Montclair State University asked me to develop and possibly teach a class on aural skills for audio engineers. It’s a great idea! It isn’t just audio engineers who need to know what frequencies and decibels are. These are concepts that any musician would benefit from knowing. Here’s my first pass at a course outline. The …
Author Archives: Ethan
I wrote another rap song to inspire my Pop Practicum students
I’m making my students in the NYU Popular Music Practicum write and perform original rap verses. To encourage them, I wrote one too, like I did last year. The samples are from Erroll Garner’s recording of “Close To You” by the Carpenters.
Designing learning experiences with music technology: good for whom, good for what?
In my Technology Trends in Music Education class at NYU, we are asking one main question: how do you know whether a technological tool is helpful for music learning and expression? How do you assess it? To find the answer, you first have to be clear about your pedagogical goals, and that is not easy …
Hidden Place
At the request of Wenatchee the Hatchet, and also following my own long-standing interest, I took a dive into the opening track from Björk’s exquisite album Vespertine: I love Björk for so many reasons. A big one is her ability to make weird ideas sound approachable, which is closely related to her ability to make …
The Anchor Song
Is there a difference between Ionian mode and the major scale? C Ionian mode and the C major scale are the same collection of pitches. Does that mean that they are the same thing? There is a lot of confusion about this. Classic FM says that C Ionian and C major are interchangeable. This Stack …
Hear J Dilla flip a Gary Burton sample three different ways
While I await my copy of Dan Charnas’ book Dilla Time, I’m listening to lots and lots of James Dewitt Yancey. As I was poking around WhoSampled.com, I noticed that Dilla used a sample of Gary Burton in three different tracks in three consecutive years. It’s five seconds into Burton’s 1967 recording of Carla Bley’s …
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The diminished scale
When I want my music to sound mysterious, the diminished scale is a reliable tool in the harmonic toolkit. It worked for John Coltrane and Thelonious Monk, and it can work for you!
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 …
We Don’t Talk About Bruno
Lin-Manuel Miranda certainly can write an infectious earworm. His songs from Moana were in constant rotation in my apartment (and in my head) for years, and as much as I tried to resist Hamilton, I fell pretty hard for those tunes too. But nothing by LMM has gripped me or my kids harder than this: …
Theory Hacks with Ableton
I’m happy to announce the release of my first project for the good folks at Ableton, a Classroom Project called Theory Hacks. It’s a set of free resources for educators who want to teach music theory and songwriting/composition to beginners using Live. In this post, I explain the pedagogical motivations for the project.