

Maybe it's a sort of "blue note" in the original meaning of that term, which means a microtonal note, not a flatted note.
The general theory is that blue notes (which aren't only present in African-American music; old time fiddlers also do this as a result of fingering methods) represent an attempt to avoid the half steps inherent in diatonic scales. Unfortunately the C major scale or C7 scale have whole steps F-G-A, so I'm not sure how the theory applies to the common use of a blued fifth.

It’s a 5th... really.. a 5th. Your lick isn’t played - it’s your lick in Pete’s place. Pete is not playing the b5 - it isn’t a blue note. Inadmissible evidence m’lud.
it’s a 5th.

 

[turf3]

A blue fifth is not a flatted fifth. It is a microtonal note.

A blue fifth is not a flatted fifth.

A blue fifth is not a flatted fifth.

A blue fifth is not a flatted fifth.

A blue fifth is not a flatted fifth.

 

[Pete Effamy]

A blue fifth is not a flatted fifth. It is a microtonal note.

A blue fifth is not a flatted fifth.

A blue fifth is not a flatted fifth.

A blue fifth is not a flatted fifth.

A blue fifth is not a flatted fifth.

But it isn’t functioning as anything other than a regular 5th.
Australian: strewth mate
Cockney: cor blimey mate
American: holy fifths Batman
I’m out.