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!
Category Archives: Music Theory
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 …
How guitarists learn music theory
This is me, rehearsing an Allman Brothers song with my stepbrother Kenny for my stepdad’s funeral last summer. If you are a music theory teacher interested in reaching guitarists, here’s some background on my own music learning that might be illuminating. My journey is a pretty typical one for a rock guitarist, except for the …
The blues and the harmonic series – a visual guide
Does the harmony of the blues come from the natural overtone series? Is it a just intonation system that later got shoehorned into Western twelve-tone equal temperament? Whether the blues comes from just intonation, or just intonation happens to sound like the blues, this is a rich and promising avenue of inquiry, both for understanding …
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The problem with just intonation – a visual guide
Tuning is the final frontier of my musical understanding. I start reading about it, and then I hit a big table of fractions or logarithms and my eyes immediately glaze over. However, tuning is important and interesting! So I continue to struggle on. Fortunately, as with so many music theory concepts, the right computer software …
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Modes from light to dark around the chromatic circle
People find the diatonic modes confusing. They are confusing! But they’re also wonderfully useful. So one of the goals of my music theory songs is to make the modes less confusing (or, at least, to make them confusing in a different way.) Some of the confusion comes from the fact that you conventionally see the …
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The Well-Tempered (and not-so-well-tempered) Clavier
Bach wrote The Well-Tempered Clavier as a showcase for a new tuning system that could play in all twelve major and all twelve minor keys. Up until that point, the various European tuning systems only worked for some keys, not all of them. If you were in or near the key of C, you were …
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