Here’s a China-style jam using a Chinese keyboard. The scale is C Major Pentatonic, the most popular key in China. Below you can hear both the 7-note and the 5-note major scales. The major scale is known as the happy scale, because it has less natural dissonances than the sad minor scale. The Major Pentatonic […]
Archive of posts filed under the Bloggies category.
Major Thirdsies
The Major Third is probably the most popular interval in America. Every time you walk into a convenience store, it plays for you. The Major Third is what makes things Major. In the above example, the E is the Major Third of the C – the Tonic. There is an inherently happy quality to this […]
Key Change Songs
Most pop music, and music in general, centers around a single note – the Tonic. In solfège, the tonic is called “doe, a deer”, as in “do-re-mi-fa-so-la-ti-do!”, or as musician’s like to call it “12345678!”. The tonic is like the King of a Key. Everything centers around her. All other notes lead to her. That […]
Warp Whistle
Example 1 showcases the “Warp Whistle” melody from Super Mario Bros. III written by the 8-bit shogun Koji Kondo. This little leitmotif will sweep your Sprite away in a mystical tornado to the Warp Zone. It begins on a D tone, goes up a whole tone to an E, then jumps up to another D […]
Secret Mystik Licks
Today, we’ll take a look at melodies from classic NES gamepacks. The one below is written by Koji Kondo for The Legend of Zelda (1986). This leitmotif plays anytime your Sprite finds a secret passage or acquires a secret item in the game. It consists of two tetrachords. Drag over them below. The first tertachord […]
Stridulations
If the woods were a jam, the crickets would provide a high-pitched pedal point with their incessant chirping for the birds to solo over. Crickets chrip all around a D tone. If you drag the mouse back and forth over the score above, you can get a sense of what a field of crickets sound […]
Musical cryptograms
Musical cryptograms are words spelled using the 7 note names: A-B-C-D-E-F-G. For instance, you can spell the word “FACADE”, meaning the front of a building. Another longer example is “BAGGAGE”, meaning a number of bags. Baroque composer J.S. Bach, often spelled his name out in a musical motif. (In German notation, B is denoted by […]
