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i wanted to do a quick analysis video on
the melody of gone still which is a
track from nine inch nails 2002 studio
release still that was a mouthful and
just try to like look at why this melody
is so haunting and so kind of unusual
sounding and i was comparing it a little
bit to the frail which also has a very
haunting melody very dark sound and also
has sort of minimal instrumentation and
sparse harmony and part of this is
because they both share the same scale
mixolydian flat six but unlike the frail
gon still has a special quality to it it
has a little bit more of a curious
sort of uncertain
and almost playful tone on top of the
darkness and that's what i'm really
really interested in discovering today
mixolydian flat 6 is arguably the most
commonly used scale in nine inch nails
music
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okay so what fascinates me though about
this song is how it uses
this scale
this
is pretty um
harmonious sounding very satisfying
really things locking into place
um still very mysterious sounding though
because that flat six just doesn't sound
like it belongs
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but what's making this melody sound a
little bit strange
is not that part it's the part before it
so the melody is starting with the
second degree and then moving up or
resolving up to the major third that's
our one of our points of stability in
the scale
so there's sort of the suspended feeling
it's just like an embellishment in a way
of the third but then the next two notes
we hear are the flat six and flat seven
the least two notes that we expect what
i'm hearing is basically a series of two
tritones if you don't know what a
tritone is already adam neely just came
out with an excellent video about it
it's been sort of nicknamed colloquially
the devil's interval but maybe that's
all
folklore he goes into that but it sounds
very unstable extremely dissonant very
awkward and it's hard to use
in a beautiful way and yet trent resner
does it all the time so i call it the
trent tone usually
and both those tritones are in this
melody
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there is one consecutive tritone created
but the other one is sort of just an
impression especially because he leaves
the sustained pedal on his piano so all
the notes sort of mingle together so you
kind of hear this
just to demonstrate how weird this
melody is try to sing it
how'd you do
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it's not easy because of the tritons
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like if i just played this by itself
with no bass line no context i think
most people would think i was playing
like avant-garde music that had no
tunnel center
another way to think about this melodic
run is that it's just an embellishment
of an e flat augmented chord
sort of like all those other notes are
just sort of neighboring tones kind of
you know just creating a little bit more
movement but the ultimate sound
that is trying to be communicated is
this augmented chord it really depends
on how you hear it but an augmented
chord is a weird chord and i'll go more
into that in just a second but before we
do i just want to kind of note that
there's some really tidy little
resolutions at the end of this sort of
lost sounding phrase initially so we
have
when we reach that it feels like a point
of of rest doesn't it and then
even more so kind of just walking us
down the scale stopping at these points
of rest and then the second time he just
ends on the fifth
on the fourth repetition he wraps it up
even nicer for you
that's a g major triad we don't usually
hear triads in trent rezner's music um
they're very far and few between and
when they happen they have a lot of
power because they're so uncommon but
they also have power in general because
you have all the information you need to
understand the tonality of the chord and
the function of the chord so he usually
doesn't give us all that information but
here he's decided to do that and it
sounds um kind of like classical music
to me and there's another part in the
song that has the same vibe and one of
my patrons said that this song reminds
her of like a broken music box and i
really hear it on that part
it feels like ballet doesn't it
something little punctuation it's so
straight ahead it's such a nice contrast
to these mingling tritones so if this
weren't already super cool enough then
the bass line leaves the tonic and goes
down to the e flat which would be like a
flat six chord my favorite but what it's
implying with the melody is sort of like
an e flat augmented chord which i
mentioned before
so augmented chords are very strange
they are completely symmetrical two
major thirds stacked on top of each
other
and so what this does is it omits the
perfect fifth that normally encases
a major or minor triad so instead it
doesn't feel fixed it feels like it's
floating it feels maybe a little
dramatic
feels
unhinged
almost like overly bright like if any
chord had to represent fake happiness i
feel like maybe this chord might do a
better job than even the major chord i
guess depending on context the chords in
the mixolydian flat sixth scale the
chords that are native to the scale are
kind of unusual there are two diminished
chords and then there's an augmented
chord the major and natural minor scales
don't have an augmented chord already so
this is sort of an unusual sound for a
lot of our ears but this song has
definitely succeeded i think in using
that augmented chord very nicely i'm not
surprised that trent rezner is
comfortable with the sound of an
augmented chord that b flat would be
what would fit into the e flat major
chord not the b natural so he leaves the
b natural there and it sounds especially
strange like a broken clock especially
with that
bass line on the offbeats but on the
third repetition after hearing this sort
of disjointed sound he flattens that b
flat just one time and when that happens
every time i'm like
because it's so incredibly beautiful and
it everything feels
like it changes like the whole tone
changes
and then the melody meanders downward as
the baseline also does and it sets up
sort of this half cadence which is like
a very classical uh situation classical
music i mean so we end up on this major
five chord and sort of the implication
is that it would resolve i think in this
case back to sort of a minor one and
that's kind of what happens um in the
second half of the song the whole setup
reminds me of the harmonic minor scale
which a lot of classical music was
written so if this part ever sounded
like classical music to you there's a
reason for that it always has for me
it's such an interesting juxtaposition
but it really speaks to i think his
influences it's interesting to think if
he was having sort of an internal battle
here of like what he's expected to do
versus what he really wants to do and
then the melody's over and we're left
with this very kind of gentle but cold
section with these big long pads
and it feels like wise i feel like this
old wisdom about this section
in contrast to the first section which
felt more playful
but still dealing with a dark subject
almost like
a child trying to process loss versus
an old person like the wrinkles in their
eyes i can feel when i hear those chords
dang why isn't this song in a movie
thank you so much for watching
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you