All concepts
What is chromatic?
Moving by through notes outside the current . Chromatic notes step between a key's tones, adding colour and tension without belonging to the home scale.
The chromatic scale is all twelve pitches in the octave, each a half-step (semitone) apart — every key on the piano, black and white. A note is 'chromatic' when it sits outside the seven notes of the current key, used as a passing colour on the way to a scale tone rather than a member of the scale itself. The blues leans on chromatic motion: the slides and bends between the fixed 'blue' notes are the ear reaching for pitches in the cracks.
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Where you'll hear it
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