I meet many people who play a musical instrument who unabashedly admit that they are unable to create a new song of their own, improvise a solo over existing music, or to learn songs by listening to a recording.  This may be true even though they can display a level of technical achievement on their instrument that clearly shows that they have spent a great many hours practicing and refining their skills.  I think this is a shame, and shows a great deficiency common in musical instrument lessons.  This post is the first in a series designed to help address this lack and hopefully make these skills more accessible to readers of this site who play an instrument. Continue reading →

[This post is the second in a series on Introductory Music Theory.  The series begins with the post A Musical Theory.  The next in the series is Stepping Into Numbers.]

I assume you are familiar with the musical sequence “Do-Re-Mi-Fa-So-La-Ti-Do”, that we are commonly taught to sing as children.  Musicians refer to this familiar Do-Re-Mi sequence as the Major Scale.  An interesting and important fact about Do-Re-Mi is that it doesn’t matter what pitch is chosen as the Do that one starts with, it is possible to proceed from any note and sing Do-Re-Mi such that it will sound “right”.  Likewise you can start from any note on your instrument and play a series of notes that sounds like Do-Re-Mi. What we understand from this is that there is not a specific set of notes that make a Major Scale.  So what makes it sound “right”?  The answer is simply that it is the “distance” between the notes you play that makes the sequence sound like Do-Re-Mi. Continue reading →

[This post is the third in a series on Introductory Music Theory. The series begins with A Musical Theory. The previous post in this series is Stepping Stones. The next post in this series is Intervals.]

Music is itself a form of communication, but communicating about the music that we play and create is a vital part of being a musician.  I am referring not only to communication with other musicians, but also to the internal dialogs we have with ourselves when thinking about the music that we play.  A necessary part of being able to communicate effectively is to have fluency with an appropriate vocabulary.  The musical vocabulary is comprised not only of words but also of numbers.   Numbers are used in various ways in different musical contexts, and this at first can seem quite confusing.  In this post I will introduce some of the ways we use numbers to communicate about music. Continue reading →

[This post is the third in a series on Introductory Music Theory. The series begins with A Musical Theory. The previous post in this series is Stepping Into Numbers.]

The interval of an octave is a pretty amazing thing. When we sing the Do-Re-Mi scale it seems perfectly reasonable that the eighth note is called “Do” again because, as one could say, “it sounds just like the first Do only higher”. (By the way, if an octave doesn’t sound this way to you, it’s may be time to consider poetry or painting as your artistic endeavor instead of music.) Of course you can sing Do-Re-Mi past the second Do, ever higher to the third Do, and as you do so each successive note is exactly an octave above the earlier one of the same name. So Mi to Mi (3 to 10) is called an octave just like Do to Do (1 to 8). As I mentioned in the last post, all of the interval names – 2nd, 3rd 4th, 5th, etc, refer to a specific number of half-steps no matter what the starting point is. The interval of a 2nd gets its name from the distance between 1 and 2 on the Major scale (1 step). Since the interval from 6 to 7 is also 1 step, we can also call it a 2nd. Continue reading →