What I said was that the tonic is "do" in major, and "la" in minor. Essentially you're learning the structure of the diatonic scale, and you get the insight very early that minor and major are modes of each other (which opens up the understanding of modes in general).merlyn wrote:Above you stated that solfege programs your brain to associate 'do' with the tonic. That's not happening with your blues scale example. Also how do you do the harmonic and melodic minors?
The chromatic solfege the way I learned it goes "do di re ri mi fa fi so si la li ti do" with sharps and "do ra re me mi fa sa so lu la ta ti do" with flats. And as I said, as long as you're in the diatonic scale, you're not using accidentals. Accidentals are for stuff like the blues scale or melodic minor.
Blues (at least the kind of bluesy stuff we get in pop music) is tonal, it just has blue notes. Like how melodic minor isn't atonal either.merlyn wrote:Where is all this tonal music? ABBA? Since the sixties blues has had a massive influence on music. We often hear bluesy and tonally 'wrong' music on the radio and elsewhere.
This is what atonal music sounds like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RCNzwdLwA8g Jazz also breaks away from tonality, but let's face it, you don't hear free jazz on the radio too much.
Turn on MTV, and you'll get some kind of diatonal music, and more likely simple than complex at that.