What is it that makes blues music sound so different from European music? Let’s take the key C major. Now we’ve touched that beginning on the note C. We could’ve pitched it anywhere. We recognize that sequence of notes as do, re, mi, fa, so la, ti, do. And that’s just time to play European. If I was to play the simplest of tunes using that scale, we could try something like this.
Something we noticed is that it starts on the keynote, the C which begins the scale and also finishes on the C. This sometimes happens particularly tunes ending on the keynote but it doesn’t know what has happen. But we also notice that the notes within the tune, all four and the C scale, the C major scale. Now let’s contrast that. Just think of the European sound with something else.
That is a bluesy sound. And we have to ask ourselves why does it sound so different from what I was playing before? The answer lies in the extra notes that I have put in. You will notice now that I have been using some black notes. So if we go out from the tonic, 1, 2, 3, that’s the major third. But on that last little sequence of notes, I was playing that in particular which is the lower third. That’s the third, that’s the lower the third. I was also playing the lowered fifth. That’s the fifth, that’s the lowered fifth. And I was also the lowered seventh. And that’s the lowered seventh.
So those three notes, often called the blue notes bear the flat and third, the flat and fifth and the flat and the seventh. What gives the blues its distinctive sound? Now, there are lots of other things as well to do with rhythm and syncopation and that kind of thing but in terms of the notes it applied, and those blue notes have a lot to answer for and accounting for why blues sounds as it does. The lowered third tends to replace the major third. The lowered seventh turns to replace the seventh but with the fifth, the fifth if you like, you think of as being the second most important note in the scale as the tonic. And that is still important to blues, so by the fifth and the lowered fifth. I have find found a place in blues.
Let’s transfer this to the harmonica now. If I take an appropriate harmonica, I can find the same keynote, C. There it is, there. And I can find the third. Here it is, there. But there is no flat in third in terms of a special reed and the way that on a piano I can play a particular key. However I could get that lowered third by bending down.
It’s like a cat syndrome you might say. And I can get notes instead of morphing the pitch gradually like I did then. I can get individual notes by just fractionally bending. So there’s the major third. You can hear those other notes here that I could get also, that third. I can do the same with the fifth. So here’s the fifth. Just like this. There’s the fifth. So there’s the bent fifth. And I can get the seventh also.
So, those notes now are available and I could easily play blues on the harmonica. Of course that sounds a little bit tern but we can pump up the sound if we play the harmonica directly into a microphone and connect the microphone to a --
So, here we go and this is the way we cannon.
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