Thread with 11 posts
jump to expanded post
holy shit the guitar might actually be easier to play melodies on than the keyboard is for me, there's no white key black key scale brainworms it's all just semitones
chords i knew it'd be easier for. but melodies! i might be fundamentally a 12-tone-equal-temperament semitone-brained person
i'm refusing to memorise what “notes” the strings are tuned to. the 5-5-5-4-5 interval pattern is far easier to think about and i can't believe that, for example, wikipedia does not simply list the intervals in a tuning
okay so the other thing with melodies is that the hands can work together to accomplish melodic movements that would instead be the sole responsibility of one hand on piano. it is difficult for me to explain this succinctly but by being aware of the intervals between strings i can move frets less
more importantly than moving less, the hand movements can be simpler, and… oh my god what wait i think i just intuitively figured out switching between strings as a technique for dealing with a major third transposition in a melody???? is that what's going on here. oh my god
i do not know any chords or scales on guitar i am going to figure out this instrument from first principles and i am going to have a hell of a lot of fun doing it
this is what i mean by it being easier to play melodies, i can choose which changes in pitch are accomplished by changing string and which are accomplished by changing fret
(again, i have no idea what i'm doing, i have read absolutely nothing about guitar technique or concepts, i'm trying to apply my very basic knowledge of the concept of intervals and knack for remembering note pitches to figuring out how to play stuff by ear)
@hikari A thing that is nice about guitars is they are "isomorphic". If you learn a pattern crossing multiple strings, you can move it left and right along the string or up and down between strings and these are fixed-size pitch offsets. People go to weird lengths to get this property with keyboards, but guitars just work that way normal type.
@mcc exactly!
@hikari here's what's truly crazy: on top of being excellent for chords and melodies, the guitar is *also* excellent for rhythm.
Truly the all-roundest of all-round instruments.