Greetings

I will be away from the Internet for about a week while we celebrate Christmas with my side of the family. Peace to all of you during the holidays.

For you music theory fans

This won't be another long post about chord theory, although that one was surprisingly well-received, and I may delve into that topic again sometime soon. This is just a link to a great new site I found while browsing Digg.com.

It's musictheory,net, and it's got lots of great lessons. Everything is done in Flash, so the interface is nice and very useful. The best part (to me at least) are the trainers:

• Guitar trainer, where you the computer displays a mark on a fret and you have to tell it what the note is. This will be awesome for me, because I pretty much suck at that, and it is starting to inhibit my playing. There is also a cool brass trainer that displays a note and asks you to press the arrow keys the way you'd press the valves to make that note on a given instrument. Since brass instruments are an offense against the ears of God, I'm not sure why anyone would go here, except that it's a cool idea.


• Interval ear trainer, which plays two notes and asks you to identify the interval. I used to have one of these on my old PDA, and it's the feature I miss most since i dropped that sucker on a concrete floor a few years back. I kept screwing up on the minor sixth for some reason.


• Chord ear trainer, similar to the interval ear trainer except it plays a chord. This one is hard but useful if you're the type of person who tries to make chord charts from recordings.

All these trainers keep track of your accuracy. I ran about 95% on the guitar trainer (restricted to the first five frets, though), 75% on the intervals, and a paltry 40% on the chords (even with the weirder ones removed from the equation).

There's a ton of other interesting and useful content on that site, and it runs from very basic to rather advanced. Cool stuff.

There's nothing funny about Creed.

Or is there? From CNN.com:

"I think my record is going to speak for itself to the Creed fans. I think it's going to be like when Sting left The Police."
—Scott Stapp

Commence laughter...NOW!

Better than no post at all?

A wise man once said, "Kids don't like to eat lunch at school. But if they've got a Remains of the Day lunchbox, they're gonna feel a whole lot better."

In a similar vein, I don't like disgusting freezing rain, but since I get to see a cool new image in my Dashboard weather widget, I feel a whole lot better.



I actually think this might be the image for hail, not freezing rain, but it's not hailing right now.

Plug: Screenshot taken with the excellent Capture widget.

Christmas 2005

I think this photo is a metaphor for the present reality in our lives: a peaceful beauty that is affected and altered and sometimes even disturbed by the presence of a toddler—but one that is not marred and is ultimately and undeniably better.

Music theory goodness

This post originated in an online chat with a friend. I was telling him about a realization I made a while back about music theory, something they never bothered to explain in my theory classes but which has made chord progressions a lot easier for me to understand. After about three of those paragraph-sized messages from me—you know, the ones that are really rude to toss off via instant messenger—he said (and I quote): "This is (somewhat) fascinating, but I should go." Ha. Sounds like the perfect type of content for a blog post, where people can say that in total anonymity. Maybe some of my hardcore musician friends will find this interesting and comment on it. I hope it is somewhat accessible to everyone, though.

With that alluring introduction, here is my discovery. It is probably old hat to some musicians, but perhaps it will be helpful to others: Half step resolutions are powerful, almost magnetic. When a note in one chord is only a half step away from a note in another chord, there is a pull from the first chord to the second that is stronger because of that half step.

Let me back up slightly. In a major scale, you have a series of notes separated by either a half or a whole step interval. (A half step would be one fret on a guitar, and a whole step would be two.) Here is the solfege (do-re-mi) for a major scale:

do re mi fa sol la ti do

In that scale, everything is a whole step except "mi-fa" and "ti-do," which are half steps. To get a sense of the magnetism of the half step intervals, imagine this scenario. It's 2 a.m. You quietly creep downstairs to the den, where the family piano is located—directly under your piano-teacher mother's bedroom. As loudly as you can, you pound out the first seven notes of the major scale: DO RE MI FA SOL LA TI... but you never play that last note, that octaved "do." Your mother would not be able to get to sleep until she came downstairs and played that last note.

Here's the point: that same ti-do pull is present in chord progressions. Let's take the key of C. Here is a C-major scale in notes:

c d e f g a b c

As you can see, the "ti-do" in the key of C is b-c. You can get this resolution by playing a G major chord and then a C major chord:

G major = g - b - d
C major = c - e - g

You can see the b-note in the G chord and the c-note in the C chord. This is "ti-do," the interval that got your mom out of bed at 2 a.m. That's why G - C is such a strong and satisfying resolution. In music theory this is called an "authentic cadence." But wait, there's more.

Another strong resolution in the key of C comes from an F major chord, and it employs the other half step interval in a major scale, "fa-mi." The cadence looks like this:

F major = f - a - c
C major= c - e - g

If you look closely, you'll see that the interval resolves in the opposite direction this time, from the higher tone (fa) to the lower (mi). The "fa" wants to resolve to the "mi" because it's so close. The F - C resolution is called a "plagal" (sometimes "half") cadence, and it is the progression you hear at the end of a hymn when everyone sings "amen." Incidentally, this "fa-mi" resolution is also present when you "suspend" a C major chord, adding in the fourth (f) and then resolve it to the third (e).

What if we could find a cadence that used both of the half step intervals in a major scale? That's easy, and it's a very popular and strong cadence: G7 - C major. The chords look like this:

G7 = g - b - d - f
C major = c - e - g

Here we have the "ti-do" resolution and the "fa-mi" resolution in one chord. This, I believe, is why the V7 - I (G7 - C in the key of C major) resolution is so strong and prevalent throughout western music. And yes, manipulating that much HTML (since my browser doesn't support fancy formatting buttons) almost killed me.

After all that, I suppose I might as well tell you what got me thinking about all this. I was working on an arrangement of a song in the key of C-major, and I was playing around with various ways to resolve to the root chord, C major. Here's a combination I came up with that I really liked:

--x---3--
--4---5--
--4---5--
--3---5--
--x---3--
--3---x--

or in notes:

Chord 1 = g - f - b - d#
Chord 2 = c - g - c - e - g

Chord 2 is a simple C major chord using a barred A shape. Easy. Chord 1 is what makes this really interesting. Let's call it a G7#5 ("G-seven-sharp-five"). Maybe that's what it's called, and maybe I just made that up. Why does this sound so cool? I think it's because it has the two half step resolutions that a G7 - C cadence would have, plus, it adds in a third half step resolution. What's more, two of those half step intervals resolve to the same note (e) from opposite directions. Add in the dissonance from having that augmented ("sharped") fifth in there, and you have a really sweet sounding chord progression when you resolve to the C chord.

I think I've pretty well cornered the market on people Googling "half step interval resolution." Now I sit back and watch the pageloads pile up!

Russian squirrel pack kills dog

From the BBC:


BBC Photo of a Russian black squirrel

This is pretty freaky.

BBC NEWS | Europe | Russian squirrel pack 'kills dog':

"A 'big' stray dog was nosing about the trees and barking at squirrels hiding in branches overhead when a number of them suddenly descended and attacked, reports say.

'They literally gutted the dog,' local journalist Anastasia Trubitsina told Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper.

'When they saw the men, they scattered in different directions, taking pieces of their kill away with them."

Via Digg.