Take Five
MOST MUSIC IS WRITTEN in 4/4, which means four beats to the bar. Some is written in 3/4, which is ‘waltz time’. But occasionally an inspired composer will write a piece of music with five beats to the bar. It’s not done very often as it’s almost impossible to dance to. The most famous piece […]
Fluffed it? Do it again
WHEN IMPROVISING MUSIC, especially jazz, it’s easy to miss the intended note and hit a pairing that clashes – a discordant chord, if you like. The simple way to cover up your error is to repeat it. The more times you play it, the more intentional it will sound.
Happy Birthday
IF THERE’S ONE TUNE every pianist needs to be able to play, it’s Happy Birthday. The problem is, everyone sings in a different key, so where should you start? In my experience the best key is F, which suits most singers. The first chord, interestingly, is not F but C7, which means you can start with […]
Things that go up at the end
THINGS THAT GO UP AT THE END have more power and dynamism. It’s a rule that applies to music, film editing, graphics, and company names. If a film editor is cutting a piece of film of someone on a swing, for instance, they’ll almost always cut away when the swinger is at the top of the swing, […]
Cycle of fifths
THERE’S A TRICK USED BY MUSICIANS when they get lost: it’s called the cycle of fifths. It’s a kind of satnav device that allows you to get back home from just about anywhere. You can jump to any chord, for dramatic effect, and get back to where you started using a simple but effective technique. The […]
Playing by ear
I STARTED PLAYING THE PIANO IN PUBS at the age of 16. People would ask for a well-known song, and I couldn’t admit I didn’t know it – so I spent a few weeks trying to play songs I knew well enough to whistle, and learning how to fit the chords to them. Of course, people rarely want […]
Music notation
THOSE UNFAMILIAR WITH WRITTEN MUSIC tend to regard scores as an impenetrable mass of dots and lines. But it’s really quite straightforward: it’s just a graph of time (on the horizontal axis) against pitch (on the vertical axis). Here’s how the beginning of the main tune from Handel’s Hallelujah Chorus would look if written out as […]
Six chord trick
WHILE YOU CAN PLAY MOST SONGS with just three chords, you get a lot more flavour if you add the relative minors of each of these chords. These are chords three notes below each of the main three. The relative minor of C is Am (the notes are A, C and E); the relative minor of […]
Three chord trick
EVEN IF YOU’RE NOT MUSICAL you’ll have heard people pouring scorn on bands like Status Quo, who appear to know only three chords. But why those three chords? What’s special about them? Let’s say you’re playing in the key of C. The scale of C can be played entirely on the white notes of a piano. […]
How music works
ALL MUSICAL NOTES ARE PRODUCED by vibrating air. That vibration can be caused by a plucked string (in the case of a piano or a harp), or by wind bouncing off the inside of a tube (a clarinet or a trumpet), or by a stick hitting a resonant object (a drum or a xylophone). The […]