The Facebook Effect

Last night I caught a lecture by David Kirkpatrick on his book The Facebook Effect. This post is going to be about Kirkpatrick’s discussion of the book, not the book itself, since I just got it last night and haven’t started reading it yet. But his talk certainly conveyed the flavor.

Kirkpatrick had one significant advantage over the makers of The Social Network: participation by Mark Zuckerburg. Kirkpatrick loves Facebook and reveres Zuckerburg, so his book isn’t exactly a hard-hitting expose. Techcrunch accompanies their review of the book with this image:

I don’t think Kirkpatrick is wrong; Facebook is an undeniable phenomenon and Zuck is a remarkable guy. I just don’t love FB as unreservedly as Kirkpatrick does.

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Promoting music through social media

As part of New York Social Media Week, I attended a panel entitled “The Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy of Social Media as Music’s Savior.” It was first thing in the morning, which really asks a lot from the music hipsters. I would normally have just live-tweeted this thing, but the wi-fi in the place was too weak, and besides, I figured it deserved a blog post. So here’s the more coherent, edited version of what I planned to post on Twitter. Since the event was dominated by Kanye West from the title on down, I’ll be featuring Twitter-centric pictures of him.

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Diminished chords and the blues

The blues is a good entry path for beginner guitarists. If you learn the standard fifteen chords and the blues scale, you’ll be well on your way. However, there’s one crucial piece of additional music vocabulary you need to fully inhabit blues tonality, and that is the mysterious diminished seventh chord.

To make a diminished seventh chord, you start on any note, go up a minor third, then another, then another. Here are the notes in Cdim7:

You can also derive this chord from C7: take each note in the chord except for C and slide it down a half step.

This video explains how dim7 chords relate to other seventh chords. Here are some good guitar fingerings for dim7 chords.

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The roof is on fire

My quest to track down the origin of the most persistent recurring hip-hop memes brings me to this chant:

The roof, the roof, the roof is on fire
We don’t need no water, let the motherf***er burn

The chant made its first appearance in the hip-hop canon in “The Roof Is On Fire” by Rock Master Scott & The Dynamic Three, the B-side to their 1984 single “Request Line.” “The Roof Is On Fire” ended up being way more popular.

The recorded version of “The Roof Is On Fire” leaves out the mofo line. In 1984 people mostly weren’t using curses in hip-hop recordings, which now seems charmingly quaint. In live shows, Rock Master Scott and the Dynamic Three were less demure, and when they led the crowd in the chant, the mofo was included.

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White people and hip-hop

A little while back I went to a screening and discussion at NYU of Blacking Up: Hip-Hop’s Remix of Race and Identity, a documentary about the wigger phenomenon by Robert Clift. I’m a very white person who has been heavily involved with “black” music over the years, like for example rapping an Ice Cube song in public on more than one occasion. So this is an issue close to my heart. Here’s the trailer:

And here are the first three minutes of the film:

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The freakiness of melodic minor

My last post on minor keys covered the three scales you need for most situations in rock, pop, and film scores: natural minor, harmonic minor, and Dorian mode. There’s also the blues scale, which sounds good in any key, major or minor. For musical Jedi masters, there’s one more valuable minor scale. It’s called the melodic minor scale, and if you want to push your playing or writing in a more adventurous, exotic and challenging direction, it’s a good one to have in your musical toolbox.

Note that the scale is symmetrical along a line drawn through D-flat and G. The scale has the same symmetry if you write it on the circle of fifths too.

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Intro to minor keys

Minor keys are way more complicated than major keys. But the effort is worth it; all that complexity gives a richer array of expressive possibility.

The best place to start with minor keys, paradoxically, is with the major scale modes. The pitches in E-flat major are the same as the ones in C natural minor. If you think of C as home base rather than E-flat, you get a bunch of useful chords and scales.

C natural minor

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The major scale modes

When you first set out to learn your scales, it can be discouraging. There are so many of them, and their names are so bewildering. The good news is that when you learn one scale, you get a bunch of other scales “for free.” This is because many scales share the same pitches, just in different orders. Scales that are related in this way are called modes.

To understand modes, picture a set of Scrabble tiles. Say you have seven Scrabble tiles that spell the word RESPECT. You can take the first two letters off and stick them on the end to get SPECTRE (the British spelling of specter.) In music theory terms, SPECTRE is a mode of RESPECT; conversely, RESPECT is a mode of SPECTRE.

Now imagine your Scrabble tiles spell ABCDEFG. If you treat the letters as note names, this is a scale called A natural minor. If you take the first two letters off and put them on the end, you get CDEFGAB, the C major scale. C major and A natural minor are modes of one another; learning to play one gives you the other one for free.

This post will walk you through all of the modes of C major. To find a mode, pick any white key on the piano and play to the right to get the mode starting on that note.

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Meet the major scale

The C major scale is the foundation that the rest of western music theory sits on. If you master it, you get a bunch of cool chords and scales for free, along with a window into a huge swath of our musical culture.

How to form the scale

Imagine an ice cube tray with twelve slots, one for each note in the western tuning system, labeled like so:

[C][C#][D][D#][E][F][F#][G][G#][A][A#][B]

To make the C major scale, you just remove all the ice cubes with # in their names, like so:

[C][ ][D][ ][E][F][ ][G][ ][A][ ][B]

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The blues scale

Expanding on a post about blues basics.

When you’re first learning to improvise, it’s daunting to be confronted with all the scales. Fortunately, there’s one scale that sounds good in any situation: the blues scale. It’s a universal harmonic solvent. I haven’t encountered a chord progression yet that didn’t fit with the blues scale. It works in blues, of course, but it also sounds terrific in rock, country, jazz, reggae, funk and much else.

How to play the blues scale

The blues scale is the minor pentatonic with a note added, the sharp fourth/flat fifth. The C blues scale is C, Eb, F, F#, G, Bb. Here it is in standard music notation:

And here it is on the chromatic circle:

The blues scale is easy to play on guitar. Your index finger plays the root on the E string, so to play C blues, put your index on the eighth fret.

Blues scale guitar fingering

The Eb blues scale is exceptionally easy to play on piano — just play the black keys and add the note A.

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