I didn’t find out about hypermeter until very late in my music theory learning journey. I think it should be part of the basic toolkit, especially for songwriters and improvisers. The explanation that follows might seem abstract, but behind the scenes, hypermeter provides the signposts that orient you in medium-scale musical time. The term “hypermeter” might be new to you if you aren’t a musicologist, but I guarantee that you already intuitively know what it is. When you feel that a verse or chorus has a front half or a back half, that you can or can’t expect when the next section is going to ..read more

Augmented chords don’t come up much, but they are on the aural skills syllabus, and they have that specific quality that no other harmony can create. Their uncanny zero-gravity quality is the result of their symmetry. Any note in an augmented triad could function as its root. When you write the augmented chords on the chromatic circle, you quickly discover that there are only four possible ones, shown in the image below. The one on the top left is C+, E+ and G#+/Ab+. The one on the top right is C#+/Db+, F+ and A+. The one on the bottom right is D+, F#/Gb+ and A#/Bb+. Finally, the one on the b ..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

Motivic development is more of a classical music thing than a rock/pop thing. If you want to hear a motive carried through a series of elaborations and variations, you should look to Beethoven rather than the Beatles. Pop songs are a few riffs, repeated or strung together. But there are some songs out there whose riffs are organized in ways that you could understand in terms of motivic development. Let’s start with the melody I have probably spent more time thinking about than any other, “Dear Prudence” by the Beatles. Here’s a chart. Here are two views of one of the song’s main motives, fir ..read more

It’s easy to understand what a section of a song is: an intro, a verse, a chorus, a bridge. It is less easy to understand phrases, the components of a song section. Usually a song section contains between two and four phrases. But what is a phrase? No one seems totally sure. This is important to figure out, because if you aspire to write or improvise music, having control over your phrasing might be the most important thing you need. If you can organize your phrases, you can have limited technique and knowledge of theory and still sound good. If you can’t organize your phrases, all the techniq ..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

This week in aural skills, we’re working on various harmonic tropes based on IV-I root movements. This chord progression is technically called the plagal cadence, but is more memorably nicknamed the “Amen” cadence because it’s a traditional European hymn ending. (It has nothing to do with the Amen break, though they do sound good together.) The plagal cadence is the mirror image of the classical V-I authentic cadence. Where does the word “plagal” come from? The Online Etymology Dictionary says that it’s probably from Greek plagios, meaning “oblique” or “side”, and that word in turn comes from ..read more

The I, IV and V chords are beginner-level music theory concepts. However, in my pop-oriented aural skills class, we are covering them in the context of the blues, where they are more complicated than they are in the standard tonal theory context. Let’s begin with a review of the basic I, IV and V from the major scale. Here they are in C. Here’s how you build these chords. The I chord is built on the first degree of the scale, C. Move clockwise around the circle, adding every alternate scale degree: skip D and add E, then skip F and add G. The IV chord is built on the fourth degree of the sca ..read more

In Aural Skills class we continue our sprint through harmony concepts with the diatonic modes. These are an advanced topic in classical theory, but for popular music, you need to deal with them up front, especially Mixolydian and Dorian. Here are the tunes I’m giving the class to practice distinguishing the modes from each other. The major modes These scales have major third degrees. They stereotypically sound “brighter” than the minor modes. Ionian mode/major scale What is the difference between Ionian mode and the plain old major scale? I think of Ionian mode songs as having a floating qual ..read more

It’s pentatonic scales week in aural skills class. This would seem to be the easiest thing on the syllabus, but I discovered while doing listening exercises with the students that even these simple scales have their subtleties. Major Pentatonic You can understand the C major pentatonic scale to be the C major scale without scale degrees four and seven. These are the ones that create all the tension and dissonance, and without them, the major pentatonic sounds uncomplicatedly sunny and cheerful. (Or does it? More on that in a minute.) Click the image to play the scale in the aQWERTYon. You can ..read more