The twelve-bar blues is not the only blues form. There is also a whole world of one-chord blues grooves over drones, pedal tones and static riffs. Howlin’ Wolf has several classic songs that follow this model, including “Spoonful“, “Wang Dang Doodle“, and “Smokestack Lightning.”
Guitarist Hubert Sumlin came up with the iconic riff. The track also features pianist Hosea Lee Kennard, guitarist Willie Johnson, bassist Willie Dixon, and drummer Earl Phillips. Continue reading “Smokestack Lightning”
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 part where I went to music school afterwards.
I am finishing my dissertation soon and am applying for full-time academic jobs. Here’s my research statement. Also see my teaching statement.
I have three main areas of research interest: the teaching and learning of rhythm and groove; the challenges of hip-hop pedagogy; and expanding the teaching of harmony to include groove-based musics, particularly the blues. I address each of these areas in turn.
In this fascinating video, Nahre Sol composes accompaniment for an isolated Billie Eilish vocal in the styles of various canonical composers.
The combination of Billie Eilish and Mozart is predictably weird, but not for any “musical” reason. There is not such a wide disconnect between Billie Eilish’s melody and classical music. The weirdness is due to the fact that Billie Eilish is a microphone singer, not a concert hall singer. It’s strange to hear microphone singing over classical-style accompaniment! Continue reading “Nahre Sol introduces Billie Eilish to the classical canon”
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 the blues and for creating new music inspired by it. In this post, I use MTS-ESP, Oddsound’s amazing microtonal tuning plugin, to visualize the possible harmonic basis of the blues. Continue reading “The blues and the harmonic series – 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 can open up lots of new learning avenues. I have been having a great time with MTS-ESP by Oddsound. It was designed to help you hear and play different tuning systems, but it also visualizes them in an attractive circular way. If you read this blog, you know how much I love a good circular music visualization scheme.
So here is the basic problem with tuning. An ideal system (for Western people) would be based on the natural harmonic series, because we love how harmonics sound. This kind of tuning system is called just intonation. It sounds lovely! Unfortunately, just intonation makes it impossible to change keys or tune your guitar. Let’s use MTS-ESP to figure out why that is. Continue reading “The problem with just intonation – a visual guide”
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 modes as being generated by the major scale. So, theory texts will tell you that the notes in C major also make D Dorian, E Phrygian, F Lydian, G Mixolydian, A natural minor, and B Locrian. This information is not necessarily helpful to you! It doesn’t tell you anything about how the modes sound, or what you might want to use them for.
I think it’s better to think about the modes in parallel: C major, C Dorian, C Phrygian, C Lydian, C Mixolydian, C natural minor, C Locrian. It’s even more helpful to see them organized in a different order, from “brightest” to “darkest”: C Lydian, C major, C Mixolydian, C Dorian, C natural minor, C Phrygian, C Locrian.
This order makes more sense when you see the modes written on the circle of fifths.
Continue reading “Modes from light to dark around the chromatic circle”
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 usually okay, but as you moved further out on the circle of fifths, things got ugly fast. So this new tuning system that actually sounded good in all the keys was an exciting development.
However… no one knows what tuning system Bach used. All we know is that it wasn’t twelve-tone equal temperament, the one we all use now. There were many systems in circulation at the time that people called “well temperament.” Was Bach using Werckmeister? Kirnberger? Kellner? Some idiosyncratic system of his own invention? No one knows. This video sums up the situation well:
Until this gets resolved, at least technology makes it easy to hear these different systems for yourself. I used Oddsound MTS-ESP to run some of the Well-Tempered Clavier preludes through various historical tuning systems. Here’s what I got:
Continue reading “The Well-Tempered (and not-so-well-tempered) Clavier”
I am finishing my dissertation soon and am applying for full-time academic jobs. Here’s my teaching statement. It’s adapted from the first two chapters of Electronic Music School: a Contemporary Approach to Teaching Musical Creativity. Also see my research statement.
I have taught as an adjunct at New York University’s Steinhardt School, The New School’s Eugene Lang College, and Montclair State University’s Cali School of Music. At NYU, I have taught the Technology Practicum for Music Education for the past seven years. I designed this course and am its sole instructor. This past year, I also began co-teaching the Popular Music Practicum for Music Education, which I worked to overhaul extensively. This spring, I will be taking over an existing graduate course, Technology Trends in Music Education. At the New School, I have taught Fundamentals of Western Music, an existing course that I had broad latitude to remake. At Montclair State University, I teach Introduction to Music Technology, another existing course that I modified and updated. I have also taught Electronic Music Composition and Cultural Significance of Rap and Rock, both of which I solely designed. Continue reading “Teaching statement”
Western people like two things in harmony: intervals derived from the natural overtone series, and the ability to play in multiple keys. Unfortunately, it’s not possible to do both of these things within the same tuning system. If you want to use just intonation intervals derived from harmonics, then they will not work in every key. So we as a civilization have decided to use a tuning system that enables you to play in lots of different keys, even though it means that all of the keys are slightly out of tune. Fortunately, the computer makes it easy to explore alternative tuning systems. I have been experimenting with this cool tuning plugin called MTS-ESP.
I have struggled my whole life to understand how tuning works, so I made a track to demonstrate to myself how just intonation sounds when you use it in all twelve keys.
What you are hearing in my track is a tuning system that is “perfect” in C major, but not so perfect in other keys, and very not perfect in a few of them. Let’s figure out why!
