Tag Archive

Respect The Form of a Song

By oneoverphi

Where has the time gone? Between work, fam­ily, and  out­side projects I’m afraid I’ve neglected to post. Well it’s time to rem­edy this. The past two months have been quite busy for me. I’ve been writ­ing up a storm of songs, though few are com­plete. There are miss­ing lyrics here, unfin­ished arrange­ments there, and now... »

Improve Your Songwriting With Odd Timesignatures

By oneoverphi

Four on the floor. How many songs are writ­ten in 4/4 time? It’s almost uncount­able. Since an over­whelm­ing major­ity of pop­u­lar songs are writ­ten in 4/4, the casual musi­cian whose only goal is camp­fire croon­ing need not ever come to grips with the whys and where­fores of time sig­na­ture. All one must do is... »

Modal Interchange Demystified

By oneoverphi

You may have heard about modal inter­change in pass­ing, but never had it explained. If you want to know what it is then you have come to the right place. I’m going to quickly break down for you what modal inter­change is all about and what it can do for you in song­writ­ing. In... »

Fantastic Free Folk Music

By oneoverphi

Tra­di­tional Music Library is this huge repos­i­tory of folk and tra­di­tional sheet music. I found it whilst look­ing for the music to “Rolling Down to Old Maui” (by-and-by, they also have an excel­lent primer on sea shanties). Songs are catagorised in sec­tions such as: OLD-TIME (OLDTIMEY) MUSIC BLUEGRASS ETHIOPIAN MINSTRELSY, MUSIC-HALL & VAUDAVILLE MUSIC TRADITIONAL DANCE BAWDY & DRINKING SONGS They even have... »

More Music and Math

By oneoverphi

Keep­ing in the vein of my pre­vi­ous post, Wikipedia has a great jump­ing off point in dis­cov­er­ing the rela­tion­ship between music and math. »

The Mathematical Take on Music

By oneoverphi

Are you a math­e­mat­i­cally minded musi­cian? Seed mag­a­zine has this great arti­cle on the rela­tion­ship of math and music. It talks about how one would map har­mony to com­plex math­e­mat­i­cal structures. When, the dust set­tles, two-note chords live on a Möbius strip, three-note chords live on a solid, twisted tri­an­gu­lar dough­nut, and larger notes live on higher-dimensional ana­logues, whose... »

Introduction to the Circle Progression

By oneoverphi

The cir­cle pro­gres­sion is a pow­er­ful and often used pro­gres­sion that you can har­ness to use in your own music. In a cir­cle pro­gres­sion the root of the chords con­tin­u­ally descends by a per­fect fifth or ascends by a per­fect fourth. How fourths and fifths are related is illus­trated well by the cir­cle of fifths. In chord num­ber talk... »

Introduction to the Circle of Fifths

By oneoverphi

One may be per­plexed when first con­fronted with the cir­cle of fifths. To the unini­ti­ated it seems to be a strange musi­cal div­ina­tion tool. A spe­cialised chart that tells you when the notes are in har­mony. Well that’s not far off. The cir­cle of fifths is a visu­al­i­sa­tion of under­ly­ing key struc­tures in our musi­cal system. Let us start... »

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