I got interested in tuning theory because of the blues. The first instrument I learned to play well was the harmonica, and an essential part of blues harmonica is bending notes to make them go flat. The same is true for blues guitar, though there you are bending notes sharp rather than flat. For several ..read more

The basic idea of tempo is simple: how many beats there are per minute. More beats per minute means the music is faster, fewer beats per minute means the music is slower. The image below shows a tempo map of “Dear Prudence” by the Beatles that I made with Ableton Live. The song’s tempo ranges between 70 and 90 beats per minute over the course of the tune, with noticeable speeding up at the end. For contrast, here’s a tempo map of the first minute and a half of “God Make Me Funky” by the Headhunters. As you can see, the Headhunters keep much steadier time; they only fluctuate between 92 and 95 ..read more

(Meta-level note: I rewrite this explainer every few years and now that I have a couple of new music theory gigs, I am rewriting it yet again.) Syncopation is to rhythm what dissonance is to harmony: conflict, surprise, defiance of expectation. If you place your rhythmic accents where listeners expect them, then the music gets boring fast. If you place them where listeners don’t expect them, that’s where the fun starts. To understand syncopation, you need to understand the concept of strong and weak beats (and subdivisions of beats). The strong beats (and subdivisions) are where you expect ac ..read more

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 on Noteflight, because as with so many jazz theory concepts, tritone substitutions make more sense when you hear them than when you see them represented symbolically. Here’s the verbal explanation, for what it’s worth. Say you have a V7-I cadence in C major, that is, G7 resolving to C. The active ingredient in G7 is the tritone between the third, B, and the flat ..read more

This week in aural skills, we are practicing identifying pop schemas, that is, chord sequences and loops that occur commonly in various kinds of Anglo-American top 40, rock, R&B and related styles. We previously covered the various permutations of I, IV and V and the plagal cadence. Now we’re getting into progressions that bring in the rest of the diatonic family, that is, the chords you can make using the notes in the major and natural minor scales. Singer-Songwriter/Axis progression A huge percentage of current mainstream pop and rock songs are built on the four-legged stool of the ..read more

My NYU aural skills students are working on chord identification. My last post talked about seventh chords; this post is about chords with more notes in them, or at least, different notes. My theory colleagues call them added-note chords. They are more commonly called jazz chords, though many of the examples I list below are not from jazz. You could also call them extended chords, or complicated chords, or fancy chords, or cool chords. It’s easy to get overwhelmed by all the numbers and symbols. My preferred way to organize all this information is to think of chords as vertically stacked scale ..read more

I have a hypothesis about harmony in loop-based music: if you have a good groove going, then any repeated chord progression at all will start to make sense and sound good after a few repetitions. In this post, I demonstrate the idea using two dance floor classics. “Love Rollercoaster” by Ohio Players (1975) is from the peak disco era, and “Genius of Love” by Tom Tom Club (1981) sits at at the crossover point between disco, new wave and early hip-hop. Let’s start with “Love Rollercoaster”. This song gets sampled a lot. Here’s my chart of the main/chorus groove.  Why is this chord loop so ..read more

For the hip-hop unit in the Song Factory class at the New School, I want to start things off by clarifying the difference between hip-hop and rap. People use these terms interchangeably, but they really describe two different things: hip-hop is a culture, and rap is a musical expression of that culture. But rapping is also a musical technique, one that long predates hip-hop. Rap appears in every style of popular music descending from the African diaspora. I list examples from several of those styles below. You might debate me on whether some of these examples count as “rap” or not. Is it rap w ..read more

I am very attached to Marvin Gaye’s version of “I Heard It Through The Grapevine” and somehow managed to not even hear Gladys Knight’s recording until late in life. I recognized immediately that Gladys’ version is a banger, but it took me a while to relax my preconceptions and warm up to it. Norman Whitfield produced both Marvin’s and Gladys’ versions. He had worked on Marvin’s version first, but Berry Gordy didn’t think it had commercial potential, so for Gladys’ recording, they took a different approach. Whitfield was inspired by Aretha Franklin’s “Respect”, and he wanted to give “I Heard I ..read more

Being a fan of James Brown can be a challenge, because his classic songs have all been recorded multiple times in different versions with different names on different labels. “I Got To Move” is a case in point. It was first released on In The Jungle Groove in 1986, but was recorded back in 1970. The strangely tacked-on intro is an excerpt from a different song, “Give It Up Or Turnit a-Loose.” Except that the specific version of “Give It Up Or Turnit a-Loose” they took the excerpt from was titled “In The Jungle Groove,” which is where they got the name of this compilation. Except that the full ..read more