I did a bunch of posts on here a while back about how I like it when Bach gets chromatic and weird, and ever since then, people have been recommending me more of his weird chromatic music. Somebody on Twitter recommended that I check out the Duet No. 1 in E minor from the third volume …
Tag Archives: visualization
Dilla Time in “Chameleon”
After reading and re-reading Dan Charnas’ Dilla Time, now I’m listening to music with new attention to rhythmic subtleties. I have especially been digging into the relationship between J Dilla and Herbie Hancock–Dilla sampled Herbie on “Get Dis Money” and “Zen Guitar.” That digging made me go back to my favorite Herbie tune with fresh …
Relative minor, relative major
Every major key has a relative minor key. Think of it as an evil twin sibling. Relative minors are very widely used but not so widely understood. In particular, there’s a lot of confusion around the fact that major keys and their relative minors share the same key signatures and (mostly) the same pitches. But …
The chromatic circle and the circle of fifths
The heart of Western tonal theory is this diagram: It’s called the chromatic circle, and it shows all of the notes you can play with a piano keyboard or guitar fretboard. It is closely related to another extremely important diagram called the circle of fifths: In this post, I explain where these diagrams come from …
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The harmonic family tree
My blog stats have made it crystal clear that very few of you want to read about tuning systems. However, a vocal minority of you do love reading about them, and I definitely enjoy writing about them. So, let’s dig in and see how much Western harmony we can derive from the natural overtone series!
The problem with just intonation – a visual guide
Tuning is the final frontier of my musical understanding. I start reading about it, and then I hit a big table of fractions or logarithms and my eyes immediately glaze over. However, tuning is important and interesting! So I continue to struggle on. Fortunately, as with so many music theory concepts, the right computer software …
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Chords and modal interchange
One of the most powerful music theory concepts you can learn is how to make chords from scales. If you learn a few scales, then you get a whole bunch of chords for free. The specifics of all the chord names can be complicated and daunting. But the concept of constructing them is very simple. …
Here is a web based music education tool that I wish existed
It is awesome that you can embed interactive Noteflight scores in a web page, like so: But for optimal music education results, I also want to be able to show that same example in MIDI piano roll view too. Imagine if the Noteflight embed included a pane that showed this:
I Want You Back
Why is “I Want You Back” by the Jackson 5 such an uncontainable explosion of joy? It has the happiest chord progression ever, which I wrote about in a previous post. But the harmony is just the icing on the cake. The real heart of this tune is the groove. Let’s have a look! I …
The great scale flowchart
Here is a visualization of all the scales in the aQWERTYon, organized by the way I personally conceptualize them. This does not represent every scale in the world, just a broad selection of the ones in common usage in pop, rock, R&B, hip-hop, jazz, and film and game music. I group scales into three broad …