This is the second session of the music theory course - LIVE.
Time: Sunday, April 20 at 10:00 a.m. (UTC-6)
Link to join:
Fellow music nerds, the color notation tool is ready for testing: ColorMusicNotation.com
🥁 🎺 🎸 🎹 🎻 🪕
It’s super slick -- you just upload traditional (black) notation, and your score is quickly turned into a PDF of color notation.
@jake_k in our community has developed this tool, and it’s AWESOME! In this video, Jake and I talk about color notation, the tool’s backend process, and lots of other stuff….
Check it out:
-- This is the beta testing phase, so please SHARE any feedback in the comments below for improvements needed.
-- Also, if you get any errors (e.g., a file cannot render), send the file as an attachment for troubleshooting to: [email protected]
Guido d’Arezzo developed “modern” notation in 1026 … so it’s time for an upgrade, yes? We are the vanguard of music, my friends.
Extended chords are easy to understand -- once you know about the Circle of Thirds.
Essentially, fancy extended chords are built by adding notes incrementally from a key's Circle of Thirds. By including ever more intervals of a third, you can play increasingly more complex harmonies.
Had I only known this in the beginning!
Without the Circle of Thirds, exotic chord names seem mysterious and complicated. WITH the Circle of Thirds, however, everything clicks into place.
🎥 This short video gives you the gist.
For more details on the construction of these chords, check out Lesson 17 in the course: https://mikegeorge.locals.com/post/6051473/296-lesson-17-pdf-video
And the PDF referenced is ChordBook 2 here: https://shop.mycolormusic.com/products/colormusic%E2%84%A2%EF%B8%8F-guitar-chordbook-modebook-bundle
Here's a PDF of Radiohead's Creep. It took 6 seconds to render using the color notation tool: ColorMusicNotation.com
The original XML file is from Musescore: https://musescore.com/user/28531351/scores/5074313
In color, the song's composition becomes clear ... like seeing it with X-ray vision.
👉 You are WELCOME AND INVITED to create posts with your own songs. (It's one of the best features of this platform.)
Currently, the Locals platform allows you to post IMAGES, specifically -- which you can screenshot from the render tool's PDF output. Alternatively, here's how to pull images using Adobe Acrobat: File > Export a PDF > Image > png
FYI: The preview image below may look black, but when you open the PDF attachment itself, the image appears correctly. (It's just a Locals platform display thing.)
Check out this snapshot of the Db parallel modes in three formats:
-- in a table, showing how these patterns compare in a "theoretical" form
-- on the piano, to play them directly on the keyboard, and
-- on the guitar, to see (and hear) each as they rise up the fretboard
Lesson 18 in the course explains each of these patterns in detail: https://mikegeorge.locals.com/post/6157872/297-lesson-18-pdf-video
Once you know how to play these modes on one instrument, you can easily pick them out on any other instrument. For example, try playing these patterns on the keyboard and then the fretboard (or vice versa). Either way, it's the same set of patterns.
And as you become familiar with these patterns, you can experiment with their sounds to create songs that sound awesome.
Here's a snapshot of the C Mixolydian mode -- in both pitch space (circular format) and on the guitar fretboard -- which you can play in any octave.
Mixolydian's b7 note gives the pattern a distinctively cool sound, as you can hear when you play it.
The QUESTION is, what is the source scale of this particular mode?
(Hint: Mixolydian starts on the fifth scale degree of its underlying source pattern.)
Music is a language. A language that your ears naturally understand, but that’s also utterly foreign to your eyes … as a mess of confusing dots and lines and squiggles.
It’s frustrating, to say the least. Because it means that you’re already fluent in this language (or at least you can easily hear it), but at the same time you’re not able to speak it (by easily playing and creating it yourself).
And as long as you’re confused by the visual language of music, you’ll struggle with the syntax of song, unable to fully articulate the music that you can hear inside.
So what’s needed is a way to align your hearing with your sight. That is, you need a method to illustrate the patterns of music in such a way that they LOOK as natural and simple as they SOUND.
In other words, you need a “Rosetta Stone” to help bridge the gap between the musical language of your ears and that of your eyes.
And with color, you have the answer — using the special connection between the circle of fifths and the color wheel, along with the natural link between the circle of fifths and the chromatic scale.
By leveraging your familiarity with color to decipher the otherwise cryptic sequence notes, you can finally crack the code of music. This is our musical Rosetta Stone.
In music theory, there are two basic symbol sets: letters and numbers.
While the letters specify each individual note, the numbers highlight the general intervals between the notes.
A helpful way to understand this distinction is to think of all the notes in a key as a family, where the letter name of each pitch is like the name of each person while the scale degrees are like the titles used to describe the different members of the group.
To understand music theory, it helps to know M.C. Escher — the Dutch graphic artist (1898-1972). He was an engineer, mathematician, illusionist, and philosopher as much as an “artist.”
His evolution was fascinating, exemplified by these two self-portraits made six years apart. On the left is “Self Portrait” from November 1929 (age 31), while on the right is “Hand With Reflecting Sphere” from from January 1935 (age 36). Clearly the man’s mind was expanding as time advanced.
And this expansion arose from his studies of symmetry, dimension, and patterns … patterns that are eerily reminiscent of those we see in music.
For example, notice how his self-referential “Drawing Hands” (January 1948) represents the fundamental structure of the circle of fifths. It’s radial symmetry echoes the strange framework of music, where time (or the concept of a beginning and end) becomes abstract.
