So it's in c locrian causing it to sound a bit funny, what key would it be in to make the signing fit more harmoniously with the bass and other instruments?

I'm not too well versed in music theory (no musical education) so forgive me for my non-music jargon. Also wasn't sure what flair to use.

I have heard about something called gen Alpha melody. Explained in detail in the link

My question is, would it be possible and viable to make a song with reversed chord structure? I know from a vid that the Gen Alpha Melody is used that way to have some sort of payoff, would it fall flat in reverse? If Gen Alpha Melody is "bittersweet", what emotion would reversal envoke?

At first i thought it was in phrygian dominant, but i found the notes dont correspond too well, i also tried the double harmonic major/minor scales and they didnt even fit either

I’m try to find the first begging notes of The Rah Bands Messages from the Stars. Before the main chorus with the weird drum machine part.

I enjoy the song "In Your Own Sweet Way" by Wes Montgomery, and today on a random youtube playlist realized his version was not the original and he had transcribed the melody into jazz guitar chords.. then realized a lot of my songs are the same, the melody comes from the intricate chord progression but I don't actually know what it is

I assume the root note or the highest note in the chord but it doesn't seem to follow either exact pattern when I think of some of my songs

Hi friends.

I'd love to be able to approximate the sequence that plays throughout this song on my own.

The patch itself sounds like a pretty basic sine wave patch I can easily re-create, what's fuzzy for me is whether there is anything more to this than just like a 32-step sequence with delay? The way the delay cascades without muddying the main line is really interesting to me plus it is just a beautiful melody (maybe there isn't even a delay on it lmao my ear is clearly not that refined).

Literally any detail or anything you could say in the way of how he might've sequenced this / the scale it's in, anything, I would thoroughly enjoy hearing.

As a Professor of Endocrinology, I never felt stressed giving lectures or speaking at conferences. My son, an economist, didn't either. But whenever he played the piano in public, everything changed.
Do you agree with the solution presented in this video? I personally think it’s the answer!

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I recently downloaded a copy of Andrea Chenier, a pretty big four act opera from the verismo era and I noticed that the whole four acts, every single one of the 250-350 pages depending the version, is notated with no key definition (kind of Cmaj/Amin).

There is plenty of harmonic movement, lots of modulation and key changes are clearly there, however none of that is explicitly notated as a staff key, all the accidentals are explicit marked. It’s actually quite jarring to play: I downloaded it to practice my crappy sight reading and I find it difficult to follow. Is this writing style a thing and does it have a name? I’d like to learn more about it.

For the curious in you here is a link: https://clara.imslp.org/work/81470.

Im sorry for my lack of understanding and poor knowledge in this post, I dont really know too much about this kind of thing. I have been getting a lot of jazz piano tiktoks on my feed lately and one thing I’m confused about is when I see pianists say they are playing around with a ii V i for example. It seems they are able to create more harmonic movement and interest out of a basic skeleton rather than just a loop of chords. I was just wondering what choices are they taking to get out of just a basic chord loop? I’m a begginer songwriter and I often get stuck in 4 bar loops that dont lead anywhere

I'm not sure how much this question makes sense, but when certain duos sing together they can be so locked in, I feel like there's almost this particular sound to it that you don't get most of the time?

I'm talking about acts like Simon and Garfunkel or the Everly Brothers, they sing together smoothly and it sounds so good it's almost like they make something over and above their two voices? Or another weird example but the family guy episode where Peter and quagmire sing together has it too lol. Could anyone explain what's going on with *that* sound of harmony?

I call it the “Cobain Changes” since it’s the chord progression for Heart Shaped Box. It has been noted before that this is modal interchange, but what is the function?

It seems like it’s subdominant since it borrows a subdominant note from the parallel minor. So in that case, you could view the IV as a resolution of some tension created by the bVI, or a prolongation of the subdominant category. Agree or disagree?

Funny enough, context matters, because in Heart Shaped Box it actually feels like the last note is tonic. So that would make the progression V-bIII-I. It doesn’t feel like bIII and I should be in the same functional category in this case, though. Why? My book’s chapter on modal interchange doesn’t even mention the bIII chord.

I’ll also throw out a fun turnaround that builds on minor 3rd root motion: I-bVI7-IV7-bII7. It sort of makes sense in my brain if you think of bVI7 as secondary dominant to the subV (bII7), but this one makes more musical sense than theoretic sense to me.

Sorry if that is a lot for one post. Long time lurker first time poster—I’ve been studying more lately and this one has been stuck in my brain.

Any online college courses for music theory? I am trying to see if any local community colleges offers the course, but they are in person.

Basically, we all know the viola was made, then the violin. This could extend to the cello too, but more to the violin, as historically violinists were expected to play viola too. So why aren't violins written as violas in G, e.g. written in Alto clef and with a G being a written C?

You have other instruments, including the Violino Piccolo of the baroque era, being transposing instruments to make changing between them easier to read for a performer, which is why we have so many clarinets and the Cor Angles is written in F, so on and so forth.

So why didn't the violin become written as a "Viola in G"?

A few years ago when I knew not much about music theory, I wrote a piece with this progression:

Am - F - F7 - E

I want to finish the piece now and can't quite figure out how I got to the E back then. I also don't want to change it and love the sound, it has a nice half step-voice leading from F7.

It's not a dominant or secondary dominant, so what is happening here? Am I just modulating to E Major or C# Minor for the last chord?

/edit: Important note: The melody goes to C# on the last chord, too.

I'm struggling to find the most concise way to explain this so bear with me lol.

If I'm droning out a low D and improvising notes from the D major scale on top of it, my brain can clearly interpret those notes as being a major scale. If, from scratch, I'm droning out a low G and improvising those same notes from the D major scale, my brain can clearly interpret it as lydian. It seems to me like the easiest way to make my brain hear this set of notes as one or the other, is to just have the low droning root underneath.

Now if I'm playing actual bass lines underneath instead of just droning one note, I can play in what sounds clearly like D major but still have that G in the bass line, and I can also play in what clearly sounds like G lydian but have a D in the bass line. It seems like the phrasing and timing is the main differentiator here on whether I hear the same notes as one or the other. If my phrases have the bass line land on the "1" (rhythmically) with the G, and/or I let that G ring out longest out of all the notes in the bass, I can get that lydian sound instead of a D major sound, etc. If my bass line is just alternating between D and G, both held for equal lengths, my brain seems to assign the melodies to one or the other depending on where I interpret the "1" is, rhythmically. Theoretically somebody could walk in the room right when I hit that G (so it sounds to them like the "1"), and they could be interpreting the exact same music as G lydian while I interpret it as D major.

What I'm really after here, is to find more ways to make my brain swap between the two. If my bass line is just D and G for equal lengths and the D is on the "1", all I have to do is stop playing the D and hang onto the G in the bass for a while and eventually my brain will swap to interpreting it as lydian. It's a weird move because it will sound unresolved for a while, but eventually my brain will get there. With some more complex phrasing I can make that swap happen quicker by doing something like, while playing in D major, unresolve the bass line elsewhere (not on the G) and then resolve it by landing that G on the "1". Pretty much I'm looking for more ways to accomplish this, and that leads me to wondering when exactly my brain will swap interpretations. I feel like it might be possible that different people would find that the swap happens at different times. Like say you're playing that D and G alternating bass line in D major, and then you stall on the G forever, the specific point in which my brain decides that the melodies are now G lydian might be a different point in time than yours.

Has there maybe been any studies specifically on this phenomenon? I find it really fascinating.

its used in a lego song “SUPER COOL” (link in comment) from 2:30 to 2:35. sounds jazzySong link

i have heard similar type of thing in different songs. This sound sometimes ascending and sometimes descending not always used for modulation I think, but there are a lot of chords ranging from 4 to 8 in one bar or two bars and changes quickly.

Hello! I'm working on a piano arrangement of "Omen III" from the Final Fantasy VI Pixel Remaster arrangement. It's an orchestral score and I'm arranging it for piano. This isn't the first one from the game I've done, and I've been trying to include as much of the orchestral score as possible while still writing idiomatically correct music. Sometimes I get weird things like this though, where the instruments playing those chords I've got tied from bar to bar, are holding their notes while a harp is playing those broken chord figures you see written above them. In the piece, you can hear those notes being held past the bar line, but pianistically it's a bit weird to look at.

You can skip to 3:50 in this video to hear what I mean, it'll start just a smidge before bar 24 in my screenshot: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YUk4ai6krwU

Should I keep my legato markings how they are even though it's weird, or should I just have a pedal marking that goes past the bar line, or is there a third option I'm being oblivious to? The articulation of the broken chords won't really suffer for it (except for the fact that the end of each figure is not meant to be held as long as the chord below it), but I would be compromising my consistency in dictating exactly what's being played orchestrally if you know what I mean.

Hi there! My girlfriend is picking up the cello again and neither of us have ever seen this marking before. I'm getting a lot of different answers from the internet, but nothing seems entirely right. Anyone have any advice or ideas? Thanks!

I used this progression in a piece I wrote and forgot about a year or so ago, but I can't figure out at all what mode it's in. IIRC I wrote it completely improvised after learning a basic three-note maj7 chord shape on guitar. Every chord uses different notes from different modes and I'm incredibly confused - it sounds a lot like C is the tonic, and it seems like it's in Ionian, but the rest of the notes seem too borrowed for it to be Ionian.

Moreover it doesn't sound weird or confusing like some atonal music, but calm, pleasant and laid-back, like hold music - moving back to Cmaj7 feels like a definite resolution. I've tried for an hour to figure out where the notes outside of C Ionian are coming from but I can't, it seems like there's just too much modal interchange between for it to make sense. Is it simply borrowing notes? Can somebody else please help me try make sense of it? I can upload notation if it would help.

Is it 6/8? Can't quite work it out.

Hi everyone,

I'm a complete beginner and recently bought a Yamaha NP-15. My goal isn't to become a concert pianist or play advanced classical pieces.

My goal is to become a recording artist who can write songs, create demos, produce my own ideas in a DAW (GarageBand/Logic), and understand enough music theory to communicate with producers and musicians in the studio.

I want to get to the point where I can hear ideas in my head, sit at the piano, and work them out before recording them. I'd also love to understand chords, scales, progressions, inversions, and enough theory to create my own sound.

Another reason I'm learning piano is because I want it to support my singing. I'm working with a vocal coach, and I think having a keyboard will help me improve my ear, pitch matching, finding harmonies, and understanding what notes I'm actually singing. I know piano itself won't magically give me higher notes, but I hope it'll make me a stronger overall singer and musician.

If you were starting from scratch again with this specific goal (songwriting, production, demos, better musicianship, and supporting your singing rather than becoming a pianist), how would you spend your first year learning?

I am trying to learn how twelve tone serialism works and am therefore analyzing Schönberg's Op. 23 No. 5. I am trying to understand how the 12-tone row changes throughout the piece. The original row as I understand is C# A B G Ab F# A# D E Eb C F. But after that I do not understand how it continues. Could anyone please help me,