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Showing content with the highest reputation on 03/12/2021 in all areas

  1. This is a sort of waltzy arrangement of Rick Astley's "Never Gonna Give You Up" for a quartet of violin, viola, cello, and double bass. This was originally a school assignment and was completed in late 2020. I was lucky enough to have this performed (albeit not in a quartet setting, as everyone had to record separately). https://youtu.be/GLwdHqTfJaA Hopefully you enjoy!
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  2. There is no reason why any key should have a different "mood" than any other given that "Key" is an entirely relative concept and the things that we derive a sense of "mood" from in music come from rhythm/phrasing, scales/mode (pitch essentially) and harmony and progression. This is easily demonstrated by the fact that if a pianist sits down and plays a number of different pieces, but plays them all in A minor, they will still have different discernable moods, equivalent to the original pieces' keys. The original Red Dead Redemption soundtrack is a great example of this; they did the entire thing in A minor. Plenty of different "moods". There are also many instances where a band will play a song in a different tuning live than on a recording, especially if they change singers. Do their songs get a different mood because of the tuning, or the different singer with a different voice and style? Does Smoke on the Water have a different vibe if I tune my guitar a 1/4 step down or up? Especially if you hear it in isolation? No; in fact, I doubt you'd even guess it was in a different tuning if I just played it for you without reference to the original recording. Relating to another discussion: The way to tell if something is truly "subjective" or not is whether or not a near-universal consensus can be independently formed or not. Even in this thread, among those who believe different keys inherently convey a different mood, you will see wildly different answers. If C# Major really sounded more "Majestic and righteous" than Ab Major, that would be a conclusion many of us (over centuries now) would have come to by now. To be honest: The idea of "keys" having an inherent different emotion is rooted in the all-too-common desire nowadays to reduce creating impactful music to something trivial and easily within the layman's grasp. It's nice to think that all it would take, or at least lend a huge helping hand, to write a piece that sounds "Majestic" or "Epic" or "Heroic" is to "play in X key"; but the reality of the situation is that if you want to write something that would inspire that consensus among most listeners, you'll require a lot more musical knowledge, know-how, skill and finesse. You'll have to know the tropes, know the harmonies, the right modes, maybe borrowed chords, and how melodies that fit that description would typically be phrased, what their contour might be like, what instruments would be used, in what registers they would be voiced, and all sorts of other esoteric knowledge and genre/musical familiarity — and that's a far greater task to accomplish than simply choosing a key.
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