tookatooka
2660 posts
Jan 27, 2012
2:50 PM
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Please can you help with what are probably stupid questions which I should really have known?
What is meant by phrasing in harmonica playing terms? Sorry this was bought up in my other thread. Ignore this one if it's already been answered. Thanks.
What does the Gain control do on an amplifier? It increases the gain of the amplifier but isnt that the same as increasing the output volume. What does it do to the sound?
Last Edited by on Jan 27, 2012 2:59 PM
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Jim Rumbaugh
659 posts
Jan 27, 2012
3:11 PM
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Here's what it means to ME. :)
Phrasing. Howmany notes you put together.
Similar to giving it a rest once in a while. If all you do is put out a long string of notes, that's one big "phrase". Break it up into groups of "phrases" of notes.
Gain. Same as volume, just as you thought. I'm sure someone can argue differntly, but to me it's the same, or not different enough to get excited about.
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HarmoniCollege March 24, 2012
theharmonicaclub.com (of Huntington, WV)
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K_Hungus
76 posts
Jan 27, 2012
3:36 PM
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I’ll give it a shot too, this is what I thought the two mean. I thougt a phrase is a musical sentence/sequence. Like the phrase ‘somewhere over the rainbow.!’ That’s one phrase. The way you time that, play with dynamics etc. is what I think people mean when the say ‘nice phrasing’ (when done good).
Gain, (and dont take my word for this) is the overdrive of the pre-amp. So by just overdriving the preamp, you can have a very overdriven tone (high gain) but you can still cut the output volume. So the overall volume will be low, with a crunch. You can cut the output volume on most amps. I’m not sure of this because gain, can have different meanings
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bluemoose
659 posts
Jan 27, 2012
4:10 PM
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Phrasing to me is the pattern of repeated phrases you can use through the 12 bar structure. Often called verse form.
Little Walter - Off the Wall. http://youtu.be/1cTw51JkPNc
Get out some paper and block out about 16 4x3 12 bar sections.
Listen for the riff/lick/phrase that Walter uses, then how and where he repeats it or repeats it with a slight variation (noodle) within that verse.
If you assign letters to the phrases you'll see verse forms like:
4Bars: A
4Bars: A
4Bars: Turnaround
4Bars: A
2Bars: B 2Bars: A
4Bars: C
2Bars: A 2Bars: A
2Bars: B 2Bars: rest
4Bars: C
3Bars: A 1Bar: noodle
3Bars: A 1Bar: noodle
3Bars: A 1Bar: noodle
You get the picture. It's how you structure your playing instead of 12 bars of noodling.
Not sure about gain. :)
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FerretCat Webbrain - Jason Ricci's vids (by hair colour!)
Last Edited by on Jan 27, 2012 4:11 PM
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STME58
69 posts
Jan 27, 2012
7:29 PM
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When I learned to read music on grade school, we were told that the little mark that looks like a comma placed about the music was a "breath mark". It is where you take a breath when playing a wind instrument. Later on I leaned that it is more correctly called a phrasing mark. The effect is the same, it shows where to break the notes up into phrases, even if you are playing an instrument that does not require you to take a breath.
It works in music just like it does in language.
No tresspassing, violators will be prosecuted.
is quite different from
No tresspassing violators wil be prosecuted.
The phraseing makes a big difference!
Last Edited by on Jan 27, 2012 7:41 PM
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STME58
70 posts
Jan 27, 2012
7:41 PM
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I am an mechanical engineer, not electrical so I am a little outside of my area of expertise on Amps. I think K_Hungus has it mostly right. Gain as an engineering term just means to multiply something. The gain control on the preamp controls how much the preamp multiplies the signal before it goes into the main amp and gets multiplied again. Overdrive is when you hit the limits of the amp and it can no longer multiply the loud sounds by the same amout it multiplied the softer sounds by. This gives the distorted sound. With the pre amp you can get the distortion withouot taking the main amp to the limit as was already stated by K_Hungus.
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Greg Heumann
1449 posts
Jan 27, 2012
10:15 PM
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STME58 has it on the right track. First, I love his example of phrasing. But the one I care about here is that GAIN AND VOLUME ARE NOT THE SAME THING. NOR is gain specifically about overdrive. @Jim - this is an important difference and you SHOULD get excited about it! Understanding it is really helpful in dealing with feedback.
Gotta go back to junior high school algebra for this, but..... Imagine a graph with input signal on the bottom (X axis) and output volume on the vertical (y axis), and a line heading from lower left to upper right. The slope of that line is gain.
Higher gain means that the difference between quiet input and the amount of input needed to reach the feedback zone is much less than with a lower gain amp. Lowering the gain on a guitar amp makes it more friendly.
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/Greg
Last Edited by on Jan 27, 2012 10:18 PM
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bluzmn
55 posts
Jan 27, 2012
10:43 PM
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Here's my take on the 2 terms:
Phrasing- It's like STME58 says; it's how you break up your playing into groups of notes. Lots of players (of any instrument) try to jam as many notes as possible into a solo non-stop; that's just like if someone where to talk like this going on and on and on without taking a break or taking a breath until they turned blue fell over hit their head had to go to the hospital...You get the point. You'll notice that a good public speaker will use pauses to emphasize important points; good musicians do the same with their solos.
Gain-Actually, I would say gain has 2 meanings; a generic one and a specific one. Specifically, it means what K_Hungus said; it controls the amount of overdrive to the preamp. If an amp has a Gain and a Volume control, that's the function of the Gain control. Generically, gain simply means increase; some amps have only a Gain control. In that case, it is simply the volume control.
On some amps with the 2 controls, they are called Volume (preamp control) and Master (volume); on others, Gain and Master. I steer clear of the amps with that 2 control arrangement for harp, because feedback is harder to control and too much preamp distortion sounds buzzy and thin. Even for guitar it tends to sound like a fuzztone, not that warm, natural distortion I like for blues. Anyway, for harp amps we like to keep the preamp gain low because too much preamp gain reduces the volume we can get before feedback.
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bluzmn
56 posts
Jan 27, 2012
10:50 PM
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Oops! It looks like Greg was posting at the same time I was; his post is more technically correct.
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Diggsblues
1156 posts
Jan 28, 2012
4:55 AM
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Phrasing is related to speech. Think how people talk.
This where the musical phrase has it's roots.
It's a grouping of notes has been written or improvised that has a shape and length.
I think of gain as energy let in and volume or gain as energy let out. In the old day audio engineers used zeroing out the board. The volume was at zero neither plus or minus and then the gain was adjusted to get a clean sound.
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Emile "Diggs" D'Amico a Legend In His Own Mind
How you doin'
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The Iceman
222 posts
Jan 28, 2012
5:02 AM
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Phrasing....good explanation by STME58 and bluzmn.
A contemporary example that explains phrasing by demonstration -
Harry Potter movies...specifically, Professor Snape. Alan Rickman's character has a singular way of speaking that really sets him apart from all the other characters. Remember how he would say "Not you, Potter."? Just these three words could be dragged out over 10 seconds to great effect.
This is an example of very powerful phrasing. Rickman is a master of drawing you in over long periods of time using just a few words. You will find yourself on the edge of your seat waiting for him to finish a sentence.
I happen to love musicians that use this approach in their soloing, hence my Miles Davis fetish.
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The Iceman
Last Edited by on Jan 28, 2012 5:04 AM
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Frank
119 posts
Jan 28, 2012
5:20 AM
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I agree Iceman...And there are times when listening to solos of Masters -where I'll feel like they are talking ,I can actually envision a spoken phrase.
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Frank
120 posts
Jan 28, 2012
5:36 AM
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A nice way to incorporate phrasing into your improvisations is to think of a conversation in your mind and play it on the harp with groove, timing and dynamics.
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MrVerylongusername
2171 posts
Jan 28, 2012
6:19 AM
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If you plug a mic directly into a speaker, nothing happens. The output of the mic is several degrees of magnitude too small to have a hope of moving the speaker coils.
So you need to increase (amplify) the signal level. The degree to which you amplify a signal is the gain.
If you were to plug a mic direct into a power amp, you might be able to amplify it to be audible (just) but you would introduce so much noise into the signal that it would be pointless.
Building good gain structure is basically a compromise between signal level (desirable) and noise (undesirable)
By increasing gain in discrete stages, it reduces the noise introduced into the signal. The preamp(s) adds enough gain to drive the power amp, the power amp adds enough gain to drive the speaker coils.
Once noise (undesirable) or distortion (sometimes desirable, esp. on a guitar amp) is introduced into the signal, you can't get rid of it.
The controls on an amp basically just control how much signal is passed into each stage. In real terms they are all controlling signal gain. By convention though, the preamp controls are usually labelled 'gain' and the power amp controls 'volume'.
On a guitar or harp amp - the 'gain' knob controls the colour of the sound (i.e. clean, fuzzy, gritty) the 'volume' makes that sound louder. (actually on tube amps the power stage can colour the sound in desirable way too.)
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Pistolcat
135 posts
Jan 28, 2012
7:42 AM
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Well, since I posted about phrasing in that other thread maybe I should give up my two cents too. I meant phrasing as note selection and which way you play them too. I referred to the "hole-masking" way of develop phrasing (which I read about in a David Barrett book).
I like the Alan rickman analogy which really hits it straight on. In music you can consider the "I'm a man" riff. Three notes. Tonic fourth and the blue third (then back to tonic). Try to play these same notes in the same order but vary length, attack and (somewhat) pitch, especially the third to make it sound different. That's a huge part of phrasing,IMHO.
Then consider noteselection and try to find, to you, new lines. Check out that box shuffle thread and try just octave jumping the tonic on each chord.
And so on... Out of time for posting for now.
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Pistolkatt - Pistolkatts youtube
Last Edited by on Jan 28, 2012 8:59 AM
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colman
120 posts
Jan 28, 2012
10:56 AM
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skat-singing,thats and old term.but if you can`t skat-sing a solo how are you going to play it
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tookatooka
2663 posts
Jan 28, 2012
1:20 PM
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Thanks guys. I think I get the picture now. Seems like I wasn't the only one who was a bit confused by these terms.
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