Bach wrote The Well-Tempered Clavier as a showcase for a new tuning system that could play in all twelve major and all twelve minor keys. Up until that point, the various European tuning systems only worked for some keys, not all of them. If you were in or near the key of C, you were …
Continue reading “The Well-Tempered (and not-so-well-tempered) Clavier”
Diminished seventh chords are strange creatures: a cliche for Dracula’s castle, but also a cornerstone of the blues. They are also difficult to understand. The good news is that in any given key, there are only three possible diminished seventh chords: the one whose root is the tonic of the key, the one whose root …
Continue reading “The three diminished chords: blues, jazz and classical”
Let’s say you have two chords, G7 and C. According to Western classical theory, these two chords establish that you are in the key of C. The G7 is tense and unresolved, and it makes you yearn for the calm stability of C. Music theory resources are full of language about how dominant seventh chords …
Ashanti Mills from my Patreon had a brilliant idea. He said, hey, you know how you combined interviews with Toni Blackman with hip-hop songs to explain hip-hop pedagogy? You should do that with music theory: have songs that explain their musical content to you. This is one of those ideas that seems obvious as soon …
One of the most powerful music theory concepts you can learn is how to make chords from scales. If you learn a few scales, then you get a whole bunch of chords for free. The specifics of all the chord names can be complicated and daunting. But the concept of constructing them is very simple. …
We all love This Is Spin̈al Tap, but you’re not supposed to take it literally. Nevertheless, this very silly Rolling Stone article tries to prove Nigel right. The author is a doctoral student in quantitative methods. She should probably have asked a music theorist about this before publishing it, or really any musical person. I …
Continue reading “No, Rolling Stone, D minor is not the saddest of all keys”
I’m spending this month in California with my in-laws, and so naturally I went searching my iTunes for thematically appropriate songs. One of the results was this exquisite Lightnin’ Hopkins recording. Here’s my visualization using Ableton Live. I tuned the recording up a half step so that it’s in A rather than A-flat, which makes …
Why is “I Want You Back” by the Jackson 5 such an uncontainable explosion of joy? It has the happiest chord progression ever, which I wrote about in a previous post. But the harmony is just the icing on the cake. The real heart of this tune is the groove. Let’s have a look! I …
Here is a visualization of all the scales in the aQWERTYon, organized by the way I personally conceptualize them. This does not represent every scale in the world, just a broad selection of the ones in common usage in pop, rock, R&B, hip-hop, jazz, and film and game music. I group scales into three broad …
So far, I have resisted writing about Robert Johnson on this blog. I love Robert Johnson, but it feels so corny to be yet another a white dude rhapsodizing about him. However, Robert Johnson is so sublimely great that he leaves me no choice. Robert Johnson’s life is famously not well documented, and his fans …
