For our last day of pop aural skills class, I did a crash course on historical tuning systems. This involved a brief introduction to harmonics. As I was talking, I realized that my verbal explanation of this concept is still clunky and imprecise. This is a problem, because harmonics are important, not just for music …
Category Archives: Physics
Frequency and EQ
EQ (equalization) plugins are volume controls for specific parts of the frequency spectrum. Every DAW, mixing board and guitar amp has EQ controls, and they can radically transform your sounds. But while EQ is an essential part of audio engineering, it is also a source of confusion for beginners. In this post, I lay out …
What is the difference between analog and digital recording?
All microphones are analog. They convert pressure waves in the air into electricity. Pressure waves in the air vibrate a little piece of metal, and that generates a fluctuating electrical current. Different kinds of mics have different specific ways of doing this. In dynamic mics, the air vibrates a magnet. This magnet is wrapped in …
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Blues harmony primer
For a more detailed and scholarly version of this guide with a bibliography, see my Blues Tonality treatise. See also this post on blues melodies. How do chords and scales work in the blues? Is there a “blues scale”, and if so, what notes does it include? What are blue notes? Why does it sound …
Tuning is hard
I am committed to teaching my students something about the history of tuning in Western European music. I don’t expect them to retain any details or do any math, I just want them to know that the history exists. In preparation, I continue to refine my explanation of this history to myself. Before the year …
Aural Skills for Audio Engineers
Montclair State University asked me to develop and possibly teach a class on aural skills for audio engineers. It’s a great idea! It isn’t just audio engineers who need to know what frequencies and decibels are. These are concepts that any musician would benefit from knowing. Here’s my first pass at a course outline. The …
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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The blues and the harmonic series
In this post, I’m going to expand on an idea in my blues tonality treatise: that the distinctive scales and chords of the blues are an approximation of African-descended tuning systems based on the natural overtone series. Gerhard Kubik argues in his book Africa and the Blues that blues tonality comes from the overtone series …
Why can’t you tune your guitar?
Short answer: because math. Longer answer: because prime numbers don’t divide into each other evenly. To understand what follows, you need to know some facts about the physics of vibrating strings: When you pluck a guitar string, it vibrates to and fro. You can tell how fast the string is vibrating by listening to the …
Four bars of Mozart explains everything humans like in music
I’m not arguing here that everyone loves Mozart, or that I’m about to explain what all humans enjoy all the time. But I can say with confidence that this little bit of Mozart goes a long way toward explaining what most humans enjoy most of the time. The four bars I’m talking about are these, …
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