I enjoy listening to Jacob Collier explain his music more than I enjoy the music itself. His arrangement of “Moon River” is mostly exhausting. However, Miles Comiskey pointed me to an interesting moment in this explainer video at the 1:04:22 mark where Jacob talks about how Kontakt enables you to change your instrument tuning on …
Continue reading “Seventh chords in just intonation vs 12-TET”
I like to dip into Rick Beato’s YouTube channel once in a while. He’s too Boomer-ish and curmudgeonly about current pop music for my tastes, but when he rhapsodizes about the 70s rock that he loves, he’s delightful. His list of the top 10 Led Zeppelin riffs is especially pure Beato essence. Number six on …
Bach wrote The Well-Tempered Clavier as a showcase for a new tuning system that could play in all twelve major and all twelve minor keys. Up until that point, the various European tuning systems only worked for some keys, not all of them. If you were in or near the key of C, you were …
Continue reading “The Well-Tempered (and not-so-well-tempered) Clavier”
One of the most powerful music theory concepts you can learn is how to make chords from scales. If you learn a few scales, then you get a whole bunch of chords for free. The specifics of all the chord names can be complicated and daunting. But the concept of constructing them is very simple. …
If you study music theory in a typical school setting, you might get the idea that the V-I cadence is the fundamental cornerstone of all harmony, or at least, of all “Western” harmony. In a standard theory course, V-I is the first chord progression that you study, and for several weeks or months, it may …
A passacaglia is a Baroque dance that is a lot like the chaconne. One of Bach’s greatest hits is his Passacaglia and Fugue in C minor. Like the Chaconne, the Passacaglia is a long series of variations on a short, simple dance form. Also like the Chaconne, it’s pretty awesome. Bach got the first half …
You can now read this post in Spanish on Deviolines I have been spending much of my free time during the pandemic learning how to play the Bach Chaconne on guitar, drawing heavily on Rodolfo Betancourt’s transcription. Here’s Christopher Parkening doing my favorite interpretation by a guitarist (I do not sound remotely like this): This …
Is this the coolest music that has ever been recorded? I don’t mean cool in the sense of fashionable (though it is) or appealing (though it is), I mean it in the sense of laconic confidence in its bad self. Booker T and the MGs recorded the tune without a title, and then when the …
In this post, I’m digging deeper into Bach’s The Art of Fugue with Contrapunctus VIII. It’s way more complex and intense than Contrapunctus I. I used Ableton Live to line up a MIDI file of the piece with Angela Hewitt’s recording, and then color-coded and annotated it to show the structure, the harmony, the subjects …
Like harmony, melody works differently in grooves than it does in linear songs or Western classical compositions. In this post, I try to figure out what makes a good groove melody, and how to write one. Update: Joshua Horowitz made an interactive animation of this image! It’s so cool.
