The combined features of a piece of music cause listeners to feel certain ways. Movies use this knowledge to set the mood for the scene with music. Performers judge the crowd’s energy and adjust their song order. Composers dive into their lyrics and fashion music to surround the words with the right mood.  As an artist, feel is a very important characteristic of your music. Let’s examine a few songs and try to describe what makes them feel relaxing, exciting, etc.  Threnody by Goldmund: Relaxing This piano piece is slow, and sparse. The recording includes the sound of the performer m ..read more

Music tells its story over time. Artists can send their listeners on a journey through build ups and break downs. Some songs start soft and slow and build in intensity throughout the composition. Others start with a bang and power thru until a middle section where they get soft and rebuild to the finale. There are even great songs without much in the way of building up or breaking down. “Somewhere Over The Rainbow” by Israel Kamakawiwo’ole is a great example of a song without much change in the underlying structure of the composition. The ukulele keeps its rhythm in the background and Israel s ..read more

In the art of music, the sequence of the sounds plays a large role on the listener’s experience. REPETITION is a powerful way to relax, build tension, and set listeners up for surprises. Music is a balancing act between tension and release between singer and band, chord and melody, loud and soft, and ultimately: repetition and change. Repeating notes, phrases, lyrics, and whole song sections help listeners feel calm, train them to sing along, and understand the timing of the piece. Alas, too much repetition can become boring and it is up to the artist to decide when and where to make changes t ..read more

In the technical pursuit of learning to play an instrument it is easy to forget the ART of music. Just like painters, cinematographers, sculptors and the like, musicians have a responsibility to themselves and their craft to delve into the mystic. In my humble opinion, this is where 90% of music misses the mark. The art section of the blog will not follow a step-by-step approach. Instead we will travel different paths until we’ve gone on a bunch of tangents. I will attempt to give you some sense of how to take these ideas and approaches and put them into use as a musician yourself. In the real ..read more

Answers for the minor triads: To complete the three most used/useful types of chords we must learn DOMINANT SEVENTH CHORDS. Seventh chords are 4 note chords and the name comes from the fact that when you spell them out you use the 1,3,5, and 7 of the scale. While there are many different types of seventh chords the most common one is the bluesy and tense dominant seventh chord. People almost always shorten the name to C7, E7, Db7 (D flat seven) without saying the word dominant. For all the seventh chords that we will learn in the future, everyone says the full name i.e. C minor seven, B flat ..read more

Here are the answers for major triads from the last lesson. Make sure you’ve used these sounds before you try to learn about the next chord, otherwise you will be full of knowledge but not full of music. MINOR TRIADS are built with three notes just like the major triads. Most people simply call them MINOR CHORDS. They have a somewhat sorrowful quality to them with a bit of tension. The note that makes up the middle of the triad vibrates the air such that it bounces in conflict with the air from the other two notes. To learn more about the science of acoustics we will later study the HARMONIC ..read more

Here are the correct notes to the major scales. Hopefully you found the right answers and can understand any corrections you need to make. Your best bet now is to print out this sheet and throw away the handwritten one so you for sure have every note listed correctly.  Our next step is going to be using these major scales to build CHORDS. If you found the major scales to be difficult to build, I think that building chords to be easier. Let me explain. The first thing we need to do look at the bottom of the completed major scales page and notice the numbers. These are the SCALE DEGREES. In ..read more

Using what we’ve learned in the previous 2 lessons about the MUSICAL ALPHABET, and HALF-STEPS and WHOLE-STEPS, we can now build MAJOR SCALES. Major scales are 7 notes that can be shuffled around to build  harmonies (a guitar chord) and melodies (your favorite singing part).  Knowing all the major scales (even if they are just written down) allows you to compare a major scale to a chord or string of notes. When you do this the major scale acts like a tape measure for musical distance. This will be highly useful once you get it. The Major Scale is built of a starting note called the RO ..read more

The next step in understanding the musical alphabet is learning the full order of the 12 notes in order: They are as follows going up in pitch: A A# B C C# D D# E F F# G G# | A A# B C … going down in pitch: A Ab G Gb F E Eb D Db C B Bb | A Ab G Gb … Each sharp/flat key is the same sound with 2 possible names. We will learn when to call it a sharp or flat in the next lesson. Most songs focus on groups of notes to make their musical recipe. For example, a rock guitar solo might be built with only A C D E and G notes. The two most important types of recipes for the musician to understand and use ..read more

The study of how music works is called music theory. Music theory provides a way to think and talk about how musical sounds interact. It doesn’t explain every ounce of magic that makes music so awesome but it gives musicians skills to break down music into concepts, inspire creativity, and solve problems. The musical alphabet is the starting point for learning how music works. The musical alphabet consists of 12 names we give to sounds that happen in most music. The easiest ones to understand are the first seven letters of the alphabet: A, B, C, D, E, F, & G. These are called “naturals ..read more