My last post on minor keys covered the three scales you need for most situations in rock, pop, and film scores: natural minor, harmonic minor, and Dorian mode. There’s also the blues scale, which sounds good in any key, major or minor. For musical Jedi masters, there’s one more valuable minor scale. It’s called the …
Category Archives: Music Teaching
Intro to minor keys
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 E-flat major are the same as the ones in C natural minor. …
The major scale modes
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 “for free.” This is because many scales share the same pitches, just in …
Meet the major scale
The C major scale is the foundation that the rest of western music theory sits on. If you master it, you get a bunch of cool chords and scales for free, along with a window into a huge swath of our musical culture. How to form the scale Imagine an ice cube tray with twelve …
The blues scale
Expanding on a post about blues basics. When you’re first learning to improvise, it’s daunting to be confronted with all the scales. Fortunately, there’s one scale that sounds good in any situation: the blues scale. It’s a universal harmonic solvent. I haven’t encountered a chord progression yet that didn’t fit with the blues scale. It …
Blues basics
Since I’m teaching the twelve-bar blues to some guitar students, I figured I’d put the lessons in the form of a blog post. Blues is a big topic and this isn’t going to be anything like a definitive guide. Think of it more as a tasting menu. Blues is a confusing term. You probably have …
The pentatonic box
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:
Doctorin’ The Top Forty
In 1988, a pair of British acid house DJs named Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty, known as The Justified Ancients of Mu Mu, The Timelords, or The KLF, had an improbable number one hit with “Doctorin’ The Tardis.” The track isn’t so much a song as it is an early mashup. Just about everything in it …
Music theory for beginner guitarists
Most beginner guitarists start by learning the same fifteen chords, usually called the “standard fifteen.” I’ve also heard them called the open chords because they make use of open strings and are thus easy to play. Major Seventh Minor A A7 Am — B7 — C C7 — D D7 Dm E E7 Em F …
Drum machine programming
This post has been superseded by my giant collection of rhythm patterns, which you can see here. I wrote a general post about what makes a hot beat hot. As a followup, here’s how to program some generic patterns and a few famous breakbeats. The basic unit of dance music is a sequence of sixteen …