I hadn't heard the Rule of 7 but it makes sense. I'll try to remember it.

But this thread is interesting to me for another reason. Earlier this year I met a Minneapolis fiddler named Dan Radford who plays with a bluegrass band called Timbre Junction. Dan is a great musician, now in his 70s, who I'm told spent years as a violinist in the Minneapolis Symphany Orchestra, obviously classically trained.

We got into a late-night jam and I was pitching a fair number of tunes in B and Dan remarked that B was a tough key in which to play (tough is a relative term here). I was a little surprised by his remark and asked why. He said it was because B has five sharps.

I know quite a few skilled bluegrass fiddlers and none has ever complained about B or any other key and yet I'm sure that Dan understands more of music theory than any of the bluegrass fiddlers I know. Then it occured to me that Dan, because of his classical training, was always thinking about sharps and flats; it was the way his mind worked. Of course most working bluegrass fiddlers don't think about those at all, they just move their arsenel of scales and riffs up or down the neck as needed. Dan was having to work a lot harder because he actually understood, theoretically, what he was playing all the time. Dan wasn't reading a score but he must have been constructing a mental score as he played, even if he hadn't played the song before.

It had never occured to me that musicians heads could work that way.

      - Mark