Podcast episode on swing
Here’s a subject that I tried hard to explain using songs, without apparent success. Maybe the podcast format will work better. It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing by Ethan Hein But what...
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Harmonic rhythm in two-chord shuttles
We devote a lot of attention in music theory pedagogy to chords. But it isn’t enough to look at what the chords are; you have to consider when they are too. The placement of chord changes in musical...
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Inside the Super MAGFest Jam Clinic
I spent this past weekend at Super MAGFest, where I led some sessions in their Jam Clinic. I was there at the invitation of Ashanti Mills, with whom I have had some great online conversations about...
View ArticleScarlet>Fire 5/8/77
Did the Grateful Dead play their best show at Cornell University’s Barton Hall on May 8th, 1977? True connoisseurs usually say no, pointing instead to something from the peak years between 1969 and...
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Identifying song forms
Song structure is a strange music theory topic, because there is not much “theory” beyond just describing it. Why are some patterns of song sections so broadly appealing? The answer has something to...
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Things I wrote in 2023
This year I wrote a bunch of groove pedagogy, including a book proposal and related materials aimed at future publications and teaching. So far, the only published part of all that work is 5 Pop...
View ArticleLove Rollercoaster, Genius of Love, and nonsensical chord loops
I have a hypothesis about harmony in loop-based music: if you have a good groove going, then any repeated chord progression at all will start to make sense and sound good after a few repetitions. In...
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Polymeter vs polyrhythm
As I continue to build groove pedagogy resources, I want to clear up some persistent confusion about polymeter and polyrhythm. If you don’t feel like reading the whole post, it can be summed up in...
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New Orff arrangements with Heather Fortune
Heather Fortune and I are delighted to announce the publication of 5 Pop Grooves for Orff Ensemble, available now from the good people at F-flat Books. If you teach elementary music, you should check...
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I made a new track for teaching swing
I just finished my Groove Theories book proposal and sent it out, that was about twenty years of very slow work followed by two weeks of very fast work. So fingers crossed on that. I included two...
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Baby, I Love You
Sign up for my new harmony course on Soundfly I continue to be severely stressed out about the state of America and the world, and I continue to reach to Aretha Franklin for emotional support. This...
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Groove harmony outline
I recently got involved in some music theory pedagogy discourse on Twitter, about which you do not care. There was some discussion of the fact that I’m planning to write a teaching resource for...
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God Make Me Funky
Herbie Hancock’s band on his classic mid-70s funk albums went on without Herbie as The Headhunters. Their biggest hit, “God Make Me Funky”, has been sampled in several hundred rap songs, and rightly...
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Building the Funky Drummer beat
I’m developing some groove pedagogy for an upcoming Soundfly course and an instrumental method book I’m working on with Heather Fortune. The Soundfly course is for producers, while the book is for...
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There Was A Time (I Got To Move)
Being a fan of James Brown can be a challenge, because his classic songs have all been recorded multiple times in different versions with different names on different labels. “I Got To Move” is a case...
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Althea
Here’s a Grateful Dead song that I loved as a teenager. As with many things I loved as a teenager, I did not know why this spoke to me. Now I do, so I get to share that knowledge with you. “Althea” is...
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My year in writing
I wrote a lot of stuff this year! First, let’s talk about the big projects that I started in previous years but finished in 2022. The biggest one was my doctoral dissertation. Read the story of it...
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Blues harmony primer
For a more detailed and scholarly version of this guide with a bibliography, see my Blues Tonality treatise. How do chords and scales work in the blues? Is there a “blues scale”, and if so, what notes...
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What’s Going On
For a discussion of musical form in Contemporary Music Theories, we talked about Marvin Gaye’s classic “What’s Going On.” The multitrack stems are in circulation, and they are quite a revelation....
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Groove: an aesthetic of measured time
As I work toward my future book on the theory of groove-based music, I’m reading up on the existing literature. There is not a whole lot of it! Most of the scholarly work about groove is about the...
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