If you're taking a harmony course, you've certainly come across the concept of secondary dominants and endless exercises, where you're given a piece of sheet music in which you have to label all the secondary dominants. Well, today I'm going to give you a simple trick to spot and label secondary dominants. We won't get... Continue Reading →
Introduction The Circle of Fifths is one of the most powerful tools we half to represent our 12-tone system. By stacking perfect fifths you get all the notes in western music. Using the circle of fifths to show scales allows us to find very interesting properties of that scale, from determining key signatures, to finding... Continue Reading →
The Universal Encyclopedia of Scales is a fully interactive PDF containing all 2048 scales in music, organized over the circle of fifths, with 2600+ pages of information. The encyclopedia includes chapters on scale theory, several master indexes by mode count and note count, source scales, symmetrical scales, and hexatonic bi-triadic scales. Each scale has its... Continue Reading →
I've been asked many times "Why do I need to learn and practice scales?" or "Why do I need to understand chords-scales and tonal harmony?" Some other people complain about the chord-scale theory, saying that they don't want to play scales, meaning they wish to play in the jazz vocabulary, licks, motives, playing rhythmically or... Continue Reading →
Here's a song by Billy Strayhorn that I've always loved and never fully analyzed until writing The Jazz Standards Progressions Book. I've been fascinated by Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn compositions since the first time I heard an Ellington album, about thirty years ago. Since then I greatly enjoyed their rich harmonies, rhythmic vocabulary and... Continue Reading →
Here's a musical concept nobody taught me at school. While analyzing 1000+ jazz tunes for The Jazz Standards Progressions Book, I noticed a great number of songs in major keys tonicize the IV degree at the beginning of the bridge. It's usually preceded by the V/IV, landing on the IV at the beginning of the... Continue Reading →
In the process of writing The Jazz Standards Progressions Book Series I realized the need to express a very common harmonic event with a new symbol. So far we had solid and dotted arrows and brackets to express II-V relationships and their resolutions. However there isn't any symbol to show a Major 7th chord that... Continue Reading →
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