For normal musical notation, a bar may have four quarter notes and this will tell you which notes to play and the duration for each one. The bar is one full note so a quarter note is a quarter of the bar and the actual duration in time will depend on how many beats per minute for the piece.
A popular timing for music is 120 beats per minute. Take it down to make it a mushy love song or take it up to make it rock. The beat is commonly-used and probably has all sorts of biological and psychological associations. We haven't pursued the science of this but we're guessing there's a lot of it in terms of musical beats and actual biological rhythms.
At 120 bpm, the bar will take two seconds so each quarter note will be half a second. The intention is to get an appreciation for how long half a second lasts and it's not so unusual if you think of some song and the notes of the melody. Many will be about half a second long.
Staccato comes into this to identify whether the note will really be half a second. In the actual notation, there may be a dot next to a note and this means to sustain it. However, the dot has a different meaning when it is over the note and this is what indicates staccato. In function it means to shorten the note.
If you're playing normally (i.e. without staccato), each note will come as it does in this sentence, it flows as you expect.
How
ever
staccato
is
terse
it
may be
tense.
And hopefully you get the idea. The point of writing is the style of play is not common, most likely because it can be unnerving by creating the feeling of unpredictability. It's of interest as usually the way rock gets more exciting is to make it louder, more lights, more bimbos ... but staccato is a different kind of excitement. It might even be terrifying at rock volume.
The first name coming to mind for me for staccato is Dave Brubeck as he played extremely tight and maybe you can amuse yourself wondering what would have happened if he had ever been able to get his hands on synthesizers.
Prog rock bands love staccato. They will build some beautiful, lush arrangement and then throw some bang, bang, bang fast changes into it. Those high impact changes are almost always staccato and switching back and forth from lushness to that makes it fascinating ... or annoying as hell, depending on your taste for it.
It's the absence of the technique in a lot of things which is noteworthy to me now. As a guitarist, my greatest focus is almost always to get more sustain from a note rather than less. For me and many guitarists, that's where the soul of the note lies.
But what if you're playing about something which has no soul. This isn't going to be beautiful as some beast eats children or some such horrible thing. As to why portray such an awful thing, one word: Guernica.
You can continue the journey with where did staccato go and why but, here at the Rockhouse, we're ready for the movies.
Note: if you are not familiar with "Guernica" and why Picasso painted it, consider yourself now in possession of an assignment, young grasshopper. Appreciation of what one does in the face of a really awful thing may well feed back to your own grasshopper art. One day Picasso had to be a grasshopper too.
A popular timing for music is 120 beats per minute. Take it down to make it a mushy love song or take it up to make it rock. The beat is commonly-used and probably has all sorts of biological and psychological associations. We haven't pursued the science of this but we're guessing there's a lot of it in terms of musical beats and actual biological rhythms.
At 120 bpm, the bar will take two seconds so each quarter note will be half a second. The intention is to get an appreciation for how long half a second lasts and it's not so unusual if you think of some song and the notes of the melody. Many will be about half a second long.
Staccato comes into this to identify whether the note will really be half a second. In the actual notation, there may be a dot next to a note and this means to sustain it. However, the dot has a different meaning when it is over the note and this is what indicates staccato. In function it means to shorten the note.
If you're playing normally (i.e. without staccato), each note will come as it does in this sentence, it flows as you expect.
How
ever
staccato
is
terse
it
may be
tense.
And hopefully you get the idea. The point of writing is the style of play is not common, most likely because it can be unnerving by creating the feeling of unpredictability. It's of interest as usually the way rock gets more exciting is to make it louder, more lights, more bimbos ... but staccato is a different kind of excitement. It might even be terrifying at rock volume.
The first name coming to mind for me for staccato is Dave Brubeck as he played extremely tight and maybe you can amuse yourself wondering what would have happened if he had ever been able to get his hands on synthesizers.
Prog rock bands love staccato. They will build some beautiful, lush arrangement and then throw some bang, bang, bang fast changes into it. Those high impact changes are almost always staccato and switching back and forth from lushness to that makes it fascinating ... or annoying as hell, depending on your taste for it.
It's the absence of the technique in a lot of things which is noteworthy to me now. As a guitarist, my greatest focus is almost always to get more sustain from a note rather than less. For me and many guitarists, that's where the soul of the note lies.
But what if you're playing about something which has no soul. This isn't going to be beautiful as some beast eats children or some such horrible thing. As to why portray such an awful thing, one word: Guernica.
You can continue the journey with where did staccato go and why but, here at the Rockhouse, we're ready for the movies.
Note: if you are not familiar with "Guernica" and why Picasso painted it, consider yourself now in possession of an assignment, young grasshopper. Appreciation of what one does in the face of a really awful thing may well feed back to your own grasshopper art. One day Picasso had to be a grasshopper too.
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