forget its guitar..this guy explains things as good as anybody.  for instance..if you looked at just the sheet music for banish..depending on who notated it and such..and it had one #.. how would you KNOW its mixolydian and not Ador or Bminor or G major?   he goes into some of that here using sweet home alabama.  be careful... lol..deep rabbit hole. 😁  but fun.  like i was saying earlier in the ither topic.. other than a learning thing, it seems playing tunes on fiddle may not require as much in this area.  bluegrass, jazz, pop fiddlers probably would need more due to the backing other muscians and improv breaks.  youd want to make sure your choices of scale runs and double stops matched..  but it seems to me especially playing like irish tunes and stuff youd be playing the melody and it is what it is.  not diminishing the value and i love the subject..just maybe not something to sweat as much about on fiddle.  opinion and not a knock on your topic, just my rambling.  hope the video is useful.  he has two excellent books that go way deep into the subject.  but theyre guitar oriented.

fun stuff @elcbk  and at times all makes sense...then i look at a tune like The Earls Chair... lol

this is required viewing and there will be a test later.   Dont let the title fool you...more to it than that.

Gordon Shumway said
Ebulent? Do you think he is trying to say ebUllient?

It may be that the original ideas about how a key supposedly feels were developed before perfect ET was finalised. Did we have another thread about this elsewhere? maybe it was vcom. I joked that if an orchestra is playing in D minor (one flat), the brass and clarinets are playing in E minor (one sharp). How is that going to work if half the orchestra is crying and the other half is laughing?

And then, as was pointed out, string instruments tuned in fifths aren't completely ET. But bear in mind, some, heavily influenced by Bach (or whomever), if he wrote in certain keys for the violin or cello, exploiting their tuning, are going to be unable to gainsay him. Is that what the guy in the video said? I didn't watch the whole thing. I'm practising the violin as I type, lol!

I think my school music teacher once said he felt these things on a modern ET piano. OK, some can smell the colour blue - I cant. boohoo.

  

what I got out of the video...

pick a key that suits the instrument...take advantage of what ithe instrument does best depending on music type and possibly muscian.   key obviously important to lead singer.  dark vs bright keys not really the reason to pick a key for a song...more about who is singing or what is playing it.  something along those lines...

only my opinion.which.may be effluent 

i did think it was a good video as are most of his to me.

Gordon Shumway said

GregW said

pick a key that suits the instrument...take advantage of what ithe instrument does best depending on music type and possibly muscian.

I wasn't disagreeing with the video - just trying to look at the same things but from a slightly different angle.

When I was learning guitar, it was clear that some pieces were "guitaristic", in other words, if the composer was a guitarist like Villa Lobos, then all the notes sat comfortably. But if a piece of keyboard music by Scarlatti was transcribed for guitar, then no note sat comfortably. It was not guitaristic music. Similarly, a violinistic piece (i.e. hopping between the E and A strings, or, worse, between the E and D strings) written by Vivaldi is pretty dreadful to play on a keyboard.

Someone on vcom asked about playing violin music on viola - transpose or not?

I invented the words "violinistic" and "violistic" and said that if a piece was violinistic, it would only be violistic if it was transposed. Ditto for cello. I have no idea if anyone understood what I said, as I didn't get a response.

  

i didnt take as disagreein..i gave my synopsis since you said you wernt able to finish.  from what you did state i gathered you were pretty much on the same wavelength in thought that the video was..

my effluent was a play on words keying off the Ebulent question.. ..  sry...lol..

Its just that I feel some of this stuff is a little above were i should be spending time when i think about it....but its still interesting.   if im not careful me repeating the information can become nonsense..

there is a section in the video where he discusses guitar music and also why things like irish/bluegrass fiddle sound better in keys like g,c,d,a. so your violinistic term is spot on...

JohnG said
@ABitRusty - That video "Which Key is the Saddest" was excellent and taught me new things (or reminded me of long forgotten things). I am very poorly trained in music theory history and videos like this remind of my lack.

THANKS

  

Me too.. theres alot of good stuff out there!

somewhere around 30 min mark he gets into modes which I think relates this video to Elcbk's original topic here.  the whole video is good though.