The top number in a time signature is easy to understand. Is the song in four? Count “one, two, three, four.” Is it in three? Count “one, two, three.” Is it in five? Count “one, two, three, four, five.” That’s all there is to it. However, the bottom number is another story. What is going …
Continue reading “The bottom number in time signatures has always confused me”
In class we have been talking about secondary dominants, where you temporarily treat a chord as a new key center before returning to the main key. In a modulation, you move to a new key center and stay there (for a while, anyway). Modulations were a common songwriting technique in pre-rock popular music, and a …
This week in aural skills, we’re working on various harmonic tropes based on IV-I root movements. This chord progression is technically called the plagal cadence, but is more memorably nicknamed the “Amen” cadence because it’s a traditional European hymn ending. (It has nothing to do with the Amen break, though they do sound good together.) …
In Aural Skills class we continue our sprint through harmony concepts with the diatonic modes. These are an advanced topic in classical theory, but for popular music, you need to deal with them up front, especially Mixolydian and Dorian. Here are the tunes I’m giving the class to practice distinguishing the modes from each other.
My NYU aural skills students are working on chord identification. My last post talked about seventh chords; this post is about chords with more notes in them, or at least, different notes. My theory colleagues call them added-note chords. They are more commonly called jazz chords, though many of the examples I list below are …
After spending their first few years writing abstract psychedelic tunes, the Grateful Dead took a hard turn into Americana. They wrote a bunch of songs inspired by blues, country and folk, and in doing so, they massively expanded their listener base. Several of these songs involve outlaws and drifters in the Wild West. I think …
As I continue to build groove pedagogy resources, I want to clear up some persistent confusion about polymeter and polyrhythm. If you don’t feel like reading the whole post, it can be summed up in this image: Here’s the most concise way I can put this into words: In polymeter, the grid lines are aligned, …
St Stephen might be the most “Grateful Dead” of Grateful Dead songs, the one that (for better or worse) sounds the most like them and the most unlike anyone else. It’s a cliche with the Dead to say that the live version is better than the studio version, but in the case of “St Stephen”, …
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 …
The Grateful Dead always had a folkie/Americana aspect, but in the early 1970s they leaned hard into country music, and it suited them. I found this song to be pretty cringe as a teenaged Deadhead in New York City, but it grew on me. The tune is named for a 1940s radio Western, which sounds …
