This dominant 7 pentatonic pattern gets tougher again. It has four notes in C and four notes in D flat but they are all spread throughout the bar. Again, this pattern helps you to get comfortable transposing quickly. And all of these patterns … [Read more...]
How To Use Tension And Release In Your Melodies
Music, much like life, is fundamentally a swinging pendulum between tension and release. Fortunately, with music, this is easy to represent objectively and to utilize in your music composition. Taking a look at the C major scale, you can see that … [Read more...]
Fantastic Music Theory Resource
Dolmetsch online has made significant contributions to the world of early music. They also host a serious online music dictionary and composers biography. I especially like their 1000+ scales and practical guide to composition. Check it out. … [Read more...]
Define: Raga
1. A generic term for Indian scales, consisting of five, six, or seven different notes and calculated to create a certain mood. Each raga is suited to a particular time of day. The word itself comes from the Sanskrit meaning "color," so that an … [Read more...]
Top Secret Patterns (shhh, they’re free!)
Patterns are a great way of putting scales to work. Not only do they get you out of any do-re-mi rut, they expand your musical vocabulary. They also expand your mind by forcing you to think about systems within systems—and sometimes within … [Read more...]
Who Else Wants To Master the Diminished Scale?
The diminished scale is an extremely creative tool. Due to the diminished chord's symmetrical structure of stacked minor thirds, we have two options of diminished scales: half step-whole step and whole step-half step. A major benefit to this … [Read more...]
The Golden Mean in Harmony Part 1
If you ride chaos all the way out to its edge, you find beauty and order... and the Blues Chaos: complete disorder and confusion; behavior so unpredictable as to appear random, owing to great sensitivity to small changes in conditions; the … [Read more...]