Tuesday, January 10, 2012
The mind constantly works to find tonal centers in any music. The best atonal music is really just very complex tonal music, challenging our ability to get our harmonic bearings without totally overwhelming us. Music that strikes the right balance between predictable, functional harmony and randomness is the stuff that people find exciting; the unexpected [...]
Friday, December 16, 2011
A musical pitch is a blend of many different frequencies beside the fundamental. Here’s a visualization of the different vibrational modes of an ideal string. The string’s movements are the sum of all these different modes simultaneously.
Wednesday, October 5, 2011
In high school science class, you probably saw a picture of an atom that looked like this: The picture shows a stylized nucleus with red protons and blue neutrons, surrounded by three grey electrons. It’s an attractive and iconic image. It makes a nice logo. Unfortunately, it’s also totally wrong. There’s an extent to which [...]
Filed in Math, Music Theory, Physics, Science
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Also tagged chemistry, einstein, electromagnetism, harmonics, linkedin, Math, orbitals, Physics, quantum mechanics, visualization
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Wednesday, August 31, 2011
When I was a kid, I’d listen to music and wonder, why is this chord progression so much more satisfying than that one? Now I know the answer: secondary dominants, chords that temporarily change the key in a logical-sounding way. If you want to take your songwriting in a more sophisticated direction, you definitely want [...]
Filed in Composition, Music, Music Teaching, Music Theory
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Also tagged alicia keys, bob dylan, cadences, chords, circle of fifths, Composition, country, elizabeth cotten, harmony, i got rhythm, jay-z, jazz, neil young, ragtime, secondary dominants, tritones
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It’s hard to figure out what key a piece of music is in. There are a lot of conflicting answers from different music theory texts. To make matters worse, it’s not at all unusual for a song to change keys, even within a section or phrase. Even rock songs written by totally naive songwriters can [...]
Filed in Music, Music Theory
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Also tagged blues, classical, hall and oates, harmonic minor, jazz, keys, major scale, melodic minor, pop, rock, scales
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I have a new harmonica student starting today, so while I gather materials for him, I figured I’d put them in a blog post too. I started learning harmonica in high school. It was the first instrument I learned voluntarily, not counting my ineffectual middle school attempt at classical cello. As a teenager, my obsession [...]
Filed in Music, Music Teaching, Music Theory
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Also tagged blues, bob dylan, deford bailey, folk, grateful dead, harmonica, howard levy, jazz, little walter jacobs, major scale, mixolydian, sonny terry, stevie wonder, toots thielemans
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I studied music theory for a good long time before it dawned on me that you can read the major scale right off the circle of fifths. Here’s the C major scale on the circle. The red notes are the ones in the scale and the grey ones are the ones outside the scale. The [...]
If you’re a guitarist, you may have noticed that it’s hard to get your instrument perfectly in tune. This is not your imagination. If you tune each string perfectly to the one next to it, the low E string will end up out of tune with the high E string. If you use an electronic [...]
Filed in Math, Music, Music Teaching, Music Theory
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Also tagged autotune, guitar, harmonics, harmony, history, Math, Music, tuning
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Saturday, February 12, 2011
I’ve read that Quincy Jones carries around copies of Miles Davis’ Kind Of Blue in his briefcase, and that he hands them out to kids whenever he meets them. Q-Tip compares Kind Of Blue to the Bible — you’re just expected to have a copy around the house. If you’ve never heard jazz before, Kind [...]
Filed in Composition, Improvisation, Key Musicians, Music, Music Theory, Sampling
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Also tagged ahmad jamal, classical, debussy, erykah badu, gil evans, james brown, jazz, john coltrane, mashups, mccoy tyner, memes, miles davis, morton gould, public enemy, Sampling, the heavy
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Wednesday, February 9, 2011
The blues is a good entry path for beginner guitarists. If you learn the standard fifteen chords and the blues scale, you’ll be well on your way. However, there’s one crucial piece of additional music vocabulary you need to do the blues justice, and that’s diminished chords. To make a diminished chord, you start on [...]
Filed in Music, Music Teaching, Music Theory
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Also tagged blues, bob dylan, chords, duke ellington, ella fitzgerald, fats waller, jazz, lambert hendricks and ross, robert johnson, roots, symmetry, thelonious monk
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