Here's a little cheat sheet to writing a song 47 Sites Every Recording Musician Should Visit In a recent “Open Mic” we asked you, “Which music-related sites do you visit regularly?” This article is a summary of the great suggestions given in the comments to that article. You can make the list even longer by commenting on this article. As you’re reading this article, Audiotuts+ needs no introduction. Several commenters mentioned Audiotuts+ - thanks for the support! This is a great Flash site with many resources to help you learn music theory. The site content is split up as follows: Lessons, including topics that cover notation, chords and scalesTrainers, that teach you notes, keys, intervals, triads, keyboard, guitar and brass. Michael comments: “I have found very helpful. This is a site that helps you with scales and chords. The charts are guitar-based, and there are options for various alternate tunings and other stringed instruments. A website that helps you learn musical scales and chords. Joe comments: “Great Ableton/sound design videos.”
Outline of basic music theory | Oscar van Dillen Professional music theory: an outline of basic music theory. Preface and Chapter 1 of the Outline of basic music theory – by Oscar van Dillen ©2011-2014 The beginner’s learning book can be found at Basic elements of music theory. Overview of chapters: Chapter 1: Introduction Chapter 2: Sound and hearing Chapter 3: Musical notation Chapter 4: Basic building blocks of melody and harmony Chapter 5: Consonance and dissonance Chapter 6: Circle of fifths and transposition Chapter 7: Concerning rhythm, melody, harmony and form Chapter 8: Further study Preface This outline offers a concise and complete overview of basic music theory. In order to speed up consulting this online book, its chapters can as of now be found on separate pages; unfortunately the original one-page version exceeded acceptable download times, because of the length of the total materials presented. © Oscar van Dillen 2011-2014 Chapter 1: Introduction integrating hearing-reading-singing-writing
Audio Signal Processing Basics Glossary There is a signal processing glossary on a page of its own. For a more exhaustive list of English-Finnish translations, see the Audiosignaalinkäsittelyn sanasto by Vesa Välimäki. Primitive Signals Sine wave The sine wave is more or less the building block of all signals, musical or not. fs = 44100; t = 0:1/fs:0.001; s = sin(2 * pi * 1700 * t); subplot(211), stem(abs(fft(s))), title('abs(fft(s))') subplot(212), stem(s), title('s') Noise white noise has an equal amount of energy on every frequency in music, there is often band-limited noise present fs = 44100; n = randn(fs, 1); n = n / max(abs(n)); subplot(211) plot(n), axis tight subplot(212) specgram(n) Speech The speech sample shown is the finnish word "seitsemän" You can listen to the speech sample. [s, fs] = wavread('seiska.wav'); plot(s),axis tight,grid on The following is the spectrogram of the above speech sound. specgram(s, 512, fs); colorbar Piano The piano sample shown is the middle C, whose fundamental frequency is 261 Hz.
alonetone, a damn fine home for musicians Octave Equivalent Music Lattices Octave Equivalent Music Lattices 5-Limit Triangular (Hexagonal) Lattices The 5-limit lattice, like 5-limit harmony, is defined around the triads: A step to the right is a fifth. Up-right is a major third, and down-right is a minor third. A bit more of the lattice looks like this: B---------F#--------C#--------G#--------D#--------A# / \ / \ / \ / \ / \ / / \ / \ / \ / \ / \ / / \ / \ / \ / \ / \ / / \ / \ / \ / \ / \ / G---------D---------A---------E---------B---------F# \ / \ / \ / \ / \ / \ \ / \ / \ / \ / \ / \ \ / \ / \ / \ / \ / \ \ / \ / \ / \ / \ / \ Bb--------F---------C---------G---------D---------A / \ / \ / \ / \ / \ / / \ / \ / \ / \ / \ / / \ / \ / \ / \ / \ / / \ / \ / \ / \ / \ / Gb--------Db--------Ab--------Eb--------Bb--------F If a scale is defined on this lattice, you can instantly see what major and minor triads it contains. Each point on the lattice is connected to 6 others, so I would call it a hexagonal lattice. Here are some more chords on a triangular lattice:
Jog Your Memory Collected by Sandy Sukhov Cressman Here are snippets of many well-known songs and tunes. The first notes of each snippet correspond to a particular musical interval. Practice these intervals by randomly choosing a starting note from a piano or pitch pipe. Then, thinking of the song clue for that interval, try and sing the prescribed interval up, or down. From Phil Richards of the Westchester County, NY Golden Chordsman Phil added a table that describes an interval's steps relative to tonic, root, or key note. Example: C Major Scale Note: The Minor intervals correspond to the piano black keys, but only in the key of C. I analyzed the chords of 1300 popular songs for patterns. This is what I found. | Blog – Hooktheory For many people, listening to music elicits such an emotional response that the idea of dredging it for statistics and structure can seem odd or even misguided. But knowing these patterns can give one a deeper more fundamental sense for how music works; for me this makes listening to music a lot more interesting. Of course, if you play an instrument or want to write songs, being aware of these things is obviously of great practical importance. In this article, we’ll look at the statistics gathered from 1300 choruses, verses, etc. of popular songs to discover the answer to a few basic questions. First we’ll look at the relative popularity of different chords based on the frequency that they appear in the chord progressions of popular music. Then we’ll begin to look at the relationship that different chords have with one another. The Database To make quantitative statements about music you need to have data; lots of it. Let’s get started. 1. 2. Don’t those chords look familiar? 3.
Harmony Explained: Progress Towards A Scientific Theory of Music The Major Scale, The Standard Chord Dictionary, and The Difference of Feeling Between The Major and Minor Triads Explained from the First Principles of Physics and Computation; The Theory of Helmholtz Shown To Be Incomplete and The Theory of Terhardt and Some Others Considered Daniel Shawcross Wilkerson Begun 23 September 2006; this version 19 February 2012. Abstract and Introduction Most music theory books are like medieval medical textbooks: they contain unjustified superstition, non-reasoning, and funny symbols glorified by Latin phrases. In particular we derive from first principles of Physics and Computation the following three fundamental phenomena of music: the Major Scale, the Standard Chord Dictionary, and the difference in feeling between the Major and Minor Triads. Table of Contents 1 The Problem of Music1.1 Modern "Music Theory" Reads Like a Medieval Medical Textbook 1.2 What is a Satisfactory, Scientific Theory? ... wbwbw wbwbwbw wbwbw wbwbwbw ... What is a "scale"? Really?!
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