Blues "neutral" 3rd

The best way to understand the blues 3rd, or any other such blues intervals (of which there are many), is to study and play blues for many years, in many different situations...it's a deep art...Hstick microstick.net myspace.com/microstick (I have 2 new blues tunes up on myspace)

--- In tuning@yahoogroups.com, <microstick@...> wrote:
>
> The best way to understand the blues 3rd, or any other such blues
> intervals (of which there are many), is to study and play blues for
> many years, in many different situations...it's a deep art...

Which does not exclude that one day there may be a good and valid
theory for it.
--
Hans Straub

hstraub64 wrote:
> --- In tuning@yahoogroups.com, <microstick@...> wrote:
> >> The best way to understand the blues 3rd, or any other such blues >> intervals (of which there are many), is to study and play blues for >> many years, in many different situations...it's a deep art...
>> >
> Which does not exclude that one day there may be a good and valid
> theory for it.
> Maybe Neil could even tell us what he thinks it is!

--
* David Beardsley
* http://biink.com

> > The best way to understand the blues 3rd, or any other such
> > blues intervals (of which there are many), is to study and
> > play blues for many years, in many different situations...
> > it's a deep art...
>
> Which does not exclude that one day there may be a good and
> valid theory for it.

I'm a big fan of explanations, but when I hear the blues what I
often hear is a vocalist (say) being really expressive with the
pitch continuum. I'm sure there are principles that good blues
intonation obeys, but I'm not sure how far they would go to
explain anything. I mean, the blues scale is one such principle,
but it's kind of just a tetrachordal scale based on a minor
tetrachord. There's not much more to it. There's nothing in
the scale itself that would make you think it would be the basis
of a musical institution. There are cultural reasons involved.

That said, I think there is a definite tendency to hang out
south of the normal minor third, especially over the IV, where
7/6 would surely tend to draw you in. But I don't hear much
JI locking in blues performances, perhaps because the notes
are always sliding around.

Actually, Martin Braun has suggested that slides are especially
interesting to the human nervous system, based on his study
of neurophysiology, and lately I've been thinking he was right.
So maybe slides are actually the main ingredient of blues.

-Carl