A unified theory of rock harmony in one sentence

When I was learning guitar, I did a lot of studying and memorizing chord progressions. I did even more thinking about chords when I was learning to play jazz. When I shifted over to mainly producing electronic music, all my focus went to thinking about groove and timbre and I stopped thinking about chords completely. But now that I’m teaching music theory, I’m back to thinking about chords, and as I prep examples for class, I am in particular thinking about chords in rock songs in a serious way for the first time since my 20s.

You can’t generalize about chord progressions in Anglo-American pop across the board, because there’s too much stylistic diversity between metal, country, hip-hop, R&B, dance music and so on. However, rock has stabilized into a canon, and it’s possible to get your arms around the entire thing.

So given all that, here’s my explanation of rock harmony in one sentence: put major chords on the notes in the natural minor scale, and put minor chords on the notes in the major scale. That doesn’t explain every chord you’ll find in a rock song, but it does explain a lot of them.

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The Weight

Take a load off, Fannie by Dr. Ethan Hein

Take a load for free

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There is a truism that art makes the strange familiar and makes the familiar strange. The Band’s biggest hit is intimately familiar to every classic rock listener, but it is quite a strange song. The lyrics seem like they are talking about ordinary people in ordinary situations, but they don’t add up to any specific identifiable reality. The devil makes an appearance. There are two different characters named Annie and Fanny. The narrator is on the run, but we don’t know from what. There are three different singers, all of whom sound like backwoodsy Muppets. In photos, the musicians look like Civil War re-enactors, or Bushwick hipsters, or rednecks, or academics, or all of the above. In the days before the internet, everything about them was mysterious, from the band name on down.

“The Weight” appeared on an album called Music From Big Pink because it came out of jam sessions that the Band held with Bob Dylan in the basement of Big Pink, a house deep in the forest outside Woodstock, New York. The house is, you guessed it, big and pink. You can rent it! We took my father-in-law to see it, and even though it’s way out in the boonies, we were not the only fans making a pilgrimage there that day. 

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What I learned from remixing “Dreams” over and over

I was planning to talk about “Dreams” by Fleetwood Mac in class when we discuss modal harmony. Music theory teachers like to bring this tune up as an example of Lydian mode, but I don’t hear it as being in F Lydian. It’s also not clearly in C major, or A minor, or really any specific key or mode at all! That’s an extraordinary level of ambiguity for a song whose melody only uses five different notes (plus a sixth note that only appears once) over a grand total of two chords (plus a third chord that only appears once.)

I was looking for ways to illustrate this harmonic ambiguity, and thought it would be fun for everyone if I took the vocal stem and put different chords and progressions under it. So here’s a series of reharmonizations: a jazzy one in A major, then simpler ones in C major, D Dorian, A minor, C blues, A blues, D blues, and F major.

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Twelve remixes of “Dreams” by Fleetwood Mac

I’m working on a podcast episode about “Dreams” by Fleetwood Mac, a perennial object of debate in the music theory world because no one can agree what key it’s in. This is because the melody doesn’t align with the chords particularly, and neither the melody nor the chords belong unambiguously to any specific key. To demonstrate its harmonic flexibility, I got the vocal stem so I could put different chord progressions under it. Then I started trying different instrumentals underneath it, and found a lot of them that work, some uncannily well. My kids helped me too. Here are the best ones.

The Bach one is my favorite, because the fit is positively uncanny in places. My daughter requested the Roblox song and Pachelbel’s canon, both of which are excellent fits as well. Enjoy.

Happy In A Silent Way Day to all who celebrate

Today is the anniversary of the recording session for the best Miles Davis album, and in its honor, I did a podcast two-parter.

In A Silent Way, side A: “Shhh/Peaceful” by Dr. Ethan Hein

The conceptually weirdest Miles Davis album is also the best one

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In A Silent Way, side B: “In A Silent Way/It’s About That Time” by Dr. Ethan Hein

Arguably the best jazz fusion that anyone has ever recorded

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Free improvisation

Recently, I went to see a performance by my NYU colleague Ramin Amir Arjomand, whose counterpoint class meets on the opposite side of the wall from my pop theory class. Ramin’s concert was an hour and a half of extremely intense free improvisation on unaccompanied piano. It wasn’t jazz; Ramin is a classical composer and performer, and he improvises in that idiom too. I might have been expecting something like Keith Jarrett, but Ramin started straight in with jagged rhythms, dissonant harmonies and extremes of dynamics and register. You can hear the first minute and a half on Facebook. The older recording below conveys some of the flavor of the performance I saw, though it’s shorter and less extreme.

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Low end theory

How do you create a bassline? This question is not just for bass players. It’s for producers and songwriters, who are likely to be programming their own bass parts in their DAW. Keyboard players can do basslines in their left hand; guitarists do them with their thumbs. And even if you never create or play a bassline, you should know how to listen to them.

You can think of the bass as serving a dual role: a percussive one and a melodic/harmonic one. In pop, the percussive role matters more. The bassline holds the groove together, and the rhythms matter more than the pitches. The best way to understand that side of things is just to listen to songs you like, focus on the bassline and scat sing along.

Below, I list seven common types of basslines found in Anglo-American pop, what you might call the basic basslines (ha). I show each of them playing the Axis progression in C using a standard rock rhythm. Then I give some examples of each drawn from actual music. Continue reading “Low end theory”

I’m in this Adam Neely video about AI

I make a couple of brief appearances in Adam Neely’s latest video about generative AI music. Neither of us think it’s a good idea.

Two-chord shuttles on the pod

After talking about them in aural skills class, I figured it was time to do an episode about them. This one includes some compositional ideas of my own in addition to all the examples from the pop canon.

The two-chord shuttle by Dr. Ethan Hein

A foundational building block of funk

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I love when my songwriting students drop albums

A student in my Song Factory class at the New School a couple of years ago has just released his first album. His style is outside my usual listening tastes, but I admire how personal and specific his tracks are: the found sounds, the synth bleeps, the noisy analog tape recording, the layered vocals.

Carson loves intentionally detuned guitars and synths. Check out the last song, “Hurry”, which has a seasick pitch wobble like a warped record. Every time you think that the creative possibilities of rock have been exhausted, someone like Carson comes along and says, okay, but what about the universe of pitches in between the piano keys? It was a real joy having this guy in class, and I’m glad everyone else gets to enjoy his music too.