pentaGuitar

Zero to Pro VISUAL HEARING by @EA_guitar // It's time to JUST PLAY™ ♥️🎸

[pentaGuitar @pentaGuitar]

remember...

if there's no silence you can't listen

and if you don't listen

it's not music

❤️🎸

[Eric Alexander @EA_guitar]

one of my favorite things I’ve done 🎺🎸

[Eric Alexander @EA_guitar]

The thing of beauty is, all you need to assemble all of music from first principles is:

ONE STRING─The Pythagorean Monochord. The instrument Pythagoras himself used to derive the entirety of his mathematics. Like gravity, acoustics is unescapable: a fact of the world itself.

[Eric Alexander @EA_guitar]

Same as for any other time signature.

Learn to count.

Learn to count as you play, that is.

Easier said than done. THEN you internalize it as FEEL and you don’t need to count consciously any more. Simple 👊

[Eric Alexander @EA_guitar]

There's two kinds of improvisation.

One kind is like the Blues. You know the form, you know the chords, you know the scales and the licks and the phrasings─then you 'reshuffle the deck' in real time.

The other kind is more like creating a new kind of music from scratch.

[Eric Alexander @EA_guitar]

Funny thing is—wasn’t even crazy intervals.

Not only was it nothing out of the ordinary.

It was plain old C major—C D E F G A B that got me there.

Only goes to show, there’s always more to the simple things in music, if you know where to look.

[Eric Alexander @EA_guitar]

Unpopular opinion: I don’t care what Fender does or doesn’t do with its intellectual property 🎸

[Eric Alexander @EA_guitar]

THE HUMAN HEARING APPARATUS, THE COCHLEA

Every major breakthrough I have ever had vis-a-vis my so called 'inner hearing,' the coveted ability to 'visualize' sounds in one's mind's eye, has been linked to direct experience of and with the Harmonic Series.

THREAD 🧵

[Eric Alexander @EA_guitar]

A lot of folks asked how I check.

When at home—any instrument 🎸🎹

On the road—piano app 🎹📲

Takes two seconds.

Again, the key word here is HABIT 💪

[Eric Alexander @EA_guitar]

Chinese tuning A D E A behaves just like guitar.

Fourths, with a 'different interval disjunction.'

Been playing with it for a few days.

Happy to report that I've mapped it completely:

5 pentatonic modes × 12 keys = 60

7 diatonic modes × 12 keys = 84

Total modes: 144 = 12²

[Eric Alexander @EA_guitar]

This is not, by the way, 'microtonal.' At all.

This is semitones, just like a regular guitar.

Semitones through and through.

12 + 12 + 7 frets.

I love the idea of an 'extended range' instrument like this 🎸

[Eric Alexander @EA_guitar]

The year is 1588. Ming prince Zhu Zaiyu has cracked it.

After decades of extraction of cubic roots on this gargantuan 81 rod abacus, the mathematics of fret placement are finally solved 🧮🎸

[Eric Alexander @EA_guitar]

Using an electronic tuner is equivalent in this sense to fret + open string. Electronic tuners are calibrated to the same mathematics well placed frets are 🧮🎸

[Eric Alexander @EA_guitar]

This here 'Lyre Guitar' from 1789

(Pierre-Charles Mareschal, Paris)

Oldest European instrument I have found

with fret markers: (0) 5 9 (10) 12

1801 chart confirms tuning: E A D G B E

[Eric Alexander @EA_guitar]

China has been making instruments with 24 frets on them for a very long time—like this Ruan Xian.

[Eric Alexander @EA_guitar]

Easiest way to understand these modes, and how they work: take the 5 notes of the pentatonic scale, in C.

Each note is the starting note for one mode. Simple.

The first mode is the C major pentatonic scale; the last is the A minor pentatonic. The rest are probably new to you.

[Eric Alexander @EA_guitar]

https://t.co/Jn0I886bpA

[Eric Alexander @EA_guitar]

Get in, loser.

We’re playing Go by the river—and I’m beating your ass.

[Eric Alexander @EA_guitar]

Before the guitar, came the Genoese Mandolin, on the right: E A D G B E.

Silk Strings. Just like the Chinese Lute.

Headstock just like the Chinese Lute.

Some had scalloped frets, just like the Chinese Lute.

Genoa & Venice had been 'hanging out' in China for a very long time.

[Eric Alexander @EA_guitar]

So much for the ‘Western 12-tone System.’

The Chinese have had the concept of 12 key modulation—5 pentatonic modes X 12 keys = 60 modes total—since at least 300 BC, and the mathematics of ‘equal temperament’ (fret placement) before ‘we’ did too.

[pentaGuitar @pentaGuitar]

@RoehrbornX @EA_guitar @hectorvelazhv but the sorry little sod blocked me here.

the weak cannot handle opposition, in any form.

https://t.co/ODfjBkO0aK

[Eric Alexander @EA_guitar]

The Idiot's Hallmark™️ is instant resentment of intellectual challenge. Any intellectual challenge.

In fact, the idiot will organize his entire existence so as never to face any. And so, the idiot remains an idiot.