Music for practicing scales

Are you trying to learn how to improvise with scales and patterns, but finding it hard to make yourself practice? Do yourself a favor, and practice over actual music. A student asked me to make him a playlist of harmonically static music that’s good for practicing over. I thought I would share it with everyone.

The music in this post is perfect for working out scales. Each track stays in a particular key or mode for long stretches of time, and has a slow or medium tempo. You can dig deep into the scales associated with each one without needing to worry about form or rapid chord changes. Click the links to load the aQWERTYon set to the appropriate key and scale.

The Temptations

“Papa Was a Rolling Stone” – B-flat Dorian or blues

Miles Davis

“Shhh Peaceful” – D Mixolydian (or blues, or major, or really anything)
“In A Silent Way/It’s About That Time” – slow part is E major (or Lydian, or blues), funky part is F Mixolydian (or blues, or Dorian)

“He Loved Him Madly” – C Phrygian (or blues, or natural minor, or any minor scale)

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Hip-hop as a tool for hip-hop ethnography

I believe in using music as a tool for analyzing and discussing music. To that end, I wanted to try interviewing a musician about a song of theirs, and then do a remix of the song that incorporates the interview. A rapper named Anna Diorio a.k.a. Happy Accident volunteered to participate. We discussed the writing and production of her song “A Man’s World.”

https://soundcloud.com/thetruthfairy/a-mans-world

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Chord pizzas

The Groove Pizza uses geometry to help visualize rhythms. The MusEDLab is planning to create a similar tool for visualizing music theory by merging the aQWERTYon with the Scale Wheel. When you put the twelve pitch classes in a circle, you can connect the dots between different notes in a chord or scale to form shapes. My hypothesis is that seeing these shapes along with hearing the notes will help people learn music theory more easily. In this post, I’ll talk through some concept images.

First, let’s look at two different ways to represent the pitch classes on a circle. On the left is the chromatic circle, showing the notes in the order of pitch height (the way they are on a piano keyboard.) On the right is the circle of fifths. These two circles have an interesting relationship: the circle of fifths is the involute of the chromatic circle. Notice that C, D, E, G-flat, A-flat and B-flat are in the same places on both circles, while the other six notes trade places across the circle. Pretty cool!

The chromatic circle and the circle of fifths

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Dancing to Michael Jackson with my kids

I have a longstanding musical relationship with Michael Jackson. There’s nothing remarkable about that; many people do. Like the rest of my age cohort, Michael entered my consciousness with Thriller in the early 1980s. Aside from a period in my teens and young adulthood, he has rarely been out of my ears since. The relationship took on a new significance when my kids got interested in him, though “interested” is not the right word to describe their obsession. Milo, at age five, will listen to “Beat It” or “Billie Jean” on endless repeat for literally hours at a time. Bernadetta, age two, asks for “Beat It” by name—it’s one of two song titles she knows, along with “Yellow Submarine.” At her second birthday party, she insisted on dancing to “Beat It” rather than opening her presents.

Michael Jackson by Paul Bedard

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Hip-hop teaches confidence lessons

I’m working on a paper about music education and hip-hop, and I’m going to use this post to work out some thoughts.

My wife and I spent our rare date night going to see Black Panther at BAM. It was uplifting. Many (most?) black audience members came dressed in full Afrofuturistic splendor. A group of women in our section were especially decked out:

Black Panther audience members at BAM

I was admiring their outfits and talking about how I wasn’t expecting such an emotional response to the movie. One of the women said it was as big a deal for them as the election of Barack Obama in 2008. I know representation is important, but this seems like it’s more than just seeing black faces on the movie screen. Black Twitter is talking about how this movie is different because it isn’t about overcoming historical pain or present-day hardship; it’s about showing black people as powerful, rich, technologically advanced, and above all, serenely confident.

Black Panther is heavily overdetermined, like all superhero movies. But I’m especially interested in the way we could read it as a metaphor for music, with the Wakandans as representing African musical traditions and Eric Killmonger as representing the global rise of hip-hop. I see Killmonger this way not only because he’s American, but because so many of his qualities and mannerisms remind me of the role of hip-hop in the public imagination. He’s stylish, effortlessly charismatic, and seemingly indifferent to anyone else’s approval. He’s funny, too, not in the warm and good-natured way that Shuri is, but in a more aggressive and sarcastic way. He’s both arrogant and vulnerable, using implacable cool to conceal deep hurt. And he wants to remake the world by fomenting black revolution, by any means necessary. The Wakandans, meanwhile, are uncomplicatedly strong, self-possessed, and at ease with their own power. But they are also withdrawn from the world, fearing that getting involving in other people’s struggles will destroy what makes their culture so unique and beautiful.

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Real vs hyperreal vs surreal

You can put all recorded music techniques and gestures into three categories: realist, hyperrealist, and surrealist. These categories have soft boundaries that broadly overlap. Nevertheless, I find them to be a useful way to organize my thinking about sonic aesthetics.

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Junto trios

In the past three weeks, thanks to the magic of the Disquiet Junto, I’ve participated in the creation of three musical trios with six strangers from the internet. Here’s a family tree of the nine tracks we all did:

Junto trios

Artist names are in black, “part one” tracks are in blue, “part two” tracks are in red, and “part three” tracks are in green. We followed Marc Weidenbaum’s prompts for part one, part two, and part three. Hear all the music we all made below.

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Critiquing creative work with a growth mindset

I’m in the process of doing some large-scale writing about the way I teach music technology. To that end, I thought I would talk some about how I evaluate students’ creative work, both for grading purposes and during in-class critiques.

Thumbs up

The main thing I have students do in music tech class is make original music and lots of it. So the question immediately becomes, how do I even begin to objectively assess that stuff?  Continue reading “Critiquing creative work with a growth mindset”

New harmony course with Soundfly

My new online music theory class with Soundfly launches in a few weeks. It’s a six-week mentor guided journey through advanced harmonic concepts like extended chords and modal interchange, with examples drawn from contemporary pop, hip-hop and electronica. Soundfly does great work and I’m proud to be working with them.

The Creative Power of Advanced Harmony

The happiest chord progression ever

See also: the saddest chord progression ever. And also check out this deep dive into the groove of “I Want You Back.”

We customarily think of descending melodies and chord progressions as being sad–they call it the “lament bass” for a reason. You may be surprised to learn, then, that the happiest song of all time also has a descending progression: “I Want You Back” by the Jackson 5.

This recording was made just after Michael’s eleventh birthday. I do not approve of child labor, and making a prepubescent boy sing all these songs about romantic love ended up having some horrific long-term psychological consequences. But he gave incredible performances as a kid, there’s no question about that.

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