Our daughter is 16 and does not date yet, but that does not stop boys from asking. Last week, she came to us to tell about this guy that had asked her on a date. I asked her what he wanted to do with his life and she said: “Music.” I was taken aback for […]
Tag Archives: harmony
One of the decisions I made in my recent arrangement of “Crown Him With Many Crowns” was to intentionally break some of my own rules (or at least rules I have stolen from others). For example, consider this: Look at the roots of the chords and you will note that I am moving in thirds. […]
Read Part 1 here Remember this line from that last post? You can substitute a half diminished chord for a minor chord of the same spelling if it is functioning as a ii chord for a target that is also minor. That is one confusing bit of writing so let me do my best to […]
Someone recently mentioned to me that I have never really discussed the half diminished chord and how to use it –and I realized they are right. I want to remedy that over a short series of two posts. As a quick reminder, a half diminished chord is a stack of 4 notes that are separated […]
Read Part 1 here In Part 1, I introduced a general rule: the further from root the melody note is, the more sophisticated the sound is going to be. This is a general rule because it requires a lot of nuance and is not always true. For example, there will be occasions where you get a […]
I was recently at an event where lots of people were presenting songs and someone presented a song that sort of blew people away. It stood out in certain ways that made people sit up and take notice. In my opinion, there was one huge factor that made it stand out and I want to […]
I laughed when I just wrote the title of this blog post because it reminds me of a few axioms that I live by. You have heard me say them before but indulge me: Those that know the least know it the loudest. Those that know all the answers don’t know all the questions. And […]
Earlier in the week, I gave you a challenge to arrange “A Shelter in the Time of Storm” with me. Several of you have let me know you are on board with that. Make sure you have printed off the rough sketch of the harmony I provided in that last blog post. Then, here is […]
I posted a challenge to you guys to name a particular chord in my free arrangement from the other day. This is a big music nerd alert but I am going to talk about that chord today. Here it is (last beat in bar 17) Several people posted their thoughts on this page and by […]
Music is a complicated business but it is furthered complicated by the fact that there are various schools of theory that are used to try to explain it. There are a couple of reasons for that. The first reason is that the increased understanding over the centuries of how music works has sort of invalidated some of the […]
I have had a number of questions about last week’s so today I want to talk more about the harmony. Let’s start with a definition. Diatonic chords are chords that are naturally derived from the key. In other words, all the notes in the chord are part of the scale of the key. If you […]