Tuesday 30 Mar 2010 by Orphi the AweKid.

Tonic, submediant, subdominant, dominant.

In the key of C major, this equates to C major, A minor, F major, G major. It’s the very first chord sequence I ever learned, before I even understood what chords were, and it’s the chord sequence of a thousand million love songs. For instance,

Unchained Melody, Earth Angel, Happy Birthday Sweet Sixteen, Breaking Up Is Hard To Do, Let’s Twist Again, Beyond The Sea, Blue Moon, Silhouettes, Angel Next Door, Stay…

And that’s only what I can think of off the top of my head. (And things like Calandar Girl feature the same chord sequence, although less prominently and in a more complicated arrangement.)

Another common choice is to replace the subdominant with the supertonic (i.e., replace F major with D minor instead). The result sounds broadly similar, given that there’s only a single note different (D instead of C). In fact some of my examples above might even be using this variant rather than the first one.

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Monday 21 Sep 2009 by Orphi the AweKid.

OK, so some more music theory, people!

Generally speaking, the human ear (or more exactly, the human brain) doesn’t respond to pitch, it responds to pitch relationships. You’ve probably seen that picture with the blue squares, and each blue square has a different background colour, and it makes the blue squares appear different shades of blue, even though they’re actually identical. Or, see this nausiating picture:

See those green and blue stripes? You know what? They’re both the same colou!

Musical notes are similar; if you play G after just having played C, it sounds natural and harmonious. But play G when you’ve just been playing B♭ and it sounds very different.

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Wednesday 20 May 2009 by Orphi the AweKid.

OK guys, so here’s a close-up of my hands while I’m playing. This also features digital sound (so hopefully less distortion), and I’ve worked on improving my playing. (I had apparently misread several parts of the score. I’ve learned some more chunks of the score. And I’ve worked on being more fluid in my playing.)

YouTube

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Thursday 30 Apr 2009 by Orphi the AweKid.

According to legend, it was Pythagorus who discovered that sounds who’s frequencies share a “simple” ratio sound harmonious together. (By “simple” I mean something like 5:4 and not something like 253:612.)

The Pythagorean scale is based on this concept. Let’s say we start with C, and tune that to 300 Hz (just to make the calculations easier). An octave is a 2:1 ratio, so we tune every other C to some multiple of this; the next C will be 600 Hz, the next 1,200 Hz, and so on.

Now, we move one 5th up from C, which takes us to G, and we tune that to 3:2 higher. So we take our 300 Hz, divide by 2, and multiply by 3, yielding 450 Hz. So that’s the frequency for G. (And 900 Hz for the octave above, and so on.)

Next we move up another 5th from G to D, again increasing the frequency 3:2, which gives 675 Hz.

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Wednesday 29 Apr 2009 by Orphi the AweKid.

OK, so I realised I’m not explaining myself very well. Let me try again…

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