Why not a scientific approach to PSG

Bo Legg · Posted 22 Jul 2015 11:47 am

So what would happen if you approached music as a non musician (a person for whatever reason could not or did not want to play) and a non vocalist (a person for whatever reason could not sing did not want to sing).
You pretty much then are limited to listening and observing.
Pretty much the way we learned about the universe.

Bo Legg · Posted 22 Jul 2015 11:49 am

Letâ€™s assume this same person was a quick learner and studied Music Theory and Tab from almost every Icon of pedal steel.
This person can then with his knowledge and a spreadsheet in a matter of minuets grasp each concept and visualize it on the steel guitar neck complete with pedal and levers where the newbie or steel players who have played for years could not grasp it if they tried forever by ear, hunt and pick.

Bo Legg · Posted 22 Jul 2015 11:52 am

Here is an example of what I speak of.
Tritone substitution which I have found to be one of the most useful things in music I have learned
The first time Stuart worked on tritone substitutions he pretty much had captured it in minuets on a spreadsheet and some amazing things just jump at you and you said wow is that ever going to open some doors.
I had played steel for years and missed this and it makes me mad to think it was something I could have visualized in minuets.
A,B,C Emmons / E lowers the Es a half tone, F raises the Es a half tone and D lowers the 2nd string a half tone.
I don't think I need to point out all the Dom7 and altered7 chord possibilities that are just begging to get entered in the spreadsheet.

Mark van Allen · From: Watkinsville, Ga. USA

Not quite sure I get your concept, Bo.
Other than someone perhaps writing a college thesis or studying how people learn something, why in the the world would someone who "could not or did not" want to play spend so much time and effort tackling this?

I'm always open to new ideas about study and application. Looking at the same material from a different perspective is always helpful.
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Bo Legg · Posted 22 Jul 2015 12:47 pm

Could Stephen Hawking play steel if he tried. I think not but if he wanted to do me some big favors and help me out with some great ideas I think I would except the offer.
I only compare Stuart and Stephen in regards to their disabilities.
If you just stare at the spreadsheet all kinds of possibilities just jump out at you.
Look at all the Dom7 and Altered7 chord possibilities.
not to mention just move back one fret for the 4 chord (D7) and up one fret for the 5 chord (E7)
You can go to fret 9 and move back one fret at a time till you get to the 5th fret and you've played the cycle of 5th thru the key of A, and that's just for starters.

Ian Rae · From: Redditch, England

The top half of the diagram appears to show where all the Gs and C#s are at on the E9 neck. The lower half shows some more got with pedals.

A dominant seventh chord contains a tritone between the third and the seventh. If the fifth is flatted then there is a second tritone between the root and the fifth and all the notes fall in the hexatonic (whole-tone) scale.

Thus A7b5 can be substituted with Eb7b5. A tritone played on consecutive frets will take you (in either direction) round the circle of fiths. Tchaikovsky used that a lot. And every jazz pianist ever.

That's all I know.
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Bo Legg · Posted 22 Jul 2015 1:48 pm

Ian you're getting a little bit ahead on the path I planned here but it's good.
I'm just at the point here of the 3 and b7 as a chord and moving it back a fret and up a fret in both inversions or moving it back a fret at a time for a cycle.

Bo Legg · Posted 22 Jul 2015 1:58 pm

Perhaps I should point out that Stuart was referring to the tritone of the 3rd, 3 whole tones apart from the b7. I'm working slowly toward the substitution possibilities.

Tom Quinn · Posted 22 Jul 2015 5:43 pm

I think your time could b far better spent practicing the instrument instead of wasting your time on graphs and spreadsheet...
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Tom Gorr · From: Three Hills, Alberta

I sometimes hit the spreadsheets to find relationships as well... I am going to need spoon fed more on what Bo is hyped about. ...I mostly just try to find notes that seem like they fit. ..haha... I don't expect to discover amazing new concepts in music that way though. ..

While I am familiar with the whole tone scale. .. what I know most about it is that by the time I get to the next octave. .. my ear thinks I am playing something other than the tonic note. ..lol...

I wish someone could explain its role in music to me.

steve takacs · From: beijing, china via pittsburgh (deceased)

Bo, I have found the spreadsheets etc. you and Stuart and other graphic examples such as Emmons, Wallace, Newman courses, to have been helpful in my understanding of and playing the steel.

Might not be true for everyone but these tools have helped me and I'm thankful for them. . stevet

Dave Mudgett · From: Central Pennsylvania and Gallatin, Tennessee

Bo - you ask why "Why not a scientific approach to PSG?". Well, most musicians aren't scientists, and even less, mathematicians. And even though science/math and music go together very well indeed, there's a certain amount of animosity when anybody attempts to bring them together.

Beyond this, many musicians even go so far as to say, "I respect players.", and I think "only players" is frequently implicit. So I guess some of this shouldn't be too surprising.

Personally, I am a scientist/engineer/mathematician by training and trade. I am also a musician, and I have taken it seriously most of my life. So I also completely fail to understand this type of animosity. It makes sense to me to try to mix music and math/science, when the result can detect patterns that are, sometimes IMO, harder to see using notation and visualization systems that most musicians use. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with any particular way of visualizing this stuff. But graphs, charts, and even purely mathematically-based approaches can also be useful - but only if you understand that language and want to use it. Of course, not everybody does or wants to - but that doesn't make it any less useful if you do.

Of course, some patterns are easier to see using standard music notation. If you're keyed to a piano (no pun intended), then standard music notation makes a ton of sense. That's how I started music myself - on a piano. But I find many musical patterns easier to see in mathematical terms, either visualizing chromatic notes or intervals as numbers 0-11, or on a graph or chart like Stuart and others use. I think this is especially true for instruments like guitar and steel, which are so 2-D geometrically and piecewise-linearly laid out, unlike piano which is geometrically much more a 1-D straight linear layout, but with those weird black and white keys which are useful for playing a piano, but in other ways a bit confounding.

And Tom Q - I expect that people like Donny Hinson and others make "... it gets tedious ..." types of comments on, for example, that Emmons thread for the same type of reason you're commenting here. At a certain level, I don't disagree that such comments are a type of a "raining on someone else's parade" type of thing. So perhaps it is reasonable to ask, as you did there, why they (and you or me or whomever else, I guess it depends on whose ox is being gored) don't just "go hang out somewhere else then ...". But on the other hand, this is an open forum to discuss music and steel guitar.

So I guess I have no problem with comments like yours or Donny's, on either thread. People disagree about stuff, and sometimes it's just gonna come out. But I also think that we should we should not, either deliberately or even unintentionally, try to run certain clearly music/steel-guitar discussions off the forum simply because we disagree with what's being said. Better to just have the discussion out. Of course, this means that those who want to carry out such a discussion may need to be a bit thick-skinned.

My hide is pretty thick. No amount of negative comments are gonna run me off. But I think it would be useful for you [editorial 'you', of course] to think about the impact of cynical negative comments on discussions that are clearly on-topic to music and/or steel guitar, even if those discussions may not seem useful to you.

Bo, Stuart - carry on.

Ian Rae · From: Redditch, England

Tom and Tom - some like to theorise, some like to just do it, and there are all shades in between - shall I draw you a graph? Laughing

As to the musical uses of the whole-tone scale, because it is just an endless string of whole tones with no discernable root, it conjures up mystery, confusion, wonder or magic in your average film score. Debussy and Ravel found that it went with the mood of the French expressionist painters.

The available triads are useful key-changing tools as they can send you in several directions. I could do a spreadsheet (!) but for example, C augmented can lead to F, A, or C#/Db; and C half-diminished to F or B. C9b5 and C7#11b5 are hexatonic chords.
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Donny Hinson · From: Glen Burnie, Md. U.S.A.

Bo's posts would probably be of great interest to me if I knew anything about music theory, and I can see where they'd probably be really useful to someone who had that understanding. Very Happy

Tom Quinn · Posted 23 Jul 2015 3:49 am

I certainly don't want to rain on anyone's parade. If making graphs and charts helps anyone to be a better picker that's great. Right now I'm focused on getting my physical technique to the best place possible.
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Georg Sørtun · From: Mandal, Agder, Norway

Back in -96 I took a few weeks off from everything - including my girlfriend, to totally focus on unlocking all potentials my PSG had for making music, and further develop my own style.

Spreadsheets were too limiting, so I developed my own software that let me both visualize and hear tonal relations as they could be found and played on my own PSG, and replay/repeat whole sequences (ad nauseam) till all these patterns, transpositions, variations etc, with all possible pedal/lever combos, got stuck in my brain - a form for auto/self programming.

It was an interesting 3 week exercise. Just me and a couple of computers and no steel-playing. Did not even have my PSG in the same building for fear of being distracted and maybe fall back to old patterns.

When I finally left those computers and went back to actually playing PSG instead of just visualizing, my girlfriend quickly commented that my living-room playing had become a lot more fluid and lively. At that time I had played steel for about 15 years, but after my "exercise" I was no longer tied to learned patterns and ways of playing - the whole neck opened up.

One positive, but also potentially negative, effect of visualizing patterns and tonal relationships without linking and locking them to keys and notes, was that I no longer focus much on keys and/or actual positions on the neck. Most of the time I have no idea what key I'm in, only what I want my PSG to sound like relative to what I'm hearing. That's the same when I'm playing solo/lead.

I have somehow "disconnected" playing music today from all the music theory I spent many years on learning as a child. And, apart from the funny moments when I cannot even tell my fellow musicians what key I'm gonna play in - have to think really hard first, this "transposition" of notes into relations and loose patterns hasn't hurt my playing one bit.

In my opinion: practicing on an instrument is necessary for developing and keeping up motoric skills, precision and speed, but not for developing musical skills. Whether one uses math and "flashes of pattern-variations" as I did and still do, or any other methodology that suits the individual, only matters for how we communicate in words and writing - not for how and what we can evolve to musically.

Ian Rae · From: Redditch, England

I had a scientific training but earned my living from music. So I look for theoretical explanations of musical phenomena because Iâ€™m comfortable with them. On the other hand I quite understand how musicians who have succeeded without any scientific or mathematical knowledge find its discussion tedious, and may suspect that words are being substituted for deeds.

When I taught, I discovered that different people have different learning styles. Some like to watch and copy; some like trial and error; and some like to read as much as possible and internalise it before trying it in practice (Georg seems to be a good example). I forget the technical terms and there may be other types, but just as there is no one-size-fits-all teaching method, so also do no two players visualise what they do in the same way. Like Dave, I started off with the piano and learnt to read early. When someone says â€œC# minorâ€ my mindâ€™s eye sees a kind of merge of piano keys and blobs on a staff. If Iâ€™d learned the banjo at my grandfatherâ€™s knee I would have a different image.

How you associate the musical requirement with the necessary action is up to you. Nuff words â€“ time for some practice, especially the right hand.
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Bo Legg · Posted 29 Jul 2015 3:32 pm

b0b Please close thank you Bo

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