December is always a complex month for half-Jewish mutts like me. When pressured to self-identify, I usually just go with “Jewish” for the sake of simplicity, but this is in spite of not having being bar mitzvahed, not knowing any Hebrew, having only the vaguest idea what all the holidays and rituals mean, and having …
Category Archives: Music Theory
The pentatonic box
Once you’ve mastered the basic guitar chords, you might want to tackle some scales. The pentatonic is a good scale to start with. It’s easy to play, easy to memorize and sounds good in an astonishing variety of musical situations. Here’s how to play it:
The mystical tritone
I’ve picked up some new guitar students lately, so I’m once again doing a lot of explaining what a tritone is and why people should care. Whenever I find myself explaining something a lot, I like to encapsulate it as a blog post. So here we go. A tritone is the interval between the notes …
INXS needs you tonight
I’m pretty sure that “Need You Tonight” by INXS was the last song I fell in love with through commercial radio. I would never have admitted it, and I couldn’t have articulated why, but oh yes, in middle school this track hit me exactly where I lived. It still sounds as fresh today as it …
Music theory for beginner guitarists
Most beginner guitarists start by learning the same fifteen chords, usually called the “standard fifteen.” I’ve also heard them called the open chords because they make use of open strings and are thus easy to play. Major Seventh Minor A A7 Am — B7 — C C7 — D D7 Dm E E7 Em F …
Blue notes and other microtones
Update: here’s a deeper and better-informed explanation of blue notes. Blue notes are a big part of what makes the blues sound like the blues. Most other American vernacular music uses blue notes too: jazz, funk, rock, country, gospel, folk and so on. In the video below, John Lee Hooker hits a blue note in …
Scales and emotions
See also a post about making chords from scales, and all of these scales in one giant flowchart. So maybe you want to write a song or an instrumental in a particular mood or style, and you’re feeling overwhelmed by all the scales. Here’s a handy guide to the commonly used scales in Western pop, …
Is clock time oppressive or liberating? Yes.
We take clocks so much for granted that it’s easy to forget how radical and recent a development they are. It wasn’t so long ago that clocks had to be painstakingly assembled by hand one at a time. Accurate timekeeping on the order of fractions of a second is a heroic engineering undertaking if you’re …
Continue reading “Is clock time oppressive or liberating? Yes.”
Learning music theory with Auto-Tune
Auto-Tune makes producing music easier. It can also make understanding music theory easier. The way you dial up different keys and scales doesn’t just guide your ear, it also guides your eye. Your voice can produce a smooth continuum of pitches. To sing, you eliminate most of those possibilities, vibrating your mouth and throat only …