I got interested in tuning theory because of the blues. The first instrument I learned to play well was the harmonica, and an essential part of blues harmonica is bending notes to make them go flat. The same is true for blues guitar, though there you are bending notes sharp rather than flat. For several …
Continue reading “Maceo Parker’s blue notes in a James Brown classic”
What makes Jerry Garcia’s guitar style so magical? What makes a person like me slog through so much indifferent-to-terrible Grateful Dead music to hear it? Rather than try to understand the whole corpus at once, I think it makes more sense to zoom in on specific phrases and passages and see how they work. In …
Continue reading “What does Jerry Garcia play on “Eyes of the World” and why does it sound so cool”
The Grateful Dead’s second and third albums were expensive, high-concept psychedelic odysseys that didn’t sell, putting the band deep in debt to their label. This forced them to bang out a series of low-budget quickies: a live album and two back-to-basics roots records. Ironically, this constraint produced the band’s best-loved and most iconic recordings: Live/Dead, …
The top number in a time signature is easy to understand. Is the song in four? Count “one, two, three, four.” Is it in three? Count “one, two, three.” Is it in five? Count “one, two, three, four, five.” That’s all there is to it. However, the bottom number is another story. What is going …
Continue reading “The bottom number in time signatures has always confused me”
In class we have been talking about secondary dominants, where you temporarily treat a chord as a new key center before returning to the main key. In a modulation, you move to a new key center and stay there (for a while, anyway). Modulations were a common songwriting technique in pre-rock popular music, and a …
This week in aural skills, we’re working on various harmonic tropes based on IV-I root movements. This chord progression is technically called the plagal cadence, but is more memorably nicknamed the “Amen” cadence because it’s a traditional European hymn ending. (It has nothing to do with the Amen break, though they do sound good together.) …
My NYU aural skills students are working on chord identification. My last post talked about seventh chords; this post is about chords with more notes in them, or at least, different notes. My theory colleagues call them added-note chords. They are more commonly called jazz chords, though many of the examples I list below are …
After spending their first few years writing abstract psychedelic tunes, the Grateful Dead took a hard turn into Americana. They wrote a bunch of songs inspired by blues, country and folk, and in doing so, they massively expanded their listener base. Several of these songs involve outlaws and drifters in the Wild West. I think …
As I continue to build groove pedagogy resources, I want to clear up some persistent confusion about polymeter and polyrhythm. If you don’t feel like reading the whole post, it can be summed up in this image: The most concisely I can put this into words: In polymeter, the grid lines are aligned, but the …
St Stephen might be the most “Grateful Dead” of Grateful Dead songs, the one that (for better or worse) sounds the most like them and the most unlike anyone else. It’s a cliche with the Dead to say that the live version is better than the studio version, but in the case of “St Stephen”, …
