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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My last post on minor keys covered the three scales you need for most situations in rock, pop and so on: natural minor, harmonic minor and dorian. There’s also the blues scale, which sounds good in any key, major or minor. For musical Jedi masters, there’s one more valuable minor scale. It’s called the melodic [...]
Tuesday, January 25, 2011
Minor keys are way more complicated than major keys. But the effort is worth it; all that complexity gives a richer array of expressive possibility. The best place to start with minor keys, paradoxically, is with the major scale modes. The pitches in C major are the same as the ones in A natural minor. [...]
Filed in Music, Music Teaching, Music Theory
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Also tagged alfred hitchcock, bach, bernard herrmann, carlos santana, chords, dorian, Emotion, harmonic minor, henry purcell, klezmer, melodic minor, modes, natural minor, scales, tito puente
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Saturday, January 22, 2011
When you first set out to learn your scales, it can be discouraging. There are so many of them, and their names are so bewildering. The good news is that when you learn one scale, you get a bunch of other scales that you get “for free.” This is because many scales share the same [...]
Filed in Music, Music Teaching, Music Theory
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Also tagged beatles, benny golson, bjork, blues, classical, dizzy gillespie, jazz, lynyrd skynyrd, miles davis, modes, rock, samuel barber, scales
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Thursday, January 20, 2011
The C major scale is the foundation that the rest of western music theory sits on. If you master it, you get a bunch of cool chords and scales for free, along with a window into a huge swath of our musical culture. How to form the scale Imagine an ice cube tray with twelve [...]
Filed in Music, Music Teaching, Music Theory
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Also tagged beethoven, bjork, chords, classical, folk, guitar, harmony, leonard cohen, major scale, mozart, Music
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Expanding on a post about blues basics. When you’re first learning to improvise, it’s daunting to be confronted with all the scales. Fortunately, there’s one scale that sounds good in any situation: the blues scale. It’s a universal harmonic solvent. I haven’t encountered a chord progression yet that didn’t fit with the blues scale. It [...]
Filed in Music, Music Teaching, Music Theory
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Also tagged blues, charles mingus, chords, dave brubeck, guitar, harmony, henry mancini, jazz, miles davis
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Since I’m teaching the twelve-bar blues to some guitar students, I figured I’d put the lessons in the form of a blog post. Blues is a big topic and this isn’t going to be anything like a definitive guide. Think of it more as a tasting menu. Blues is a confusing term. You probably have [...]
Filed in Music, Music Teaching, Music Theory
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Also tagged aretha franklin, batman, blues, chords, country, duke ellington, Emotion, flatt and scruggs, guitar, hank williams, harmonica, herbie hancock, jazz, john coltrane, john lee hooker, louis armstrong, memes, modules, muddy waters, race, thelonious monk, tritones
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Thursday, December 23, 2010
John Lennon supposedly thought “Dear Prudence” was one of his best songs. Who can argue with him? I could make a case for it as the best song by the Beatles generally, which puts it in the running for the best song by anyone ever. The song was written about Mia Farrow’s sister Prudence, who [...]
Once you’ve mastered the basic guitar chords, you might want to tackle some scales. The pentatonic is a good scale to start with. It’s easy to play, easy to memorize and sounds good in an astonishing variety of musical situations. Here’s how to play it:
Wednesday, November 10, 2010
I’ve picked up some new guitar students lately, so I’m once again doing a lot of explaining what a tritone is and why people should care. Whenever I find myself explaining something a lot, I like to encapsulate it as a blog post. So here we go. A tritone is the interval between the notes [...]
Filed in Emotion, Math, Music, Music Theory
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Also tagged blues, busta rhymes, chords, irrational numbers, Math, melodic minor, michael jackson, miles davis, psychology, scales, simpsons, sonny rollins, stevie wonder, thelonious monk, tritones
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