I hear it all the time from my friends in the rock world, and see it all the time in internet discussions: guitarists are struggling with their music theory, or they’ve given up on it completely. This is not their fault! Music theory is taught pretty badly for the most part, and it rarely addresses …
Category Archives: Music Teaching
Music theory on Hacker News
This fascinating thread about music theory on Hacker News showed up recently in my blog pingbacks. Two posts in particular caught my eye.
A history of pop production in three tracks
Earlier this spring, I subbed for Adam Bell‘s Music Technology 101 class at Montclair State. His sections were populated more exclusively with classical conservatory kids than mine, so for my one-shot lesson, I figured I’d talk them through some items from my illicit collection of multitrack stems, and give them a sense of the history …
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How the heck do you know what scale you’re supposed to use for lead guitar?
There’s a broad diversity of harmonic practices being used out there in the world of blues-based popular music, rock in particular. While a given song may not use a lot of scales and chords, the relationships between those scales and chords is rarely simple or obvious. You really just need to learn all of them. …
Continue reading “How the heck do you know what scale you’re supposed to use for lead guitar?”
Do you need music theory to create music?
This question gets asked a lot. It’s really four questions: 1) What is music theory? 2) Does music theory really teach you what music is? 3) Does music theory teach you how to create music? And 4) how do you learn music theory? Let’s take these questions one at a time.
BB King gives us a guitar lesson
Did you know that the man has some guitar lessons online? I did not. They are invaluable. Let him show you how it’s done.
Mobile music app recommendations
Phones and tablets have rich potential as musical instruments. Here’s my list of interesting music apps. The iOS apps are ones that I’ve personally used and enjoyed. I haven’t tried most of the Android ones, but they were recommended by people whose opinions I trust.
Beethoven fan sputters with rage
In the Wall Street Journal, David Gelernter is very upset about Kids Today. For most young people, music is a minor consumable, like toothpaste. Okay. That’s debatable, by which I mean wrong, but moving along. Here’s where it gets real. Emphases in original: Musicians and music majors aside, my students at Yale—and there are no …
Musical shares
Recently we had some guys from Splice.com visit NYU to show off their intriguing new product. (It’s basically GitHub for musicians.) The Splice guys demonstrated the power of networked collaboration with an exercise they call “musical shares.” Everybody starts a track in some DAW (we used GarageBand.) You work on your track for ten minutes. …
Booking me for workshops
I want to expand my private teaching and speaking practice. If you were to book me for a workshop or seminar, what would you want it to be about? Music production? Intellectual property and authorship? Music and math? Music and science? Music pedagogy? Improvisation and flow, both in music and in life generally? Something else? …