I'm not a native speaker, so maybe there's a better word I could use, but by "accent" I meant "emphasize". All this comes to these three things:



Personally, I think the second ones make the biggest difference. And this is also linked to avoiding note A. Sure, you can use it, but I would always keep in mind that if you give it too much importance, you can have a bad time.

But hey, ultimately, it's music, so "do whatever you want" always applies. As long as it sounds good, it's good.

PS. Now, when I think of it, maybe "be careful with it" would be a better description.

 

I hope this whole discussion is helpful to you.

 

It´s the chords you use with the melody, that turn it into major or minor, not the melody itself.

 

In music, accenting never, and I mean never, can be confused with a note of dissimilar pitch. Accenting is stressing the property of pitch so that it stands out for the creative purpose of emphasis. So, to reiterate, "Accenting means also lingering longer on certain notes or playing them higher in pitch" is patently false in regard to musical composition. Perhaps you have mistakenly taken linguistic refinements of oral accents and transposed them to your understanding of musical expression. An accent on an eighth note lasts bever longer than an eighth note and the pitch of that note would never change by definition. If this is not your held belief then please change my mind by example.

 

Check my recent post that has descriptions of different accents. I already expanded on this topic. Tonic accent is what I had in mind in this case.

 

Yes, you are giving attribute falsely if you believe the pitch changes. It does not. A note is accentuated BECAUSE of it's higher pitch. Again, the pitch does not change.

Emphasis given to a note on account of its higher pitch, rather than because of stress (i.e. dynamic Periodicals, ) or lengthening of durational value (i.e. Agogic accent). In ex.1 the third beats of bars 1 and 2 receive a tonic accent, in addition to a dynamic accent, because the melody notes that fall on them are higher than those of beats 1 and 2....

Now do you understand.

 

Oh, mate! This is like a kick in the nuts to me now.
Point #1 DYNAMIC accents. This is what I said on page one! And you said no!
I know we get on now since our private convo, but wow man.

Seriously. Bruh!
Mate, you are 29 telling a 48 year old to take his head out of his ass and stop assuming everyone is dumb.
The year you were born I was playing Ronnie Scott's.
YOU are assuming everyone else is dumb.
This is apparent now.
Your grammar is probably all that is letting you down. You may be a good player though.

 

Last edited: Jan 7, 2021

Umm... yes? I agree?

Accenting means also lingering longer on certain notes or using notes higher in pitch in relation to other notes. Better?

I understand where your point is coming from, but please also note that to use this accent in practice you technically have to PLAY a note, so I believe my previous wording is correct, depending on how you understand it. But I admit, it can be misleading.

Well, I think the issue is that sophisticated differences between words like "accent" or "emphasize" go over my head, since English isn't my first language and we might have not been on the same page during some parts of our conversation... Oh, well...

 

Not funny, bro. Even with emoji.

Okay, that quote is funny!
Words "like" accent or emphasize? Or THOSE EXACT WORDS?? hehe.
If English isn't your first language, you've got a lot of nerve to say any of what you've said at all, and to try to tell fellow brethren wha' gwan, you get me?

Hear what. Imagine this:
It's the mid 80s.
TR-808.
'Accent'.
And that says what?
End of.

I thank you, Ladies and Gentlemen.

 

Now you are trolling. One cannot linger on a note longer than a note is supposed to be played.

Just stop.

 

The funniest thing of this calm and polite thread is that the OP disappeared.

 

@Smoove Grooves and @Lois Lane, you are funny. You both focus on the linguistics just to flip the argument and say that I'm wrong/ridicule me, even though I literally quoted the article written by someone probably way smarter than you or me and it's obvious what I had in mind. I'm done talking to you, have a great day! Thanks for reminding me why I usually only lurk.

 

Writing melodies is simple once you understand the following:

The Scale Degrees

• 1st – The tonic.
• 5th – The dominant.
• 3rd – The mediant.
• 4th – The subdominant.
• 6th – The submediant.
• 2nd – The supertonic.
• 7th – The leading note/subtonic (minor key).

Try it with C-G-Am-F // Am-F-C-G ...

 

I did empathise when we spoke about this yesterday in pm, and I can see your point of view if you don't often post, and then when you do I opine that something is "laughable" as I did.
But as I said in our pm, it was what you said that imo was laughable, not you.
Don't take it personally at all.
Just as I didn't take it personally when you dissed my whole professional life in one sentence, and used foul language towards me.
Definitely don't take it personally especially if you were talking info from a person probably smarter than all of us in your opinion.

I hope you won't stay away for so long next time...
You are passionate.

 

To The Thread Author:
After reading everyone's posts, I decided to re-read the thread header.

On topic. The short answers are of course it sounds good or it does not and the minor and major are relative but that's a given.
I am not going into modes or areas you can get from any advanced harmony book and there are multitudes of scale books out there ad nauseum.
I will, however, say that any composition can be generated from many sources not just where you are insinuating you are grounding in.
It does not matter really whether it is minor or major. A great melody is a great melody. This is what people sing in a shower.
Bach in the 17th Century showed that an entire harmony structure can be implied with just melody and a bass note.
This is one way of composing. If you have a great melody, find the bass note that makes it sing and ring out as you intended. Often, it will tell you whether the rest of the harmony is major or minor as some of the notes tend to clearly indicate either a major 3rd or minor 3rd.
Reharmonization is something I am not going to go hard at, because it is a forum, not a symposium.

You can write from a groove, a feel, a melody, a chord, and emotion or even and experience. Scale harmony limits you to the confines of the scale. A very large proportion of famous tunes were never written that way. I know that if it sounds good it's probably right sounds lame, but it is not. The idea of simply changing the bass note can change how a melody sounds completely, experiment with it. Try to move outside of the boundaries of the scale.
As a tiny, tiny example if C is the melody and you wanted a maj7 chord you could go Fmaj7, Bbmaj7(9), Abmaj7, Dbmaj7 - so on and so forth and the same goes for minors - Am7, Dm7, Bbm7(9), Fm7, Gm11, Cm7.... You can see how I am NOT using a scale to generate my harmony choices eh?
A scale is a tool not the be-all and end all.
TRULY, it sounds good or it does not. I would not necessarily use the aforementioned paragraph, but it indicates clearly it is ultimately about how your tune sounds - TO YOU.

 

Last edited by a moderator: Jan 7, 2021

because terminology is not arithmetics or logic, terminology is a bit more complex.

but IF you reduce it to math, then the only difference between C major and A minor is in fact the root note.

a tonal system consist of two factors: the relationship between the keys, and the root note.

the relationship between the keys is the same for all church modes, and it is indepedent from the root note.

that a different root note for the same group of keys ends up beeing a different system, is part of the whole idea.


and btw, you could as well say that C major has a lot in common with C minor. they have the same root note, they share 5 ouf 7 keys while only two are different, and both are based on the same formula how the scale once was generated.

let me tell you where i am coming from, maybe then it is clearer:

there are thousands of different tone systems people use, and that boring 7 out of 12 chromatic keys per octave stuff is only a small part of them.

minor and major (and the other church modes) have (because of the above math) far more in common between each other than every other of the known and used scales would have.

there are, for example, tone systems which are limited to three octaves and contain artbitrary frequency relations modelling the distance between planets and moons. they have nothing in common with C major. A minor otoh shares the complete frequency relations with C major, and that is a bit more than nothing.

even a blues scale - and all other used scales based on 12 tone chromatic - do have more differences to major than the modes of major have, many do not even have the same amount of members.

major works as follows:

major is made up from the chromatic ladder by starting with the root note and then you to get the other 6 members by finding the most equal distribution of the 7 keys across the octave.
(it is a similar idea like the "euclidian sequencer" type of african rythms, just much easier to calculate.)

and now guess how the theorists calculate minor.
right: go 9 step up, calculate major as above, go 9 steps down again.

yeah, you can use major and minor - even of different root notes - just fine in a piece of music together, even at the same time if you wish.

...because they are so similar! SNCR.

 

good question.

i would say it is the melody, there is a tendency that you use major a bit different.

and dont forget that in classical music you often start and end phrases with the root notes chord.

saying that, it can be a great help to create new interesting melodies by "switching modes while composing", and pretend to be in another mode or key from time to time.

you will end up finding interesting progressions which were not already available in your usual improvisation fundus and eventually become the next depeche mode.

 

while this is not wrong, you are missing that a piece of music might not use any chords.

which gate would you like to choose now to win the car?

 

i think what makes the biggest effect mostly depends on the material.

also, i miss number 4, number 5 and number 6. in this list:

4. accent by time (predelaying an event)

5. accent by rudiment ("accent" in this sense you use it could refer at least to flams, double strikes, add rimshot to the snare, this kind of closely releated "grouped events" )

6. accent by timbre change (most typical again for drums (hitting the ride or tom elsewhere) but of course also for cello (playing closer to the bridge) trumpet (turning your instrument towards the audience while for other "non accented" events you are pointing it to the floor) and last but not least for any type of synthesizer)

of course i have to admit that for "timbre change" in electronic sounds it is hard to delimit which timbre change is an "accent", "goes up", raises the interest and cognition and which is not.

btw, it is interesting that a TB-303 sequencer has "accents" but not the opposite of it, isnt it?

 

That same screenshot of the first 3 types of accent again...

So if it is really written by somebody "probably more intelligent than all of us" (according to the lurker), why does the 3rd one choose to state "In music theory..."?!
Sounds like it's written by a non-literary person, to put it mildly.