Overtone Series

I'm learning theory with a very good teacher right now (privately) and I feel always so inspired. Right now I'm learning chord substitution. Very elementary stuff. People try to find great chord against melody on the piano. But when you present a sheet music of a melody and tell them to harmonize. Often times they realize, It's not easy to harmonize without piano (or any other instrument) But this can be done.

We've started with doing every thing with I, IV, V. yes three chords to harmonize everything.
V-I progression usually is call perfect or authentic cadence. IV - I = Plagal Cad. ends on V = Half Cad. those are choices when you do this.

Next time we talked about substitutions. I had more choice to work with so it became easier but feel of this I, IV, V had to stay there. (again all in your head)

I = iii, iv
IV = ii
V = vii dim but you have to be careful. (so forget about it for now.. almost)

other than that.
you can suspend V with approaching I 64 or I with 5th on the bass. if the melody allows.

very simple but chords starts to flow really well this way. At least in the classical/pop manner.
i believe if you don't understand this very very very very well you can't play jazz or other things.

And of course later on you verify your answer on the keyboard.
When you do this I always DON'T voice lead. I play everything in root position unless it's specified. (like that 5th on the bass chord)

4 part - why you don't double third? not very many book explain that.. they all stop there?
but If you look at overtone series. Overtone series created by the root will clash with those created by the 3rd.
Although 3rd is the character, root defines the fundamental or the bass and that is the one you'd want to emphasize. not the clash created by 3rd. (like people only used parallel 5th motion in polyphonic music)

and.. if the 3rd was the Leading tone - if you double, you'll create parallel octaves. two notes that needs to resolve up a half step.

Etc. there are more but i'll stop for now..

http://hucbald.blogspot.com/2006/10/musical-implications-of-harmonic.html


Physics of music is another interesting topic. Overtone series and their connection with chords and music of course. There are so many other thing you can come up with or try to apply when you think about BEST sounding BEST AMAZING music. You can just feel them if you are genius or if you want to be genius of one particular thing or genre..

iTunes Music Store - Global listening

Well a little time ago iTunes have added a feature to select country at the bottom of your iTunes Music Store home page.

I find this really interesting because although lot of music are internationally distributed you still don't really know in what country what song is popular.. Question like is American music really popular in Europe? what's the Europe's trend?

one way to find out is through magazines but i think iTunes can function in this way also.

If you navigate to the iTunes MS for UK then you'll see something you can only see in UK version. France or french version will something that's only available in france. likewise you can just navigate through all stores and you can actually listen to music from all over the world.

you can search in their languages (if you know or if you just knew the title), i'm not sure about the downloading but at least you can listen to them.. and buy CD (well the quality of digital download is still lower compared to regular CD so actually it's cheaper if you buy CD in my opinion)

but it's amazing how easily you can listen to all kinds of music and cultural differences. at least for musicians or composers.

Synthesizer Tutorial Video

I've just found a few amazing synthesizer tutorial. Not really for beginners.. you'd have to understand at least what oscillator, filters are and their functions..

They were talking about FM synthesis, how to make drums beats with LFO, things like that.. good point to cover. and he explains it really well.

http://www.sonicstate.com/

learning the Guitar Fingerboard

It's been a while since i posted but i wanted to make a note about learning guitar.

finger board knowledge has been a biggest obstacle to me that no one seemed to know what the effective way of learning fingerboard is. (that is knowing notes)

now i have a guitar teacher who's been giving me great insights on how finger board works. and how to "memorize" them. memorizing all of them takes at least memorizing 24x6 notes without counting enharmonics. that's a quite a number. and you won't be able to just memorize. so he introduced me a couple of methods that can be done in like 3-12 minutes a day.
that was wow to me.

so here are them
1. single string playing
2. never ending scales
3. blues and chord inversions.
4. patterns.


i will tell you about 1 and 2 on this one.

just pick your favorite tune and start playing notes only using one strings. try jumping around and play melodies. it would be nice to have a tune or simple recorded chord progressions or just forever CM7 for the key of C.
this technique will make you good at one perticular string.

... but yes this is only good for one perticular string.. so not when you use all strings..here is the another technique comes into a play. The never ending scales... sounds like WTF? i know. but this is really cool.
you play scales using all strings. this sounds like normal stupid scale training but it's not.
you play the root on the 6th string and next note on 5th string, next one on 4th string and go up and down forever until you end up where you started. it will take some time but it will come back to this point.
only pitfall to this is that you can't really play melody or music with this. so you need to do single string practice. they complement each other.

cool huh but there is one more step to this, which is "do this for ALL 12 KEYS!"
after a while you know all your scales and all your notes.
simple and effective isn't it? probably a month or two to remember all notes on the finger board. if you do it every day 3-4 keys.

and this worked for me. more than any other books i've got in attempt to learn fingerboard. try this out.