h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

No, we're not THAT different, ya know But it wasn't me who named the notes, and here, it's H, and if you have to play B, there must be a special key (namely a b) ahead of the note h You then play a b

I'm confused but content to be!

Nice entry, short and to the point.

Maybe you could mention "drop-D tuning", where the thickest E-string is tuned down to a D (7th fret of E-string same as open A-string)... ?

One thing that annoys me about a lot of guitar bands out there is their tendency to tune everything to Eb/Ab/Db/Gb/Bb/Eb rather than E/A/D/G/B/E ... presumably this is to annoy people who want to work out how to play the song without having to buy the book with the chords in...

The 'drop-D' tuning is the reason I wanted a Peavey Wolfgang. Then they went and discontinued it!

If I mention the 'drop-D' tuning I think it'll muddy things - remember trying to tune a guitar for the first time and think how a mention of 'drop-D' tunings would have made you feel!

>finds himself humming 'Outshined'<

But you do put a # key in front of f,g or c to indicate fis,gis or cis ? Why don't you just make a footnote, saying that Germany uses different strings ? I've found a website, you must scroll down a bit, to the sixth picture from above. You'll see it in the text at the left side of the picture ( even if you don't understand what it says)

Eek, forgot to post the link

http://www.saitenweise.de/saitenwechsel/saitenwechsel.html

Footnote added.

B'Elana is right. In Germany, the notes are called C D E F G A H C. And the note that we call B flat, they call B. But that doesn't need to be mentioned in the entry.

Good entry, Roymondo. Since Skankyrich has already been over it with an eagle eye, there's nothing much I can suggest. Resist the temptation to add to it by giving details of harmonic tuning etc.

Good work Roymondo, and thanks for the footnote, I'm hopefully not the only German researcher who will read this

Do you know if there are other differences in the naming of the notes in the Western scale? If there are I could generalise the footnote to 'These are the standard Western names but differ in some areas'.

That was a reply to Gnomon BTW, and was meant to say 'do the namings differ in any other countries'. It'd be a bit odd to single out Germany if they do!

I thought of suggesting *other countries, like e.g. Germany, but then I have no idea about the other countries, so I just said Germany, because that was what I now knew for sure. I could ask on the Grey hair chatter, maybe Hapi knows for the Netherlands, and pierce or Tartaronne for Denmark, and hati for Estonia.

Steady on! I can't justify a footnote each but if there are more variations I'll move the current footnote to point out that there are 'Regional variations'.

It's only in English that they have the names we know.

In Italian:

do re mi fa so la si do

In French:

ut ré mi fa sol la si do

In German:

C D E F G A H C

Oh. I'll amend the footnote then!

Bach was able to spell play out his name as a theme "B A C H" because B meant B flat and H meant B. But he always resisted using that particular theme. Eventually when he was an old man, he was writing a piece of polyphonic music, and he introduced the theme B-A-C-H into the music. A few bars later, he became so ill that he had to stop writing. He never continued that work. It wasn't actually the very last thing he wrote, but he died about three weeks later.

I seem to recall that he was deaf, too

No. That was Beethoven.

Well, in Estonia we usually have it like this: e,h,g,d,a,E
I had to look it up though, I don't know nothing about it myself and my friend the guitar teacher seems to be already.

It was the guitar tuning, I mean.