concert g major scale for alto sax concert g major scale for e flat insturments

Upright bassists also make use of open strings, as do many acoustic guitarists-especially those using various 'open' tunings.Īs Michael mentioned, when a chromatic instrument-such as a piano or mandolin-is considered in a home key context, it's usually a colloquialism or convention used in some musical context (as opposed to truly diatonic instruments-such as a 'quint-tuned' button accordian-which is intended to be played in its home key). While a violin, too, is obviously chromatic, in folk styles it sounds good playing in D and A-in which one can make use of droning open strings.

My flamenco guitar teacher was fond of saying that the guitar was a 'miniature piano.' He was referring to its musical versatility: among its capacities, it is easily played chromatically and solo due to its polyphonic range which which can be exploited for chordal harmony and 'bass' self-accompaniment. (Also, a builder could chime in on this, the preferred taptone for a mandolin top, I believe, please don't shoot me on this, is in the neighborhood of an F# which fits nicely in G).Īcoustic string instruments tend to sound best in certain keys, especially if one is making use of ostinato bass and open strings-and of course player ability and style. Yes, we should all learn all of our keys, but G gets mando players where they want to go in a breeze.Ī lot of the old blues guys only played in one or two keys and simply capoed to get to other places. So when someone says the mandolin is in G they tend to mean that it's all right there and quickly available in G. E is popular for the guitar, as it provides an easy path to great blues licks based out of chords and the pentatonic scale. G is a favorite banjo key, as noted above, because it lends itself to easy, tasty licks on the banjo - and again it's a key where the instrument tends to ring nicely. A and D, for example are common fiddle keys because they - like G - leave a lot of room for ringing open strings and drones the like.

It's just an old colloquialism based on the fact that certain keys lend themselves to certain instruments, and I don't just mean Bb for bagpipes.

Concert g major scale for alto sax concert g major scale for e flat insturments