RE: Flamenco Circle of Fifths (RE: Flamenco Keys) (Full Version)

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Ricardo -> RE: Flamenco Circle of Fifths (RE: Flamenco Keys) (Feb. 7 2021 17:42:12)

quote:

I do agree with the position that a scale with both thirds accounts for all diatonic chords plus the raise third on the tonic. It is found everywhere in melodic and harmonic form. I previously called it flamenco octotonic or flamenco phrygian octotonic.


It does not account for the Bb7 or Aug6 chord in por medio, which is not only diatonic but a strong primary Cadential chord. I will only add that using the octatonic is ok if you want to devise Romans similar to how the basic minor key works (3 different scales), but it is incomplete in that form...more scales are needed. And finally the concept of a minor key is natural minor+harmonic+melodic to account for diatonic chords...not ABCDEFF#GG#...if you get my drift? That is NOT a scale that justifies minor key...it is a collection of notes considered “diatonic”. Simply put, if you are gonna talk about “diatonic chords”, you should have two or more SETS of Roman Numerals....that correspond to the fact you base your diatonic harmony on different scales...not one “super scale”.

About modulation ... they did use modulations. Fandangos is relative key modulation. Problem is the falseta modulations are often so brief to be considered tonicization of diatonic chords...but for sure parallel modulation has always been done. I agree that direct modulation and other types of exotic key changes (minor third, step wise, or even 4th or 5ths) were not used until “modern” flamenco started experimenting. Guajiras de lucia for example is pretty old school but moves from A to B to C#phrygian to E phrygian....again we could argue about how long or what constitutes modulation proper from tonicization of Diatonic chords.




Ricardo -> RE: Flamenco Circle of Fifths (RE: Flamenco Keys) (Feb. 7 2021 18:08:00)

quote:

You've got a lot of credibility in my book Ricardo, but on this point - how often is what you refer to really done ? I'd love to hear the example you're referring to, and 3 or 4 more - because if they're doing what they say you are doing, I'd love to hear more and learn how they approach finding these types of improvisation passages (or compositions more likely)


Hey joe, you are replying to me, but quoting Burdo...and like you, I would love to hear that example. I suspect this is subjective about it sounding cool. Dissonance does not always mean “out of key”. But it does remind of the joke about jazz “just play all the wrong notes as fast as possible”. [:D]

I am often frustrated trying to explain clearly what I am talking about when people reply with odd guitar speak revealing to me they weren’t really following. I think it whittles down to MINOR KEYS and how they operate differently than major keys. I think a lot of guitar players think Aeolian jams and minor keys are the exact same thing, and sometimes that exotic fully diminished7 you mentioned comes in for flavor, or not it’s all the same. I really don’t see it that way, it is much more black and white to me. If the people I am trying to translate flamenco concepts to already understand minor keys and tonal funciton, then I have a basis of how to move forward with how flamenco is similar and different to minor keys. What I often end up with is people that understand modes and jazz somewhat and cant’ get into “tonal function mind set”, even if they sort of understand ii-V-I. Blues jazz and rock operate differently, and it is a lot of “we don’t follow classic music rules here”, but that is not the point...it is not about “rules” it is about what a basic view of circle of 5ths shows is the scope of music on equal tempered instruments. Nothing in Rock or jazz is so innovative it violates the basic system at work.

Coming back to your diminished trick (you meant fully diminished7th, as there are two other types, half diminished, and diminished major7), the reason it works is simple. Spelling. If you spell the thing wrong on purpose you can use it as a device to move to other territories. Enharmonic misspelling is a fun trick jazz discipline uses to move around the wheel more freely. It is not complicated, but you can only use 7 letter names at a time. But right there a lot of guitar players are like “wow, too much theory for me!!!”. To explain what a simple scale implies I feel like I need to get super wordy to be crystal clear. I have restated countless times, the circle of 5ths contains all the logic about everything going on. If something doesn’t fit, then it is a spelling issue, it is real simple.




El Burdo -> [Deleted] (Feb. 7 2021 20:02:52)

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El Burdo -> [Deleted] (Feb. 7 2021 20:09:57)

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El Burdo -> [Deleted] (Feb. 7 2021 20:15:02)

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Ricardo -> RE: Flamenco Circle of Fifths (RE: Flamenco Keys) (Feb. 7 2021 20:16:22)

quote:

eg Gdim7 can be


It can ONLY be the Eb7 sub. The others imply that the Gdim7 is actually an inversion of something else (ie spelled wrong). For example as a sub for F#7 it is A#diminised7 in 3rd inversion (A#dim7/G)...if a sub for A7 it is C#dim7/G, if a sub for C7 it is Edim7/G.....the misspelling is a fun trick that people can use to light their way through the dark jungle of harmony, but learning how to spell things correctly gets at the deeper logic and meaning of how music works.




El Burdo -> [Deleted] (Feb. 7 2021 20:25:00)

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El Burdo -> [Deleted] (Feb. 7 2021 20:42:36)

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joevidetto -> RE: Flamenco Circle of Fifths (RE: Flamenco Keys) (Feb. 7 2021 20:55:42)

quote:

I didn't realise you were referring to me Joe, sorry.


Sorry about that - I didn't realize I was referring to you either lol - thanks for pointing that out Ricardo, sorry about the misquote.




Ricardo -> RE: Flamenco Circle of Fifths (RE: Flamenco Keys) (Feb. 8 2021 14:45:38)

quote:

There is an American pianist called Brad Mehldau who has played with John Scofield. They play a contrafact along the lines of 'There Will Never be Another You'. I looked at Brad's solo - there were virtually no times when the notes he played related to the chords at all. It was bizarre how great it sounded. I'm not talking of 'side slipping' or anything as trite, but whole arpeggios of unrelated chords. If Brad was 'borrowing notes' he will have been deeply in...debt...er.. (whatever).


Thanks for the score. So I learned this simple concept from mclaughlin instructional DVD....if you are jazz enthusiast it is a cool thing to check out. As you advance through the chapter you final arrive at the good stuff in chapter 9. What he does is impose melodic minor modes over the 2-5-1 and admits to creating devices that function so if it is fast you can toss them out quick. The general one is play Aeolian b5 over the 2 chord (mode 6 melodic minor) and super loc on the 5 (mode 7 melodic). The tensions created invite the accompanying chords to change...and indeed in the actual play along charts those tensions are played in the chord voicings. But the point he made was you can invoke these tensions even on basic chords...but the tensions are obviously more violent.

So in your piece the piano player is not always doing those exact modes, but he is doing his more violent tensions and chromatics on each respective 2 or 5 chord....and clearly resolving on the respective 1 chords with consonant intervals. That is why it sounds “cool”...but the real reason his tensions don’t hurt your ear relative to the chart chords is that nobody is actually PLAYING those chords. If you play along with the written voicings and don’t add your own tensions (and some cases if you DO add the wrong tensions it could be worse!) then you hear the violence. So it’s only walking bass until he adds left hand chords which as wrtten, are not the charted chords either. At one point even the 2-5 the bass does the tritone subs to be more in key with the piano briefly... anyway things like playing Bm9 arpeggio against the Bbm7 implied chord sounds cool and dissonant...but if you actually play the Bbm chord it sounds pretty bad....but he releases the tension finally at the Abmj7 ...so that is basically “typical’ in my jazz brain.

I know in jazz they sometimes feel they have taken chromaticism to a new upgraded level in context improvising in a basic “song”. But check this old fugue ... especially around 2minute mark it gets really crazy.





El Burdo -> [Deleted] (Feb. 8 2021 16:34:00)

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El Burdo -> [Deleted] (Feb. 8 2021 16:51:16)

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Ricardo -> RE: Flamenco Circle of Fifths (RE: Flamenco Keys) (Feb. 8 2021 16:52:05)

quote:

You mention tricks: one nice mm trick on a minor ii V i is play the ø arpeggio on the ii, then play the same shape a m3rd up for the altered dominant, then play the same shape a further M3rd up for the i (getting the M7th). Similar to the diminished 7 'steam engine over damsel tied to the rails' trick but with harmonic movement.


Sorry I only added the Bach thing to the previous post (I was looking for some chromatic piano that showed a similar dissonance that resolves to consonant place but was more deliberately “tonal”.). It is NOT the same of course, that’s why I wanted to show it as more “tonal” concept. Though a similar idea of tension and release is at play.

Yes I forgot to mention that the two mm modes I described are the same scale a minor third apart. (2-5–1 in C means F melodic then Ab melodic and yes C is a major 3rd up from that.). So one could potentially play the same phrase, scalar or arpegio, and move it up 3 frets. Anyway after going through his course I did start noticing the fun stuff happening on the 2 chords in jazz.

About flamenco key system. I feel I need something as a musical reference outside of pure flamenco in order to justify the concept. I am still sort of searching for such a thing but my research tells me I am pretty close. The reason it is important is because if the only musical examples are flamenco itself, it can be argued for a prejudice in favor of something that is too specific. As I have stated over and over, it is not easy to justify Solea/fandango in E phrygian as legitimate distinct “key” from A minor proper. Anything I might say about it can be scrubbed in favor of “half cadence” by a good musician unfamiliar with flamenco compas. What has been going on in literature is folks are cool with “modes” from a rock/jazz guitar perspective and feel that is sufficient to explain flamenco. We have already seen that most of us can tell the different between “fakemenco” vs what actually goes on in andalucia. Andalusian cadence serves nothing more than point back to minor key function. Since I can barely convince you guys that actually know about flamenco and importantly COMPAS, what the heck I am talking about, then you need to wait until I can get some concrete thing that can be analyzed correctly from NON flamenco people, as representative of the same thing we have going on.




joevidetto -> RE: Flamenco Circle of Fifths (RE: Flamenco Keys) (Feb. 8 2021 19:08:09)

quote:

I'm so naive . I should have realised you would actually analyse it and then teach me!


I didn't intentionally set it up that way - but I saw that coming lol




El Burdo -> [Deleted] (Feb. 8 2021 20:07:26)

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Ricardo -> RE: Flamenco Circle of Fifths (RE: Flamenco Keys) (Feb. 8 2021 20:12:23)

quote:

Well, this is certainly a fertile direction (as you have all been discussing)...wikiquote:The harmonic minor is also occasionally referred to as the Mohammedan scale...commonly found in Middle Eastern music. The harmonic minor scale as a whole is called Nahawand[6] in Arabic nomenclature, as Bûselik Hicaz[7] in Turkish nomenclature, and as an Indian raga, it is called Keeravani/Kirwani...


As I said before, non tempered, non funcional ie non useful/false equivalence.

I thought it was clear the concrete example I need has to be equal tempered basically, and functional western instrument oriented. For Example that ca 1800 harpsichord “fandango” score was ALMOST the perfect example I could have used to illustrate my point. However when I examined it closer it doesn’t really work for our purposes, it is simply “minor key” piece using half cadence. We deliberately avoid that device in flamenco today. To make that work I would have to alter all the guys d minor chords, and I dont’’ want to do that. I intend to find SOMETHING man, and I will I promise, and when I do I will write out the thing crystal clear.




Sr. Martins -> RE: Flamenco Circle of Fifths (RE: Flamenco Keys) (Feb. 8 2021 20:16:35)

Modes are a great way of mapping out the available notes, specially when visualizing on the fingerboard but the tonal functioning harmony is not the same as really using modes in a piece of music. To me the vanilla minor key is not even a thing functionally because for it to work functionally for my ears there's always that raised 7th making it harmonic minor, not vanilla minor.

In the end I guess that I only ear the major key as being functional and everything else as a segment of that and when a forceful tonicization is happening, it sounds has a mode to me.

To conclude, flamenco sounds like regular major scale tonal music to me, except for the parts where it is not. [:D]




Ricardo -> RE: Flamenco Circle of Fifths (RE: Flamenco Keys) (Feb. 8 2021 20:22:27)

quote:

In the end I guess that I only ear the major key as being functional and everything else as a segment of that and when a forceful tonicization is happening, it sounds has a mode to me.

To conclude, flamenco sounds like regular major scale tonal music to me, except for the parts where it is not.


That is pretty much it. I feel like your basic minor operation, as you said “only the major key is functional”, so there is some STUFF going on that legitimizes the concept of a “minor key”. So that is where I would love to begin by showing we can do the same for phrygian.




joevidetto -> RE: Flamenco Circle of Fifths (RE: Flamenco Keys) (Feb. 8 2021 20:39:48)

Ricardo - you've often stated that one must learn how the minor key works in order to understand lots of flamenco concepts. Can you reccommend a book or website that does this in a way you feel complete and accurate ?




Sr. Martins -> RE: Flamenco Circle of Fifths (RE: Flamenco Keys) (Feb. 8 2021 20:42:24)

Ah, nice.. I am not the only one with crazy hearing hehe

On phrygian and flamenco I can hear weird too. For instance, the inverted Bb chord for me keeps sounding as a Dmin with a raised 5th...it's like my mind puts it as a D, going to C, down to Bb and A.

Bb's also sound dominant, although modally as a degree it would be Lydian. It just sounds like it, maybe idiomatically, wants to resolve a half step below. It even sounds great with added tension, just like a dominant would.

Really like this Bb:

x
3
3
3
x
4

Tension note on the bass that ends up making it a "true dominant" that still resolves a half step back. Well, looking at it now, maybe with this particular one it's just some a tri tone sub which I hadn't thought of before.. ok, carry on with the lessons.




Ricardo -> RE: Flamenco Circle of Fifths (RE: Flamenco Keys) (Feb. 9 2021 2:01:29)

quote:

Bb's also sound dominant, although modally as a degree it would be Lydian. It just sounds like it, maybe idiomatically, wants to resolve a half step below. It even sounds great with added tension, just like a dominant would.

Really like this Bb:

x
3
3
3
x
4


Yes exactly right...the Ab bass note is actually a G# leading tone, the same one that is altering Em to E maj to resolve to A minor. But you have F instead of E note, or rather a Bb triad up top. That thing in classical music is called “Augmented 6th chords” in classical theory classes...the idea being it is tonicizing the Dominant chord in the key of D or D minor. But in jazz, yes, the misspelled G#->Ab allows your tritone swap of E7b5 with Bb7. It is functioning the SAME way in both schools of thought, but it is not so obvious to everyone it is actually the Phrygian Cadence at work.




Sr. Martins -> RE: Flamenco Circle of Fifths (RE: Flamenco Keys) (Feb. 9 2021 2:28:18)

Ah yes, the V of the V, I can see that. Had never thought of it that way because I don’t really hear it wanting to go up to D. In the end, it’s all a matter of context and the genre/vocabulary in question.

Analysis is mostly a bunch of numbers that represent distances but, by themselves, they don’t mean that much. Looking forward to the audiobook version of this thread. [:D]




Ricardo -> RE: Flamenco Circle of Fifths (RE: Flamenco Keys) (Feb. 9 2021 4:35:35)

quote:

ORIGINAL: joevidetto

Ricardo - you've often stated that one must learn how the minor key words in order to understand lots of flamenco concepts. Can you reccommend a book or website that does this in a way you feel complete and accurate ?


The simple logic to the concept sitting in my brain is not fully realized anywhere I see on youtube. I either see missing pieces or too long and boring lectures with tiny errors. These two short videos, plus the third on secondary dominants are a good intro but we need to next see a professor analyzing a piece of music properly, a piece that is sufficiently involved to cover all the bases. Tonal Harmony text books should have this but I learned it all on blackboard so I can’t recommend any single book.





Here is a “correct” analysis in a minor key.





JasonM -> RE: Flamenco Circle of Fifths (RE: Flamenco Keys) (Feb. 10 2021 17:01:17)

Hey theory nerds,

Is there a name for a sus2 triad with a flattened 5th ? Is it just sus2flat5?

Just practicing by triad inversions and was wondering




Ricardo -> RE: Flamenco Circle of Fifths (RE: Flamenco Keys) (Feb. 10 2021 23:51:35)

quote:

ORIGINAL: JasonM

Hey theory nerds,

Is there a name for a sus2 triad with a flattened 5th ? Is it just sus2flat5?

Just practicing by triad inversions and was wondering


If you say “sus2” it implies the third is absent and the 5th is present. But if you say “b5” it means you have either a vii dim chord in major or iidim in minor. It could also be the chord is misspelled and needs #4 instead of b5. It would be important for myself to know if the appropriate scale melody is lydian or aeolian b5. And vice versa...if you have that contextual info you could interpret the chord correctly. For example play A lydian then C melodic minor over this chord to see why it is important:

X
0
2
1
0
X




JasonM -> RE: Flamenco Circle of Fifths (RE: Flamenco Keys) (Feb. 11 2021 1:23:13)

Ahh ok, thanks!

What I was doing was

x
5
5
5
x
x

Then

x
3
5
4
x
x

so that F# should be considered a sharp 4 not a flat 5 because it’s not dim7 nor m7b5... I guess I need to crack open the Beato book before I start to go astray




Ricardo -> RE: Flamenco Circle of Fifths (RE: Flamenco Keys) (Feb. 11 2021 1:48:21)

quote:

ORIGINAL: JasonM

Ahh ok, thanks!

What I was doing was

x
5
5
5
x
x

Then

x
3
5
4
x
x

so that F# should be considered a sharp 4 not a flat 5 because it’s not dim7 nor m7b5... I guess I need to crack open the Beato book before I start to go astray


Actually it is NOT a #4 either in that context, though it would be if you had a C bass note. Moving from C triad to what you think is “Csus2/Gb” is over complicating it. The chord is D7/F#...and normally we play A open so you can see and name it correctly, but in this case the 5th is omitted. The root is D. That is why circle of 5th is helpful to see the bigger picture.

However by forcing me to guess that C was the bass note, and playing Eb melodic minor, you can see how exotic “enharmonic misspellings” can operate. While the context tells us it is a D7 chord, the concept of forcing the exotic scale over it (tritone sub is Ab7#11 lydian dominant mode 4 of Eb melodic) is how jazz often works.




Sr. Martins -> RE: Flamenco Circle of Fifths (RE: Flamenco Keys) (Feb. 11 2021 1:58:38)

How are you guys coming up with sus2flat5? Sounds like an inverted dom7 chord..




Ricardo -> RE: Flamenco Circle of Fifths (RE: Flamenco Keys) (Feb. 11 2021 2:04:04)

quote:

ORIGINAL: Sr. Martins

How are you guys coming up with sus2flat5? Sounds like an inverted dom7 chord..


He viewed the middle note as the root...which we have already determined was incorrect. That is why I doubled it in octaves to drive my point. He spelled it wrong as b5-1-2, thinking the E drop to D was suspension from the C triad, and the G-F# was a 5 to b 5 situation. With correct spelling it should be 3-b7-1...5th was omitted. The missing info I was delt was the preceding C triad that completes the picture. However with the 5th omitted from the D7/F#, it is hopefully clear that my melodic minor offering, AND my C lydian offering BOTH WORK REGARDLESS. [:)]




Sr. Martins -> RE: Flamenco Circle of Fifths (RE: Flamenco Keys) (Feb. 11 2021 2:15:46)

Yes, I had a opened a few threads and this one didn't have your last answer.

I think this is a good example of why we need to analyse with our ears first. There aren't as many chords as one would think. Now that I think of it, we have way more chord structures that are inversions than plain ones. If you see/hear a fourth (or a sixth) in a funky place, chances are that the chord isn't in root position.




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