Basics of music.

Life has been made to interact with music so many a times, that it has become a part and parcel of our lives. People have used music for divine interactions. They have use it for making a connection with God. Music is close to us, very close. In fact, it is an entity like us. It has been made of same stuff from which we are made, waves. This universe is derived in waves. Music is vibration which our ears can understand.We can perceive music designed up to 20000 Hz, the other limit being 20 Hz. Out from this slab, we will not be able to hear it.Our vocal chord creates voice for us. We have different voices. Some people have good voice quality. They sound very good when they sing.Some people have croaky voice which might not sound good. Life is based around.
We are very familiar to music in the form of a band playing it live or  recording their song and we listening to them.
So, What is this form called musical band?
 
As the name suggests, band is some kind of a slab of music abilities. It has different instruments played at the same time but all of them produce sound of their own type. Like Drum set. It has kick drum, snare drum, floor tom, tom 1, tom 2, tom 3, crash cymbal, ride cymbal  , then base guitar, rhythm guitar, synthesizer, lead guitar and most importantly the people who would play all these instruments and a lead vocalist whose voice will be followed by everybody through the instruments. These are the basic requirements to form a band. There can be n numbers of instruments based on what is the type of band and what kind of music they want to play for their audience.So, basically what happens in a band is different frequency of sound is played together to form a band of sound waves which makes people to feel good.
Bass is described through low frequency sound waves whereas treble is described as high frequency sound waves. Drum set is what behaves as the bass producing agent in the band, base guitar too compliments in the same way. Lead guitar produces treble and low frequency sound waves.Synthesizer can produce any sound from high to low frequency. Piano can  also do the same.We tend to amaze when, all of a sudden, sound waves of different frequencies hit our ear drums at the same time. It feels magical.But we are naturally very familiar with these kind of stuff. You can imagine a thunder strike with drum set. Chirping with lead guitar and etcetera.The band assembles a song in a certain scale or a slab of frequencies. It has its own rules and set of frequencies which should only be played in a give scale.It it gets out of the slab it wont look good. It would sound like alien sound to the listeners but that same sound in right scale would sound good.

There are basically, seven notes DO RE ME FA SO LI TA Do in western style. In Indian style it is SA RE GA MA PA DHA NE Sa.
These seven notes define the entire musical compositions from bird's eye view. There are notes called the sharp notes in western style.They sit between these seven basic notes. But before that we should know how music is made understand to musicians. They have their set of symbols.You will have to come across these seven notes in you music school like C D E F G A B C. Now, where and what are those notes which sit between these. CDEFGABC represents SA RE GA MA PA DHA NE Sa or DO RE ME FA SO LI TA Do.
SA or DO =   C
RE or RE =    D
GA or ME =   E
MA or FA =   F
PA or SO =    G
DHA or LI =  A
NE or TA =   B
Sa or Do  =     c
The notes which sit between these are like

C c# D d# E F f# G g# A a# B C. E F and B C, don't have a not sitting between them.But these are only 13 unique notes what about guitar which has more than 13 frets representing a note each. As energy is spiral, notes are too, music is also an energy. When we finish one set of these 13 notes we tend to play the same notes again but the slab of frequency gets changed. Either we go from high to low frequency range or vice versa. It is called octave when we categorize all these 13 notes in a shell. But a note played in any instruments if it belongs to certain octave or higher it would sound the same but only frequency would change or in others words either bass or treble will be heard from note. Scale is what which basically defines a frequency slab and notes. Notes belong to a scale.So, C# note in a piano will be equal to C# in a guitar to C# in a flute to C# note if can be played through drums.So, basically what is happening here is same note is played but in different frequencies and instruments. We can also play same note in different frequencies in a single instruments like guitar, 1st fret 2nd string would sound equal to 5th string 3rd fret. This is the scale of C.
Then comes the concepts or Chords or Harmony. Chords are formed when we play more than one note at once. Chords follows the strict pattern of scales. There are some universal chords which belongs to certain scale.For example in the scale of C we would have these chords. C, D, E, F, G ,A B C.

As chords have different notes played together, how notes are being decided. Its every alternate note which are taken to form a chord.For example we might have C chord so what notes will be played together as I said it would be alternate notes which means if starting for C ,as because it is C chord, then leaving D but including E then G and so on. But be careful, we have notes which sit between notes. Now the chords are classified into Major and Minor chords and scales are too. The third notes in a scale makes it major or minor. The third note is important as it appears in almost every scale.A minor is third note which is  one note lower than its major 3rd. So, what would be the difference between C major and C minor chord, we saw C major chord in our example before.At the third note we had E but in the minor of same Chord, which is C minor, we would play one note less than E which is d# of E flat. So in C major we played C E and C but in minor we would play C d# or E flat and C.

Thanks and keep hardworking!!
 


Ashumeet Mitter