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, Music Theory, pop, rock
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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, Music Theory, natural minor, 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, Music Theory, rock, samuel barber
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December is always a complex month for half-Jewish mutts like me. When pressured to self-identify, I usually just go with “Jewish” for the sake of simplicity, but this is in spite of not having being bar mitzvahed, not knowing any Hebrew, having only the vaguest idea what all the holidays and rituals mean, and having [...]
Filed in Autobio, Music, Music Theory, Race and Identity
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Also tagged Autobio, blues, dave tarras, history, judaica, klezmatics, klezmer, microtones, naftule brandwein, nyc
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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, Music Theory, psychology, simpsons, sonny rollins, stevie wonder, thelonious monk, tritones
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Following up and expanding on a post about learning music theory with Auto-tune. See also a post about the major scale modes and an intro to minor keys. So maybe you want to write a song or an instrumental in a particular mood or style, and you’re feeling overwhelmed by all the scales. Here’s a [...]