The great scale flowchart

Here is a visualization of all the scales in the aQWERTYon, organized by the way I personally conceptualize them. This does not represent every scale in the world, just a broad selection of the ones in common usage in pop, rock, R&B, hip-hop, jazz, and film and game music.

I group scales into three broad categories: Major, Minor, and Neither. Major scales include a pitch that’s a major third above the root, and minor scales include a pitch that’s a minor third above the root. Makes sense! The “neither” category includes scales that have both major and minor thirds (e.g., altered, diminished) or just generally exist outside the major/minor universe (e.g., blues.) I hope you find it useful! And see also a list of typical uses for all these scales.

Circular chord charts

Being home with my kids all day is not very conducive to dissertation writing, but my fragmented attention is still up to the task of making infographics. I’ve been thinking about ways of visually representing grooves. Since circles work so well for rhythms, maybe they can work for harmonies too. Here’s a circular view of twelve bar blues in C:

Think of this as a chord chart wrapped in a circle rather than written in a line. Each cell is a measure. Start on the C7 at the top and move clockwise.

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Chord progressions in the Bach Chaconne

Recently I have been digging deep into the Bach Chaconne. Since I’m a poor music reader, I’ve been using Ableton Live to remix, loop, and analyze the piece, both in audio and MIDI form. It’s working! The structure of the Chaconne makes sense to me now when I hear it, and I’m learning to play sections of it (slowly and haltingly) on the guitar. I’m supposedly doing this because the piece is a useful teaching example for minor-key harmony. Really, though, I just enjoy listening to it and thinking about it, and I’m lucky enough to have a job where I can use some of that thinking later.

You’re supposed to analyze classical harmony by annotating the score with Roman numerals and figured bass. I come from jazz, though, and while we like Roman numerals in jazz, we don’t do figured bass. I did learn figured bass well enough to get through grad school, but I would rather write and think about modern chord symbols. Also, I’d much rather analyze by ear than on the page. So I went through the MIDI file of the Bach Chaconne and segmented it out whenever I heard a chord change. Then I labeled the chords, through a combination of looking at their constituent pitches and my subjective sense of the chords that those pitches imply.

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Na Na Na Na

If you’ve been following my internet presence, you know how much I love flowcharts. So naturally, I was amused by this Randall Munroe cartoon:

I was reminded of it walking down the street the other day, because someone in our neighborhood in Brooklyn was blasting a dancehall track from their car that sampled the “na, na na na na, na na na naaah na na na na na na” part from “Land Of A Thousand Dances.” Then I got to thinking, this cartoon is actually an inspired recipe for a mashup.

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