Yesterday I was sitting in on a colleague’s theory class, and when she said that it was time to practice identifying key signatures, everyone groaned. I feel their pain and want to help. I myself learned the key signatures by reading and writing a lot of music in lots of different keys and eventually just …
Continue reading “I wrote a song to help my students with key signatures”
Long before I knew who Duke Ellington was, I adored a Grateful Dead song vaguely named after one of his early hits. I was most attached to the Brent-era version on Without A Net: This is not the Dead at their absolute best. Jerry sounds like he’s about 95 years old, and some of those …
The Dead recorded a bunch of rehearsals and jams while making Blues For Allah. John Hilgarth helpfully compiled and annotated them. A Reddit commenter pointed me to “Descent Into A Spacy Place”, which is farther out harmonically than the Dead usually get. I heard a lot of interesting ideas there, and I wanted to see …
Continue reading “I built a track out of Grateful Dead jamming”
The Grateful Dead gave their fans a rich education in Americana through their choice of cover songs. My first exposure to Johnny Cash was almost certainly the Dead’s cover of “Big River.” Johnny and the lead guitarist (I think Luther Perkins) are fingering in E, but the recording sounds in F, so I guess they …
I am approaching my New School songwriting class differently this semester: rather than having students write songs in particular styles, I am having them write using particular forms and structures. For example, for the blues unit, they don’t have to write in a blues style, but they do have to use the twelve-bar blues form. …
A while back, I learned how to play the Dead’s epic suite of “Help On The Way” into “Slipknot!” into “Franklin’s Tower”. However, I skipped the jam, because I wanted to focus on the composed parts. But since this is apparently the Summer of Jerry for me, I thought it was time to work out …
You can listen to the Grateful Dead for the songs, or you can listen for the jams. I love the songs as songs, but the Dead do not always do their own material much justice, especially when it’s time to sing a three-part harmony. The jams are less immediately accessible, but it’s what the band …
The Grateful Dead sold a lot of concert tickets and a respectable number of albums, but it took them more than twenty years to have a top ten hit. When “Touch of Grey” broke out, it inspired a debate among the Deadheads: on the one hand, its popularity ruined the experience of going to shows, …
The Grateful Dead’s second and third albums were expensive, high-concept psychedelic odysseys that didn’t sell, putting the band deep in debt to their label. This forced them to bang out a series of low-budget quickies: a live album and two back-to-basics roots records. Ironically, this constraint produced the band’s best-loved and most iconic recordings: Live/Dead, …
Now that the novelty of merely getting to talk about the blues in class has worn off, I am dealing with the practical question of how best to teach it. Rather than working from a set of abstract principles, I decided to walk my students through a selection of specific tunes to see what we …
