Hey Rolo, did you ever watch that Thunderbolts of the Gods video I posted for you in the Vicarious DVD thread?

who the fuck is Rush?





just kidding

But i still believe that anything more technical than what Adam does would ruin the songs. Its a matter of finding the balance between all the intruments. No one part stands out most of the time. The music is a joint effort, not just Adam thrashing the guitar. Know what i mean?

All Tool Albums are Experimental.

10k days was experimental because i don't believe i've heard anything similar guitarwise to Lost Keys, Intension, Rossetta Stoned, Or Wings 1 and 2 in any of the previous albums.

Uncreative in the world, yeah
Uncreative in Tool, No
Even if he just plucked the A string throughout the whole song it'd be creative for Tool

Almost a burn on Tool. But not quite. I'm serious here.
Even in Dream Theatre or any other band, if they just played one string they'd be incredibly creative, from the guitar playing perspective, just because they've never done it before.

Burn Fucker Burn!

Its quite true though. except its less so in Tools case cause i'm sure they actually did that in Lateralus

Have a look at the semi official tab. I think it has a label
<<Mindblowing!! <<Sarcasm

In fact it is quite hard. My four year old cousin played it when i handed him my guitar, so he is pretty good.

nah its pretty hard

Note: The above two posts had sarcasm in it. If you are allergic to it, induce vomiting and call the local poisons helpline

Alcohol is a poison. Induce vomiting and call the AA/listen to the 13th Step album

Yeah, i check out the first 10 minutes of it. Interesting stuff. I'm beeing a little busy so i didn't have the time yet to view it all. But i will eventually.

Well...I'm Western. I would like to see some more detail on the difference in the Eastern scales though. I've just never heard H notes or B.5 harmonics. Pretty interesting though.

I also don't think Tool is an "experimental" band. They do what they do in the hard prog rock format and they do it well, with no apologies.

Tool (and others) play a single open string lots of times.

That friggin pisses me off...

I accidentally ripped off that riff yesterday :(

If they ripped it off, at least it was from a song that nobody fucking cares about. From an album nobody fucking cares about.

Well, except me. I think Test for Echo is a passable album, good song... but Driven is clearly the best song on that album. Though the riff should go back to Motorhead.

Now THAT is a band one would not easily mention in a Tool forum...

it seems we can't discuss tool or music without having an online alpha male pissing contest, so back to what i was saying, you can't just lob every note that isn't on the western scale into the categories of vibrato and pitch bends. So these godly universal principles of music theory you speak of don't allow things to exist outside the 12 notes and vibrato? I wish it were that simple Professor Rivek.

Well, hey, weird shit happens at t.d.n.

The Western scale is comprised of 12 notes and the music is played in half notes.

The Eastern scale is comprised of 24 notes and the music is played in quarter notes.

Western music is much more popular and the basis of this discussion (being that Tool uses the Western scale).

If you were to bother and read what I said, I never said that Eastern scales reproduce every frequency you dolt. And I never said anything about not having to have a defined and unified system either, I just said that there are an infinite amount of frequencies to be reproduced, and yes we can only use the ones that are in range for the human ear to pickup and for convenience reasons divide them up into simple little sets. I've been playin guitar for almost a decade dude, i don't have to prove myself online to a bunch of obsessed tool nerds, i've cut heads with bb king, and i tell ya the ability to read or write music, or any music knowledge at all isn't really relevant when you're speakin your soul through your instrument. Like adam jones once said in an interview, something to the effect of - If you wanna learn scales and music theory then go to GTI (guitar tech school), but if you wanna start a band, then start a band.

jesus christ, i'm sorry i didn't realize i was dealing with someone who posts over 14 times average a day on this site alone....you know, there is a real world out there where things happen and it makes a difference so take the plug out of the back of your head neo and free your mind haha...seriously though, why is it important to be an online forum celebrity these days? isn't that what vicarious is about, stop living your life watching tv, living life through imaginary drama, unreal fantasies, get out there and do something man, if you put half the effort into doing something in the real world that you put into posting on this site, i bet you could come up with something to help all mankind...but i bet you'll put more creative energy into making me look like an inferior forum poster. Great job!

Werd.

The human auditory system is capable of hearing frequencies between 60hz and 60,000hz. This would be perfect hearing. I think most people can hear 80-20k or something like that.

Notes and frequency are two different things, however. A "C" note can be played at 90hz and again at 10,000hz. This is where octaves come in to play. A limited number of notes played at different octaves which give us higher and lower pitch.

That must have been an AMAZING experience to play with the King, I would love to hear more about it.

I would also like to hear more of the Eastern Scale and its details.

Music theory has nothing to do with being able to play great music, all you have to do is feel it.

While Rivek and Inner can be uneccesarily harsh at times, be wary that you don't expend an equal amount of time and energy doing the same thing...thinking you're doing something different.

This is the real world. This forum exists in the real world and we're all really participating in it. Don't do what you tell others not to do...

There is nothing we can do to save humanity.

Here is the proof...

http://www.talismanicidols.org/video.html

Well I guess i should have reiterated my idea, thank you for the elaboration. As far as different "notes" go, before you reach an octave of the first note again, there are an infinte amount of frequencies between octaves even, it just depends on how far you break it down, now as for being able to actually hear the difference in a 90hz wave and a 90.00000000000001hz wave, that's a different story, but it exist nonetheless, like atoms, neutrons, quarks, eventually you'll come to a point where it seems impossible to break it down past the atoms that are making the sound vibrations in the first place...and i guess i was wrong about the western scale not reaching those notes, it's just harder to reach those same exact semi-semi-tones each time consistently without a different system of division between frequencies, i.e. Far Eastern and Middle Eastern scales, and music can't be divided into 2 halves like western and eastern. Just because most schools of music start teaching at the Bach era and beyond doensn't mean there's nothing else out there, there are thousands of styles of music existing right now in third world countries that no one has even heard of, that include the most random and ridiculous combination of frequencies notes and scales which would be unheard of with a Western head point of view. I'm not an extremely knowledgeable person on these matters but i do know what i've seen and heard and things that have ripped me out of my western music thought pattern. on a more western note though, jammin with BB was scary, it was his 80th birthday on beale street at his club in memphis and we jammed about 45 minutes playin straight up 12 bar blues and slide guitar, in B flat by the way, i guess that's what bb's vocal range is in these days. I have video and audio for it, and pictures of us on myspace if you'd like http://www.myspace.com/kodylovell

I used to warm up with the outro to "Vicarious" for years, always thinking it would be cool in a song. Then "Vicarious" came out. No great loss, as it's not terribly inventive, but I was kind of awed that Adam Jones wrote the same riff I did.

Don't think I'm arguing with you. Just adding missing information and I see your point.

I was pointing out that notes and frequency are seperate. Different frequency doesn't denote a different note, therefore, there isn't an unlimited number of different notes.

Each note can be played at each frequency. So you could run the scale at 90hz and again at 90.000000001hz.

And BB King himself could give a shit either way, as long as it feels good :-)

Well, if you play a given tone -- let's just say you play an E on your guitar, and you bend up half a step to F -- you bent through the Fd (F half-flat) between F anf Fb (E). To actually stop on it would take either great hearing or great skill.

I want to take issue with your terminology; the music is played in half-tones and quarter-tones, respectively, last I checked...

Half note, whole note, quarter note?

Tones are relative to intervals and scales.

Note frequency (hertz)
In all technicality, music can be composed of notes at any arbitrary frequency. Since the physical causes of music are vibrations of mechanical systems, they are often measured in hertz (Hz), with 1 Hz = 1 complete vibration per second. For historical and other reasons, especially in Western music, only twelve notes of fixed frequencies are used. These fixed frequencies are mathematically related to each other, and are defined around the central note, A4. The current "standard pitch" or modern "concert pitch" for this note is 440 Hz, although this varies in actual practice (see History of pitch standards).

The note-naming convention specifies a letter, any accidentals (sharps/flats), and an octave number. Any note is an integer of half-steps away from middle A (A4). Let this distance be denoted n. If the note is above A4, then n is positive; if it is below A4, then n is negative. The frequency of the note (f) (assuming equal temperament) is then:

f = 2n/12 × 440 Hz
For example, one can find the frequency of C5, the first C above A4. There are 3 half-steps between A4 and C5 (A4 → A♯4 → B4 → C5), and the note is above A4, so n = +3. The note's frequency is:

f = 23/12 × 440 Hz ≈ 523.2511 Hz.
To find the frequency of a note below A4, the value of n is negative. For example, the F below A4 is F4. There are 4 half-steps (A4 → A♭4 → G4 → G♭4 → F4), and the note is below A4, so n = −4. The note's frequency is:

f = 2−4/12 × 440 Hz ≈ 349.2290 Hz.
Finally, it can be seen from this formula that octaves automatically yield factors of two times the original frequency, since n is therefore a multiple of 12 (12k, where k is the number of octaves up or down), and so the formula reduces to:

f = 212k/12 × 440 Hz = 2k × 440 Hz,
yielding a factor of 2. In fact, this is the means by which this formula is derived, combined with the notion of equally-spaced intervals.

The distance of an equally tempered semitone is divided into 100 cents. So 1200 cents are equal to one octave — a frequency ratio of 2:1. This means that a cent is precisely equal to the 1200th root of 2, which is approximately 1.0005777895

For use with the MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) standard, a frequency mapping is defined by:


For notes in an A440 equal temperament, this formula delivers the standard MIDI note number. Any other frequencies fill the space between the whole numbers evenly. This allows MIDI instruments to be tuned very accurately in any microtuning scale, including non-western traditional tunings.

Last I checked, they referred to length of the note. Half-tone=semitone=half-step =

E->F->F#->G->G#->A->A#...

Quarter-tone=half a semitone=quarter-step =
E->Fd->F->Gdb->Gb->Gd->G->Adb...

Lots of information, quite an interesting read... Thanks. I'm a bit behind on my knowledge of some of this.

You're right, they do. I was referring to whole step, half step, quarter step and my verbiage was wrong.

A - A flat = half step (note interval)

A - B = whole step

So apparently the Eastern Scale recognizes A - x - A flat. Whereas x = quarter step (note interval)

Anyone know what this note might be?

It's referred to as A-half-flat and is represented by Ad, or with a reversed flat-sign in front of it. The image also displays half-sharp, sharp-and-a-half, and flat-and-a-half.

It's possible... it's not something I know much about. I just know the basics of it. I'm just basing this off what I've read... which is little.

Which I guess is Kodys' point. Whats between A and A 1/2 flat and whats between that and so on...

Valid but irrelevant to the East and the West :-O

lol, in case you didn't realize, you're on here too

I'm not harsh, I'm a realist dreamer.

Yeah, but he's not an obsessed Tool nerd and that makes ALL the difference!

I see. Anyways, I'm staying out of this music argument. I'm still trying to get good at Guitar Hero III let alone play an actual instrument.

Nonetheless, I would LOVE to learn to play guitar and/or drums one day

You shouldn't play guitar hero.

Blair says that it's stupid to waste time doing such meaningless things instead of learning to play a real instrument and write original music.

My wife still won't let me get it!