This Stevie Wonder classic is an iconic blues-based groove combined with some very non-blues-based harmony. Stevie sang all the parts and played all the instruments, including the sumptuous analog synth sounds designed with Malcolm Cecil and Robert Margouleff. Stevie’s brother Calvin Hardaway is the main character in the spoken interlude. Ira Tucker Jr of the …
Author Archives: Ethan
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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Remixing David Bowie’s “Starman”
In Electronic Music School: a Contemporary Approach to Teaching Musical Creativity, we include a series of project plans that are designed to scaffold student creativity. If you sit someone down in front of an empty DAW session and tell them to be creative, they are likely to be paralyzed by uncertainty or anxiety. It works …
Morning Dew
Do you ever think about how there are several thousand nuclear missiles sitting in silos around the world, ready to launch at a moment’s notice? When I was a kid in the 1980s, that was the main macro-level anxiety lurking behind day-to-day life. Now we worry about different things: the climate, the pandemic, the impending …
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!
Seventh chords in just intonation vs 12-TET
I enjoy listening to Jacob Collier explain his music more than I enjoy the music itself. His arrangement of “Moon River” is mostly exhausting. However, Miles Comiskey pointed me to an interesting moment in this explainer video at the 1:04:22 mark where Jacob talks about how Kontakt enables you to change your instrument tuning on …
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Let’s analyze Alexander Scriabin incorrectly
I get academic articles in my email from various lists that I’m on, and this was an interesting one: “The Pedagogy of Early, Twentieth-Century Music: Ideas for a Classroom Discussion based on a Multi-Faceted Analysis of Scriabin’s Op. 31, No. 4.” by Michael Chikinda. Here’s the piece he’s talking about: I don’t know Scriabin’s music very …
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Dual tonicity in a classic klezmer tune
I’m rewatching Curb Your Enthusiasm and very much enjoying the work of music supervisor Steven Rasch. In season five, episode eight, Larry pretends to be an Orthodox Jew to win over the head of the Kidney Consortium. To soundtrack the scene where Larry first meets the guy, Rasch chose a classic klezmer tune, “Tanz Tanz …
Led Zeppelin, “Ten Years Gone”
I like to dip into Rick Beato’s YouTube channel once in a while. He’s too Boomer-ish and curmudgeonly about current pop music for my tastes, but when he rhapsodizes about the 70s rock that he loves, he’s delightful. His list of the top 10 Led Zeppelin riffs is especially pure Beato essence. Number six on …
Curb Your Enthusiasm
I’m currently enjoying a rewatch of the cringe-iest of TV shows and its theme song is one of the all-time greats. It’s a tune called “Frolic” by Italian film composer Luciano Michelini. Why is this so magically effective?