This week in pop theory class, we are talking about the melodic-harmonic divorce, where the chords and melody to a song are all from the same major or minor key, but do not necessarily agree with each other at the local level. This is a common feature of current pop. It’s so common, in fact, …
Tag Archives: music theory
Adding vocal harmony to a Tears for Fears song
My theory students are going to be writing vocal harmonies for one of their assignments. To give them guidance, I will be talking through one possible approach to adding harmonies to “Shout” by Tears for Fears. Here’s the original song: Here’s the acapella. I’m not arguing that this song needs harmony vocals; it’s just a …
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Identifying chromatic embellishments
Embellishing tones are non-chord tones that are still within the key or mode. Chromatic embellishments are notes from outside the key or mode. They are easy to spot because they sound characteristically “weird”, or, at least, more colorful than the other notes around them. Thus the “chromatic” part – the word comes from chroma, the …
Modern Band Music Theory
I met Dr Jim Frankel, the founder of MusicFirst, back when I was a grad student. We have been mutual admirers in a passive way since then. It was a pleasant surprise when, over the summer, he asked me to contribute to their new Modern Band curriculum, specifically, the music theory component. It’s now being …
I wrote a song to help my students with key signatures
Yesterday I was sitting in on a colleague’s theory class, and when she said that it was time to practice identifying key signatures, everyone groaned. I feel their pain and want to help. I myself learned the key signatures by reading and writing a lot of music in lots of different keys and eventually just …
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C-flat and B-sharp
This post is a continuation of my explainer on the difference between F-sharp and G-flat. To sum that one up: in our present-day standard tuning system, F-sharp and G-flat sound the same; the only difference between them is notational. In historical tuning systems, however, they sounded quite different. Tuning is hard! In this post, I …
F-sharp vs G-flat in just intonation
As I gear up for teaching music theory in the fall, I’m still refining my explanation of Western music’s arcane naming system for enharmonics. Why is the note between F and G sometimes called F-sharp and sometimes called G-flat? Why do we sometimes call the interval between that note and C an augmented fourth, and …
High Time
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, …
Hobo Blues
Now that the novelty of merely getting to talk about the blues in class has worn off, I am dealing with the practical question of how best to teach it. Rather than working from a set of abstract principles, I decided to walk my students through a selection of specific tunes to see what we …
The minor key universe
In a previous post, I suggested that we think of an expanded major key universe that includes the major scale, Mixolydian mode, Lydian mode, and maybe also Mixolydian b6. In this post, I present a similar approach to minor keys, by extending the logic of Western European tonal theory to cover some additional minor scale …