Piano Guidance
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Is tritone the blues note?

@Ricky the blue notes can be used to make tritones, but they alone are not tritones and have other applications such as chromaticism and tension. A tritone is an interval not a note. I believe we're talking about the same thing. A blue note is also an interval.

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There's no standard precise definition of what a blue note is. In some cases, a blue note could be seen as a deviation from the pitch of the note of a 'standard' (e.g. major) scale, but in other cases, blue notes are used in music whose tonality is far enough removed from the major or minor scale that those scales are arguably not sensible reference points to measure deviations from.

The quote in the Wikipedia article seems quite good:

Like the blues in general, the blue notes can mean many things. One quality that they all have in common, however, is that they are lower than one would expect, classically speaking. But this flatness may take several forms. On the one hand, it may be a microtonal affair of a quarter-tone or so. Here one may speak of neutral intervals, neither major nor minor. On the other hand, the lowering may be by a full semitone--as it must be, of course, on keyboard instruments. It may involve a glide, either upward or downward. Again, this may be a microtonal, almost imperceptible affair, or it may be a slur between notes a semitone apart, so that there is actually not one blue note but two. A blue note may even be marked by a microtonal shake of a kind common in Oriental music. The degrees of the mode treated in this way are, in order of frequency, the third, seventh, fifth, and sixth. — Peter van der Merwe, Origins of the Popular Style, 1989 We can see from that explanation that blue notes are not simply the use of flattened notes that themselves still belong to the 12-tone scale, as blue notes can be quarter-tone deviations, or characterised as a glide though a frequency range. Although the idea of blue notes is not restricted to the blues scale, this question - Exact pitch of blues scale notes - has some relevant answers. In particular, you can see from my answer there that I think that there's a note in the blues scale that is - in a guitar context, at least - played as a raised fourth more than a flattened fifth, though it may depend on the style in question (and of course such a distinction would be meaningless on the piano.) When talking about 'blue intervals', we normally mean intervals from the root - so the 'blue third' is some kind of (altered) third above the root. A tritone is simply an interval of three tones. So we can say that a note an interval of a tritone above the root could have the same frequency as a 'blue note' played between the fourth and fifth. That's not to say that a tritone above the root is a blue fifth though - blue notes are more complex than that.

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