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Friday Fun Thread for November 24, 2023

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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I have no idea if you can play two melodies on a guitar.

In principle one could, using two-handed tapping.

Fingerpicking can achieve the same result. Undeleted and edited to add: The easiest example is probably the intro to Stairway To Heaven. All the higher notes work together as the melody. The low notes are a much simpler melody, descending from A to E chromatically. That means without skipping any out-of-key notes. Just for reference, there are 12 notes in an octave, and most scales are 7 of those 12. And, as the other guy says, the lower part isn't "officially" a melody because there can only be one melody, but if you played it on its own it definitely counts as a melody, albeit a boring one.

One of my favorite things to play is a solo acoustic arrangement of Scarborough Fair, which has two (and a half?) melodic lines. Sure, when you put it all together it's more like a melody with parallel thirds and occasionally a third voice, but the main two voices are separate melodies. The melodies move together at times, contrary at other times. (Contrary in this context means one goes higher, the other goes lower).

Tapping greatly improves the ability to play separate lines with larger intervals within the voices, but it's entirely unnecessary. The distance between the lowest string and the highest (assuming standard tuning) is two full octaves. That's 24 notes on a piano for any laymen in the audience. Who am I kidding, I'm a layman too.

If this is hard to follow, I blame holiday drunkenness.