I hear it all the time from my friends in the rock world, and see it all the time in internet discussions: guitarists are struggling with their music theory, or they’ve given up on it completely. This is not their fault! Music theory is taught pretty badly for the most part, and it rarely addresses the music that rock musicians are playing.
Does this geometric relationship mean anything musically? Turns out that it does. Lydian and Locrian are mirror images in feeling, not just as necklaces. Read on!
I don’t know a lot about Afro-Caribbean rhythms, beyond the fact that they cause me intense joy whenever I hear them. My formal music education has focused almost exclusively on harmony, and I’ve had to learn about rhythm mostly on my own. That’s why it was so exciting for me to discover the work of Godfried Toussaint. He introduced me to a startlingly useful pedagogical tool: the rhythm necklace.
A rhythm necklace is a circular notation for rhythm. Let’s say your rhythm is in 12/8 time. That means that each cycle of the rhythm has twelve slots where sounds can go, and each slot is an eighth note long (which is not very long.) A 12/8 rhythm necklace is like a circular ice cube tray that holds twelve ice cubes.
What’s so great about writing rhythms this way? Rhythms are relationships between events that are non-adjacent in time. When you write your rhythms from left to right, as is conventional, it’s hard to make out the relationships. On the circle, the symmetries and patterns jump right out at you. I recommend the Toussaint-inspired Rhythm Necklace app to get these concepts under your fingers and into your ears.
You can’t look into Afro-Caribbean beats without coming across a bell pattern called Bembé, also known as “the standard pattern” or the “short bell pattern.” Here’s how it sounds:
I was probably first exposed to Bembé by Santana’s “Incident at Neshabur.”
Bembé’s meter is ambivalent. You can represent it as duple (4/4) or triple (6/8 or 12/8). Practitioners urge you not to think of the bell pattern as being in one meter or the other. Instead, you’re supposed to hold both of them in your head at the same time. The ambiguity is the point.
Earlier this spring, I subbed for Adam Bell‘s Music Technology 101 class at Montclair State. His sections were populated more exclusively with classical conservatory kids than mine, so for my one-shot lesson, I figured I’d talk them through some items from my illicit collection of multitrack stems, and give them a sense of the history of the recorded art form.
There’s a broad diversity of harmonic practices being used out there in the world of blues-based popular music, rock in particular. While a given song may not use a lot of scales and chords, the relationships between those scales and chords is rarely simple or obvious. You really just need to learn all of them. It takes a lot of practice. Fortunately, there is a single scale that works in every situation, which I’ll get to at the end of this post.
The app is delightful by itself, but it really gets to be miraculous when you use it as a wireless MIDI controller for Ableton. I was expecting to use this thing as a way to sequence drums. Instead, its real value turns out to be that it’s a way to perform melodies in real time. Continue reading “Rhythm Necklace”
This question gets asked a lot. It’s really four questions: 1) What is music theory? 2) Does music theory really teach you what music is? 3) Does music theory teach you how to create music? And 4) how do you learn music theory? Let’s take these questions one at a time.
Most of us agree that the Beatles made great music. But some people don’t believe the Beatles to have been especially good musicians. Quincy Jones famously called them “the worst musicians in the world.” He’s exaggerating, but he has a point. By modern standards, the playing on Beatles records is sloppy. The parts are interesting by the standards of 60s rock, but not nothing that would challenge a jazz or classical player. John, Paul, George and Ringo are pretty good singers and instrumentalists, but you could walk into any music school and quickly find yourself dozens of better ones.
The thing is: I do think the Beatles are great musicians. However, it is not because of their playing, or their singing, or even their songwriting. The Beatles are great because of their ability to create studio recordings. Their albums from Revolver onwards are hugely greater than the sum of the material, arrangements, and performances. Those late albums are masterpieces of recording, editing, mixing, and effects, of hyperrealist timbral and spatial manipulation, and of surrealist tape editing.
