Congrats, great video! As it can be seen in the official scorebook, I disagree with the semitones you used instead of microtones in the songs Billabong, Anoxia, Doom City and Flying. The band told me that they were consistent with the use of Huseyni microtones in all the pieces of the first album. Sometimes it is tricky to hear them on zurna, because the intonation is in between the quartertone and semitone.
@microtonalguitar Thanks for the comment! It means a lot, coming from you. I wasn't aware of the different intonation on the zurna, that definitely explains some of the unusual notes I had picked for the main melody in Billabong Valley. In general, whenever I heard something questionable, I isolated/looped the audio and tried to match the exact note with an adjustably-tuned keyboard. In some cases, the note didn't line up exactly with 24-equal, and in those cases I just picked whatever seemed closest. In retrospect that might not have been the best idea. I'm still a little confused about songs like Anoxia and Doom City, because they definitely have some major 2nds and major 6ths in the places I indicated, at least from an audio analysis standpoint. I think maybe some of these were using quarter-tone trills or hammer-ons, but for some reason the lower note didn't articulate properly. Maybe just a performance issue, since later live performances of these songs do seem to more clearly favor the neutral intervals. Separately, I am curious about what you think of the scale used in songs like Static Electricity and Ontology. I described it as the 'neutral Hicazkar' scale, since it's obviously not a match for the Arabic Hicazkar, or even the 'softer' Hicaz tetrachords that I seem to hear in a lot of Turkish music. Since you have a lot more experience with this kind of music, do you feel that King Gizzard's execution of this scale 'references' the Hicazkar to some degree, or do you feel like it should be considered an idiosyncratic scale in its own family?
@@ThePopDescriptivistYes, the trills are really crazy and misdirecting :) You are also right about the live performance changes. In my concerts, I am also inconsistent sometimes. I will look the Hicazkar issue up carefully and get back to you.
as someone who knows basically zero music theory your manner of explaining and editing makes their microtonal music go from “it’s basically magic to me” to “oh, the thought process behind this must have been fascinating to listen to” and also now I have a better idea of what else to look for when I wanna listen to microtonal music that isn’t king gizzard lol
“Flying Microtonal Banana” was my introduction to microtonality, and I was obsessed with it at first listen. Since then, I’ve been looking for a comprehensive explanation of what is happening on that album, and this is everything I could’ve asked for. Incredible video
commenting for the algorithm. amazing breakdown! two minor notes is that 1. the first apperance of microtonality was the guitar solo on 2016’s robot stop, and 2. stu directly stated they based FMB off turkish anatolian rock so the similarities aren’t coincidental
Thanks for the comment! To your first point, I was aware of that solo but felt it was too brief/fragmentary to bother including. If you wanted to categorize it, it basically uses the Hüseyni cins. Clearly an omen of things to come on FMB!
Wow, I have been waiting for someone to make a video like this for years, and you really knocked it out of the park. Tolgahan Cogulu was my introduction to King Gizzard. His video on Sleep Drifter vs Kara Toprak was the first time I ever heard King Gizzard's music, and though I am now a huge fan of their whole catalog, I have always liked their microtonal work best. The examples you give are fantastically laid out (the color coding really helps), really clear for someone like myself that watches a lot of TH-cam music theory but has never had any formal training in it. I can only imagine how hard you worked on all the scoring. Some of my personal highlights: 8:04 blew my mind. Cool how typically Aeolian is presented as "between" Dorian and Phrygian, but Huseyni presents sort of an alternate twist. 17:42 I loved when you compared and contrasted the Turkish maqams to Arabic Makams throughout the video. Too often people call all of them "middle eastern music" and don't differentiate between these traditions (for those who want to learn more about that, Farya Faraji here on youtube has some great videos that explain differences between Arab, Persian, and Turkish music). 22:38 this chart makes total sense and I like the language of "compromises" between experimentation and conventional harmony. 28:39 this was a big mind blowing moment at first, but I'm glad you were able to contextualize it with the other examples at 29:34. Still mind blowing, but always good to have the full story. I assume it is basically a legal obligation that if you have do a long KGLW video you must mention Tool or Radiohead at least somewhere in there lol 33:50 honestly stunning to see King Gizzard's restraint in not defaulting to Hijaz more often. My sense is that the vast majority of Middle Eastern "inspired" music (e.g. Hollywood soundtracks) uses this double harmonic major sound to make it sound "desert-y". I might have naively assumed without much thought that many of the songs off of Flying Microtonal Banana probably used this scale. Glad that you corrected my misconception! Thank you so much for making this! You had my rapt attention for like an hour!
I'm really glad you got so much out of the video! I agree with all your comments, you're definitely picking up what I'm putting down. Also, I'll have to check out Farya Faraji (not familiar with them) - I am still learning about all this myself, after all. Makam/maqam is such a rich tradition, and as someone who grew up in the West, there's so much 'learning by osmosis' that I've missed out on.
Greenhouse Heat Death's odd time signature is 2 sets of 4/4 and 1 set of 5/4, making it 13/4 (kinda) overall great video and presentation. Love the sheet music demonstration!
@@ThePopDescriptivistOhhh okay my bad. Hearing the song without drums confused me I guess. As someone who claims not to know middle-east maqams and scales that good, I get a better understanding of maqams than other turkish sources. Incredible job!
I did not deserve this, what a treat!♥️ Did you notate all of this from ear? Amazing work Edit: I cannot thank you enough for the whole “tetrachord symmetry” thing. I will need to sit down and digest this. What a lovely way to approach scales.
This is the most incredible breakdown I’ve seen of the microtonal music! Thank you so much for this! Also you should release the full covers of all the microtonal songs played with the minimalistic keys like you were using in the examples!
Actually that's a sick idea, doing an album of minimalistic electric piano covers of King Gizzard. I already put out an album of my own minimalistic microtonal electric piano music so the concept is definitely within my capabilities, lol. I wouldn't want to half-ass it though, so you may need to a wait a while before I can bring it to fruition. Nonetheless, thanks for the idea!
Thank you sir for the high quality vid! Microtonal Banana is one of the most consistent albums I’ve heard come out in the past 20 years but the microtonal aspect always threw me off from learning the songs and analyzing them. It’s helpful to see that first maqam or scale as a pentatonic with those microtonal notes added as ornaments. Also I like that you use the more neutral Rhodes piano instead of that bright piano sound that theory teachers usually use which wouldn’t be very helpful for this style of music.
I actually have an analysis of 'Crumbling Castle' in the works, but a discography-wide analysis of polymeters (or better: unusual time signatures) might also be cool. We'll see.
This is amazing! The way you connected their scales with traditional makams, the transcriptions and the colored notation are really helpful! I just finished designing some 3D printed additional frets for my bass and was looking for more info on 24edo microtonal scales.
This was really cool! I knew that the band had used multiple scales across their microtonal songs, but didn't realise there were this many! You explain everything in such a clear way. I also loved your Crumbling Castle analysis and I hope to see more King Gizzard videos! I might have to re-listen to some of the tracks you talked about, as there were a few points in the video where you notated certain notes as not being microtones when I was sure that they were; the main example I remember is the intro to Doom City (at about 18:08) - I was certain that the bassline also used the half-sharp sixth rather than the sharp sixth.
I was surprised as you are about the 'Doom City' intro. I even went into my DAW and looped some of those notes and compared them against my keyboard to make sure. If it's a conscious artistic choice, I have no idea why they decided to do that. There are other cases where the notes were a little more ambiguous. Like those minor 2nds in 'Open Water' are actually very slightly flat, but still much closer to minor 2nd than subminor 2nd. I wonder if maybe the guitar was slightly out of tune or something. Or possibly the tremolo picking was hard to enough that it stretched the string making it sound sharper than an intended subminor 2nd. If I ever meet the band (unlikely) I have a long list of questions for them lol.
Amazing work -- enlightening about KGLWs practice but also it's inspiring stuff to experiment with... I like the approach of starting with familiar 12EDO structures as points of departure, it makes the ideas a lot more accessible.
Thank you for taking the time to put this together! As many have stated (as did yourself), FMB was my introduction to microtonal music, as well as KGLW. As a musician who's just getting started on musical theory and notation, your video is hugely comprehensible without getting convoluted! Every little context is utilized in such an expert way that enhances understanding rather than complicating it. Also, the amount of time and effort you've put into this must have been HUGE. Can't thank you enough!! Earned a sub, in the first 5min, kudos from Brazil ✨️
Hey, this is a wonderful video. Learned some new things and it’s just really well put together and informative, great work! FMB is what inspired my own microtonal psych-krautrock + world music project (Disoriented Ghost, the albums i have out are all on this channel im commenting from lol) this video has me wondering what scales i may have stumbled upon in the process as i did a few things different than gizz w my fret placement on the microtonal guitar, and i incorporate a lot more world instruments as well (moreso on the more recent album “Metamorphic” that im curious about but also on some of the songs from the earlier albums) i have a bit of a grasp on theory but not nearly to the degree you do, you know a lot more about specific scales from different folk backgrounds, really cool learning about these and it rejuvinated my theory brain a bit haha, def liked and subscribed not sure if my tunes are something you’d ever be interested in checking out but figured i’d share! once again, awesome video, gave me some new ideas and stuff to think about
Hey, I checked out a couple of your songs. There's some interesting stuff there, it definitely has an 'outsider art' kind of vibe. Harmonically, it reminds me of another relatively unknown musician called mitka (you can find him on bandcamp) - you both really lean into some of the less accessible quarter-tone intervals/scales and have a similar approach to instrumentation and compositional style. That said, from what songs I checked out, I feel like you overuse the shamisen a bit. Its quick decay means for the most part it has low overtone content, which makes it harder for the ear to detect relative 'in tune'-ness and thus for microtonal intervals be recognizable (especially when people don't have a strong familiarity with the fundamental pitches). I think a lot of microtonal musicians intuitively do the opposite: either picking instruments with high overtone content or artificially increasing overtones by increasing the gain on an amplifier, for example. Of course, it's all a matter of taste in the end, but that was my impression. If you have any sheet music or charts I'd be curious to take a look, if not just to see how it differs from King Gizzard's stuff. As I pointed out at the end of my video, there's a lot of territory they don't experiment with, and really 24 equal is more flexible than people assume despite some of the harsher intervals. Also, FYI, I definitely plan to do other videos on microtonality at some point, so hopefully that will give you even more ideas. Thanks for tuning in!
@@ThePopDescriptivisthey sorry for the delay but thank you so much for your feedback and for checking it out!! mean’s a lot! and yea i feel you the shamisen’s short attack muddies the microtones slightly even though its layered w microtonal bass and guitar, its sort of a distinct part to this projects sound but i can totally see how it would make things less precise and clear as to what exact microtone is being used on occasion. also thank you for the rec of that artist! cheers
Fantastic video, on the final point about the lesser used intervals, I reckon this is because the guitar necks used for the microtones dont have all the quarter tones included, making playing them either awkward or simply just impossible within certain keys, hence the synth heavy Intrasport is one of few to include them. Either way your explanations of everything was amazing, really enjoyed the more in depth explainers on Turkish and Arabic 'scale' construction.
I agree that the guitar neck design is probably an obstacle. However, in many cases, it's just a matter of switching keys. This is why many of the Hüseyni-based songs are in F# or C#, whereas many of the subminor Phrygian or neutral Hicazkar-based songs are in G. I took another look at their guitar necks, and with their C#-F#-C#-F#-B-E string tuning, you could get a scale with the subminor 3rd and neutral 4th if you use a root note of D (for instance).
This video was excellent! I'm a huge King Gizzard fan and literally just received my first Microtonal yesterday from my guitar teacher who is building a few for fun. I plan to study a lot of the scales and try to play along with the music/sheet illustrations you've provided here. One thing that i've had a hard time nailing down is what tunings are being used on the guitars (and I know they aren't always the same). If there are any guides on open microtonal tunings I'd greatly appreciate that!
Dude I'm jealous, I don't have the money for my own microtonal guitar. Did you get the standard FMB fret layout or the whole 24 per octave? I think the tuning used for a lot of King Gizzard's microtonal stuff is C#-F#-C#-F#-B-E - kind of a weird tuning, but the top four strings are tuned in fourths like most strings on guitar. Then you have the second F# string that kind of acts like a 'drop tuning' relative to the other strings, and the first string doubling the third string. I'm not familiar enough with open microtonal tunings to give you more guidance than that. You could probably start with standard or open guitar tunings (for regular guitars) though.
This is super fascinating. KG is one of my favorite albums. I am loving this in-depth review of the microtonal stuff they do here. When covering Pleura at around 19:30 in, the written notation timing seems to be off, though? Maybe? It’s been ages since I actually read music/studied it seriously, but it doesn’t look right to my eyes: it is written out as going between 7/8 and 4/4, but both types of measures are using the same quarter note-per-beat beat throughout the sheet music. So it should be adjusted, using 7/8 and 8/8 and make every beat consistent, right? You’d then have to change the other notes’ timing to all be consistent with having eighth notes instead of quarter as the beats. Or, since it’s been so long since I even studied music of any sort, maybe it’s something I never learned-maybe there’s an accepted way of notating that the 7/8 isn’t *really* 7/8 and it’s just 4/4 with an extra eighth note added on? Like, do musicians assume if the music is written going back and forth between those two that this is the case? I’m just curious how that works, if that’s the case.
I think you could definitely make the argument that the 4/4 measures should be 8/8, but the whole topic of time signatures is so riddled with inconsistencies that there's probably no 'right way' to notate this type of rhythm. The only thing that seems certain is that 4/4 and 8/8 time signatures at the same tempo have the same duration. The difference between them is ostensibly how the beat and subdivisions are organized, with 8/8 having twice as many beats. But conventionally, especially in rock music, 4/4 is used for pretty much any music that can be divided as such - including things like tresillo (3+3+2 / 8) rhythms which logically might be more fitting with 8/8. In this case, I wanted to emphasize that King Gizzard were switching back and forth between an odd time signature and a normal one. The rhythm in the 4/4 measures kind of follows a 7+9 pattern of eighth notes, but this is a pretty common 4/4 trope. Like, if you took those 4/4 measures and repeated them at length, I think most people would identify this pattern as being in 4/4. It's not unreasonable to want the beat duration to be consistent throughout the song, but if I notated everything /8, I think it would be more strictly accurate to follow the eighth note emphases, which follow this 7+9 pattern - 3 measures of 7/8, and one measure of 9/8 in total. Of course, 9/8 is conventionally a compound meter where the /8 indicates not the beat but the beat subdivision (resulting in three beats of 3/8 duration). But putting this issue aside, the 7+9 interpretation fails to capture how these last two measures evoke what might naively be called a '4/4 feel'. I think most people who see 7+7+7+9 without the chance for deeper consideration would just assume there's some heavily convoluted 'aksak' pattern at play, which isn't really how this rhythm works. So I think none of the options really account for everything. Ultimately, time signatures are a product of a history of musical practice which did not foresee something like 'Pleura', so for this type of situation I usually just shrug my shoulders, make sure at least the duration of the meter makes sense, apply whatever familiar conventions pass the vibe check, and move on.
As someone who has attempted to compose microtonal music, what i do is i take a scale i like for example Dorian, then i just raise or lower a couple of the intervals by a quarter tone
That can be a useful way to experiment and 'feel out' a microtonal tuning. But I think you can get more consistent results by applying concepts like tetrachord symmetry or just intonation chords to the process. I hope my video has helped you find some new ideas!
If you're using the regular western tuning to approximate maqams, you can treat the microtones on the maqam like blue notes in blues (which I believe have historical connections to the maqam music, through north africa and spain). If you're going up to the next note from below, use the tone that's closer to the next tone. For example huseyni in A, use A B C D E F# G A ascending, A G F E D C Bb A descending (the true microtones are in between Bb and B, F and F#, but approximated to either one depending on the next note). A similar thing happens in western classical music, the minor scale has an ascending and descending form, listen to how Bach uses it for example. And also you can bend the strings on your guitar like in blues music to land on the microtone. I must also admit King Gizzard does not represent the best or prettiest kind of this music, as they're not born in this music or trained. I would listen to Turkish folk and Turkish makam music to get a better feeling for this kind of microtonal music. Even the 70's Turkish psychedelic rock bands did it much much better imo. Another way and it's more free yet you need to try and explore more yourself, is take the major or minor pentatonic scales and add your own flavor of intervals on top of that. This works because 99½ of the music, be it western, eastern, and the scales or makams historically evolved over millania out of the basic strong pentatonic scales (strong in the sense that the pentatonic scales contain the most stable harmonic intervals and nothing else). Every note you add to the pentatonic scales, is a melodic flavor and doesn't have to be a chord tone, when harmonizing that scale/mode/makam melody. Yet Huseyni is such common and useful makam, it is in fact used as a base makam in Kemal Ilerici's book on Turkish music harmony, some Turkish classical composers like Muammer Sun used that system expansively in their classical music compositions, on the 12 tone western tuning.
Neat comment! There's definitely a through-line from world music traditions that use microtones to the blue notes of Western music - in fact you're liable to hear actual microtones in recordings by Aretha Franklin or Bill Withers among many others. As for your technique in approximating makams, I suppose in a worst-case scenario it might be better than nothing. But otherwise, I feel like trying to approximate microtones in 12-equal is a bit stuck in the Western viewpoint that there's something more fundamental about 12-equal, and that microtones can somehow be boiled down to those notes without a major loss of tonal quality. I've run into similar views - for instance, people saying that a neutral 2nd is just an out of tune minor 2nd, or that these intervals have roughly the same auditory impact - but the more I've played with microtones. the more I feel that up to a certain point they are really unsubstitutable. But maybe I'm misunderstanding your point. It is interesting you bring up different ascending and descending scales though, because makam itself sometimes has these, though more subtle differences in note tunings are not always explicitly described in formal representations of the makams. And just like the ascending/descending forms of the minor scale in Western music, it seems like in most cases (that I've heard) makams tend to sharpen ascending approach notes and flatten descending approach notes. Makes me wonder if there's a fundamental 'cognitive' appeal to this technique, based in how humans perceive music. Also, for the record, if you really want to try to hit quarter tones on a standard 12-equal guitar, it's better to use a 'neutral thirds' tuning. For instance, the strings might be E, G half sharp, B, D half sharp, F#, and A half sharp (from low to high). You'll need to figure out the unique fingerings of this tuning, and it has some hard limits in what kind of intervals and scales can be comfortably played, but it's still flexible enough to help a person explore quarter tones, and really get to know what they sound like. I actually recorded a whole album that way and I feel that it was reasonably successful, musically.
@@ThePopDescriptivist Yes, me too thinks there is a fundamental 'cognitive' appeal to the directional sharpening and flattening of notes in music, sometimes it's the lead tone in western music that needs a smoother resolution to the tonic, sometimes in jazz and classical it's approach tones, or chromaticism, in eastern music like you described. What about your album where you used 3rds tuning for a microtonal approach? I want to give it a listen please, what's the name?
Trauma Triad - 'Visceral Defects'. If you download it from Bandcamp (for free if you want) it comes with a pdf with some explanations of the tuning system and with tablature for the songs as well. If you're not into the metal/hardcore style I did on that album, I also have an album called 'A North Facing Window' which is more ambient/low-key electric piano music, though it's much easier to set up a MIDI keyboard to have custom tunings so it might be less interesting from that angle.
@@ThePopDescriptivist I understand now what the 3rds tuning offers, it's a brilliant idea I will try for myself, enjoying the first album except for the trashy vocals:) You did a very good job mixing post hardcore midwest emo style with the makams, that's my perception anyway, just a few chords with the microtones bother me really, other than that I like it, really melodic stuff, also proggy at times
Thanks, glad you can appreciate it! There's definitely a few tracks with makam influence - track 1 for instance uses the Hüseyni quite a bit. But chords are not really a significant feature in makam music theory, so beyond that I tried mostly to use 'harmonic series' chords mixed with regular 12-equal chords. There are some other less structured chords which end up being a lot more dissonant, but I felt that it was in line with the aggressive style of the music, and maybe something that can be appreciated more when you acquire a taste for it. Definitely try neutral 3rds tuning though, it's a lot of fun!
Fantastic video! Very informative! Have you checked out The Mercury Tree or Ventifacts? I would love to hear what you'd think of their newer stuff, like "Spidermilk" or "Self Similar"! Compared to King Gizz, their current music is mostly in 17EDO, and it'd be super interesting to see an analysis on them! :D
Love both those bands, though I think it would be incredibly hard for me to dissect their music. I know the basic gist of how 17edo works from the Xenharmonic Wiki, but I think the deep/insightful stuff only comes once you've got a lot experience actually playing with a tuning. My playing has pretty much stuck to 24edo, JI, and a little bit of 22edo. There are a bunch of Ventifacts songs in 24edo but the songwriting seems very impressionistic, not locked into a convention like makam or JI-approximation or anything. Very different from how I usually conceptualize things. Without these limits, the conceptual space is so large that compositional choices become very hard to identify. My best bet would be to just go and ask the band how they wrote the songs - but this also seems like content that THEY really ought to be making, not me.
So I've noticed anytime they try to make chords (or at least something close to chords like at 12:28) with microtonal scales it sounds kinda bad, but all the microtonal melodies sound very good. Harmonizations of melodies very often are done with perfect 5ths. Most of the music is either a melody on top of a drone or melody on top of some other melodic riff in lower voice. I wish someone tried to make chords-based microtonal music, or at least use microtonal melodies on top of conventional chords to make kind of a new "blues" sounds with them (maybe that's not the point of such music though, as the microtones would rather be deviations from Western scales, not self-sufficient independent scales), but it seems chords is a limitation of microtonal scales. Like you said at the end, their music may sound repetative on the first album because of using only one scale, but for me it does because it is always the same "harmonic layering" idea, it is somewhat hard to distinguish songs from each other. I didn't listen to their whole discography, so if there are such elements and you just didn't talk about them, please tell! Btw.: I love such in-depth music theory analysis videos, can't imagine how much effort went into making this video. And video production is also superb, I like how structured and clear it is, it is not just dumping theory on a viewer.
You're right to point out the dissonance of the chords used in 'Some of Us' - a lot of times the instruments are essentially playing a neutral 2nd interval as a chord, which can be pretty dissonant (kind of like how a minor 2nd interval is considered dissonant). It's actually pretty hard to form consonant chords in 24-equal without applying the structure of the harmonic series, which is a whole convoluted topic that King Gizzard may or may not really pay attention to. I've actually recorded some 24-equal music that does take a much more chord-focused approach if you were curious to hear what that sounds like (if you look up 'Trauma Triad - A North Facing Window', you'll find my latest album). There's also plenty of other chord-focused microtonal music by artists that use other tuning systems which are perhaps more suited to forming diverse and good-sounding chords. If you want, I can point you towards some of those. I do sort of agree that King Gizzard's 'harmonic layering' technique, as you put it, can make their individual songs indistinct. Though I also think that to a certain degree, it helps establish a clear style which is characteristic of the band, setting them apart from other similar artists on the basis of more than the music being merely microtonal; the technique is necessitated by microtonality, but its main impact is on melodic shape. Ultimately, it's a matter of opinion whether it's TOO repetitive. But even in my relatively generous opinion about then, if they make another microtonal album, they really will need to change their approach.
I use MuseScore for the notation. I haven't found any notation software which has visually appealing playback, so I just export a staff-only copy and a notes-only copy of the sheet music, work up a 'highlighted' copy of the notes, and in Adobe Premiere it's pretty straightforward (if tedious) to animate simply using cropping. As for the audio, I use a MIDI keyboard to record with AAS Lounge Lizard.
0:40 I know that's a bit of a nitpick, but this statement is technically untrue. There's no correlation between Islam and microtonality, and in fact microtonality as we now know it was invented in Ancient Greece and pioneered by the Arabs and later by the Turks, while still in use in the ERE, whose church music carries on in many an Orthodox (see: non-Muslim) nation to this day. What's more, plenty of Muslim cultures do not practice microtonality, including central Asian nations and most sub-Saharan African nations you've listed (who instead have their entirely different octave subdivisions that do not originate in Ancient Greek modality).
39:28 these trills cannot be thought of as part of the scale. As you yourself said earlier in the video, they are more like vibrato - and in fact they are quite literally so if you take a look at oud technique, where embelishments do not come in the form of hammer-on trills, like in Western music, but in the form of rapid sideways movement of the left hand, which makes sense since the oud is fretless. A similar effect can be replicated on the baglama with a microtonal trill, be it Western style, or with the aforementioned oud technique. In the case of what King Giz are trying to do in this example, you could argue that they're going for a deliberately off-octave interval, unintentionally similar to such intervals commonly found in gamelan music. Or you could just chalk it up as being an example of a heterophonic texture, which is the main textural mode in cultures that use microtonality.
You're right, I should have clarified that Muslim quarter tone music in its native form is mostly central Asian, though at least from African Muslims I've talked to, this particular type of music does have some global reach even if it doesn't supplant local music traditions. I think this may be due to Arabia being the de facto seat of Sunni Islam, which is the main global denomination, which perhaps results in a greater spread of Arabic cultural influence, especially since maqams are often used in Quranic recitation. I'm not a scholar of Islam or anything though, so take that as speculation. Can you point me towards any examples of non-Muslim quarter-tone music? I was not familiar with that, and I am curious about how similar such traditions would be to standard maqam.
@@ThePopDescriptivist So, as I said, microtonality, but also the idea of scales as a combination of tetrachords and pentachords, was actually originally invented in Ancient Greece. Microtonality was referred to as the "chromatic" system, as opposed to the West-like "diatonic" system. This system, apart from being the primary inspiration for makam theory, it also survives in the form of Byzantine music and also Greek folk music (although the latter now commonly uses repurposed Turkish terminology). I'm not sure to what extent cultures that are influenced by the ERE still use microtonality to this day, but Greeks certainly do. Conversly, central Asians don't actually use microtonality (e.g. Uzbekistan, northern Iran, etc); their long-necked lute of choice, the tar, does not have any microtones. The oud has prevalence only in some Iranian cultures and is primarily an Arabic instrument, whereas Turks prefer the baglama, both microtonal instruments. West Africa, to my knowledge, is not even remotely related to the modal tradition of the Arabs, but I could be wrong on that one.
I'll have to look up Byzantine/Greek folk music. I have a few Greek folk albums in my library but they're not microtonal (though they do have very wide embellishments/vibrato). And separately, I meant to say western Asian, not central Asian (my mistake). As for microtones in West Africa, I wasn't trying to say that the indigenous music uses quarter tones per se. From what I've heard, there's a lot of free intonation type stuff, as well as scales which kind of imitate 5-edo or 7-edo for instance. But insofar as we can call parts of sub-Saharan Africa part of the Muslim world, this is due to the relatively recent exporting of Islam to these places, and with it, the musical traditions that surround Islam. There are at least some mosques in sub-Saharan Africa (and in Indonesia as well, while we're at it) where you will hear maqam simply due to this influence. At least, this is the impression that I've gathered from people I've spoken to, and from a merely cursory look at the literature on the subject, so who knows the strength of this trend actually is.
@@ThePopDescriptivist Yes, that was my recollection, too, that a lot of West African musics use 7-edo. As for Greek music, there's multiple different styles and some are microtonal, while other ones aren't. The thing is, however, that there's no standardised theory in historically recent Greek folk music, which is why Turkish terminology has been repurposed over the last century. As for church music, that has very formalised theory, and its own system of notation.
I did make the sheet music in MuseScore, but I formatted it so that it would be easy to incorporate into the video. The files as they are now would not be too satisfying to use as live-playback sheet music, I imagine. And furthermore, the files are just a few riffs, not the whole songs. Nevertheless, if you still want the files, shoot me an e-mail and I'll send them over. If there's enough demand for it, I could see doing some full transcriptions (for K.G. and L.W. at least - Tolgahan Çoğulu has the market cornered on FMB tabs). But not any time soon, most likely.
Hey there! I'm filming a graduate project in the form of a podcast covering the western influences in KGLW's microtonal rock. I would really love to exemplify your work, would we be able to get in contact about whether I could use parts of your video for this educational purpose?
@acg0813 - looks like TH-cam deleted my previous response, probably because I put a temporary e-mail address in it. I added that address to my channel's about section, feel free to shoot me a message (though maybe also reply to this comment when you do so, just in case the temporary e-mail doesn't work for some reason).
A lot of people feel this way at first. But with enough exposure, you can acquire a taste for microtones. It's easier if you're familiar with them from early childhood exposure, but certainly still possible in adulthood.
@@ThePopDescriptivist I do understand the sound and the appeal if they are used sparsely. But the more microtonal notes are included in a motive, the more out of tune the motive sounds 😅 For some reason they sound the best for me when they are used playing trills, played fast or used as passing notes, then theres not so much disonance to my ears to throw me off completely. And I am used to disonant sounds in music, such as diminished/augmented chords, minor 2nds etc and that does not sound disonant to me at all. I guess listening to Opeth for the last 15 years (starting at age 14) made its impact on my hearing. :)
I think it makes sense to consider many 24-equal notes as better as passing notes/trills, in a similar way to how we label regular 12-equal notes as 'color tones' when they don't match a chord's basic triad. Except 24-equal is even more dissonant, so they're sort of like 'extra-color tones'. However, there are also ways to make 24-equal as well as other microtonal tunings sound more consonant, by carefully arranging chords to match the harmonic series, or through any other number of techniques to 'massage' these notes into sounding in-tune. I think King Gizzard make little effort to do this since a lot of their playing is based on makam, which is far less concerned with chords and harmony than it is with scale shape. Not to self-promote, but I attempt to use 'massaged' 24-equal chords in my own music. If you look up my last album (Trauma Triad - A North Facing Window) and listen to the opening chord on track 2, does that sound in-tune to you? It's basically sus2 chord with an added 'super fourth' interval - but this particular collection of notes forms a 8:9:11:12 harmonic series chord, so even when (or ESPECIALLY when) the keyboard is put through an overdriven amp, there's no wobbly/beating sound which is part of what our ear uses to determine in-tune-ness. If you still find that chord out of tune, then I think it's more a familiarity issue, but you might find it surprisingly accessible. Other microtonal artists use similar approaches. I'd recommend the Brendan Byrnes track 'Roamers', or the Julia Reidy track 'Walls and Clearings', or maybe the Horse Lords track 'Law of Movement' as examples of artists taking a more intentional and consonant approach to microtonal chords.
Congrats, great video! As it can be seen in the official scorebook, I disagree with the semitones you used instead of microtones in the songs Billabong, Anoxia, Doom City and Flying. The band told me that they were consistent with the use of Huseyni microtones in all the pieces of the first album. Sometimes it is tricky to hear them on zurna, because the intonation is in between the quartertone and semitone.
@microtonalguitar Thanks for the comment! It means a lot, coming from you.
I wasn't aware of the different intonation on the zurna, that definitely explains some of the unusual notes I had picked for the main melody in Billabong Valley. In general, whenever I heard something questionable, I isolated/looped the audio and tried to match the exact note with an adjustably-tuned keyboard. In some cases, the note didn't line up exactly with 24-equal, and in those cases I just picked whatever seemed closest. In retrospect that might not have been the best idea.
I'm still a little confused about songs like Anoxia and Doom City, because they definitely have some major 2nds and major 6ths in the places I indicated, at least from an audio analysis standpoint. I think maybe some of these were using quarter-tone trills or hammer-ons, but for some reason the lower note didn't articulate properly. Maybe just a performance issue, since later live performances of these songs do seem to more clearly favor the neutral intervals.
Separately, I am curious about what you think of the scale used in songs like Static Electricity and Ontology. I described it as the 'neutral Hicazkar' scale, since it's obviously not a match for the Arabic Hicazkar, or even the 'softer' Hicaz tetrachords that I seem to hear in a lot of Turkish music. Since you have a lot more experience with this kind of music, do you feel that King Gizzard's execution of this scale 'references' the Hicazkar to some degree, or do you feel like it should be considered an idiosyncratic scale in its own family?
@@ThePopDescriptivistYes, the trills are really crazy and misdirecting :) You are also right about the live performance changes. In my concerts, I am also inconsistent sometimes. I will look the Hicazkar issue up carefully and get back to you.
This is a GREAT addition to microtonal TH-cam king
as someone who knows basically zero music theory your manner of explaining and editing makes their microtonal music go from “it’s basically magic to me” to “oh, the thought process behind this must have been fascinating to listen to” and also now I have a better idea of what else to look for when I wanna listen to microtonal music that isn’t king gizzard lol
“Flying Microtonal Banana” was my introduction to microtonality, and I was obsessed with it at first listen. Since then, I’ve been looking for a comprehensive explanation of what is happening on that album, and this is everything I could’ve asked for.
Incredible video
commenting for the algorithm. amazing breakdown! two minor notes is that 1. the first apperance of microtonality was the guitar solo on 2016’s robot stop, and 2. stu directly stated they based FMB off turkish anatolian rock so the similarities aren’t coincidental
Thanks for the comment! To your first point, I was aware of that solo but felt it was too brief/fragmentary to bother including. If you wanted to categorize it, it basically uses the Hüseyni cins. Clearly an omen of things to come on FMB!
Wow, I have been waiting for someone to make a video like this for years, and you really knocked it out of the park. Tolgahan Cogulu was my introduction to King Gizzard. His video on Sleep Drifter vs Kara Toprak was the first time I ever heard King Gizzard's music, and though I am now a huge fan of their whole catalog, I have always liked their microtonal work best. The examples you give are fantastically laid out (the color coding really helps), really clear for someone like myself that watches a lot of TH-cam music theory but has never had any formal training in it. I can only imagine how hard you worked on all the scoring. Some of my personal highlights:
8:04 blew my mind. Cool how typically Aeolian is presented as "between" Dorian and Phrygian, but Huseyni presents sort of an alternate twist.
17:42 I loved when you compared and contrasted the Turkish maqams to Arabic Makams throughout the video. Too often people call all of them "middle eastern music" and don't differentiate between these traditions (for those who want to learn more about that, Farya Faraji here on youtube has some great videos that explain differences between Arab, Persian, and Turkish music).
22:38 this chart makes total sense and I like the language of "compromises" between experimentation and conventional harmony.
28:39 this was a big mind blowing moment at first, but I'm glad you were able to contextualize it with the other examples at 29:34. Still mind blowing, but always good to have the full story. I assume it is basically a legal obligation that if you have do a long KGLW video you must mention Tool or Radiohead at least somewhere in there lol
33:50 honestly stunning to see King Gizzard's restraint in not defaulting to Hijaz more often. My sense is that the vast majority of Middle Eastern "inspired" music (e.g. Hollywood soundtracks) uses this double harmonic major sound to make it sound "desert-y". I might have naively assumed without much thought that many of the songs off of Flying Microtonal Banana probably used this scale. Glad that you corrected my misconception!
Thank you so much for making this! You had my rapt attention for like an hour!
I'm really glad you got so much out of the video! I agree with all your comments, you're definitely picking up what I'm putting down. Also, I'll have to check out Farya Faraji (not familiar with them) - I am still learning about all this myself, after all. Makam/maqam is such a rich tradition, and as someone who grew up in the West, there's so much 'learning by osmosis' that I've missed out on.
Greenhouse Heat Death's odd time signature is 2 sets of 4/4 and 1 set of 5/4, making it 13/4 (kinda)
overall great video and presentation. Love the sheet music demonstration!
I believe that's how I notated it, unless you mean I should have made it 13/4.
@@ThePopDescriptivistOhhh okay my bad. Hearing the song without drums confused me I guess.
As someone who claims not to know middle-east maqams and scales that good, I get a better understanding of maqams than other turkish sources. Incredible job!
Oh my god... my favourite band and by one of my favourite music channel
This is such an impressive and comprehensive piece of work. Just incredible work!!!
I did not deserve this, what a treat!♥️ Did you notate all of this from ear? Amazing work
Edit: I cannot thank you enough for the whole “tetrachord symmetry” thing. I will need to sit down and digest this. What a lovely way to approach scales.
This is the most incredible breakdown I’ve seen of the microtonal music! Thank you so much for this!
Also you should release the full covers of all the microtonal songs played with the minimalistic keys like you were using in the examples!
Actually that's a sick idea, doing an album of minimalistic electric piano covers of King Gizzard. I already put out an album of my own minimalistic microtonal electric piano music so the concept is definitely within my capabilities, lol. I wouldn't want to half-ass it though, so you may need to a wait a while before I can bring it to fruition. Nonetheless, thanks for the idea!
Of course! And again, amazing video.
I started playing microtonal this past year; and this really just made things make more sense
Thank you sir for the high quality vid! Microtonal Banana is one of the most consistent albums I’ve heard come out in the past 20 years but the microtonal aspect always threw me off from learning the songs and analyzing them. It’s helpful to see that first maqam or scale as a pentatonic with those microtonal notes added as ornaments.
Also I like that you use the more neutral Rhodes piano instead of that bright piano sound that theory teachers usually use which wouldn’t be very helpful for this style of music.
This is fantastic work, really clear and very thorough! Would be great to see a similar video analysing the polyrhythms that King Gizzard use
I actually have an analysis of 'Crumbling Castle' in the works, but a discography-wide analysis of polymeters (or better: unusual time signatures) might also be cool. We'll see.
@@ThePopDescriptivist awesome, I look forward to it!
This is amazing! The way you connected their scales with traditional makams, the transcriptions and the colored notation are really helpful! I just finished designing some 3D printed additional frets for my bass and was looking for more info on 24edo microtonal scales.
Thank you very much for this compendium! Super interesting and well made
This video is amazing wow. Big fan of the uses of color in the sheet music, it makes everything extremely clear :) well done!!
This is so amazing. Thank you so much. Also love how the half sharp six approaches just intonation tuning - this is fascinating.
Fantastic analysis - big props for clarity, thoroughness, and research into the related makams!
This was really cool! I knew that the band had used multiple scales across their microtonal songs, but didn't realise there were this many! You explain everything in such a clear way. I also loved your Crumbling Castle analysis and I hope to see more King Gizzard videos!
I might have to re-listen to some of the tracks you talked about, as there were a few points in the video where you notated certain notes as not being microtones when I was sure that they were; the main example I remember is the intro to Doom City (at about 18:08) - I was certain that the bassline also used the half-sharp sixth rather than the sharp sixth.
I was surprised as you are about the 'Doom City' intro. I even went into my DAW and looped some of those notes and compared them against my keyboard to make sure. If it's a conscious artistic choice, I have no idea why they decided to do that.
There are other cases where the notes were a little more ambiguous. Like those minor 2nds in 'Open Water' are actually very slightly flat, but still much closer to minor 2nd than subminor 2nd. I wonder if maybe the guitar was slightly out of tune or something. Or possibly the tremolo picking was hard to enough that it stretched the string making it sound sharper than an intended subminor 2nd.
If I ever meet the band (unlikely) I have a long list of questions for them lol.
This was fascinating and informative. Thank you! Well made and edited!
This video is simply incredible. Great stuff!
Hey saudi here! great video I'm not an expert either on the makam but I'd say you got things perfectly accurate! Thank you!
Amazing work -- enlightening about KGLWs practice but also it's inspiring stuff to experiment with... I like the approach of starting with familiar 12EDO structures as points of departure, it makes the ideas a lot more accessible.
Thank you for taking the time to put this together! As many have stated (as did yourself), FMB was my introduction to microtonal music, as well as KGLW. As a musician who's just getting started on musical theory and notation, your video is hugely comprehensible without getting convoluted! Every little context is utilized in such an expert way that enhances understanding rather than complicating it. Also, the amount of time and effort you've put into this must have been HUGE. Can't thank you enough!! Earned a sub, in the first 5min, kudos from Brazil ✨️
Thank you very much for such high praise!
Great work here and great explanations!!
Hey, this is a wonderful video. Learned some new things and it’s just really well put together and informative, great work! FMB is what inspired my own microtonal psych-krautrock + world music project (Disoriented Ghost, the albums i have out are all on this channel im commenting from lol)
this video has me wondering what scales i may have stumbled upon in the process as i did a few things different than gizz w my fret placement on the microtonal guitar, and i incorporate a lot more world instruments as well (moreso on the more recent album “Metamorphic” that im curious about but also on some of the songs from the earlier albums)
i have a bit of a grasp on theory but not nearly to the degree you do, you know a lot more about specific scales from different folk backgrounds, really cool learning about these and it rejuvinated my theory brain a bit haha, def liked and subscribed
not sure if my tunes are something you’d ever be interested in checking out but figured i’d share!
once again, awesome video, gave me some new ideas and stuff to think about
Hey, I checked out a couple of your songs. There's some interesting stuff there, it definitely has an 'outsider art' kind of vibe. Harmonically, it reminds me of another relatively unknown musician called mitka (you can find him on bandcamp) - you both really lean into some of the less accessible quarter-tone intervals/scales and have a similar approach to instrumentation and compositional style. That said, from what songs I checked out, I feel like you overuse the shamisen a bit. Its quick decay means for the most part it has low overtone content, which makes it harder for the ear to detect relative 'in tune'-ness and thus for microtonal intervals be recognizable (especially when people don't have a strong familiarity with the fundamental pitches). I think a lot of microtonal musicians intuitively do the opposite: either picking instruments with high overtone content or artificially increasing overtones by increasing the gain on an amplifier, for example. Of course, it's all a matter of taste in the end, but that was my impression.
If you have any sheet music or charts I'd be curious to take a look, if not just to see how it differs from King Gizzard's stuff. As I pointed out at the end of my video, there's a lot of territory they don't experiment with, and really 24 equal is more flexible than people assume despite some of the harsher intervals. Also, FYI, I definitely plan to do other videos on microtonality at some point, so hopefully that will give you even more ideas. Thanks for tuning in!
@@ThePopDescriptivisthey sorry for the delay but thank you so much for your feedback and for checking it out!! mean’s a lot! and yea i feel you the shamisen’s short attack muddies the microtones slightly even though its layered w microtonal bass and guitar, its sort of a distinct part to this projects sound but i can totally see how it would make things less precise and clear as to what exact microtone is being used on occasion.
also thank you for the rec of that artist! cheers
Fantastic video, on the final point about the lesser used intervals, I reckon this is because the guitar necks used for the microtones dont have all the quarter tones included, making playing them either awkward or simply just impossible within certain keys, hence the synth heavy Intrasport is one of few to include them.
Either way your explanations of everything was amazing, really enjoyed the more in depth explainers on Turkish and Arabic 'scale' construction.
I agree that the guitar neck design is probably an obstacle. However, in many cases, it's just a matter of switching keys. This is why many of the Hüseyni-based songs are in F# or C#, whereas many of the subminor Phrygian or neutral Hicazkar-based songs are in G. I took another look at their guitar necks, and with their C#-F#-C#-F#-B-E string tuning, you could get a scale with the subminor 3rd and neutral 4th if you use a root note of D (for instance).
This video was excellent! I'm a huge King Gizzard fan and literally just received my first Microtonal yesterday from my guitar teacher who is building a few for fun. I plan to study a lot of the scales and try to play along with the music/sheet illustrations you've provided here. One thing that i've had a hard time nailing down is what tunings are being used on the guitars (and I know they aren't always the same). If there are any guides on open microtonal tunings I'd greatly appreciate that!
Dude I'm jealous, I don't have the money for my own microtonal guitar. Did you get the standard FMB fret layout or the whole 24 per octave?
I think the tuning used for a lot of King Gizzard's microtonal stuff is C#-F#-C#-F#-B-E - kind of a weird tuning, but the top four strings are tuned in fourths like most strings on guitar. Then you have the second F# string that kind of acts like a 'drop tuning' relative to the other strings, and the first string doubling the third string. I'm not familiar enough with open microtonal tunings to give you more guidance than that. You could probably start with standard or open guitar tunings (for regular guitars) though.
I feel it's important to note that KG started experimenting with microtonality on Nonagon, but it wasn't a focal point until FMB
I know there's that little lick on 'Robot Stop', but is there anything else? I might have included it in the video if there were multiple songs...
So glad I found this
great work! loved it
This video is a huge help, thanks so much
Thank you
very professional video! i subbed, cheers!
This is super fascinating. KG is one of my favorite albums. I am loving this in-depth review of the microtonal stuff they do here.
When covering Pleura at around 19:30 in, the written notation timing seems to be off, though? Maybe? It’s been ages since I actually read music/studied it seriously, but it doesn’t look right to my eyes: it is written out as going between 7/8 and 4/4, but both types of measures are using the same quarter note-per-beat beat throughout the sheet music. So it should be adjusted, using 7/8 and 8/8 and make every beat consistent, right? You’d then have to change the other notes’ timing to all be consistent with having eighth notes instead of quarter as the beats.
Or, since it’s been so long since I even studied music of any sort, maybe it’s something I never learned-maybe there’s an accepted way of notating that the 7/8 isn’t *really* 7/8 and it’s just 4/4 with an extra eighth note added on? Like, do musicians assume if the music is written going back and forth between those two that this is the case?
I’m just curious how that works, if that’s the case.
I think you could definitely make the argument that the 4/4 measures should be 8/8, but the whole topic of time signatures is so riddled with inconsistencies that there's probably no 'right way' to notate this type of rhythm. The only thing that seems certain is that 4/4 and 8/8 time signatures at the same tempo have the same duration. The difference between them is ostensibly how the beat and subdivisions are organized, with 8/8 having twice as many beats. But conventionally, especially in rock music, 4/4 is used for pretty much any music that can be divided as such - including things like tresillo (3+3+2 / 8) rhythms which logically might be more fitting with 8/8.
In this case, I wanted to emphasize that King Gizzard were switching back and forth between an odd time signature and a normal one. The rhythm in the 4/4 measures kind of follows a 7+9 pattern of eighth notes, but this is a pretty common 4/4 trope. Like, if you took those 4/4 measures and repeated them at length, I think most people would identify this pattern as being in 4/4.
It's not unreasonable to want the beat duration to be consistent throughout the song, but if I notated everything /8, I think it would be more strictly accurate to follow the eighth note emphases, which follow this 7+9 pattern - 3 measures of 7/8, and one measure of 9/8 in total. Of course, 9/8 is conventionally a compound meter where the /8 indicates not the beat but the beat subdivision (resulting in three beats of 3/8 duration). But putting this issue aside, the 7+9 interpretation fails to capture how these last two measures evoke what might naively be called a '4/4 feel'. I think most people who see 7+7+7+9 without the chance for deeper consideration would just assume there's some heavily convoluted 'aksak' pattern at play, which isn't really how this rhythm works.
So I think none of the options really account for everything. Ultimately, time signatures are a product of a history of musical practice which did not foresee something like 'Pleura', so for this type of situation I usually just shrug my shoulders, make sure at least the duration of the meter makes sense, apply whatever familiar conventions pass the vibe check, and move on.
As someone who has attempted to compose microtonal music, what i do is i take a scale i like for example Dorian, then i just raise or lower a couple of the intervals by a quarter tone
That can be a useful way to experiment and 'feel out' a microtonal tuning. But I think you can get more consistent results by applying concepts like tetrachord symmetry or just intonation chords to the process. I hope my video has helped you find some new ideas!
If you're using the regular western tuning to approximate maqams, you can treat the microtones on the maqam like blue notes in blues (which I believe have historical connections to the maqam music, through north africa and spain). If you're going up to the next note from below, use the tone that's closer to the next tone. For example huseyni in A, use A B C D E F# G A ascending, A G F E D C Bb A descending (the true microtones are in between Bb and B, F and F#, but approximated to either one depending on the next note). A similar thing happens in western classical music, the minor scale has an ascending and descending form, listen to how Bach uses it for example. And also you can bend the strings on your guitar like in blues music to land on the microtone. I must also admit King Gizzard does not represent the best or prettiest kind of this music, as they're not born in this music or trained. I would listen to Turkish folk and Turkish makam music to get a better feeling for this kind of microtonal music. Even the 70's Turkish psychedelic rock bands did it much much better imo. Another way and it's more free yet you need to try and explore more yourself, is take the major or minor pentatonic scales and add your own flavor of intervals on top of that. This works because 99½ of the music, be it western, eastern, and the scales or makams historically evolved over millania out of the basic strong pentatonic scales (strong in the sense that the pentatonic scales contain the most stable harmonic intervals and nothing else). Every note you add to the pentatonic scales, is a melodic flavor and doesn't have to be a chord tone, when harmonizing that scale/mode/makam melody. Yet Huseyni is such common and useful makam, it is in fact used as a base makam in Kemal Ilerici's book on Turkish music harmony, some Turkish classical composers like Muammer Sun used that system expansively in their classical music compositions, on the 12 tone western tuning.
Neat comment! There's definitely a through-line from world music traditions that use microtones to the blue notes of Western music - in fact you're liable to hear actual microtones in recordings by Aretha Franklin or Bill Withers among many others.
As for your technique in approximating makams, I suppose in a worst-case scenario it might be better than nothing. But otherwise, I feel like trying to approximate microtones in 12-equal is a bit stuck in the Western viewpoint that there's something more fundamental about 12-equal, and that microtones can somehow be boiled down to those notes without a major loss of tonal quality. I've run into similar views - for instance, people saying that a neutral 2nd is just an out of tune minor 2nd, or that these intervals have roughly the same auditory impact - but the more I've played with microtones. the more I feel that up to a certain point they are really unsubstitutable. But maybe I'm misunderstanding your point.
It is interesting you bring up different ascending and descending scales though, because makam itself sometimes has these, though more subtle differences in note tunings are not always explicitly described in formal representations of the makams. And just like the ascending/descending forms of the minor scale in Western music, it seems like in most cases (that I've heard) makams tend to sharpen ascending approach notes and flatten descending approach notes. Makes me wonder if there's a fundamental 'cognitive' appeal to this technique, based in how humans perceive music.
Also, for the record, if you really want to try to hit quarter tones on a standard 12-equal guitar, it's better to use a 'neutral thirds' tuning. For instance, the strings might be E, G half sharp, B, D half sharp, F#, and A half sharp (from low to high). You'll need to figure out the unique fingerings of this tuning, and it has some hard limits in what kind of intervals and scales can be comfortably played, but it's still flexible enough to help a person explore quarter tones, and really get to know what they sound like. I actually recorded a whole album that way and I feel that it was reasonably successful, musically.
@@ThePopDescriptivist Yes, me too thinks there is a fundamental 'cognitive' appeal to the directional sharpening and flattening of notes in music, sometimes it's the lead tone in western music that needs a smoother resolution to the tonic, sometimes in jazz and classical it's approach tones, or chromaticism, in eastern music like you described. What about your album where you used 3rds tuning for a microtonal approach? I want to give it a listen please, what's the name?
Trauma Triad - 'Visceral Defects'. If you download it from Bandcamp (for free if you want) it comes with a pdf with some explanations of the tuning system and with tablature for the songs as well. If you're not into the metal/hardcore style I did on that album, I also have an album called 'A North Facing Window' which is more ambient/low-key electric piano music, though it's much easier to set up a MIDI keyboard to have custom tunings so it might be less interesting from that angle.
@@ThePopDescriptivist I understand now what the 3rds tuning offers, it's a brilliant idea I will try for myself, enjoying the first album except for the trashy vocals:) You did a very good job mixing post hardcore midwest emo style with the makams, that's my perception anyway, just a few chords with the microtones bother me really, other than that I like it, really melodic stuff, also proggy at times
Thanks, glad you can appreciate it! There's definitely a few tracks with makam influence - track 1 for instance uses the Hüseyni quite a bit. But chords are not really a significant feature in makam music theory, so beyond that I tried mostly to use 'harmonic series' chords mixed with regular 12-equal chords. There are some other less structured chords which end up being a lot more dissonant, but I felt that it was in line with the aggressive style of the music, and maybe something that can be appreciated more when you acquire a taste for it. Definitely try neutral 3rds tuning though, it's a lot of fun!
amazing video
great video!!
Fantastic video! Very informative!
Have you checked out The Mercury Tree or Ventifacts? I would love to hear what you'd think of their newer stuff, like "Spidermilk" or "Self Similar"! Compared to King Gizz, their current music is mostly in 17EDO, and it'd be super interesting to see an analysis on them! :D
Love both those bands, though I think it would be incredibly hard for me to dissect their music. I know the basic gist of how 17edo works from the Xenharmonic Wiki, but I think the deep/insightful stuff only comes once you've got a lot experience actually playing with a tuning. My playing has pretty much stuck to 24edo, JI, and a little bit of 22edo.
There are a bunch of Ventifacts songs in 24edo but the songwriting seems very impressionistic, not locked into a convention like makam or JI-approximation or anything. Very different from how I usually conceptualize things. Without these limits, the conceptual space is so large that compositional choices become very hard to identify. My best bet would be to just go and ask the band how they wrote the songs - but this also seems like content that THEY really ought to be making, not me.
You HAVE to talk about "Cinnamon Temple" By Hiatus Kaiyote, i don't even know ehat to think of it, it's like captain beefheart or something
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So I've noticed anytime they try to make chords (or at least something close to chords like at 12:28) with microtonal scales it sounds kinda bad, but all the microtonal melodies sound very good. Harmonizations of melodies very often are done with perfect 5ths. Most of the music is either a melody on top of a drone or melody on top of some other melodic riff in lower voice.
I wish someone tried to make chords-based microtonal music, or at least use microtonal melodies on top of conventional chords to make kind of a new "blues" sounds with them (maybe that's not the point of such music though, as the microtones would rather be deviations from Western scales, not self-sufficient independent scales), but it seems chords is a limitation of microtonal scales. Like you said at the end, their music may sound repetative on the first album because of using only one scale, but for me it does because it is always the same "harmonic layering" idea, it is somewhat hard to distinguish songs from each other. I didn't listen to their whole discography, so if there are such elements and you just didn't talk about them, please tell!
Btw.: I love such in-depth music theory analysis videos, can't imagine how much effort went into making this video. And video production is also superb, I like how structured and clear it is, it is not just dumping theory on a viewer.
You're right to point out the dissonance of the chords used in 'Some of Us' - a lot of times the instruments are essentially playing a neutral 2nd interval as a chord, which can be pretty dissonant (kind of like how a minor 2nd interval is considered dissonant). It's actually pretty hard to form consonant chords in 24-equal without applying the structure of the harmonic series, which is a whole convoluted topic that King Gizzard may or may not really pay attention to.
I've actually recorded some 24-equal music that does take a much more chord-focused approach if you were curious to hear what that sounds like (if you look up 'Trauma Triad - A North Facing Window', you'll find my latest album). There's also plenty of other chord-focused microtonal music by artists that use other tuning systems which are perhaps more suited to forming diverse and good-sounding chords. If you want, I can point you towards some of those.
I do sort of agree that King Gizzard's 'harmonic layering' technique, as you put it, can make their individual songs indistinct. Though I also think that to a certain degree, it helps establish a clear style which is characteristic of the band, setting them apart from other similar artists on the basis of more than the music being merely microtonal; the technique is necessitated by microtonality, but its main impact is on melodic shape. Ultimately, it's a matter of opinion whether it's TOO repetitive. But even in my relatively generous opinion about then, if they make another microtonal album, they really will need to change their approach.
groovy
"era of psychedlic garage rock" completely skipping over spoken word spaghetti western lol
Lol fair point
Awesome video! What software did you use for the notation and playback?
Also I have a feeling that “The Hungry Wolf of Fate” is named after that half-flat fifth, it’s very close to the “wolf fifth”
I use MuseScore for the notation. I haven't found any notation software which has visually appealing playback, so I just export a staff-only copy and a notes-only copy of the sheet music, work up a 'highlighted' copy of the notes, and in Adobe Premiere it's pretty straightforward (if tedious) to animate simply using cropping. As for the audio, I use a MIDI keyboard to record with AAS Lounge Lizard.
Also, good catch on the wolf fifth idea - that does seem like the band's sense of humor.
Great video! You accidentally mislabeled laminated denim as acid techno instead of made in timeland
Good catch. A video this long is guaranteed to have at least one stupid mistake lol.
0:40 I know that's a bit of a nitpick, but this statement is technically untrue.
There's no correlation between Islam and microtonality, and in fact microtonality as we now know it was invented in Ancient Greece and pioneered by the Arabs and later by the Turks, while still in use in the ERE, whose church music carries on in many an Orthodox (see: non-Muslim) nation to this day. What's more, plenty of Muslim cultures do not practice microtonality, including central Asian nations and most sub-Saharan African nations you've listed (who instead have their entirely different octave subdivisions that do not originate in Ancient Greek modality).
39:28 these trills cannot be thought of as part of the scale. As you yourself said earlier in the video, they are more like vibrato - and in fact they are quite literally so if you take a look at oud technique, where embelishments do not come in the form of hammer-on trills, like in Western music, but in the form of rapid sideways movement of the left hand, which makes sense since the oud is fretless. A similar effect can be replicated on the baglama with a microtonal trill, be it Western style, or with the aforementioned oud technique.
In the case of what King Giz are trying to do in this example, you could argue that they're going for a deliberately off-octave interval, unintentionally similar to such intervals commonly found in gamelan music. Or you could just chalk it up as being an example of a heterophonic texture, which is the main textural mode in cultures that use microtonality.
You're right, I should have clarified that Muslim quarter tone music in its native form is mostly central Asian, though at least from African Muslims I've talked to, this particular type of music does have some global reach even if it doesn't supplant local music traditions. I think this may be due to Arabia being the de facto seat of Sunni Islam, which is the main global denomination, which perhaps results in a greater spread of Arabic cultural influence, especially since maqams are often used in Quranic recitation. I'm not a scholar of Islam or anything though, so take that as speculation.
Can you point me towards any examples of non-Muslim quarter-tone music? I was not familiar with that, and I am curious about how similar such traditions would be to standard maqam.
@@ThePopDescriptivist So, as I said, microtonality, but also the idea of scales as a combination of tetrachords and pentachords, was actually originally invented in Ancient Greece. Microtonality was referred to as the "chromatic" system, as opposed to the West-like "diatonic" system. This system, apart from being the primary inspiration for makam theory, it also survives in the form of Byzantine music and also Greek folk music (although the latter now commonly uses repurposed Turkish terminology). I'm not sure to what extent cultures that are influenced by the ERE still use microtonality to this day, but Greeks certainly do.
Conversly, central Asians don't actually use microtonality (e.g. Uzbekistan, northern Iran, etc); their long-necked lute of choice, the tar, does not have any microtones. The oud has prevalence only in some Iranian cultures and is primarily an Arabic instrument, whereas Turks prefer the baglama, both microtonal instruments. West Africa, to my knowledge, is not even remotely related to the modal tradition of the Arabs, but I could be wrong on that one.
I'll have to look up Byzantine/Greek folk music. I have a few Greek folk albums in my library but they're not microtonal (though they do have very wide embellishments/vibrato). And separately, I meant to say western Asian, not central Asian (my mistake).
As for microtones in West Africa, I wasn't trying to say that the indigenous music uses quarter tones per se. From what I've heard, there's a lot of free intonation type stuff, as well as scales which kind of imitate 5-edo or 7-edo for instance. But insofar as we can call parts of sub-Saharan Africa part of the Muslim world, this is due to the relatively recent exporting of Islam to these places, and with it, the musical traditions that surround Islam. There are at least some mosques in sub-Saharan Africa (and in Indonesia as well, while we're at it) where you will hear maqam simply due to this influence. At least, this is the impression that I've gathered from people I've spoken to, and from a merely cursory look at the literature on the subject, so who knows the strength of this trend actually is.
@@ThePopDescriptivist Yes, that was my recollection, too, that a lot of West African musics use 7-edo. As for Greek music, there's multiple different styles and some are microtonal, while other ones aren't. The thing is, however, that there's no standardised theory in historically recent Greek folk music, which is why Turkish terminology has been repurposed over the last century. As for church music, that has very formalised theory, and its own system of notation.
Do you have downloads available for the sheet music that is compatible with MuseScore or equivalent?
I did make the sheet music in MuseScore, but I formatted it so that it would be easy to incorporate into the video. The files as they are now would not be too satisfying to use as live-playback sheet music, I imagine. And furthermore, the files are just a few riffs, not the whole songs. Nevertheless, if you still want the files, shoot me an e-mail and I'll send them over.
If there's enough demand for it, I could see doing some full transcriptions (for K.G. and L.W. at least - Tolgahan Çoğulu has the market cornered on FMB tabs). But not any time soon, most likely.
Hey there! I'm filming a graduate project in the form of a podcast covering the western influences in KGLW's microtonal rock. I would really love to exemplify your work, would we be able to get in contact about whether I could use parts of your video for this educational purpose?
@acg0813 - looks like TH-cam deleted my previous response, probably because I put a temporary e-mail address in it. I added that address to my channel's about section, feel free to shoot me a message (though maybe also reply to this comment when you do so, just in case the temporary e-mail doesn't work for some reason).
damn all of this microtonal music just sounds out of tune for me haha
A lot of people feel this way at first. But with enough exposure, you can acquire a taste for microtones. It's easier if you're familiar with them from early childhood exposure, but certainly still possible in adulthood.
@@ThePopDescriptivist I do understand the sound and the appeal if they are used sparsely. But the more microtonal notes are included in a motive, the more out of tune the motive sounds 😅 For some reason they sound the best for me when they are used playing trills, played fast or used as passing notes, then theres not so much disonance to my ears to throw me off completely. And I am used to disonant sounds in music, such as diminished/augmented chords, minor 2nds etc and that does not sound disonant to me at all. I guess listening to Opeth for the last 15 years (starting at age 14) made its impact on my hearing. :)
I think it makes sense to consider many 24-equal notes as better as passing notes/trills, in a similar way to how we label regular 12-equal notes as 'color tones' when they don't match a chord's basic triad. Except 24-equal is even more dissonant, so they're sort of like 'extra-color tones'.
However, there are also ways to make 24-equal as well as other microtonal tunings sound more consonant, by carefully arranging chords to match the harmonic series, or through any other number of techniques to 'massage' these notes into sounding in-tune. I think King Gizzard make little effort to do this since a lot of their playing is based on makam, which is far less concerned with chords and harmony than it is with scale shape.
Not to self-promote, but I attempt to use 'massaged' 24-equal chords in my own music. If you look up my last album (Trauma Triad - A North Facing Window) and listen to the opening chord on track 2, does that sound in-tune to you? It's basically sus2 chord with an added 'super fourth' interval - but this particular collection of notes forms a 8:9:11:12 harmonic series chord, so even when (or ESPECIALLY when) the keyboard is put through an overdriven amp, there's no wobbly/beating sound which is part of what our ear uses to determine in-tune-ness. If you still find that chord out of tune, then I think it's more a familiarity issue, but you might find it surprisingly accessible.
Other microtonal artists use similar approaches. I'd recommend the Brendan Byrnes track 'Roamers', or the Julia Reidy track 'Walls and Clearings', or maybe the Horse Lords track 'Law of Movement' as examples of artists taking a more intentional and consonant approach to microtonal chords.