Take a load off, Fannie by Dr. Ethan Hein Take a load for free Read on Substack There is a truism that art makes the strange familiar and makes the familiar strange. The Band’s biggest hit is intimately familiar to every classic rock listener, but it is quite a strange song. The lyrics seem like …
Category Archives: Composition
What I learned from remixing “Dreams” over and over
I was planning to talk about “Dreams” by Fleetwood Mac in class when we discuss modal harmony. Music theory teachers like to bring this tune up as an example of Lydian mode, but I don’t hear it as being in F Lydian. It’s also not clearly in C major, or A minor, or really any …
Continue reading “What I learned from remixing “Dreams” over and over”
Happy In A Silent Way Day to all who celebrate
Today is the anniversary of the recording session for the best Miles Davis album, and in its honor, I did a podcast two-parter. In A Silent Way, side A: “Shhh/Peaceful” by Dr. Ethan Hein The conceptually weirdest Miles Davis album is also the best one Read on Substack In A Silent Way, side B: “In …
Continue reading “Happy In A Silent Way Day to all who celebrate”
Low end theory
How do you create a bassline? This question is not just for bass players. It’s for producers and songwriters, who are likely to be programming their own bass parts in their DAW. Keyboard players can do basslines in their left hand; guitarists do them with their thumbs. And even if you never create or play …
Mr Tambourine Man
I grew up with a cassette copy of Bringing It All Back Home. It was the first Bob Dylan album that I remember hearing, and I knew that my Boomer parents and classic-rock-loving peers revered it. That said, people definitely respected Bob more than they enjoyed him. I did enjoy a lot of Bringing It …
All of Me
My students and I tend to think of all pre-rock American popular songs as being “jazz”, because that’s the context in which we tend to encounter them. However, jazz was an artistic outgrowth of popular song, and it’s worth seeing how those tunes existed before jazz musicians began interpreting them. The jazz pianist, composer and …
Dancing in the Street
Now that my semester is done, it’s time to start thinking about the next one. I like to spend the first day of class on a song that encompasses all the big themes and topics we’ll be covering. For this spring’s pop theory kids, I chose “Dancing in the Streets” by Martha Reeves and the …
Portrait of Portrait of Tracy
While I was writing about fretless bass, I briefly mentioned Jaco Pastorius’ “Portrait of Tracy.” Now it’s time to dig into this tune properly.
Amen break listening guide
In Advanced Pop Transcription class, we are entering the part of the semester where we turn our focus away from notes and rhythms and toward sound. One of the most important sounds in the past five decades of dance and hip-hop is the Amen break. In this post, I give context for the break and …
Listening to the Well-Tempered Clavier in actual well temperament
I tried this already as a YouTube video and a blog post, but I don’t think I did a good job explaining what was going on in each tuning system. This is because I didn’t really understand the tuning systems myself. I have been filling gaps in my knowledge and refining my examples, and the …
Continue reading “Listening to the Well-Tempered Clavier in actual well temperament”