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.
Category Archives: Music Theory
We should be counting most pop music in 8/4
Almost all Anglo-American pop music is in 4/4, aside from occasional 6/8 ballads. However, dancers tend to count off “five, six, seven, eight.” Why are they counting like this? Is it because they are thinking in 8/4 or 8/8? If so, they are right to do so. I think everybody should be counting pop music …
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F-sharp, G-flat, and the mysteries of just intonation
This is a favorite topic of mine, and people on the internet are surprisingly receptive to learning about it. This is another one where the podcast format suits the material well, because being able to splice together verbal explanation of the music with the music itself is so easy and straightforward. It’s making me want …
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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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Ray Charles on the podcast
I did a podcast episode about Ray Charles’ recording of “You Are My Sunshine”, a crucial example for my pop theory and aural skills classes. You Are My Sunshine by Ethan Hein Ray Charles and the racial politics of country music Read on Substack This is the first episode where I layered multiple versions of …
The circle of fifths is a lie
In this episode, I use “Don’t You Worry ‘Bout A Thing” by Stevie Wonder (1973) as a jumping off point to contemplate the headache of naming notes and chords in keys with a lot of flats and sharps in them. The circle of fifths is a lie by Ethan Hein My struggles to learn “Don’t …
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 …
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 suspensions
In a previous post, I listed examples of melodic suspensions. But I didn’t do a very good job of explaining how they work. So I will rectify that here.