Musical inspiration can strike at any time: driving home from work, in the shower, or even when you wake up in the morning. You could hum a melody one day, and find it sticks around for days, weeks, or longer. Focus your inspiration while exploring the possibilities and you’ll soon be molding melodies of your own!
Just as physical materials have texture, so does music—though, of course, texture in music is characterized by sound, not feel. You might describe the texture of a song or piece in terms of range, dynamics, articulation, or rhythmic complexity….
In reality, transposition isn’t all that hard to grasp. Put simply, a transposing instrument is one whose musical notes are written at a pitch different from actual concert pitch.
Seventh century music scholar Isidore of Seville said it was impossible to notate music. Boy, was he ever wrong: there is evidence that notation was practiced by the Egyptians in 3,000 BC. Ancient Greece also had a system, and other forms arose in China and Japan. Now you too can know the proper history of the staff.
You can learn how to build a chord very easily. Believe it or not, you don’t even need to know how to read music, just follow this chart…
Rhythm is how we perceive and measure time. Humanity awoke to the awareness of passing of time in the passing of days and seasons. Logically, then, days and years became the basis of the language of time.
In just five short minutes you will learn basic music theory and trust us when we say it goes a long way to learning an instrument.
The Andalusian Cadence or Diatonic Phrygian Tetrachord, written I – bVII – bVI – V (A-G-F-E in the key of A), is the most frequently used musical sequence.
Have you ever played a song or a piece with a marking in the middle stating♩=♪ or something similar? If this puzzling marking left you scratching your head, you’re not alone! After all, since our days in elementary school music class, we’ve been taught that whole notes, half notes, quarter notes, eighth notes, and so on, all have distinct rhythmic values.
A scale is a collection of pitches that follows a set pattern of ascending or descending intervals. A major scale, for example, may start on any note, as long as the subsequent notes follow the appropriate pattern of whole steps and half steps. The same is true of minor scales—but with a different pattern of steps, of course.