#modal chords

[guitarguitarworld]

Jazz Fusion Chords:How to create them from scales

CLICK SUBSCRIBE! Hi Guys, Today, a look at how to create colourful and interesting jazz/fusion chords: Because, we are dealing with jazz/fusion we will manipulate a scale in modal form. This will be C Mixolydian: Now, let’s add one note above each note of the mode and create 3rds. [Here we can hear the mode in double stops]. Now, we will add another note a 5th above the root and create…

[relicsongmel]

Being a music-based synesthete with absolute pitch is wonderful but so frustrating because the vast majority of people have no context for the way I experience music and thus whenever I try to explain it it makes no sense to them. What do you mean you can't tell what color this song is. What do you mean you don't hear a Bb minor chord and feel your body react to it before your brain does. What do you mean you can't feel the warm sunbeams of D major dancing across your face. My world is filled with musical color but even if people think it's cool they will never really see it and it makes me sad

[legobiwan]

Esoteric thought for the day: the Super Paper Mario menu screen theme is textbook modal mixture (bIII, bVI, N6 chords) and I am already salivating at the idea of including this in future theory class curriculum.

[femmeterypolka]

i hope whoever made traditional music library dot co dot uk gets their shit slonked silly style tonight

[gowns]

ok listen i have been exposed to a lot of music theory and a lot of it has flown over my head -- i understood major and minor and etc and how to play easy chords and how to sing a pitch and all that, but any time people started talking about the circle of fifths and modalities i spaced out. i found this video last week and i was like whoa WHOOAAAAAAA holy shit... i understand now. and i printed out a big color picture of the circle of fifths and put it by my piano.

[thumpypuppy]

Lindar here!

Thinking on a conversation I had with Sadie about the title theme of ISAT, and given a lot of folks have been transcribing music for the OST, I kinda want to briefly talk about something.

First I would like to say, the language we use for music theory is DEscriptive, not PREscriptive, and so it is important to keep that in mind. We try our best to describe what's happening!

One interesting conversation is around the title theme, and so I will say this: The first part written was the melody, which is strictly in D Dorian. This melody and it's various incarnations throughout the soundtrack exist with many different supporting chord structures that change on basically every iteration, but one unusual feature in its original iteration (the START AGAIN title theme) and modern original (In Stars and Time title theme) is that, despite being in D Dorian for the melody, the supporting chord structure features a rather prominent major five. To me it makes sense and adds some amount of resolution, where if it was ACTUALLY D Dorian it would feature a minor five, which didn't sound right. Does the piece shift between D Dorian and A minor? Is it a "harmonic Dorian" scale? WHO KNOWS! As much technical nonsense as I've put into the soundtrack (largely thanks to the ongoing theory lessons from the one and only Sadie Greyduck) at the end of the day we do what sounds best. It's an unusual modality, so maybe we can just call it "Thumpian Mode" and call it from there?

I've also seen some other interpretations of different pieces, and one that really stands out to me is how people perceive the rather drastic key change in, among other things, "We're With You!". While we could talk endlessly about this particular motion of chords, I'd like to bring up my actual thought process.

First off, listen to the first battle with the King ("Do You Remember?"), specifically the "victory/hope" motiff at the end that features a prominent brass section. The beginnings of that song as a whole were actually the first piece of music written for the original START AGAIN soundtrack, followed shortly thereafter by the melody for the title theme. While START AGAIN and the subsequent In Stars and Time do feature a heavy usage of leitmotifs (and yes the many identifiable motifs are specifically used to indicate an emotion or context, which are later recontextualized for dramatic effect), a number of them were written out of order and given additional meaning through clever placement. Further, transitioning from START AGAIN's 11 tracks to In Stars and Time's staggering 41 tracks, a significant amount of expansion of existing leitmotifs was done in addition to creating new ones.

Second, the actual thought process behind writing the hope/victory motif was something like "dang I need something to round this off… uhhh… screw it, arbitrary chromaticism because it sounds intense and metal" and so we go A5, C5, B5, Bb5, and the actual melodies used were vaguely navigated by ear kinda in the ballpark of A minor. Upon hearing this piece, Sadie explained to me that a common alternative to using a Dominant 5 is to use a tritone substitution of the five, which is a bII(7), which is why the progression (mostly) makes sense despite classic progressive motion saying i->III is valid but fairly weak, and III->ii is extremely weak.

Now we fast forward a year or two and I have been requested to make a chipper rendition of the victory/hope motif for a different context (which, in my opinion, adds to the weight of its later appearance), so now let's finally take a look at "We're With You!". While the time signature is quite different from its original 5/4, you'll notice that the chord progression is somewhat familiar (I -> iii -> ii -> bII), and while the leading melody is something else, the supporting voice(s) are a reiteration of the hope/victory motif!

Now we get to the unusual part, the key change! It's not particularly common to change keys to a tritone as they have essentially nothing in common, but we're using that bII as our return to tonic, so what if we reinterpret that chord as the V of a new key, since it's kinda functioning that way anyway? So instead of Bb returning to A as we've done before, we move to the new tonic of Eb! From there the piece essentially makes the same motions, and does the same key change at the end, returning us back to our original key in time for the piece to loop!

So I think at the end of the day what I'm trying to say is that music theory can definitely give you an understanding of why certain things sound certain ways, and it can teach you things that you would not have thought to do before, but the most correct way to write music is to do what sounds good and try to understand it later. Lindar from five years ago was afraid of key changes, but modern Lindar knows that keys are arbitrary and you can make unusual motion to interesting effect.

All that said, I absolutely love reading posts about how people interpret and analyze the things I've written, so keep it coming, because I learn something new every time I see a new interpretation!

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Joni Mitchell: “When I was 19 I went to art school. I had six months of teaching myself to play baritone ukulele under my belt, so was sort of a novice folkie. … I was singing folk songs at that time. At that time I was a folk singer. … Then I went to Toronto to see the Mariposa Folk Festival, actually to see Buffy Sainte-Marie. I still didn’t have an image of myself as a musician. I found I couldn’t work and I didn’t have enough money to get in the union, $160, I didn’t have it. I worked in women’s wear. I worked in a department store and I could barely make ends meet. I finally found a scab club in Toronto that allowed me to play. I played there for a couple of months. Then I married Chuck Mitchell and I moved across the border. We still were scrambling to work. As a couple, we were making $15 a night. There were clubs that were very cliquish that we couldn’t get into. In Detroit, we had a fifth floor walkup apartment and it had some extra rooms. When Eric Anderson and David Blue and Tom Rush, and people passed through Detroit, we billeted them there. Bruce Langhorne, they used to stay with us. Eric taught me a couple of open tunings. He taught me Open G and Drop D Modal tuning. Once I got the open tunings for some reason, I began to get the harmonic sophistication that I heard that my musical fountain inside was excited by. Once I got some interesting chords to play with, my writing began to come.”

Interview by Joe Smith Photo by Jim

[canmom]

I think Farya Faraji has realised that hour long videos about the difference between actual historical music and modern historically themed music is a great way to get people to watch stuff about music theory. Which, you know, guilty, I haven't watched his older videos on medieval music yet but I did watch this one!

Anyway it's fascinating stuff - I didn't realise how new our current approach to tonal harmony is. I tried to be careful to distinguish between the general and the culture specific in my music theory posts, but even in my own culture, it turns out I was picking out emphases that are very modern. If Farya is right, medieval European music actually sounded a lot more like the 'modal' approach that still exists in middle Eastern, Balkan and Mediterranean music. Instead of supporting a melody with chords, you would improvisationally add various kinds of what modern Western music calls ornamentation. Towards the end of the middle ages you'd get a greater degree of polyphony using e.g. a sustained drone note or additional melodies that don't really try to harmonise in the way we write them to today. At this point the level of ornamentation dies down, and it lays the groundwork for the modern system of harmony to appear in the early modern period.

In contrast to actual historically informed music, Farya describes a genre he calls 'bardcore', which aims for a superficial appearance of medieval style to modern ears but uses a modern folk-inspired performance style - strummed chords, modern classically trained singing styles, modern instruments like the Irish bouzouki invented in the 70s. (As with the viking music and orientalism videos, he's at some pains to emphasise that anachronistic music isn't bad music and he likes a lot of these 'bardcore' bands.)

Anyway, I appreciate it because it expands my horizon for 'ways music can work' and gives a narrative to the evolution of tonal harmony - maybe an oversimplified narrative, and I'm still not entirely sure what the term 'modal' is getting at (presumably something to do with the modes [roughly, scales] that music was written and embellished in?), but it's a starting point. one of the most interesting youtubers to come along recently...

[retropopcult]

"Simple Kind of Life" is a song by American rock band No Doubt. Written by lead singer Gwen Stefani in late 1999 for the group's fourth album, Return of Saturn, the song contrasts Stefani's desire to settle down and start a family with fellow rocker Gavin Rossdale while still keeping her commitment to the band.

"Simple Kind of Life" was released as the album's first single for the holiday season of 1999. Peaking at number 38 on the Billboard Hot 100, #18 on the Adult Top 40 and number 14 on the Modern Rock Tracks chart.

The lyrics of "Simple Kind of Life" discuss Stefani's relationship with  Rossdale but also bandmate Tony Kanal whom she dated for seven years until he wanted to break up. She describes wanting to settle down, get married, and have children. In the final verse, she even dreams about how her life would be if there were a mistake in her birth control and she became pregnant.  But in the song she ultimately decides that settling down is just a fantasy for her since freedom and independence is more important to her. In real life, she would marry Rosdale just two years later and ultimately have three children with him.

The song was recorded with no rehearsals, a first for the band. Adrian Young's drum parts were mixed through low fidelity filters to get the feel of a lo-fi power ballad. It opens with a four-measure intro, which features the Dm9-Cmaj7 modal chord progression used for the song's three verses. After the third chorus comes a coda, which closes the song as Stefani repeats the phrase "a simple kind of life" ad libitum while the song fades. It received positive reviews from music critics, who noted the song's somber melody and raw but honest lyrics. Rolling Stone described it as being "at once grand, fragile and very, very sad".

[guitarguitarworld]

Modal Chords:Modal Chordal Harmony

Modal Chords: Harmony

CLICK SUBSCRIBE! Modal Chords: “Chords” from Transposed Mode [C as Root] Lesson/How to/Examples Please watch video above for detailed information and examples: Hi Guys, Moving on from our last blog on the Modal backing track, I have included another video [above] explanation regarding the modal chords/harmony that I employed. PDF MODAL CHORDS: pdf-modal-chordsmodal chords Download IF THIS…

[patricia-taxxon]

its so weird to have just one of your works have an entire viral life of its own outside of your normal sphere, like to the point where it doesn't feel like you made it anymore.

I know the weird sequence of events that led to this happening too, like twitter animator kekeflipnote was looking for royalty free music to use & i cautiously offered my latest album The Best Day as a candidate, and this unrelated person who follows kekeflipnote probably ended up seeing it & made this without any direct interaction with me, and then it got fucking 29 million views because i think it went viral on 3 separate occasions? Like firstly just on its own from the animation, then it had a 2nd life as a friday night funkin song, and then it had a 3rd life on tiktok because someone freebooted it onto spotify which meant they could use it in their vids.

I don't want to fall into the trap of bitterly hating my biggest hit, but like... i spent so little time on it compared to how long it's been enduring as a viral youtube animation, i may as well have not made it. sometimes i check back on my upload of sd_bbb to try and convince myself the song's mine, doesn't really work. odd.

I definitely recognize good things in it at the same time though, like it's incredibly catchy, has this weird chord progression made entirely out of mediant harmonic motion, some modal interchange in the melody that NONE of the remixes manage to accurately transcribe, "fix that old piano and the birds will fall apart" is one of my best lyrics lmao. It's at least better than fucking Wavetable.

[fugengulsen]

MISSISSIPPI FRED McDOWELL and young BONNIE RAITT in the 1960s. McDowell was the powerhouse slide guitarist and singer who the Rolling Stones based their "You Got To Move" on. Fred took Bonnie Raitt under his wing and taught her about playing slide guitar. Fred's sound was very modal, mostly based in one chord and a deep groove, positively locomotive in nature. Many of his songs accelerated to a frenzied rhythm, like a train picking up steam. He was well known in his Como, Mississippi neighborhood as "Shake 'Em," after his popular piece, "Shake 'Em On Down." The music included blues and gospel, all from the same wellspring. He is one of the best blues musicians of all time. Bonnie Raitt, of course, went on to considerable fame herself, and is still touring the world with her wonderful voice and guitars.

[soop-musical-fool]

Ok I said I would make a pin full of music so here it is

First off, I mentioned KNOWER. It's a long project that started a really long time ago, but their best stuff is probably coming out like right now. As in, they are just about to release a new album, KNOWER FOREVER. The singles on it are incredible, like I'm The President just comes right out the gate with the fattest walkdown I've ever heard from a horn section. The B section makes it feel like I'm enjoying a song like I would a multiple-course meal. Then Crash The Car just transfixes you. Yes, yes, you should listen to those, but don't neglect the fire they put out in 2017 because you owe it to yourself to watch the live sesh of Overtime:

Oh god this post is gonna make viewing my blog super annoying isn't it

Anyway the next thing I gotta mention is Vulfpeck. These guys are famous for scamming Spotify, basically. They released an album full of 30-second tracks of pure silence, just absolutely nothing, titled Sleepify. They got online and said "Yo guys, help us raise money for a free concert by listening to this on loop while you sleep." What they were actually doing was exposing a loophole in the way Spotify calculated royalties, and before they could pull the album (citing "content policy violations," of course), Vulfpeck had already bagged around $20,000, so they put on the completely admission-free Sleepify Tour, which was incredibly fucking based of them.

Vulf went on to become several spin-off projects, all entirely independently released and full of some of the stankiest funk fusion that I cannot stop listening to.

My favorite of these projects, The Fearless Flyers, is headed by Cory Wong, with a guitar idol of mine for 5+ years Mark Lettieri and of course the government subsidized active bass of Joe Dart, but the keystone of the group is no doubt Nate Smith on drums. Dude makes a three-piece set onstage sound like a full kit.

Like just look at what they can do with the added power of sax:

And yeah, I could just talk about those guys, but let's get weirder.

I'm talking modal. The kind of stuff that makes my choir-trained mother cringe inward at the dissonance. Let's talk about the crunchiest, most feral fucking harmonies and keyboard solos that make you question what you thought you knew about chord progressions and key centers.

Obviously anyone super into this stuff will have already heard of Jacob Collier, so I won't show him. But THIS:

I listened to this the first time and it was just.. too much. I put it in its own specific playlist titled "very complex shit" immediately. When I went back to it, enough time had passed and I had learned enough that after way too many listens I can actually follow along with this insanity. This track blew my fucking mind, dude. I have never heard a chorus use so many of the 12 chromatic notes and still sound heavenly. The groove changes add so much texture. The flute solo goes off way too hard. The slower final section is just disgusting syncopation when the drums come back in. Everything about it is incredible, and this album came out in 2007. I am staring back at years of my life I spent not listening to this and ruminating my lack of music theory knowledge. And when I wanted to see if some kind transcribing jazz grad student like June Lee had uploaded anything of System, I found a 2020 reboot with 24 musicians playing System for over twice its original runtime, and guess who did the showstopping final solo??

JACOB FUCKING COLLIER.

Look him up if you don't know. The other musicians I obsess over inspire me. This guy makes me want to quit.

[sonicmusicmusings]

How's it going everyone?

This is a fun and bouncy Saturn-era track, and you can hear that early-mid 90s sound dripping from every inch of this soundfont. The trumpet samples! The drum stings! I feel like I'm waiting for my chance to get in the ring and take a swing myself! Every bit of this is punchy and high-energy, from the offbeat hits way in the background, to the groovy bass line, to the melody itself. We have both piano samples and keyboard samples in here, both for when the mix needs to be smooth and when it needs to punch. It's a modal tune, not too much variety in the chord changes, but it certainly makes up for it with the rest of its energy. Very fun!

[tangledbea]

Healing incantation is actually in a minor key! It has some tonic major chords on ‘glow’ and ‘shine’ (I think the modal ambiguity is to help it sound more mystical/otherworldly) but then these chords are changed to minor in the decay incantation :)

I know it's in a minor key, but the Reverse Incantation is more in a minor key, if that makes sense? lol Like, the Reverse Incantation's register has more sharps/flats as compared.

But again, I know I don't know much about music, and you clearly know more than me. But let it be known that I already knew the Healing Incantation is in a minor key. And the original ask is whether or not they're in the same key, and the answer to that is still "no".

[automaticfrenchhorn]

Today's piece is a modal-inspired dance for horn quartet. My initial plan was to invert what I did in study no. 84, and write in the Dorian mode, with a melody in the relative Phrygian mode. To an extent it still does this, with a (written) C# melody over a B root, but this study's identity ending up being shaped by the ebb and flow between D natural and D sharp instead.

This study primarily oscillates between B minor and C# minor, the i to ii vamp being a distinctly "Dorian" sound. However, I found the Phyrigian D natural sound on the C# chord to be a bit too tense for my liking, so on a whim I replaced it with the natural 9th, D#, and found I much preferred this sound. Due to this, I don't think I would say this study in is B Dorian anymore, as it spends half of its time in B Mixolydian (or C# Aeolian, really). Instead, this modal oscillation became the driving force of the piece, with key moments that emphasize one or the other.

Beyond that, I continued with mostly modal writing, emphasising colour tones in the melody, usually by using tones from the C# chord over the B harmony, and vice versa.

The other main idea in this piece is the bracketed notes, functioning like a "reverse accent" where the players are to play them softer than the surrounding dynamic. I used this idea a little bit in study no. 108, but here it is much more of a prominent musical idea.

As always, these pieces are welcome for anyone and everyone to play! All I ask is that you share it with me, because I'd love to hear it done by live players!