What are /r/musictheory's favorite Products & Services?

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I use an app on my phone called iReal Pro MusicBook-PlayAlong. You can make your own charts and edit any existing chart to your liking. You can also change the style the music is played in, tempo, key, etc.

I highly recommend it.

Here's a link to import 1300 jazz standards: http://www.irealb.com/forums/showthread.php?12753-Jazz-1300-Standards

Dariusz Terefenko, Jazz Theory: From Basic to Advanced Study

>so far the only thing i found close is mark levine, but he only shows one example for intervals.

I can think of a better use for that book in these cold winter months.

www.musictheory.net

Skip the Mark Levine book – it has serious pedagogical problems. Go with Terefenko if you must learn from a "jazz" textbook. Truthfully, you would be better off in the long run learning traditional theory and circling back around to jazz practice. Music theory, either coming from a classical or jazz perspective (or otherwise), is not going to help you to play jazz. What will help is playing jazz. In other words, get some lessons, play along to recordings, find some jam buddies, and do it to it.

> I'm a man of limited time, and transcribing just isn't in the cards

You won't make a jazz musician, then.:-(

You don't have to transcribe everything, of course, and you don't actually have to literally write down everything that you learn. But (I mean to be a half-way serious jazz musician) you need to devote substantial amounts of time to just listening and copying - picking licks or phrases you like out of solos. Listening and copying is always better than reading.

The important thing is to develop your own voice using that process - even if ends up somewhat limited in scope. You can certainly get books of transcribed solos (the Charlie Parker Omnibook is a classic) - but they're really for people studying the work of a specific player.

My advice would be to get a Real Book (collection of jazz standard melodies and chord sequences, no solos), pick a few of your favourite tunes. The process then is: (1) learn the head (melody) by heart; (2) work through the chord arpeggios, all over your instrument, checking how the melody threads through them; (3) listen to how a handful of famous jazz players treat the tunes, and listen out for any hook lick that catches your ear.

The melody is really your guide when you improvise - never try soloing on any tune until you can play the melody. The melody holds your hand through the sequence. Take parts of it and play around with it; use it as your launch pad.

You don't need a lot of technical sophistication, nor (to be honest) a whole ton of jazz knowledge and a big lick vocabulary. You just need to bear the principle in mind of "embellishing the melody" - and also think rhythm first, not notes. If you know the melody, and you know the chord tones, all your raw material is there. Get into the groove, and pick a few notes out of that raw material.

Gee, broad question. But I do understand what you mean, I also did start with the guitar.

To give you some quick answer, it would mainly depend on the scale you're playing in.

To give you a much better answer, dive deep into the music theory. I'd recomend this course I once did: https://www.coursera.org/course/musictheory

> How did they do this?

If you mean how technically did they alter the notes of the recording, it was in all likelihood done using pitch editing software called Melodyne. Melodyne is essentially a competitor to Auto-Tune and sets itself apart largely through its ability to recognize and selectively edit individual notes within chords. Its a little more complicated than that... Melodyne is an audio editing environment rather than a real-time effect like Auto-Tune but they cover a lot of similar ground as pitch correction tools.

Here are two papers on the band Meshuggah. The first one discusses the music through the lens of rhythmic structures, etc. and the second is an overview of the tonality of certain songs like Rational Gaze. They may not touch on the aspect of the aggression that you're looking for, but they're interesting nonetheless.

I suggest you spend a lot of time tuning by ear, then checking yourself electronically. You'll get better over time, and that'll give you more confidence.

Also - and this is great for any musician in any situation - download one of the interval training apps (I like this one ) and spend time trying to pick out different intervals. You'll get a feel for the difference between a fourth and a fifth, a seventh and major seventh, etc. I found it gave me a sharper ear overall, and I could hear smaller differences in pitch.

I understand there are also apps for singers that let you pitch-match - can anyone confirm this?

Adding onto this list, I'd highly recommend Justin Kramer's <em>The Time of Music</em>. It might be a little more abstract than /u/caleblee01 is looking for, and I didn't follow all of it when I read it, but it absolutely opened my mind to a lot of ways of thinking about rhythm and time more systematically.

https://www.coursera.org/course/musictheory

This course is currently active. I am working through it now. Week 4 lecture videos will go online this Sunday. 5 week course. Most helpful theory information I have found so far.

I will most certanly check it out at home, added this link to my Pocket, looks good so far, but i have a one major complaint: Your site does not have https enabled, thus not only possibly compromising your visitors who want to leave a feedback by exposing their email on the Internet, but endangering you login page (which is an easily detectable Wordpress), especially if you administrating this site form, for example, a public Wi-Fi. You should look at least at letsencrypt to get a free SSL certificate, or get a free/paid certificate from one of the many CAs out there. I'd suggest sticking with letsnecrypt for your purpose though :)

Feel free to PM me if you have questions about securing your website. SSL configuration is dependent on a hosting you choose, so i can't really provide step-by-step instructions for your case.

Further read:

• what is SSL on Wikipedia
• Let's Encrypt website

>There's another huge issue at play; political economy.

>…

>TL;DR the idea that Mozart was a "musical genius" is not necessarily true, as that concept was defined by the elitist norms of patronage that canonized specific musicians and artists of that time. In other terms, Mozart represented the valued aesthetics of the time and was paid heavily for it; his genius was culturally manufactured. Mozart is no more of an "objective" "musical genius" than any musical artist you could name today. The difference is constructed value and canonization.

Yaaaas kween

>>While it would be misleading to claim—especially for Germany—that industrialization was the cause of the transformation of musical life that followed (and was indeed already under way as Burney wrote), the unchallenged centrality of the courts in musical life was coming to an end.

>>Musicians, however, were by no means certain what, if anything, could replace the patronage of those courts. Already in 1787 a Viennese commentator noted that, because of declining support for music at courts, “one can scarcely expect the likes of Handel, Gluck, Gasmann, Paisello, Sarti, Naumann, Salieri, Haydn, Dittersdorf, or Mozart in the future”. (David Gramit, "Music Scholarship, Musical Practice, and the Act of Listening" in Music and Marx: Ideas, Practice, Politics, 13)

You should consider Musescore. Not the most advanced or intuitive (but no notation software is intuitive) but it's free and development is backed up by a very dedicated dev team and contributors.

They're actually super useful for airy/spacious voicing of common chords. I can give a few 5 note examples with C as the root (transpose to your heart's content):

C6/9: E A D G C
Cmaj7(6/9): B E A D G (this one replaces the high C (root) from the previous with a low B (maj7th) but you can totally do both for a 6 note chord)
Cmaj7(6/9/#11): F# B E A D
C-11: G C F Bb Eb
Csus(9): D G C F Bb

Using less than 5 notes will be more ambiguous but you can totally use this to your advantage. Nothing wrong with using a quartal voicing/structure on top of a standard triad or even just a 3rd and 7th. Pretty useful for dominant chords:

C9: E Bb D G C (obviously the bottom tritone is not quartal but the top 3 notes are)
C9(13): Bb E A D G (I flipped the bottom tritone from the previous example for a more evenly spaced voicing)

Because quartal voicings can be ambiguous they're a great tool for modulating. They can be placid or intense depending on how you employ them. I first got into using them after reading Mantooth's Voicings For Jazz Keyboard. It's not a book directly about quartal voicings but they're used as a kind of basic building block for many of the voicings in the book. Also, McCoy Tyner is a quartal fiend if you're looking for inspiration.

As Elaine Gould establishes in her book:

>Notes are easiest to read and to pitch when they are spelled according to the following conventions, whether or not the music has a tonal context:

>
>i. Use the most familiar intervals — perfect, minor and major — rather than augmented and diminished intervals
>
>ii. Chromatic-scale figures use sharps to ascend, flats to descend
>
>iii. Spell stepwise figures as a scale, i.e. as adjacent pitch letters: F# G Ab or D Eb Fb, not Gb G G# or Eb E Eb.

Godfried Toussaint devotes a chapter to these interlocking rhythms in his Geometry of Musical Rhythm, where he calls them "Complementary Rhythms".

He notes that two of the most important rhythms in sub-Saharan Africa, the 7 onset Bembé and the 5 onset Fume-Fume (in rotation) are complementary and are often played that way.

As an aside the Bembé, in modulo 12 (clock arithmetic) is directly analogous to the major scale and the Fume-Fume is directly analogous to the penatonic.

Choro: A Social History of a Brazilian Popular Music (Profiles in Popular Music) https://www.amazon.com/dp/0253217520/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_AA1zFb68A6XKE

Written by a former professor of mine. Took a few classes with him in Latin American music . Not sure if this is what you are looking for.

Do you feel like learning how to write another type of music could help you? If so, there is a free online course starting on January 13th, on Coursera. It's an introduction to classical music composition.

Prerequisite are: Some knowledge of music theory, which you seem to have.

More information here: https://www.coursera.org/course/classicalcomp

I don't know if the course is actually good, but I've taken some excellent ones on Coursera in the past, so I'm going to try this one out too.

The obvious answer is - musescore. It's free, it does guitar tab, and you can copy tab to notation. And the notation looks a lot better than GuitarPro (IMO).

You will need to understand about timing - how to choose a time signature, note values (durations) and so on - but there are plenty of sites to learn that, and I also recommend looking at sheet music for songs you already know, to see how they show rhythms.

Mathieu - Harmonic Experience

"The rules of music--including counterpoint and harmony--were not formed in our brains but in the resonance chambers of our bodies"

NB: I've not read it, although I keep meaning to. The five reviews on Amazon may be revealing: four 5-star, one 1-star. Love it or hate it, no half measures....

I think mainly because there are a lot of people that play drums, but there are not a lot of legitimate drummers. Insofar as those that study their instrument like it's a science. Also there are way more guitar and piano players over all; so you're definitely right on your main point.

By all means, educate me on some drums! I write my own music and program the drums; so I'd love to have insights and ideas from knowledgeable percussionists, drummers, or whomever that can fill in my knowledge gaps that is only rivaled by the grand canyon.

I've learned so much just from coming to this subreddit on a daily basis; some of these people really know their shit!

For example; this is a song I wrote recently and would love some drumming insights. Specifically, how I could improve my drum ideas.

https://www.bandlab.com/posts/316eb740-239a-ea11-96d2-0003ffd1fc09

The chords are F#m9-B13, followed by Em9-A13, but you're right it's implying two different keys alternately - first E major, then D major. So there's four key signature options as I see it:
1. E major with accidentals for the D major bars;
2. D major with accidentals for the E major bars;
3. Blank key sig with accidentals all over;
4. Take the average: A major, with fewer accidentals, evenly distributed.

Personally I don't know which would be easiest to read. I think my preference would be for D major, because it feels like that's where it might end up resolving, if it ever did.

As for the rhythm, it seems to be swing overall - not just in the drums - although each instrument is interpreting the swing value differently (or it's been set at random on a DAW or whatever).
If you thinking of this as 2 bars per chord (in fast 4/4 or slow 2/2?) then the drums have a quarter-note triplet pattern at one point. Otherwise the swing 8ths don't seem quite at triplet strength.
In jazz, swing is not normally notated at all - i.e. 8ths are written as normal, maybe with "swing" written above. Only anything that is clearly in regular triplets would be written as such.
There is a metric modulation sign sometimes used in rock, but that indicates (literally) a triplet shuffle rhythm, not really swing. Swing itself is in the region between straight and triplet feel - nearer straight at fast tempos, nearer triplets at slow tempos.
Sorry this isn't much help!

I found about this today, but I haven't tried it yet. It is free and multi platform, so perhaps give it a try: https://musescore.org/

For really simple stuff I still use a copy of finale notepad 2007 (last free version).

To my knowledge, the heavy weights are still finale and sibellius, but I find them overkill for my needs.

Yes. Neuroscientist David Eagleman got together with Brian Eno and a bunch of drummers and did a study. http://www.openculture.com/2015/08/the-neuroscience-of-drumming.html

>if there is a structural commonality between memorable melodic phrases in pop music.

Yes, but I took a semester-long class about it. Consider everything that can make the hook different from the rest of the song: the notes of the melody, the rhythm, the chords/harmony, the rhyme scheme of the lyric and even the instrumental accompaniment. All of those properties can be used to emphasize a hook.

The official One Size Fits All guitar book that Vai worked on has a lot of the keyboard lines and chord charts for it as well. good luck, such a great song!

EDIT: book link

I actually have my song files on my phone these days, so I use this great little app called Music Speed Changer. For desktop, I have seen people talk about Transcribe! quite a few times on here.

Hein makes a great argument. Where a lot of jazz is indeed partially accessible via European theory (because it uses a lot of classical harmonic practices), blues is much further away from it. It really hardly cares about chords at all.

However, one response might be: who cares, outside of the rarefied world of academic music theory? Blues (and jazz) can take care of itself without needing music theorists to recognise its value. In whose eyes has African-American musical culture been "delegitimized"? It seems to be widely respected everywhere in popular culture around the world.

But of course, if you are within that music theory world - if you're up in the ivory tower and not in the market place - and especially if you are in America - then yes you should be thoroughly embarrassed that African-American music is so poorly represented in academia.

America liberated itself from Europe over 200 years ago. About time it liberated itself from European music theory!

After all, the music of "the descendants of the African diaspora" has been busy liberating all of us from the dead hand of classical music for over a century now. That's the beautiful irony: descendants of slaves liberating the descendants of their masters.

The fact that academia (or some regions of it) doesn't recognise that is more pathetic than outrageous. IOW, for academia to accord African-American music the respect it deserves would be academia legimizing itself.

For anyone else interested in the cultural impact of the music of the African diaspora, I highly recommend this book: Music of the Common Tongue.
This one looks important too, but I haven't read it (yet...).

Thesaurus Of Scales And Melodic Patterns by Nicolas Slonimsky

Lou Harrison: https://books.google.com/books?id=WtUTdOxkV_YC&amp;pg=PA54&amp;lpg=PA54&amp;dq=lou+harrison+alternate+tunings&amp;source=bl&amp;ots=ywB73atAAw&amp;sig=u1LJ2zD2l0vmrGM1VcvH-JI9ou8&amp;hl=en&amp;sa=X&amp;ei=xp8xVaeAI4y7ogSJ3YC4CA&amp;ved=0CDAQ6AEwAz...

I would recommend this book by Samuel Adler. It's a little old school, but it's a pretty thorough guide on how to orchestrate, and goes through most of the major instruments found in the orchestra.

It's a common misconception that copying without permission is legal if one does not make money from it. This is not true. Copying or distributing copyrighted material without permission is 100%, always, without exception, illegal. It's not just about the the copier not making money, the copier is potentially preventing the copyright holder from making money. If the copier is sued for damages, the copier is liable for the lost sales. Nevermind, that you can't ever really tell how many sales were actually lost, because not everyone who took a free copy would necessarily have paid for a legal copy. A copy was distributed and the copier is on the hook for that.

That's the letter of the law. In practice, lawsuits are fairly rare because lawyers and lawsuits are expensive. So it generally has to be some major infringement to make a lawsuit cost effective.

However, in this case, the owner of the copyright has given permission to distribute and modify the work, so long as you give credit to the artist and indicate changes were made (if any). https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/us/?utm_source=www.domtail.com

Someone linked this further up, it's the engineer of And Justice For All talking about how "there was about 5 million edits in them from Lars Ulrich's drums alone". I'm not sure if that album is a good example of how Lars is a good drummer

https://www.iheart.com/content/2018-02-23-metallica-engineer-recalls-millions-of-drum-edits-on-and-justice-for-all/

You could check out his Masterclass if you want some stories and anecdotes from the man himself about his process.

You could also check out the Hollywood Reporter Roundtable Composer discussions on Youtube that he participates in for more stories and anecdotes.

https://typekit.com/lists/alternatives-to-helvetica has lots of alternatives. The main point being that they are all sans-serif typefaces. These would help readability even more, especially for the numbers.

For those who are so inclined -

I use Note Attack for practicing reading sheet music. The notes fall like tetris blocks and you have to identify them before they hit the end.

http://download.cnet.com/Note-Attack/3000-2133_4-10076897.html

Plenty of results on Google..

chordify

She might enjoy a staff paper notebook with the Christmas season coming up: https://www.amazon.com/Music-Notebook-Unicorn-Manuscript-Staves/dp/1545195730/ref=sr_1_7?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1542579236&amp;sr=8-7&amp;keywords=music+ledger+paper

Try MuseScore. They've been free/open source for years. I used to use it when I was stuck on Linux and I didn't think it was very good six years ago but it's improved a lot since then. Your Linux distro probably already has a package for it.

For free? I'd suggest either MuseScore, which in my experience was rather buggy but easy to use, or LilyPond, which produced better results but involved transcribing the music in a text format like a computer programming language.

Rock, for the most part, is homophonic. This means the format is melody + bassline + chords in the middle. Two-voice species counterpoint is actually a pretty good model for this. However, where species counterpoint is concerned with interval succession and proper diminution (putting multiple notes to one note, e.g. 2nd and 3rd species), rock music places emphasis on chord progression, regular phrasing, and sometimes riffs. This means it is closer to the homophonic contrapuntal style of the 18th century than the polyphonic style of the 16th century (the typical pedagogical context for species counterpoint). 18th century classical music and rock counterpoint differ in that rock is generally unconcerned with parallel perfect consonances (perfect octaves and fifths) and may contain interval successions that are generally not found in classical music. This paper talks about some melodic structures that are particular to rock counterpoint, and this article discusses some important information about the relationship between voice leading and form.

At my college, we use the Benward theory book. It offers detailed explanations, as well as exercises to reinforce the ideas. It might be expensive, but it's well worth the cost if you want a good theory book.

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/16342/16342-h/16342-h.htm#page_17

http://openmusictheory.com/fourthSpecies.html

In counterpoint, chord progressions are written one note at time as if they're 3 or 4 unique melodies (or voices) played simultaneously that just so happen to form chords. This is where extended chords originated from when the most advanced music came from choirs of monks, who on their own usually could only sing one note at a time.

(this is my awkward way of trolling)

Immediately come to mind 2 options from the 2 major music notation companies, Finale and Sibelius.

Sibelius First is the stripped down version of Sibelius. Running between $80-100US, it's a pretty powerful tool. I use it every day and I couldn't be happier with it.

Finale PrintMusic is the stripped down version of Finale. I don't know much about it, since I haven't used it, but I've heard nothing but good things. PrintMusic 2014 seems to be priced everywhere right around $100US.

Both programs will help your son explore music and eventually create professional-looking scores if he so desires. Plus, they will both run on laptops. Unless the computer is an absolute dinosaur, he shouldn't have a problem.

So, I'm lazy as hell and I have a terrible ear. I'll usually go run a song through Chordify first to get a very rough and basic idea of what is going on, then I'll go through and correct any errors, and add tensions and extensions as appropriate.

Nested tuplets is the term you'll want to google. They're written exactly as you'd expect.

I sincerely urge you not to buy Finale or Sibelius (they are ridiculously overpriced), use the free software MuseScore instead!

I have been using Sibelius for the last seven years or so, it's OK and gets the job done. MuseScore however is both free and has a much more intuitive interface, runs lighter and has better playback. I found out about it about a month ago and since then I've written arrangements ranging from marching band to piano solo without any trouble whatsoever -- I'm never going back!

If you want to spend money on notation software, Sibelius is vastly better than Finale, but I recommend using money on a DAW instead (as I see people are suggesting under) and use the free notation software available.

Music Theory Online is free and open to the public. You can buy a subscription to JSTOR independent of any university, but I imagine it's pretty pricey.

If I can shamelessly link it here, I have two documents on my academia.edu page, which includes my masters thesis and an article I published. More importantly, though, academia.edu is a great resource that more and more scholars are joining, many of whom post pdfs of their articles and/or books. So long as you create a profile, this is a free resource.

Keep in mind as you're reading that writing a thesis or dissertation is a very different style of writing than publication-style writing. And even publication-style is different depending on what your topic is, the journal or publisher, your personality, etc. Perhaps if you posted some of your specific interests or topics you'd like to explore, we could mention specific authors who are (or were) exceptional writers.

Which YouTube reviewer though? What's their level of experience? How do they approach the topic of orchestration? Do they teach pupils orchestration?

Fux is a classic but I wouldn't recommend anyone try and learn species counterpoint from it because there are far better books on the market and "Learning via Socratic dialogue", while a very old technique, is a crappy way to present material when compared with modern teaching methods.

TBH I would say what's crucial is not the book you have but the teacher you have and the approach you take. If what you want is to learn "how to orchestrate in the style of ..." that's going to demand one approach. If OTOH you want to learn - for want of a better term - "general orchestration" that's going to require a different approach.

If you want a book on individual instruments then this is perfectly fine. You will get some of that in Adler & Blatter but like most course textbooks they have to strike a balance between various factors - in the case of orchestration individual instruments / instrument families, combinations of instruments and historical approaches to orchestration.

Personally I found Adler just fine (think I had a copy of Blatter as well at one point - probably gathering dust somewhere). It's not perfect but I don't think there is such a thing as the perfect book on any given musical subject. Even if it were the size of an encyclopaedia that would still be both a blessing and a curse - sometimes (especially when you're just getting started with something) what you need is less detail rather than more. And then there's the fact that technical approaches for instruments develop over time so whatever you have will slowly get more and more out of date.

I got a couple of these and also a couple of these

They're cheap enough where if you screw it up, you don't feel too bad about it.

I got a few of each because it took me a few tries to figure out what the hell I was doing. There are endless videos on youtube about how to solder too.

Gonna second this. I learned on guitar solely for about 10 years. I was pretty decent at music theory, but getting a keyboard in front of me really made it a lot easier to visualize and better understand.

Not sure what a good aussie website for gear is, but if you're only getting a keyboard for music theory you can start small with a mini 25 key for $110 aud: https://www.bettermusic.com.au/akai-lpk25-midi-controller-keyboard

Or normal size 49 key for $160: https://www.amazon.com.au/Alesis-V49-Keyboard-Controller-Buttons/dp/B00IWWEW20/ref=mp_s_a_1_4?dchild=1&amp;keywords=midi+keyboard&amp;qid=1603768269&amp;sprefix=midi+k&amp;sr=8-4

I'm a fan of the Functional Ear Trainer app (android/iphone). It helped me a lot.

‚Ultimate Circle of Fifths‘ (dev. by Christian Hengst), it can be a bit overwhelming in the beginning, but its worth it. Cool design, with sound samples and transcriptions to play them. You can build your new song in minutes + you learn music theory. It‘s not free, but therefore without ads.

iOS Android

Don't give up, but start out with just scale degrees 1, 3 and 5. Practice for 10 minutes and take a break, then 10 more and so on. Don't practice for 40-60 minutes in a row.

If you own an Android device, I would recommend you to try this app: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.kaizen9.fet.android Do the exercises and don't move on until you get more than 90%

Here you go - this is a zip of various jazz theory pdfs I've found online. I've only really dipped in and out of them, but I hope they'll be helpful.

Full list:

• _elementary_Zeitlin P, Goldberger D - Understanding Music Theory (1981).pdf (32.3 MB)

• Dobbins Bill_A Creative Approach To Jazz Piano Harmony.pdf (14.5 MB)

• Dobbins Bill_Jazz Arranging And Composing.pdf (11.4 MB)

• Feldstein Sandy_Practical Theory Complete; A Self-Instruction Music Theory Course (1982).pdf (41 MB)

• Jamey Aebershold_How To Play Jazz and Improvise.pdf (6.9 MB)

• Liebman Dave_Chromatic Approach to Jazz Harmony and Melody.pdf (17.5 MB)

• Russo William_Composing for the jazz orchestra.pdf (1.8 MB)

I've also heard good things about this Coursera course on jazz improvisation - I haven't taken it myself though so perhaps someone else can weigh in.

Yeah it's all over the place. The bass does Bb F E, Bb F E, A Bb, which describes a Bbmaj7#11 chord. Then the guitar plays a Bb minor arpeggio (which defies conventional analysis, but sounds cool, polychords!), and briefly Bbsus2. That's only the first 12 seconds or so. At 13 seconds the bass goes to a B natural pedal while the guitar/synth does a Bb phrygian sounding arpeggio. x1344x I stopped there.

It's not in any one key, it's bouncing around from key to key.

I've always loved C - B+ - Gm/Bb - A7. It's based on chromatically descending major thirds, which gives it a sort of ragtime feel. I first heard it in the theme from Super Mario Brothers 2, and then later went on to use it in my song &quot;Lonely Octopus&quot;.

Check out the <em>Cambridge History of Western Music Theory</em>, which has a good overview of what we do and don't know about musical practices in ancient Greece.

The major scale is symmetrical. This is why when you invert it, "you get a mode of major": because its inverted form is the same as its non-inverted form. These are the seven-note set-classes that share this property, along with their common name (if they have one):

^(†) This is a name I've seen used by Krantz/Douthett and Tymoczko, which I think is very descriptive.

^(††) This is a made up name that has no historical usage, no attachment to the Neapolitan chord, and no attachment to the Neapolitan school (AKA the composers who founded the style we now know as "Classical music," and after whom the Neapolitan chord is named). It it not descriptive, and furthermore it is very misleading.

I'm finding this book (available for free at archive.org) extremely helpful in learning the arpeggio shapes. Arpeggios start at chapter 2.

It's basically a CAGED method, but begins with learning just the triad arpeggios (major, then minor, then diminished/augmented if you care about them), which is very easy if you already know all your open chord shapes, and then adding the sevenths and extensions.

I've found it significantly easier than learning from other books, including oft-recommended titles like Fretboard Logic or Guitar Fretboard Workbook. Don't be intimidated by the book's size, it's pretty user-friendly, and while there is an encyclopedic thoroughness, the author is pretty explicit that you can feel free to skip things you're not interested in or unready for (e.g. augmented/diminished triads, which may not be of interest to pop guitarists).

Hey, thank you for your advice. I think I got what you were talking about I made a melody and repeated it with an added harmony, does it work alright or did I mess up somewhere along the way?

I recently discovered that ZynAddSubFx supports microtonal tunings. You can even get non-octave repeating scales (like the Bohlen-Pierce scale) to work.

It's a very capable, free and open-source synthesizer. You might want to give it a try.

Here's a documentation, if you're interested: http://zynaddsubfx.sourceforge.net/doc_2.html

https://www.amazon.com/Music-Theory-Dummies-Michael-Pilhofer/dp/1118990943

it sits on the bookshelf of the classroom i recently took a job teaching in, but i'm, thus far, avoiding it like peewee herman avoided the snakes in the burning pet shop.

I just quickly transferred this onto Desmos for anyone who wants to mess around with this.

https://www.desmos.com/calculator/jaf1jsxzd5

edit: Here is the corrected version with a slightly wider range https://www.desmos.com/calculator/fqkn58ch2r

Are you looking for the waveform that represents the chord? Something like this? That might be possible.

Edit: I think I have what you want.

Paste this:

\sin \left(x\right)+\sin \left(x\cdot 1.25\right)+\sin \left(x\cdot 1.5\right)+\sin \left(2x\right)+\sin \left(2.25x\right)+\sin \left(3x\right)

here

First, standard disclaimer: for your OWN composition, you can do anything you want. The rules you're talking about are for writing in the Common Practice Period, i.e., the style of music written predominantly by Old Dead White German Guys from around 1600-1900.

And though the "rules" regarding harmonic and melodic minor are usually labeled as "theory fundamentals," they are really very much Old Dead White German Guy rules, not General Rules For Writing All Music Forever. They generally didn't care for the mushiness of natural minor when it came to V -> I cadences, so they said "screw it, let's raise the leading tone." That was all well and good until it came time to write melodies using those notes, and the augmented second between the 6th and the raised 7th made things sound weird. Hence, harmonic minor for creating chords (harmonies) and melodic minor for creating melodies.

As a general answer, however, the thing to remember is to raise the leading tone over dominant function harmonies. Dominant function harmonies are chords that reeeeeally want to resolve to I... i.e., V and vii°. There are theory textbooks out there that would have you believe that you should raise the leading tone over the III chord to make it III+, but the fact is these composers weren't all that crazy about augmented chords, and in general they just left it as a major III.

This is described here and here, if it helps.

But again: YOU MAKE THE RULES FOR YOUR OWN COMPOSITION. You don't have follow Bach's. Even the Old Dead White German Guys weren't obsessively consulting self-created rulebooks; they were writing what sounded good to them. (How often do you use participal phrases? Future pluperfect tense? You don't care, right? But in 150 years, students enrolled in "How hamseatlambs Spoke 101" will obsess over it as they study 21st century linguistics.)

> What are your takes on the topic of emotional substance of keys in music?

Its nonsense. If you want a clue to how ridiculous it is, take a look at this. OK, it was 1806, before 12-TET was a thing, but that only meant that some keys sounded more out of tune than others. The rest is subjectivity, not to mention an excessively fevered imagination.

> Did equal temperament tuning (1917) make music less emotional (ELI5)?

It meant that certain subtleties of tuning were lost - most of which are not audible to most people anyway. You'd probably be interested in this book. I've not read it myself, so check the reviews. It seems largely focused on classical music, and I'm more interested in the argument about folk music, and how it was - supposedly - damaged by the spread of accordions tuned to 12-TET.

But of course, music is still as emotional as you want it to be. Most musicians (aside from keyboard players) are able to vary their intonation while playing to escape the fixed pitches of 12-TET - there all kinds of ways of adding emotional expression by distorting pitch in various ways, well beyond any issues of arguably "pure" ratios or "just intonation".

I taught myself music theory from the very basics using a book called Elementary Rudiments of Music by Barbara Wharram. It explains musical concepts with examples and then gives you a ton of questions to practice with. You can also get the answer key book to check your answers but I've learned a lot with just the question book. Can get it for $40 Canadian and $30 for the answer book. but if you seriously want to learn its a great reasource to understand the fundamentals.

Here's a link on amazon:

https://www.amazon.ca/Elementary-Rudiments-Music-Barbara-Wharram/dp/1554402832/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1543703864&amp;sr=8-1&amp;keywords=elementary+rudiments+of+music

edit: Put in right price

We actually had a poster here in this sub who made an app for this specific purpose.

It's called "ChordProg". It's for both Android and iOS, and it's fantastic.

It has chord progressions in context of actual music, with plenty of options for how you want to learn.

I'd highly suggest it, it's free.

Shoutout to /u/ChordFunc for making it.

As usual, I am recommending: GNU Solfege, a free and open source ear training program

It's available for the major platforms, on Linux it is probably in your repository somewhere.

Windows download link

Someone also probably has it for Mac, but I don't know about that, I am a Linux user.

Anyway, it has:

Interval training, both melodic and harmonic.

Transcription.

Harmonic progression training.

Mode recognition.

Rhythm dictation and recognition.

Singing.

Interval comparison.

Chord quality training, etc.

And many other things.

It's good.

If you want a lot of ear training in a short amount of time, every day:

GNU Solfege, free and open source

Windows download link

I know I am a massive shill for this program, but you get so much mileage out of it in a short amount of time (think flashcard levels of efficienty) that you'll get better and better at recognizing intervals and chords of all kinds.

This has actually been asked before in this subreddit, and there are some good answers in that thread.

>how do you get started?

www.daveconservatoire.com

this is the best place to start. get started with the video series for pitch, then scales, then harmony, and that will give you enough of the basics to branch out from there. each series is about 5 videos, most of them only 5-10 minutes, so they are very easy to digest. Dave also takes care to explain everything assuming the audience has no prior knowledge.

https://www.coursera.org/course/musictheory

this is a free online class which starts august 3rd. I believe its basically going to cover the same type of material. I've already watched Dave's videos, but I may take this class anyways, just to see how I do, and I assume there are bound to be some new things I learn.

>its boring and hard

yup

its definitely true that becoming a great musician takes time, dedication and practice. there is no way around that. there are some shortcuts, but it still a long way to the top. successful musicians enjoy that journey, their motivation may be to become the best, but they dont give up if they cant be great from day 1.

you have to enjoy practicing. its not that hard to learn some riffs, some melodies or a chord progression. as long as you can play something you have something you can enjoy, and you can build from there.

>Where do you start if you are learning?

check the links i listed above.

>How would you start if you were teaching your best friend to play the instrument you play?

I play a few instruments, but the main one is guitar, so lets go with that. first, I would have them do Dave's videos. then I would let them play some Rocksmith guitar using my guitar. Rocksmith is a video game, kind of like guitar hero...except is uses a real guitar, has some built in lessons and exercises, fun songs to learn, etc. I would also point them towards JustinGuitar.com, especially if they wanted to learn rhythm.

No modulation here. It's all in C.

The penultimate chord is a weird one. It's basically a V^(7) chord (G7), but with a chromatic approach chord (D♭∆, or ♭II^(∆)) slapped on top of it. Kind of like syntax divorce, but with two different chords altogether.

If anything, I'd say the lydian chords (II) are the borrowed ones.

What /u/Polypeptide said. A matrix provides all the classical transformations and transpositions of a tone row. How you compose with such a tool is highly dependent on style. If you compare the twelve-tone works of Ernst Krenek, Ruth Crawford-Seeger, Arnold Schoenberg, and Luigi Dallapiccola, you will find that they use the row in different ways. Crawford's twelve-tone works tend to focus on the prime form of the row (sometimes at transposition) and use rotation extensively. She tends to go one row at a time. Schoenberg is much more exhaustive, using all row forms and various transpositions to outline symmetrical relationships. He tends to pair rows, so at any moment you are likely hearing two tone rows unfolding simultaneously. The symmetrical relations dictate the row pairing to a large extent. (Note: neither of these composers had a matrix at their disposal. Schoenberg wrote out every single transposition and transformation of the row in his sketches. Ursula Mamlok actually did use matrices to compose and does so in ways that are completely different from the composers mentioned above.)

Largely it's about learning cord progressions that apply to your desired style. If it's pop learn I-IV-vi-V and variations. If it's classical, it's a bit more complicated, but in that case I highly recommend the Write Like Mozart class on Coursera. Also on Coursera check out Berklee's Songwriting class

What do you think of this treatise from the 1330s, in which, on page 3, the author first defines "point against point" with regard to simplex discantus, which should seem to connect this technique to a style of (non-mensurated) discant, no?

Of course I agree with everything else. But I either if the original concept was actually connected to a real style. Wegman has a paper where he argues the transformation of counterpoint into the basis of all music comes about in response to a papal bull banning discant that wasn't simplex, ie, banning things that weren't note-against-note counterpoint. To which people responded, "no, see, we're still doing counterpoint even in mensursted stuff, so it's all good."

Convention. As others have mentioned, they mostly come in "one size." Also, those intervals were the basis of the tuning systems for a while, having several kinds of the basic building block complicates things.

People have also labeled 4ths and 5ths as major/minor. That kind of system is less common, but it has been used. That example is from the late 19th century, an discusses some not too mainstream things, but I have found those systems mentioned in books from the 1940s (Zamacois' harmony treatise comes to mind).

Harmony-wise, sounds like an Am7-D7 vamp to me: standard dorian groove. That may be what reminds you of the Doors. They used dorian vamps in Light My Fire (keyboard solo) and Riders on the Storm (intro); probably others too. Santana's Oye Como Va (a Cuban tune) is probably the most famous example (4 beats per chord, not 2 as here).

The syncopation on "2-and" is extremely common in all kinds of popular music - known in jazz as the "charleston" rhythm after the 1920s hit that made a feature of it - but it probably comes from Cuban/Brazilian clave patterns in the first place. Check the first part of the pattern here.

The unusual thing here is how the drums also accent the same syncopation, which makes the groove sound jerky - it doesn't flow. Brazilian music (samba or bossa) would never sound like this.

What are the dimensions of your final bit of paper? Is it two whole sheets of paper side by side or is it one sheet cut on two and re-assembled?

This is A3 ~~portrait~~ [edit] LANDSCAPE if that helps

http://www.filedropper.com/reddit-rmusictheory-doublewidthstaffpaper

https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/112509560/

&#x200B;

you can use this to play it yourself, to me it sounds different based on the context, if you have just played a major chord, it sounds more minor, and if you have just played a minor chord it sounds more major, on its own im not really sure, probably minor because of how dissonant it sounds to ears that are not used to it.

Nathan Blustein gave a paper at SMT on the pump-up modulation in musical theater. Abstract here, handout here. That has a bibliography for you to mine.

Rameau was a very important French composer and one of the most important music theorists (he introduced ideas that many of us take for granted today). His treatise on harmony is a classic; Philip Gossett translated it into English.

Solfeggi were short vocal exercises that were used to instruct musicians both how to sing and how to compose good melodies. This website has examples of these by some of the most important figures in eighteenth century music, including Mozart, Hasse, Paisiello, Farinelli, etc.

> Has somebody taken the time to carefully measure the sounds produced by different instruments and determine their exact ratio of overtones?

I don't think there's any one catalog like that, but lots of researchers have done that kind of analysis for additive synthesis. For example, check out this article, which explains a process for using Max/MSP to analyze gamelan percussion samples and then Csound to synthesize them. (Well, it's probably not super clear what's going on if you're not familiar with Max or Csound, but hopefully you can kinda get the main idea of what happened.)

Aside from doing "manual" analysis or coding up your own automated solution (like the Csound/Max article), there are a number of modern plugins and software solutions that can automatically analyze and resynthesize any sound you throw at them--it's basically like doing a Fourier transform but then resynthesizing with a bank of oscillators instead of by using an inverse Fourier transform. This approach saves you all the trouble of measuring partials by hand and tracking their amplitude over time.

Some examples of software that can do that are Image-Line's Harmor, SPEAR (has the option to synthesize with sinusoids instead of through inverse FFT), and Csound (through various additive synthesis opcodes).

I showed it to someone and they want to make a short video composed of a set of similar pieces.

I thought I would share another work, if you're interested:

https://flat.io/score/5ac4f695c09a863e9442be52/edit

I still have no idea what a cadence is, but playing around I came up with this (note: some notes are collapsed). I've asked here before without reply so I figured I'd ask again, what did I do and is this a valid progression? (i.e. it doesn't sound too bad to me, would it to you?)

Oh yeah, here's a loop of it

Check the manual for "Cross staff". There's a plug-in that will help you.

Also, this: http://www.finalemusic.com/blog/finale-blog-cross-staff-shortcut/

Finale isn't always about being the fastest at things, but about being able to do anything.

The guy who wrote this book was the keynote speaker at a conference I attended last year. I haven't read the book and the handouts have been taken down from the website but I assume that the book covers most of what he talked about.

Tons of interesting stuff, including that early music training may be protective against dyslexia and other language processing issues because, until about the time kids start to read, music and language are processed identically in the brain. This is why those kids who grow up in a musical household have such an easier time becoming "fluent" musicians--because it's literally a second language to them.

Edit:

So far as the language music connection, as I recall they basically analyzed the underlying pattern of stress and unstressed syllables--that English does this by keeping stressed syllables in a relatively metronomic rhythm, fitting other syllables around this. "I want to go to the store," for instance, where "to the" are crammed into a small space to keep "store" happening on time. French, on the other hand, has the syllables occurring at equal intervals rather than the stresses. This is mirrored in the music. Same goes for melodic contrast, with languages that have larger pitch contrasts also using that in melodies.

Here's some software you may find useful for this kind of thing:

OpenMPT: a tracker with support for arbitrary alternate tunings. (A tracker is an old-school but still useful type of sequencer).

Scala: a program for experimenting with tunings.

I dunno, genre signifiers? Genre tropes? I've never thought about it before, to be honest. We should definitely have a name for them.

If you're interested in learning about different genres of music, you can do worse than rateyourmusic

Whomever told you that Reggae was characterized by an accented 2 and 4 was not incorrect in their analysis, but certainly incomplete. Most forms of Western popular music - rock, EDM, country, hip-hop - involve strong accents on 2 and 4 (this is known as the "backbeat").

Yup, came here to post Symphony of Psalms (1930) too.

I also love his Symphony in C (1940), especially the opening of the first movement!

http://reaper.fm is free to try indefinitely (although if you like it, you should buy their very affordable license), you should at least give it a try. You will also need some type of audio interface.

I think they meant getting input from a keyboard, not necessarily the Parts function of musescore (though that is quite handy for arranging for an actual band). There's definitely note input from a MIDI keyboard, with a limited real-time input mode and a "step-time" entry mode. https://musescore.org/en/handbook/note-input#midi-keyboard

There is software which allows you to remove anything panned dead centre in a stereo track, by putting the L and R channels out of phase with one another.
Audacity will do that, as (more easily) will Transcribe.
However, you may lose the bass as well, which is typically panned centre. And of course it won't work with a mono track.

I don't believe that that functionality exists. The closest thing that I can think of is in RES, a Chrome plug-in: when you browse a sub and come across a thread that you've visited before, it will show highlighted text saying how many new comments have been added since you last visited that thread.

Awesome, I really dig this kind of stuff. I'm impressed that you did this after only a few days of coding. You might wanna look into doing some algorithmic composition! There are languages out there, like Csound, ChucK, SuperCollider, PureData, and others that are built expressly for music composition and performance. I think ChucK is probably the easiest of them to learn. Coursera hosted a good class on ChucK a few months ago, from CalArts. Maybe they'll run it again.

In any case, I think the best way to learn to code (or to learn any skill, for that matter) is to find ways to apply what you're learning to what you're passionate about.

I really like your blog, by the way :) .

Good list. I would add four other things:

1. Gapped scales (generally, hexatonic). Melodies are often based on 6-note scales that make the actual mode ambiguous. Mixolydian/Dorian ambiguity is probably the most common (i.e., the melody is missing the third). Here is a very good article about the use of such scales.

2. Drones. In a session, you can almost always play the tonic against the melody. Pipers will have a constant drone, fiddlers often will have a drone note, and guitarists/bouzouki players often add the drones to the chords they are playing.

3. Either a circular i/I-VII or I-IV chord progression as the main implied progression.

4. Melodies that are difficult to harmonize, because they were constructed without harmonies in mind. The result is that when someone throws a chord over a melody it often sounds like the music has a lot of suspended 9ths and 11ths, which gives it a rather modern character, which surely was not the intent when the music was writtern hundreds of years ago.

EDIT: Added last point and link to hexatonic article.

I first read the idea that "any chord can follow any other of the same type" (i.e., not just maj7s) in William Russo's book Composing for the Jazz Orchestra - which is actually a very brief guide to big band arranging, not composing.
It doesn't exactly "discuss" the idea, as it's really just a book of tips and essential info (instrument ranges, chord voicings, etc).

The concept of "chromatic mediants" covers chords of the same type a minor or major 3rd apart, which is almost the same thing. (Chords of the same type a 2nd or 4th apart can often be in the same key.)

This is a big question. There are a lot of intermediate steps involved in going from having no clue how to do what you want to do, to being competent at what you want to do.

Theory and composition will go hand and hand, and are helpful for what you are trying to do.

Ideally you will take lessons with a good teacher who can show you this stuff.

You also will likely want to load up on some books.

You also will want to study how these things work in various real bits of music, so you want to be learning music and analyzing it.

To do what you want to do, you need to know how to construct scales. Then you need to know how to derive chords from those scales. Then you need to know how to fit melody to chords, and also how to fit chords to melodies. Studying real music can help you with this.

A great way to practice this kind of thing is with lead sheets, which give you a melody and tell you the chords that go along with the melody. Lead sheets look like this: https://www.vgleadsheets.com/view/chrono-trigger/millennial-fair?transposition=C#

But seriously, this is a very deep subject and is kind of beyond the scope of what can be realistically handled in a single reddit thread.

Consider buying some theory books. I hear really good things about Mark HArrison's Contemporary Music Theory books. You can also search out various harmony books. I have some old ones that are oriented towards keyboard that I very much like - especially this one by Sol Berkowitz: https://www.amazon.com/Improvisation-Through-Keyboard-Berkowitz-1975-06-23/dp/B01NGZOSWA/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&amp;keywords=sol+berkowitz+harmony&amp;qid=1624322891&amp;s=books&amp;sr=1-1

I'd try to find a PDF of that online somewhere, if at all possible.

Good luck.

For a comprehensive survey of jazz theory, IMO you can't beat Terefenko. (And you really need to work your way through from the "basics" - however much you already know, there's always holes you can fill.)

A more controversial book is Mark Levine - the "The" in the title is presumptuous, as it's biased towards a specific, post-modal approach to jazz. You really need a good grounding in music theory basics (traditional functional harmony) to appreciate this book as an alternative view. And don't take his illustrative examples from jazz recordings too seriously (there are other interpretations possible). Otherwise, it's a well-written and accessible book - lots to like in it, especially in later chapters.