Is my friend Stupid?

[tZer]

Originally Posted by Captain_Arrrg

Never once have I told the gatekeeper to a gig that I was in jazz band.

Now I've read and responded to something not on the front page!

Huh? Not sure I follow...

[DudeistMonk]

Originally Posted by DudeistMonk View Post
Jimi also did god awful amounts of LSD, and sounded like it...everyone seems to forget that part.
I'm sorry - I don't understand the point you want to make here.

Just saying Jimi is such an extraordinary case, a rare convergence of talent, practice and a ton of psychedelics and it bothers me when people use him as an example for self taught greatness...To think he looked at music the same way as you or I (or anyone else on this planet) is a gross under sight.

[MarkTAW]

Originally Posted by lamarjones

actually, we are on a twelve note system, that is NOT the first music system ever, and yes there are some reasons why its twelve notes and the relation ships among them. this is a whole different topic, but unless you have a different instrument or play with ethnic instruments and ethnic music, your whole basis in music is actually pretty well thought out, NOT reverse engineered.

I'm not talking about equal temperment or the concept of major/minor, that's a completely different discussion. I'm talking about the kind of stuff you find when you study composition - no parallel 5ths, no doubled 3rds, plagal & perfect cadances, etc.

Rock musicians get the most dilute form of all. "V7 - I" with little understanding as to why a V7 - I works.

On the topic you're discussing - as you say there is a reasoning behind the 12 tone major/minor system and it's very flexible, and there are compromises that have been made. So why aren't musicians taught this stuff - why are they taught "a chord is 1, 3, 5" without the reasoning behind it?

Otherwise, I agree with you & it's an excellent point.

[maryhyphenbeth]

I say, if you are the guitarist, and you intend to be in a band with this fellow...I guess here is your chance to set some standards for your band as a whole. Right? If he doesn't play to your level, I guess he's out of the band, and free to self teach, alone, as much as he wants.

[Implosion]

You can learn and know theory even if you don't actually study theory. I have learned a lot just from learning songs by ear or from tablature. Theory is only a formal presentation of certain things.

Few poor examples:

When I started to play guitar I had lessons were I learned the basic chords, power chords and the notes in an octave but nothing more. From there on I just played. Later when I started to write my own music in my second band around '99 I learned the difference between the 4th, 8th and 16th notes because of the computer software I used for notation. Of course I had previously known the difference between playing two, four, eight or whatever times more notes per bar, but since we taught the riffs face to face there was no need for names like the 16th.

We also didn't know the name for triplet so we called it the six-thingy. Also, I knew the pentatonic minor scale and I figured some new scales out of it. Later I found out that those scales were called natural minor, harmonic minor and lydian. But because I didn't know their names did not stop me from using them