Enharmonic.

 Okay, I could tell you about the plague of ants I've just dealt with in our kitchen,

or I could comment on TC's self-praising post (though he never took 16 tight heads in one 1st. fifteen rugby match) about his old paedo Catholic school system.

No, instead I want to talk about enharmonic notes in music.*

Most people know (well, maybe not players of the bagpipes) that there are 12 differently named notes in our western music tempered system, five of which have two names. All these12 notes are evenly spaced from each other. Well, actually more than five can have two names - for example, E could be called Fb. The well-known notes with two names are F#/Gb, G#/Ab, A#/Bb, C#/Db and D#/Eb. These are often known as the black notes on the piano. The other seven notes are white. Hey, look at a piano if you don't understand that.

There is no black note between
E & F or B & C.

I've gotten heavily into tritones lately. This was brought on by my love of hearing the #4 (also can be called #11) in jazz solos. A #4 is a tritone from the root in standard scales like the dominant 7th. scale. A tritone, you probably guessed it, is made up of three tones. A tone is where you move up from one note, skip one and go to the next note. The distance from one note to the note right next to it is called a semitone. Here's a tritone: C-C#-D, D-D#-E, E-F-F#. ----> C D E F#. Note - that F# could also be called Gb (enharmonic). So, it could be a #4 or a b5.

Okay, you should know by now that, when I'm improvising on my violin, I often like to play 3/7 chords. Hey, they give a nice sound! Four note chords are often made up of the 1st, 3rd, 5th and 7th notes of a scale. For example, let's take the scale G7. It contains the notes G A B C D E F G. The G7 chord contains the notes G B D F. The 3rd note is B and the 7th note is F.

Here's a funny thing: Let's take the dominant 7th. scale that would begin on the tritone of G - C#7. This scale has the notes C# D# E# F# G# A# B C#. Let's check out the 3rd and 7th notes. E# and B. Okay, remember the enharmonic thing I told you about? E# = F. I could have also called this C#7 scale Db7 (enharmonic again). Db Eb F Gb Ab Bb Cb Db. Now our two notes are F and Cb (enharmonic again, Cb = B). The same two notes of G7, just in reverse order!

Okay, that's probably enough for today. I know that Peter (and probably his phone) will be in the bath by now and Robert will be off to the church shop.

Let me just finish off with this. If you use, say, 3/7 dominant 7th. chords, There are only six different chord sounds:

1. C7 & F#7 (Gb7)
2. D7 & G#7 (Ab7)
3. E7 & A#7 (Bb7)
4. G7 & C#7 (Db7)
5. A7 & D#7 (Eb7)
6. B7 & E#7 (F7)

I hope you enjoyed that.

Ciao tutti.

* Just stop reading now, if it's not your thing.