Defining the Tonic ~ PMT#6

Lesson 6: Defining the Tonic.  Let's talk about stress. And no, I'm not talking about what happens when you're overloaded with school work and constantly have people telling you what to do. In music, stress is how we define depth, or different layers if you will. There is also Relief which we will discuss later.  Stress basically is when we take some element, note or chord in the music and put emphasis on it. The highest stressed note in a piece of music is called the "Tonic" This is the same thing as what I've been referring to as the "bottom note" or "base note". It kind of becomes the base of the music (and no, I didn't make a spelling error, bass is something different.) Basically, the foundation.  The tonic is always referred to as the same letter name as the scale. So C major, the note C is the tonic. Db minor, the note Db is the tonic and so on. Very often, the tonic ends up being the lowest note on the main chord o a song. It will literally sound as if everything revolves around it.  Which adds to our understanding slightly, from now on, we will call the bottom note of a scale, the tonic.

If we take seven fifths from G, and reorder the scale with the second note as the bottom of the scale we get
D E F# G A B C# D so in turn, this means that we could also say: Take seven fifths from G and reorder the scale with D as the tonic.  This means we can now look at the major scale and COF in two point of views:

A. Take Seven fifths and make the 2nd note in the sequence the tonic
B. Build a sequence of seven fifths a fifth BELOW the note which we want to make the tonic.

So example A is just what we've been doing. Example B, is just another way of looking at it because we're picking a tonic for our major scale then going a fifth down to figure out the notes of the scale. They're the same thing, what I'm trying to do is get you to start thinking about this stuff as collective ideas. Right, so Example A would be like taking C G D A E B F# and picking G as the tonic making a G major scale. Example B would be like taking G as the tonic and going down a fifth and building seven fifths for the rest of the scale. So one goes backwards but they're both the same result. Here's the thing though, there is one more way of looking at this which completes the understanding.

If we have C G D A E B F# and make G the tonic, we get G major right? But if we flip the scale into
G D A E B F# C then we can now see that we could have just taken Seven fifths directly from G and flatted the last fifth by a semitone giving us the EXACT SAME result. Which means now we can do this.
D major would be seven fifths from D which is D A E B F# C# G# then flat the last note to G which gives us
D E F# G A B C# D.   You may find that as a quicker and easier way to understand the concept and build major scales more easily. So now, we pick a note to be our tonic build seven fifths and flat the last note in the sequence and BAM! Instant major scale. By now, if you know the COF very very well, then you should be able to make major scales from any note without any problems. But remember how to do it like before as well. It's extremely important to know that we place stress on the 2nd note in the sequence to get a major scale because later, we'll discuss how placing stress on different notes in the sequence creates different modes. But that's quite a bit away.

So what is the tonic? It's basically the note the music revolves around. That simple.

ASSIGNMENT:
           Keep working on learning the COF
           Review and practice making major scales with both methods

Onto finding intervals with the COF