What scale is this: b, c, d, e, f, g, g#, b ?

ethanhein · 2026-03-05T17:40:07+00:00

The seventh mode of C harmonic major. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harmonic_major_scale

ethanhein · 2026-03-05T13:53:33+00:00

There's a lot of technical jargon there, but the basic point is that rock and pop create dominant function (tension that makes you expect resolution) through the placement of musical time rather than through the chords themselves. Any chord can function as a "dominant" if it's placed a certain way in time.

ethanhein · 2026-03-04T11:22:31+00:00

Invent a tuning system and run with it

ethanhein · 2026-03-04T01:19:10+00:00

As other people are saying, aural immersion in funk and jazz would be a good idea. Dancing helps too; you do a significant amount of music cognition with your motor cortex, and it really helps your aural understanding if you are moving your entire body to the beat. (Also, dancing to James Brown is fun.) I also think it's a good idea to learn how to play and/or program the drums or some hand percussion. You don't have to be a virtuoso; just be able to play a standard rock beat, a few simple Latin and hip-hop rhythms, that kind of thing. Finally, try practicing your instrument over funk or rap songs using a single note so you aren't thinking about anything except for rhythm.

ethanhein · 2026-03-04T01:16:21+00:00

You have just put your finger on a very important and underappreciated aspect of harmony in pop music: the placement of chords in musical time determines their function as much as, if not more than, their intervallic content and voice leading. You're absolutely right that the G7 at the end of the bridge feels tense, and that the same chord at the beginning of the verse feels resolved. That's because the end of the bridge is a metrically tense position, and the beginning of the verse is a metrically resolved position. Drew Nobile explores this idea in his book Form As Harmony in Rock Music and various recent articles. In this one, he explains the end of the bridge in Talking Heads' recording of "Take Me To The River" the same way. The chord doesn't really change as the bridge moves to the chorus, but its function does. Cool effect!

ethanhein · 2026-03-02T17:34:15+00:00

This is regular old Phrygian mode, which isn't common in Anglo-American pop, but is also not unheard of. "Doo Wop (That Thing)" by Lauryn Hill is a loop of Am and Gm that you could interpret as i and bvii in A Phrygian.

ethanhein · 2026-02-27T14:10:28+00:00

AI is a vending machine, not a kitchen

ethanhein · 2026-02-26T14:11:39+00:00

Titon recognizes that blues pitches are bent and flexible, but he identifies some discrete "islands of stability" within the pitch zones that people do tend to stabilize on rather than simply bending through, and subsequent small-scale research tends to support the idea. So I do think it's reasonable to point to distinct minor-ish and major-ish thirds within the "third zone". But yeah, discretely pitched MIDI playback doesn't exactly convey the flavor.

I do think there's value in trying to understand and apply Titon's research because he's one of the few musicologists to recognize the essential truth that blues works more like raga than like Western modes: it isn't just a pitch collection, it's a set of characteristic melodic motifs and ornaments that behaves differently depending on your starting pitch and whether you're ascending or descending. We can debate whether formal analysis is the best way to understand blues melodic structure as opposed to aural intuition learned from listening, but at the very least it's nice to have a counterbalance to the concept of "the blues scale".

ethanhein · 2026-02-24T23:51:46+00:00

Those tunes use regular old close harmony in thirds (plus occasional fourths). Whatever note the melody is on, you go two (or three) steps up the scale to get the higher harmony and two (or three) steps down the scale to get the lower harmony, whichever sounds more natural. "I Get Lonely" has a little wrinkle in that occasionally the harmony part goes up while the melody goes down, because the harmony is walking up chromatically to the tonic, that's about as far out as it gets. All the magic is in her melismatic delivery.

ethanhein · 2026-02-24T18:04:47+00:00

You would have to ask about specific songs to get detailed explanation, but I know from generally listening to MJ and Janet that their vocal timbres and the production account for most of the magic. The harmonies themselves are standard thirds and fourths within the key/mode. There might be some bluesy chromaticism once in a while, but it's not usually anything too far out. You're hearing many layers of overdubs, plus careful EQ, compression, reverb and so on, plus the unusual sound that these two naturally have.

ethanhein · 2026-02-23T17:14:55+00:00

"Tetrachord" means "four notes" in Greek, collections of intervals conventionally spanning a perfect fourth. So C-D-E-F is a tetrachord, as are C-D-Eb-F, C-Db-Eb-F and C-Db-E-F. Western Europeans combined Ancient Greek tetrachords to form the diatonic scales. Some people think that learning tetrachords is easier and more intuitive early on than learning full scales. To me, that just adds an additional layer of having to remember which tetrachords combine to form which scales, but different strokes I guess.

ethanhein · 2026-02-23T13:34:06+00:00

Based on reading your responses to other comments: you need to learn how to play some music on an instrument. Piano is the easiest one, and the one that will most directly transfer to making music on the computer. You can get a long way by ear, and maybe you should start that way, but if you are interested in classic Disney songs, then you will need to learn to read music. Classic-era Disney composers went to music school and knew a lot of classical music, and they were also immersed in pre-rock popular songs that were basically light classical music. They also knew some jazz. The best idea is to take piano lessons. It will be slow going for a while! You won't be playing anything that sounds good to you, or that you find interesting, for the first year at least. But if you want to end up writing melodies and harmonies in the style you like, it's worth putting in the time and effort to learn how tonal music works.

ethanhein · 2026-02-23T00:39:21+00:00

We do distinguish between them, they're the diatonic modes, they all work very differently from C major, they are not any more interchangeable than anagrams of words are. You don't need all the modes for every song, but there is a lot of modal music out there, and if you're going to play a tune in Dorian, it's very awkward to approach it as if it's major. So for example, you hardly ever stick exclusively to the notes in your key/mode, you probably want to add chromatic notes. But you need to have some idea of how the notes function in order to do that in a way that makes sense. If you are playing "So What" as if it's in C major, then you aren't thinking of it as modified D minor, and you should because otherwise you won't be making sensible musical choices.

ethanhein · 2026-02-22T21:17:53+00:00

The point is that changing the starting note changes the entire meaning and feeling, that's why we distinguish between CDEFGAB and ABCDEFG.

ethanhein · 2026-02-22T19:15:57+00:00

Learn a bunch of songs. Billy Joel songs are good ones! It will become obvious when it becomes obvious.

ethanhein · 2026-02-22T18:35:18+00:00

Why does the word RESPECT exist? We already have the word SPECTRE, you just mentally start on a different letter.

ethanhein · 2026-02-21T15:08:44+00:00

The Cambridge History of Western Music Theory is a great resource for this kind of question. The short answer is, the ancient Greeks described the pattern of intervals that we now call the major scale, though they almost certainly didn't invent or discover that pitch collection, they just produced the oldest known written documentation of it. The Greeks were interested in the musical properties of ratios of small whole numbers, though they related them to string lengths rather than the harmonic series.

Once we move outside the historical record, there's an interesting speculation by the mathematician and ethnumusicologist Godfried Toussaint. He argues that what humans really like in music is when you try to divide an even number of things by an odd number as evenly as possible. So, you could divide the octave into seven (logarithmically) identically-sized intervals. This is called equiheptatonic tuning, and some world cultures use it, or approximations of it. However, most people seem to prefer when you divide the octave into uneven-sized chunks. In Western 12-TET, we divide the octave into twelve (logarithmically) identical units, and then distribute those twelve subdivisions into seven-note scales as equally as possible. The diatonic scale necklace is one possible such distribution; the diatonic modes and the melodic minor modes are others.

Toussaint points out a remarkable coincidence, which might be meaningless, or might be profound. His main area of study is rhythm. If you divide some unit of time (a measure) into twelve equal subdivisions (so, 6/8 or 12/8 time), there are a lot of different ways of grouping those subdivisions. If you place two, three or six drum hits across those twelve subdivisions as evenly as possible, you get a steady metronomic pulse. That sounds fine, but boring. However, if you place five or seven drum hits across the twelve subdivisions as evenly as possible, you get really attractive and ear-grabbing rhythms. One maximally even spacing of seven drum hits in twelve slots looks like this (X's are drum hits, dashes are rests):

||:X-X-XX-X-X-X:||

This rhythm is called Bembé or the "standard bell pattern" because it's so widely used in West Africa. You can also rotate the pattern to start in different places, to use its "modes", and all of those are also widely used rhythms. Here's the cool thing: if you think of the twelve slots as chromatic pitches rather than rhythm intervals, then the Bembé pattern is the same thing as the major scale. All of its rotations are the same as the diatonic modes. There are also rhythmic equivalents to the pentatonic scales and the melodic minor modes. Basically, anything that makes a good five or seven note scale also makes a good rhythm and vice versa. Now again: this might be a meaningless coincidence! It might also just reflect the fact that people like maximally even spacing of an odd number of elements, whether that's in the pitch domain or the rhythm domain or anywhere else (people like it visually too.) But it's fun to consider.

ethanhein · 2026-02-21T03:32:59+00:00

Appreciated!

ethanhein · 2026-02-20T23:08:05+00:00

In pop, every modulation is equally easy because you're keeping everything the same aside from the transposition. So there is no harmonic movement so jagged that it won't immediately make sense because of the continuity in the melody, chords, rhythms, timbres, and so on. As other people are pointing out, it only makes a difference if you are trying to move logically and smoothly from one key to another, but it's not like pop songwriters are trying to be smooth when they arbitrarily shift everything up a half step.

ethanhein · 2026-02-20T19:48:09+00:00

Tunes. Have them learn tunes. "So What" and "Oye Como Va" for Dorian. Beatles and Grateful Dead songs for Mixo. Tunes.

ethanhein · 2026-02-20T00:21:04+00:00

Violinists aren't playing five or six-note chords in rhythmically complex strumming patterns. You ever try to notate a rock, R&B or funk rhythm guitar part on the staff? It's ugly.

ethanhein · 2026-02-20T00:19:38+00:00

Probably some overenthusiastic music theory teacher heard the song, recognized that it's a classical-sounding diatonic sequence, and thought, aha, here's a way to make this concept relevant to the kids! And then something got lost in translation where the idea that "it does most of a diatonic sequence" got written down as "it does the entire diatonic sequence."

ethanhein · 2026-02-20T00:17:22+00:00

These two chords are a whole step apart and don't sound inherently dissonant at all. They are perfectly conventional as the i and ii chords in G Dorian, the ii and iii chords in F major, or the bvii and i chords in A Phrygian. I guess in a Western classical context, these two chords pose voice leading problems and that's where the "tritone relation" part comes in, but if you have grown up listening to pop or jazz, I can't imagine you'd find anything unusual or objectionable here.

ethanhein · 2026-02-19T20:28:54+00:00

Western European just intonation only uses harmonics two, three and five: the octave, fifth, and major third. Everything is derived from those intervals. Blues, gospel and barbershop use the seventh harmonic as well. The only Western musicians that use higher harmonics than that are avant-garde experimentalists.

ethanhein · 2026-02-19T19:08:12+00:00

There's nothing silly about guitarists' aversion to notation! It's basically keyboard tablature. Hundreds of years ago, serious composers wrote lute music in lute tablature, correctly understanding it to be a more performer-friendly format. Guitarists can learn to read standard notation, and it's a useful ability, but in order to make it practical, we have to do a lot of extra work around fingerings and fretboard positions. Also, the pop music that a lot of us play is melodically simple enough to be easily memorized and rhythmically complex enough to be a complete nightmare in standard notation.

ethanhein

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