Frazz by Jef Mallett for January 21, 2016

A to E? Did they change the grading system?

FOUR chords, Frazz… four. You write hist yourself… surely you know that most any big hit can be written using the same four chords? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pidokakU4I

Dammit. “You write hiTS”. ;-)

This is why schools are Hawaii are so great. There is B, C, D or F in the Hawaiian language. That leaves only As.

Peterhuppertz, actually almost all songs in rock, blues or country are written in 3 chords,,,,It’s called a 1,4,5 structure. …Pick a chord, say E….Play E, then play A,and for the turn around plat B then A then E

I guess they replaced F with E so the kid’s wouldn’t get upset for failing. But get an E for effort.

at her age I was mostly a flat.

When I went to school (40+ years ago), we had A-B-C-D-F for coursework, and E-S-U (excellent, satisfactory, and unsatisfactory) for “citizenship” and “work habits”, so for each class you’d get something like “B-S-E”.

You couldn’t very well have an “E” standing for “fail” in the first column and “excellent” in the second and third.

The reason that 3 chords (G/C/D7) is enough, is that if you sing a song using the standard 8 notes (do,re,mi, etc.), one of the three chords matches to each of the notes. However, there are other chords that could be used to match the notes, and if you use an alternate chord you can create different moods, perhaps, haunting, or mysterious. Since pop music generally isn’t trying to create odd moods, they usually stick to the main line chords.

One example of a group that broke away from the standard three chords was The Beatles, who did some much more interesting things. Consider “when I’m 64”, where the tab I’m looking at, besides G/C/D includes C#dim, E7, A7, B, and Am among others. Also consider “Sweet Dreams” by the Eurythmics, and you can see the different/mysterious mood that they created by getting away from the standard chords.

If you want to really get away from the normal sound, consider modal music. The standard do,re,me pattern is found by using the white keys only going from C to C. What happens if you use only the white keys going from some other starting point? Then you end up with “modal” music, a whole other subject. Irish music does this a lot, and the Beatles also used this, for example, in “With a little help from my friends”.

and, the constant standardized testing.

Carl RThat doesn’t even get into pentatonic scale (bagpipes, much of Celtic folk music including Appalachian), or even more complex, Indian classical ragas where one choose five or six notes from 31 possible in an octave.

And hexadecimal (base 16), widely used in computer data storage, uses both E and F (A thru F), but no G.

1960–62 I went to a school that scored A–E. More than anything else, I think it’s just a question of people with OCD not being able to tolerate that gap.

When I was a little kid, the grades were:E xcellentS atisfactoryN eeds improvementU nsatisfactory

Eight? Don’t you mean seven?

E S N U for me, too. I didn’t follow the you-tube links, but suspect it is the illustration of all the different songs that are basically Pachebel’s Canon in D. Remarkable!

My High School did the A, B, C, D, F but added 1, 2 or 3 for the amount of effort the teacher thought you put into the class. So you could get an A3 if you got good grades but the teacher thought you didn’t need to make much effort or you could get an F1 if you failed, but were trying. I never got one of the latter, but thought it would be a bit insulting. Yes, you flunked but I know you can’t do any better.

My primary school (1955-60) used E-S-N-U for lower grades and A-F for the higher. One student joined us mid-year from another country. He had been sick, and his previous teacher had written “ABSENT” on his last report card. Our teacher asked him what a “T” meant!

An E allowed you to go to summer school, while an F meant you had to repeat the course, in PA. It was changed to help students to move along.

Paul McCartney once told an interviewer how much the Beatles, he and John in particular, respected the work of Buddy Holly. He thought it was sheer genius how expressive Holly was with only three chords, A, D and E. “We knew those chords,” he told the interviewer, “and we were working on B7.”Curiously, in his song “Early 1970,” Ringo sang, “I play guitar A, D, E. I don’t play bass ‘cause it’s too hard for me. I play the piano if it’s in C. And when I go to town, you know I wanna see all three.”

They should use O-E-A-P-D-T.

There’s a similar discrepancy in grade point averages. Some schools use 0 to 4, while others are 1 to 5.