Before major and minor became the dominant scales of Western music, composers worked within a system of seven modes — ordered sets of pitches derived from the…
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Song forms are the structural skeletons songwriters reach for again and again, the shapes that make a song memorable, singable, and recognizable as a song.
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A motif is a musical seed. It is the smallest fragment of melodic and rhythmic material that has an identity — something recognizable, something the listener…
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The primary chords of any key — tonic, dominant, and subdominant — are the three foundational harmonies from which all Western tonal music is built.
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A triad is a three-note chord. Add one more note — a seventh above the root — and you enter the world of seventh chords: richer, more complex, and more…
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The minor scale has an identity problem — a productive one. Unlike the major scale, which has a single fixed formula, the minor scale comes in three versions…
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Relative and parallel keys are the two ways one key can be a close cousin of another, and understanding both is the foundation of fluent modulation.
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There are four triad qualities in Western music, and each has a distinct acoustic character — a personality, really — that the ear recognizes immediately.
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Every interval has a mirror image. Take a third and flip it — move the lower note up an octave, or the upper note down — and you get a sixth.
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Tool Number Three is a diagram. It looks like a clock — twelve positions arranged in a circle — but instead of hours, it shows key signatures.
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