This one was assigned by my editor, and I went into the song more or less cold. I ended up liking the song, though maybe that’s because so many of my students adore Chappell Roan and I was inclined to give her the benefit of the doubt. Or maybe she’s just good! Anyway, as the …
Continue reading “New MusicRadar column about Chappell Roan’s “Good Luck, Babe!””
The movie Ghost World tells us that people who are obsessed with old blues records are creeps, but also that old blues records are worth being obsessed with. There’s a pivotal scene where Enid, the young protagonist, hears “Devil Got My Woman” by Skip James, and reacts to it in much the same way that …
When I was in college, I liked to dip into the dollar bin at the record store. That’s where I picked up Jerry Garcia’s second solo album. It was forgettable, even for an obsessive fan like me. Forgettable, that is, except for one song: I had never heard of Django Reinhardt at that point, and …
Music ed folks! If you need some PD credit this summer, check out the online Annual Back-to-School Symposium presented by the good people at F-Flat Books. Heather Fortune and I are doing a session on groove and improvisation in ensemble classes. The lineup includes some of the people I admire most in the field: Brandi …
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In a previous post, I suggested that we think of an expanded major key universe that includes the major scale, Mixolydian mode, Lydian mode, and maybe also Mixolydian b6. In this post, I present a similar approach to minor keys, by extending the logic of Western European tonal theory to cover some additional minor scale …
The best way to teach the diatonic modes is to compare them to each other in parallel. One way to do that is to just run up and down them scalewise, but that isn’t very musically satisfying. So I thought, how about putting a familiar melody into all the modes? I wanted one that touches …
There are two ways to understand intervals: the right way, and the way I learned them. Before we get into that, let me point you to some good resources for learning the right way. I like the online tutorials by Robert Hutchinson, Chelsey Hamm and Bryn Hughes, musictheory.net and musicca.com. I really love Nate May’s visual …
Sit down at the piano and play the chords C and F in root position, back and forth, like so: (C E G) to (F A C). Pretty clunky! Now invert the C chord; that is, move the bottom note up an octave. Alternate that version of the C chord with the F chord, like …
Kids need to learn how to read staff notation. However, they would rather look at the MIDI piano roll. My question is, why not show them both? Each view has its own affordances. Staff notation is more human-readable and space-efficient, but the piano roll is more discoverable for beginners. The staff doesn’t show microrhythmic subtleties, …
The basic idea of tempo is simple: how many beats there are per minute. More beats per minute means the music is faster, fewer beats per minute means the music is slower. The image below shows a tempo map of “Dear Prudence” by the Beatles that I made with Ableton Live. The song’s tempo ranges …
