You know what nobody ever says? ”Learning math is important. It can really help you become a better musician.” It’s an undeniable fact. Music theory is mostly mathematics. Tone frequencies are spaced logarithmically. Intervals, and the chords they form, are mathematical structures. Scales, keys, and the functional relationships contained within them are set theory. Understanding complex rhythmic subdivisions requires intuitively understanding the process of multiplying fractions. And on a more abstract level, music theory is about symbol manipulation in the same way mathematics is symbol man ..read more

The full list of Summer I classes. This is the most extensive slate of group classes we've ever offered. And the short 6-week sessions mean there's never been a better time to get an affordable jump start on a new instrument, return to one that's gathering dust, pick up a new skill, or introduce your kid to a love of music. Whatever you're looking for, we have you covered. Space is limited so sign up now ..read more

Theory Level: Intermediate It’s Bb Augmented. That’s the answer to last week’s question. The only triad that is properly spelled with both a sharp and a flat. In this case Bb, D, F#. But why is such a seemingly normal chord the one exception? Well, right off the bat, if you know a little theory, you probably should have guessed it would be an augmented chord. After all, every major, minor or diminished chord is diatonic in at least one major key, and since no major key signature contains both sharps and flats, it stands to reason that no major, minor, or diminished chord could possibly satisf ..read more

I sort of dropped the ball on this series, but I’m back. Anyway…when I last left this discussion, we had defined 2 of our 4 answers to the question ofhow many unique triads there are (48 and 68). Today, as promised, we’ll talk about the next answer, which is 84. To recap, we get 48 by simply multiplying the 12 unique tones of the octave by the 4 types of triads to get how many different sounding triads there are. 68 we got by adding in enharmonic spellings of black keys (e.g. F# and Gb are two different spellings of the same tone). This gave 17 possible roots x4 possible chord types. And thi ..read more

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Theory Level: Intermediate Ok, so let’s put our Bb Augmented chord aside. We’ll come back to it. Two weeks ago, I posed the question: How many different triads are there, and I proposed 4 different answers. Those answers were 48, 68, 84, and infinitely many. So let’s look at each of those answers in turn. Answer #1: 48. This one is simple. As we discussed last week, there are 4 different triad qualities, diminished, minor, major, and augmented, which each come from stacking a combination of two thirds on top of one another, (min+min), (min+maj), (maj+min) and (maj+maj) respectively. These ar ..read more

Theory Level: Intermediate Here’s a question with an ambiguous answer. Ignoring inversions and doubled voicings and multi-octave range, how many distinct triads are there? There are at least four legitimate answers to this question, and maybe more (if you come up with a different answer, I’d love to hear about it in the comments). The four possible answers are: 48, 68, 84, and infinitely many. The difference depends on what you count as a legitimate chord root, and whether you care about your answer’s real-world usefulness. BTW "There are multiple answers and one of them is infinity but that ..read more

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