Make your chord progressions less boring using secondary dominants

Diatonic harmony is boring. Random dissonance is boring too. How do you make your music less predictable, but in a logical-sounding way? Especially if you want your harmony to sound “jazzy”? One reliable technique is to use secondary dominants. The idea is to treat each chord in a key as the temporary center of its own key, and precede it with its own V7 chord. This diagram shows all twelve possible key centers on the inner ring, and each one’s V7 chord on the outer ring:

The idea here is that if you pick any dominant chord on the outer ring, it will sound good to resolve it to its neighbor on the inner ring.

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Let’s listen to some extremely slowed down Bach

In this stressful time, we all need some help attaining inner peace. I’ve been enjoying listening to and thinking about the prelude to Bach’s Violin Partita Number 3 in E major as played by Hopkinson Smith.

Beautiful though this is, it’s also a lot of information packed into a small space. I thought it might be more relaxing if it was slower. And that it might be a lot more relaxing if it was a lot slower. So I used Ableton Live to stretch it out as slow as I possibly could.

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An intro to counterpoint

Counterpoint is a musical technique that combines two or more independent melody lines. It’s one of the characteristic sounds of Western classical music. Bach wrote a ton of it.

But counterpoint isn’t always so complicated. Any song that has a vocal melody with a bassline underneath is an example of counterpoint. If you have ever sung “row row row your boat” in a round, that is also counterpoint.

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The Chord Dictionary

I made a big spreadsheet with all the chords in it. It’s not all the possible chords, but it’s the ones you most commonly encounter in Western classical, jazz, rock and pop.

I also made some videos explaining how chords work, with handy aQWERTYon visualization. Enjoy!

I’m making a bunch of music teaching videos

Partially to prepare for remote teaching my courses, and partially to keep myself from losing my mind, I’m putting a bunch of new videos on YouTube. I’m starting with material I’ve done many times in classes and conference presentations, and then will be branching out into newer stuff as I go.

I imagine that these will also get looser and more podcast-y as I go along, so if you have requests for topics or themes, please let me know.

Online music teaching resources

This is my curated collection of online music teaching, learning and creation resources. Use in good health.

Big collections:

A spreadsheet of online music theory resources and projects, plus my New School syllabus that uses many of these things.

A spreadsheet of online music technology resources and projects.

The NYSSMA Best Practices Database.

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Harmonica Meditation

This post is something new for me: an online prose score, in the spirit of Pauline Oliveros.

Harmonica Meditation

For unaccompanied ten-hole diatonic harmonica, in any key.

  1. Exhale completely.
  2. Put the harmonica to your mouth and take a deep breath all the way in, as slowly as you can. I recommend starting at the low (left) end of the harmonica and arpeggiating upwards, but you can play whichever notes you like.
  3. Exhale completely through the harmonica, as slowly as you can.
  4. Continue to inhale and exhale slowly and completely. Pay attention to the sound of the notes and chords, to their loudness, intonation, and timbre. If you can bend the notes or create articulations by tonguing or opening and closing your hands around the harmonica, do so.
  5. The piece ends on an inhale. Let the notes fade out gently as your lungs fill. When you take the harmonica away from your mouth and exhale, the piece is over.

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RIP McCoy Tyner

One of my favorite ever jazz musicians, and favorite ever musicians period. His playing with John Coltrane is obviously mind-boggling, but even if he and Coltrane had never met he would still have been a giant. My favorite McCoy moment is a four-bar phrase from the middle of his long solo on Coltrane’s “Lonnie’s Lament.” Listen at 3:35.

That might be the single hardest, funkiest thing in jazz history. I did my best to transcribe it, though I’m not a hundred percent confident about the left-hand voicings.

McCoy influenced my guitar playing in a major way – his iconic fourths chords translate better to guitar than most piano voicings. I have done my best jazz playing by planing fourths chords up and down chromatically or by bigger jumps. I certainly can’t play single lines as fast as McCoy could, but I have strived to imitate his swing and power.

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Metrical dissonance in the Gigue from Bach’s E minor English Suite

I’m continuing my journey through rhythmic analyses of canonical classical works with Metrical Displacement and Metrically Dissonant Hemiolas by Channan Willner. One of the pieces that Willner analyzes is the Gigue from Bach’s English Suite No. 5 in E minor, played here by Glenn Gould.

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