{"id":48657,"date":"2019-12-03T06:00:48","date_gmt":"2019-12-03T11:00:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=48657"},"modified":"2019-12-03T02:15:42","modified_gmt":"2019-12-03T07:15:42","slug":"music-class-part-3-stuff-i-learned","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=48657","title":{"rendered":"Music Class Part 3: Stuff I Learned"},"content":{"rendered":"

First I complained about the Monthly platform<\/a>. Then I shared some of my work<\/a>. Now I want to talk about what I learned while taking Andrew Huang’s class.<\/p>\n

As with my Bad and Wrong Music Lessons<\/a>, you should take all of this with a grain of salt. I’m figuring this stuff out as I go, and I’m likely getting lots of details wrong. Also, in the past I’ve noticed that posting Wrong Stuff about music is a great way to get musicians to show up and give me a bunch of education for free. It’s the classic internet problem. Ask a question…<\/p>\n

“What’s a good chord progression?”<\/p>\n

… and aside from people telling you to “Google it<\/a>“, you’ll get ignored because people have better things to do than answer questions for lazy info-beggars. But if you make an assertion…<\/p>\n

“In A minor, the a-F-C-G chord progression is pretty much the only one anyone uses.”<\/p>\n

…then lots of people will stop and tell you how terribly wrong<\/b> you are. Some of them will even stop to explain why! It’s free knowledge! All you need is a lack of self-respect!<\/p>\n

Annyway, here are some of the most interesting things I learned:<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

1. You can just mash chords together like, whatever.<\/h3>\n

Apparently you can just do this and nobody will call the music police on you.<\/div>
Apparently you can just do this and nobody will call the music police on you.<\/div><\/p>\n

This didn’t come directly from the instruction and it wasn’t really part of the class, but it’s something I stumbled across in two different places on YouTube while I was working on the class and I want to talk about it here.<\/p>\n

Assuming you’re working in a traditional genre and not messing around with strange experimental stuff, then your song is going to have a chord progression. For example: A minor, F major, C major, E minor, which is sometimes annotated as a-F-C-eLowercase for minor chords, uppercase for major chords.<\/span>. But whatever. In pop music, having three or four chords in your pattern is pretty standard. Fewer than that and it will feel (even more) repetitive, and if you have too many then it might be hard for the listener to detect the pattern and the song might feel aimlessAs always, there are exceptions.<\/span>. You play your chords, in the chosen order, over and over again, and then maybe you change things up a bit when you get to the verse \/ chorus \/ breakdown and play some other chord pattern so the listener doesn’t get bored.<\/p>\n

The important thing here is that I really thought you were limited to one chord at a time. I’ve had occasional mishaps where I accidentally played two chords at once and got the “cat walking on a piano” vibe, so I figured that was a bad thing. But then I ran into this video<\/a>:<\/p>\n