I have a lot of blog posts and videos in the pipeline, but I’m feeling some anxiety about where all this work is taking me. Don’t get me wrong, I love blogging for the sake of blogging, it has improved my life immeasurably and has had major professional benefits as well. But it’s not very …
Author Archives: Ethan
Nature Boy
There was a boy, a very strange enchanted boy. His name was eden ahbez, he was a hippie decades before that was a common thing to be, and he wrote “Nature Boy“, which Nat King Cole turned into a major hit. The tune has become a jazz and pop standard, and has been recorded uncountably …
Starfish and Coffee
My kids love “Starfish and Coffee”, and rightly so. The version on Sign o’ the Times is fine and all, but for me, this is the canonical recording, both musically and visually: According to the Genius annotation, Cynthia Rose was a real person who Susannah Melvoin knew growing up. All the details are taken from …
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 …
Interview with the Vancouver Arts Colloquium Society
Klara Huebsch of the Vancouver Arts Colloquium Society was recently my host for a conversation about the Groove Pizza, music visualization, the health benefits of drumming, participatory music cultures, and antiracist music education. It’s a good one!
I was weirdly obsessed with this jazz tune when I was twelve
I mainly grew up in a classical radio type of household, but my folks had a couple of jazz albums too, including Duke’s Memories by Abdullah Ibrahim. It included an obscure Ellington tune called “Way Way Back.” The melody is elegantly simple, and reveals greater depth with each listen. When I was in sixth grade, …
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Our book is out!
I wrote a book with Will Kuhn and now it exists in real life! You can buy it from Oxford University Press, Amazon, Powell’s, Apple Books, and many other places. The foreword is by Adam Neely. Electronic Music School is a complete guide to starting and running a creative music technology program. We include many …
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 …
The blues and the harmonic series
In this post, I’m going to expand on an idea in my blues tonality treatise: that the distinctive scales and chords of the blues are an approximation of African-descended tuning systems based on the natural overtone series. Gerhard Kubik argues in his book Africa and the Blues that blues tonality comes from the overtone series …