{"id":24156,"date":"2014-09-08T11:08:18","date_gmt":"2014-09-08T16:08:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=24156"},"modified":"2015-01-25T17:55:39","modified_gmt":"2015-01-25T22:55:39","slug":"bad-and-wrong-music-lessons-part-4","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=24156","title":{"rendered":"Bad and Wrong Music Lessons, Part 4"},"content":{"rendered":"

As this series drags interminably onward, we reach the end of my musical knowledge. Actually, I guess we were at the end of it way back in part one<\/a>, and now we’ve sailed off the edge of the map into a vast ocean of befuddlement and misapprehension. (It happens.) <\/p>\n

You’ll hear music nerds talking about “chord progression”. It’s time for another one of my screwball images of keyboards:<\/p>\n

piano9.jpg<\/td><\/tr><\/table><\/p>\n

Again, imagine this is a piano where all the keys are the same size. Think of the red keys as “keys that don’t belong in my song”. As I’ve mentioned before, there are 12 notes in the scale but we never use more than 7 in a given piece of musicMusic nerds, I KNOW you want to nitpick this. I’m watching you.<\/span>Truthfully, I enjoy the expanded explanations from people who know music, but just be aware that I’m over-simplifying on purpose here.<\/span>. <\/p>\n

So now we want to make some chords. For the sake of argument, let’s say we’re making minor chords. Those are shaped like this:<\/p>\n

piano8.jpg<\/td><\/tr><\/table><\/p>\n

So you have NOTE (skip 2 keys) NOTE (skip 3) NOTE. To find a chord, mentally overlay this pattern on our keyboard above. Our goal is to find a spot where we can do this without landing on a red key. Like So:<\/p>\n

piano10.jpg<\/td><\/tr><\/table><\/p>\n

But if we try to go one note higher:<\/p>\n

piano11.jpg<\/td><\/tr><\/table><\/p>\n

We land on a red key, making this an invalid spot to have a chord. If you climb up the entire scale and try every spot, you’ll find exactly 3 spots where you can fit a chord with this particular shape. Music majors have a special name for these three chordsThey have a special name for everything, but good luck keeping it all straight.<\/span>. I think the proper name in this case is triad<\/a>. But I get get a bit lost when trying to follow the terminology this close to the deep end. Often one bit of jargon is defined using three other jargon words, and there’s only so long I’m willing to chase my tail on Wikipedia before I give up and invent my own names for things. I call them the “perfect” chordsThis is probably a terrible term for them, since the word perfect is already used elsewhere in music terminology. This series is called “Bad and Wrong Music Lessons” for a reason!<\/span>. <\/p>\n

There are other chords, of course, but these three are the perfect ones. In my experience, you can do no wrong with them. As long as you’re building on one of these, you can play notes all over the place and it all sounds good. In contrast, other chords – the “less perfect” ones – are a little more difficult to handle. <\/p>\n

Let’s imagine we have two instruments in our song. One is a piano, slowly hammering out simple chords. The other is (let’s say) a singer, who is doing nothing but belting out scales. (Maybe she’s a showoff.) Up and down the scales she goesNote that she’s sticking to our 7 notes.<\/span>.<\/p>\n

If we’re playing a perfect chord, then all is good. Our singer runs the scales and we play our chord on the piano. Maybe I’m playing a chord with C-E-G in it, and she’s singing a D. That’s fine. But if I’m playing an imperfect chord, then at certain points she will sound dissonant with my piano. I don’t have the ear to nail down which notes cause problems or why, but I always run into this problem when using imperfect chords: I have to make sure all the instruments in the arrangement are using notes from our chord, which is kind of limiting.<\/p>\n

People talk about the fact that most pop songs only use four chords<\/a>. I’m sure that’s why mashups like 6 Songs Collide<\/a> are possible. But I can’t even get four chords into my music. I always stick the the three perfect ones. In A minor this means my chords are A-D-E. Since iI make songs in 4\/4 time, I end up with A-D-E-A as my chord progressionWe need to be doing things in groups of 4.<\/span>. I’ll usually move some or all of the second A chord to a different octave, just to keep it from sounding too monotonous. <\/p>\n

My latest effort is yet another 3-chord song in A minor:<\/p>\n