I Want To Hold Your Hand

My kids are deep into the Beatles right now, and unlike me, they like the early stuff as much as the late stuff. So I find myself listening repeatedly to “I Want To Hold Your Hand” for the first time in basically forever. As with so many Beatles songs, the silly lyrics are sitting on top of some highly ingenious music.

The funniest day of music theory class in grad school was when the professor played us the intro to this song as an example of bad voice leading. Everybody in the room lit up with recognition: “Oh yeah, we love that riff!” If the professor was trying to illustrate the universal validity of eighteenth century voice leading conventions, “I Want To Hold Your Hand” was a terrible choice. If those conventions are supposed to be universal, then why does it sound so good when the Beatles violate them? But if the conventions are limited to a particular historical and stylistic context, then why does every music major have to learn them?

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I Heard It Through The Grapevine

My first exposure to Marvin Gaye’s recording of “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” was on the Big Chill soundtrack, which my baby boomer parents kept in heavy rotation.

Here’s a live version. Nobody wore a glittery tux like Marvin Gaye.

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Dorian mode

Dorian mode is such a cool scale. It evokes medieval chant and the blues. Its characteristic minor sixth chord is almost a diminished chord. And it’s unique among the diatonic modes for being symmetrical, meaning that it uses the same sequence of intervals going up and down. When you write Dorian on the chromatic circle, it’s left-right symmetrical, and it’s even more obviously symmetrical on the circle of fifths.

Dorian mode is like a combination of the natural minor scale and Mixolydian mode. You can make Dorian by raising the sixth of natural minor, or by flatting the third of Mixolydian.

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The Ghostbusters theme song

It’s Halloween, and that means that everyone is scrambling to find seasonal music beyond Michael Jackson’s “Thriller.” In the pharmacy this morning, I heard “Ghostbusters” by Ray Parker Jr, and remembered that it’s an absolute banger. This is one of a long list of songs that I loved as a kid, became embarrassed by as a teenager, forgot about in young adulthood, and then learned to fully appreciate in middle age. I watched the movie about a thousand times as a kid and had the soundtrack on cassette. But it took me until recently to understand why I loved the song so much, and why I foolishly became embarrassed by it for a while.

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Blues harmony primer

For a more detailed and scholarly version of this guide with a bibliography, see my Blues Tonality treatise. See also this post on blues melodies.

I enjoy reading r/musictheory, partially because it’s a good way to hone my theory pedagogy chops, and partially because I am a big nerd. There’s a recurring question on the sub about how chords relate to the blues scale, or how you generate chords from the blues scale. This is a typical example:

Wanted to get into some rock music and a lot of those songs use major or minor blues scales. My question is what are the chords within those scales?

This one too:

Previously, I learned that the melody generally uses notes from the scale corresponding to the underlying chord. Recently, I started watching some videos about the blues scale and I notices people were playing major or minor blues scales over various dominant 7th chords(mostly I7 or IV7).

This confusion is understandable. Music theory books and classes rarely mention the blues at all, and when they do, they often misrepresent or oversimplify it, so amateurs are left repeating mythology to each other. Blues is a difficult subject to teach! It has never been systematized, and probably never will be. The best we can hope for is to look at common practices in the music, and see what tropes and patterns we can identify. In the rest of this post, I talk through my best understanding of what the “blues scale” is, the most commonly used blues chords, and a possible explanation for them both.


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Mixolydian mode

If you flatten the seventh note of the major scale, you get Mixolydian mode. It’s like a bluesier version of major.

Mixolydian is a medieval mode that fell out of favor with “art” music composers during the Baroque era. However, it stayed alive and well in various European folk traditions before having an explosion in popularity during the rock era, helped by its resemblance to the blues.

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The microphone placement playlist

Last week in music tech class, we talked about audio recording, and how the placement of microphones relative to the voices or instruments can shape the sound of a recording. Mics don’t just pick up the sound of the voice or instrument itself. They also pick up the sound of the voice or instrument bouncing off the walls, floor, and ceiling. Depending on where the mic is relative to the sound source, it might pick up more direct sound or more indirect sound. The specific blend tells the listener a lot about the environment that the sound was recorded in, and carries information about style and genre too. 

Here’s a highly simplified diagram of sound in an environment. The solid line represents direct sound, pressure waves going straight from the guitar into your ear. The dotted lines are indirect sound, pressure waves that bounce off the walls, floor and ceiling before reaching your ear.

In a recording, microphones are a stand-in for your ears, receiving pressure waves and converting them into electrical fluctuations. If the mic is close to the sound source, it will mostly pick up direct sound. If the mic is far away from the sound source, it will mostly pick up indirect sound. 

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In My Life

My daughter is getting deep into the Beatles, so I’m listening to them a lot with her. I don’t usually listen to the Beatles all that much, because I know their songs backwards and forwards and inside out. But it’s always nice to come back to the songs in a new context, and it’s rare to listen through them closely and repeatedly with someone who has never heard any of them before. One of the ones that piqued the kid’s interest was “In My Life.” When I was a teenager, I loved that tune without really knowing why. Now I have the tools to find out. So let’s find out!

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Why are there so many minor scales

I wrote this explainer for my New School students; maybe you will find it useful too.

The white keys on the piano don’t just have to play C major. If you play the white keys over a droning or repeated A, you get a very different-sounding scale. It has a few different names: the A diatonic minor scale, the A natural minor scale, or A Aeolian mode. I prefer to call it natural minor.

But this is only one of several minor scales in widespread use. The minor-key world is more complicated than the major-key world. But that also makes for a lot of musical variety. Let’s dig in!

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Tuning is hard

I am committed to teaching my students something about the history of tuning in Western European music. I don’t expect them to retain any details or do any math, I just want them to know that the history exists. In preparation, I continue to refine my explanation of this history to myself.

Before the year 1400 or so, Western Europeans mainly tuned their instruments in three-limit just intonation, which they called Pythagorean tuning. (Don’t be fooled by the name; this system was in use in Mesopotamia centuries before the Greeks described it.) Three-limit just intonation is based on the first three harmonics of a vibrating string. Western Europeans really like the pitch ratios produced by these harmonics, as do people from many other cultures (though not all of them). In this post, I will explain why Europeans liked three-limit just intonation, why they nevertheless eventually abandoned it, and what came after.

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