Bach’s Duet in E minor BWV 802

I did a bunch of posts on here a while back about how I like it when Bach gets chromatic and weird, and ever since then, people have been recommending me more of his weird chromatic music. Somebody on Twitter recommended that I check out the Duet No. 1 in E minor from the third volume of the Clavier-Übung III (“keyboard-practice”). Whoever you are, you were right, I do like this!

The word “duet” here does not mean that it was written for two people, but rather, that it’s a fugue in two voices. (You could certainly play it on two instruments if you wanted, though.) I like Bach’s two-voice counterpoint pieces as listening experiences because they are easier to follow and understand than the ones with more voices. The very dense ones are fascinating, but they throw too much information at me for enjoyable real-time listening.

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Dilla Time in “Chameleon”

After reading and re-reading Dan Charnas’ Dilla Time, now I’m listening to music with new attention to rhythmic subtleties. I have especially been digging into the relationship between J Dilla and Herbie Hancock–Dilla sampled Herbie on “Get Dis Money” and “Zen Guitar.” That digging made me go back to my favorite Herbie tune with fresh ears.

This might be the funkiest thing in the history of funk. But what makes it so funky? I wanted to investigate the microtiming of that incredible opening groove to find out.

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Relative minor, relative major

Every major key has a relative minor key. Think of it as an evil twin sibling. Relative minors are very widely used but not so widely understood. In particular, there’s a lot of confusion around the fact that major keys and their relative minors share the same key signatures and (mostly) the same pitches. But they sound and feel completely different. How can this be? Let’s dig in.

Here’s the C major scale. Click the image to play it on the aQWERTYon.

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The chromatic circle and the circle of fifths

The heart of Western tonal theory is this diagram:

It’s called the chromatic circle, and it shows all of the notes you can play with a piano keyboard or guitar fretboard. It is closely related to another extremely important diagram called the circle of fifths:

In this post, I explain where these diagrams come from and what they mean.

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The problem with just intonation – a visual guide

Tuning is the final frontier of my musical understanding. I start reading about it, and then I hit a big table of fractions or logarithms and my eyes immediately glaze over. However, tuning is important and interesting! So I continue to struggle on. Fortunately, as with so many music theory concepts, the right computer software can open up lots of new learning avenues. I have been having a great time with MTS-ESP by Oddsound. It was designed to help you hear and play different tuning systems, but it also visualizes them in an attractive circular way. If you read this blog, you know how much I love a good circular music visualization scheme.

So here is the basic problem with tuning. An ideal system (for Western people) would be based on the natural harmonic series, because we love how harmonics sound. This kind of tuning system is called just intonation. It sounds lovely! Unfortunately, just intonation makes it impossible to change keys or tune your guitar. Let’s use MTS-ESP to figure out why that is. Continue reading

Chords and modal interchange

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. Take a seven-note scale, like, for example, C major.

Start on any note. That’s your chord root. Go around the scale clockwise, skipping the next scale degree to land on the following one. That’s your third. Go around clockwise and skip the next scale degree to land on the following one. That’s your fifth. Do the same thing to find the seventh. (You can also keep going to get the ninth, the eleventh, and the thirteenth. Then you will have used all the notes in the scale.) Any seven note scale will produce seven different chords, and they will all sound good together in any order and any combination.

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Here is a web based music education tool that I wish existed

It is awesome that you can embed interactive Noteflight scores in a web page, like so:

But for optimal music education results, I also want to be able to show that same example in MIDI piano roll view too. Imagine if the Noteflight embed included a pane that showed this:

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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.