How do you create a bassline? This question is not just for bass players. It’s for producers and songwriters, who are likely to be programming their own bass parts in their DAW. Keyboard players can do basslines in their left hand; guitarists do them with their thumbs. And even if you never create or play …
Tag Archives: Michael Jackson
We should be counting most pop music in 8/4
Almost all Anglo-American pop music is in 4/4, aside from occasional 6/8 ballads. However, dancers tend to count off “five, six, seven, eight.” Why are they counting like this? Is it because they are thinking in 8/4 or 8/8? If so, they are right to do so. I think everybody should be counting pop music …
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Modulations in “Man in the Mirror”
It’s modulation week in aural skills class, and that means we get to talk about my two favorite pop song key changes, both of which are from the same Michael Jackson song. The song was written by Glen Ballard and Siedah Garrett. Michael and Quincy Jones produced. Glen Ballard also co-wrote and produced “Hold On” …
End-accented phrases make melodies sound cool
I learned the terms “beginning-accented melody” and “end-accented melody” from The Musical Language of Rock by David Temperley. The terms mean what they sound like: a melodic phrase whose accent is either at its beginning or its end. This seems like the definition of a purely academic theory concept, but it turns out that end-accentedness …
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Harmonic rhythm in two-chord shuttles
We devote a lot of attention in music theory pedagogy to chords. But it isn’t enough to look at what the chords are; you have to consider when they are too. The placement of chord changes in musical time is called harmonic rhythm. The easiest way to understand this idea is to look at songs …
A general theory of pop smashes
My latest MusicRadar column advances the theory that to be a truly generation-spanning pop colossus, a song has to be at least a little bit weird and annoying. This was a tricky thing to write, because I wasn’t looking for “popular songs that I personally find annoying.” That would be easy, I find most popular …
The major key universe
Minor keys are complicated, because there are so many different minor scales. Major keys seem simpler, because there is only the one major scale. At least, that is how things worked in Western Europe between 1700 and 1900. In present-day Anglo-American pop, though, we need to expand our idea of what a major key is.
The bottom number in time signatures has always confused me
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 …
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Identifying tritone substitutions
This is one of those jazz theory ideas that gets explained endlessly online and in texts and is relatively rare in a typical American’s listening experience. But when you do hear it, it does sound cool. I made an interactive explainer, because as with so many jazz theory concepts, tritone substitutions make more sense when …
Identifying modulations
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 …