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 …
Category Archives: Composition
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 …
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The name of this tune is The Funky Drummer
I have written about the Funky Drummer break several times here before, but this podcast episode is my best explanation of it. The main thing that’s new is the connection between this break and Afro-Latin tresillo patterns. I also programmed a bunch of variations on the groove for comparison purposes. The name of this tune …
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Thelonious Monk plays the blues
Everything is terrible, but at least we have the blues to help us through it. Blues melody week is my favorite week of pop aural skills class. Last session, after one of my sections worked through some Aretha Franklin and John Lee Hooker, we listened to a couple of jazz tunes, including “Functional” by Thelonious …
Aretha Franklin sings “Bridge Over Troubled Water”
We’re coming up on blues melody day in aural skills class. I always like to do some close listening to Aretha Franklin for that session, especially her version of “Bridge Over Troubled Water.” I hadn’t previously done any analysis of it; we just listen and let it speak for itself. But I thought, this semester, …
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I wrote a song about chromatic embellishments
There are two kinds of embellishing tones, the ones from inside the key and the ones from outside. The outside ones are called chromatic embellishments, and that name is appropriate; you get the most color from careful application of the “wrong” notes.
End-accented phrases make melodies sound cool
I learned the terms “beginning-accented melody” and “end-accented melody” from The Musical Language of Rock by David Temperley. The terms mean what they sound like: a melodic phrase whose accent is either at its beginning or its end. This seems like the definition of a purely academic theory concept, but it turns out that end-accentedness …
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Explaining embellishing tones
This week in aural skills, we are covering embellishing tones. This topic is tough, because I can never remember the difference between an appoggiatura and an escape tone without looking it up, but it’s on the syllabus, so I have to try. In previous semesters, I have approached it by having students identify examples from …
What key is “Dreams” by Fleetwood Mac actually in?
Here’s a simple-seeming song that is a subject of a lot of music-theoretic controversy. “Dreams” by Fleetwood Mac only has two chords (plus a third chord that only appears once), so it seems like it would be easy to analyze its harmony. And yet, no one can agree what key it’s in. The two chords …
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Terrapin Station
I took a break from analyzing the Grateful Dead while working on other things, but now it’s time to resume, with a tune that is deeply loved by Deadheads and not of conceivable interest to anyone else. Terrapin Station is a weirdly disjointed album, reflecting the conflicted motivations behind its creation. After their record label …