Easy Music Guides

Numbers are wonderful in that you can make them dance and sing pretty much any tune you’d like and yet they still have the capability of stopping you dead in your tracks. For example, I didn’t think twice about it when someone congratulated me on starting in on my fourteenth year as part of guitar [...]

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Now we’ll start getting a little bit more complicated, placing two notes in the counterpoint for every one in the CF (the cantus firmus, or fixed melody). As with first species, we must start with either a perfect octave or a perfect fifth (if the CF is above the CP, it really should be a [...]

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This week my younger son came over with a rough cut of one of his bands (the Hollywood Nightmares) first CD, which should be released in May or June. They play “punk pop” music – which I’d characterize as tight vocal harmonies over driving guitar based punk progressions (think of the Beach Boys singing Ramones [...]

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Now that we’ve got the basic terminology behind us, on to writing counterpoint melodies. The big breakthrough for Fux was dividing counterpoint lines into what he called “species”.  In Fux’ view, there are five species of counterpoint: Note against note Two notes against one note Four notes against one note Offset melodies creating suspensions “Florid” [...]

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Perhaps you’ve heard of “counterpoint”. It’s a style of music in which you have multiple voices (or instruments) doing different things at the same time, and it all adds up to something bigger than its parts. In this series, I’m going to explore that aspect of music. In some ways it’s highly technical; in other [...]

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There are lots of possible chords. Almost all popular music follows “tertian” harmony, with chords built in thirds: C-E-G, etc. Let me define “lots” a bit more precisely. By my count, there are roughly 47 different chord names used in the tertian system, including power “chords” and various altered and suspended chords used in popular [...]

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Even More Exotic Scales! At the end of the Part 8, you may have noticed I wrote “in our twelve-tone system.” Western music currently divides an octave into twelve equal parts, and the tuning we use is called 12TET, for 12 tone equal temperament. Prior to the 18th century, we used twelve tones, but they [...]

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Additional Exotic Scales In addition to what composers have done, theorists have provided us with many scales. In an earlier installment I outlined Heinrich Glaren’s theory of modes; he found that the existing church modes and secular scales could all be seen as the major scale “starting from” different notes. The harmonic minor scale had [...]

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Exotic scales After the pentatonic, major, and common minor scales and the modes, everything else – with one exception – can be considered an exotic scale; these won’t be used very often, but they’re still pretty cool, and each has its own sound. The one exception is the chromatic scale. The word “chromatic” comes from [...]

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Modes Modes are probably the single most confusing element of music for guitarists. There’s a ton of mis-information out there, which just makes things worse. But they’re not that difficult to understand and use if they’re approached properly. What we think of today as “modes” are simply scales. Several of them are very old – [...]

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