[Les Cargill[_4_]]

mcp6453 wrote:
On 5/9/2016 12:54 PM, Nil wrote:
On 09 May 2016, mcp6453 wrote in
rec.audio.pro:

Maybe the musically inclined here can help me with this
question. As background, I'm a terribly amateur musician, music
theory is a mystery to me, I absolutely can't sing, and the only
way I can properly tune a guitar is with a tuner. Yesterday for
no reason, while playing a chord on my guitar that sounds a lot
like "the chord" in the Beatles' "A Hard Day's Night", I moved it
up to the seventh or ninth fret. (I don't remember which.) As
soon as I struck the chord, I immediately recognized it as the
same as or similar to the opening chord in "Venus", but Shocking
Blue. I then loaded "Venus" on my computer and hit play. Not only
does the chord sound right to me, but it was in the exact key.

If I played it in a different key, it doesn't sound like the
song. How does that happen?

??? Are you funnin' us, or maybe I don't understand your question?
If the chord is played differently, of course it doesn't sound like
the song.

The "Venus" chord is B7(sus4), played 797977 (lo to hi), barred at
the 7th fret. The "Hard Day's Night" chord is often played with the
same fingering barred at the third fret. That's not really what
they play on the record, but it's close enough that people will
recognize it.

Telling us exactly what this mystery chord is and/or how it's
played would be helpful.

I warned you that I'm not a musician, so I understand that I'm not
doing a good job asking the question. Someone told me once that F# is
the perfect key. Songs played in F# have a special sound. Now, that's
probably crap, but what I'm trying to understand is how the "Venus"
chord played at random at the 7th fret was immediately identifiable
when it wasn't at the 5th or 9th frets. If I had perfect pitch, maybe
that would explain it, but I have little to no pitch.

And no, I'm not funnin' you. It's a serious question. There must be
something in the physics of rhythmic vibrations at play.


No, it's all the latent lingustic parts of your nervous system, the
parts Noam Chomsky just gave up on trying to explain.

The guy who taught the sociology class I took in college was part
( a grad student/experimenter, not a subject ) of a study where
they hooked people up to alpha wave detector machines and played music.

He claimed he was partly responsible for disco because of that. His
point ( which stuck with me ) is that a lot of people's
processing is not conscious.

--
Les Cargill