This is a favorite topic of mine, and people on the internet are surprisingly receptive to learning about it. This is another one where the podcast format suits the material well, because being able to splice together verbal explanation of the music with the music itself is so easy and straightforward. It’s making me want …
Continue reading “F-sharp, G-flat, and the mysteries of just intonation”
I have written about the Funky Drummer break several times here before, but this podcast episode is my best explanation of it. The main thing that’s new is the connection between this break and Afro-Latin tresillo patterns. I also programmed a bunch of variations on the groove for comparison purposes. The name of this tune …
Continue reading “The name of this tune is The Funky Drummer”
I did a podcast episode about Ray Charles’ recording of “You Are My Sunshine”, a crucial example for my pop theory and aural skills classes. You Are My Sunshine by Ethan Hein Ray Charles and the racial politics of country music Read on Substack This is the first episode where I layered multiple versions of …
In this episode, I use “Don’t You Worry ‘Bout A Thing” by Stevie Wonder (1973) as a jumping off point to contemplate the headache of naming notes and chords in keys with a lot of flats and sharps in them. The circle of fifths is a lie by Ethan Hein My struggles to learn “Don’t …
Everything is terrible, but at least we have the blues to help us through it. Blues melody week is my favorite week of pop aural skills class. Last session, after one of my sections worked through some Aretha Franklin and John Lee Hooker, we listened to a couple of jazz tunes, including “Functional” by Thelonious …
There are two kinds of embellishing tones, the ones from inside the key and the ones from outside. The outside ones are called chromatic embellishments, and that name is appropriate; you get the most color from careful application of the “wrong” notes.
I learned the terms “beginning-accented melody” and “end-accented melody” from The Musical Language of Rock by David Temperley. The terms mean what they sound like: a melodic phrase whose accent is either at its beginning or its end. This seems like the definition of a purely academic theory concept, but it turns out that end-accentedness …
Continue reading “End-accented phrases make melodies sound cool”
In a previous post, I listed examples of melodic suspensions. But I didn’t do a very good job of explaining how they work. So I will rectify that here.
I came to Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys through my dad. He had the first volume of The Tiffany Transcriptions on CD, a series of live recordings that the Texas Playboys made for radio syndication. My dad was an impeccably highbrow opera fan, and aside from the Elvis Christmas Album, Bob Wills was the …
In my MusicRadar column honoring Roberta Flack, I thought of a new analogy for secondary dominant chords, and I figured that I should work it into a new explainer with some new graphics. So, if you are having trouble understanding how these chords work, read on. Secondary dominant chords solve a specific problem: how to …
