Essential Music Theory for Engineers

Music The purpose of this video is to introduce music theory to recording engineers and interested audiophiles who don't play a musical instrument. However, musicians who play only by ear should also find this video useful, as will musicians who read music but wish they understood better the meaning behind the notes they play. I believe that understanding music theory helps one to be a more educated and appreciative listener, and it's certainly helpful for those who record and produce music. A recording engineer who knows the basics can communicate better with his clients. For example, to understand what a musician means when he tells you, punch in on the upbeat to bar 12, or rewind back to the augmented chord just before the chorus. Understand that music is a language, and it's as highly developed and detailed as any spoken language. You'll learn the basics in a few hours watching this video, but dedicated musicians spend a lifetime learning the intricate details of written music and the subtle nuances of musical performance. The New Harvard Dictionary of Music shown here is more than two inches thick and contains more than 940 pages written by 70 different authors. The language of music is deep indeed. This language is also universal and can be understood by people of any nationality. A jazz big band might contain players who cannot speak each other's native language, yet they can perform together as an ensemble and interpret the printed notes on a page with the same technique and emotion. Even if you speak only English, you can enjoy and appreciate fully a performance by an orchestra from Turkey, Israel, India, Russia, or any other country. In this video I'll start at the very beginning and continue through fairly advanced concepts. I'll also present common musical devices so you'll recognize them in the music you enjoy. Written music will be shown on screen while the examples play, but the examples are simple so you don't need to read music in order to follow along. I'm an old man, so most of the musical examples will be popular oldies from the 1960s and 70s, and works from the classical literature. We'll cover a lot of ground in a relatively short amount of time, so if you're really serious about learning all the material, you'll probably need to watch this video a few times. When I learned music theory in college, it was a two-year course. He has been, The earliest musical instrument was probably the human voice, though historical evidence shows that cave dwellers banged rocks together and played primitive flutes made from animal bones 40,000 years ago. In more modern times, before 900 AD, harmony was primitive and consisted mainly of octaves, fourths, and fifths, which are neither major nor minor. Of course, back then people didn't know what they were missing. They were used to primitive harmony, and it sounded normal to them. Thankfully, by the Baroque era in the early 1600s, harmony in musical form became much more sophisticated. In the 1700s, Bach was perhaps the first composer to use modern jazz chords, though my favorite period was the 1800s, starting with Beethoven, who invented rock and roll. Later in that century, the Romantic era of classical music came into prominence, providing us with numerous masterpieces from Chopin, Schumann, Liszt, Tchaikovsky, Dvorak, Grieg, Debussy, and too many others to list here. I encourage you to explore resources such as the Classical Composers Database and Wikipedia for more information about these amazing musical pioneers. Links are in the description for this video. Music consists of three basic properties, melody, harmony, and rhythm. There are only 12 distinct musical notes available, but they can be strung together into an infinite number of combinations. We'll start with note lengths to help follow the upcoming music examples, then move on to note names, intervals, scales, and arpeggios, which are the foundation of every melody. This shows the most common note lengths, though there are others. From left to right, a whole note extends for all four beats of the bar. 1, 2, 3, 4. Half notes extend for two beats. 1, 2, 3, 4. And quarter notes are one beat each. 1, 2, 3, 4. 2, 3, 4. Shorter notes include eighth notes that sustain for half a beat, 1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and, while sixteenth notes are only one fourth of a beat. There are also thirty-second notes and sixty-fourth notes, not shown, that are shorter still. The last two bars show dotted notes, where the dot means the note is held for half again longer than its stated duration. So this dotted half note lasts for three beats, and the quarter note that follows completes the measure. Quarter notes can also be dotted to play for one and a half beats. We'll cover time signatures, beats, and note lengths in more detail later. Notes are written on a musical staff, as shown here. Staffs, or more properly staves, are divided into bars, which are units of time that contain a group of notes. This staff has two bars. The first bar contains the first four notes, and the second bar holds the next four notes. Again, these notes are called quarter notes because each represents one quarter of the bar when music is in 4-4 time. The numbers at the left of the staff identify the music's time signature, which in this case is 4-4. The upper 4 identifies the number of beats in each measure, and the lower 4 is the length of each beat, which is one quarter note. So every bar contains four quarter notes, or some other combination of notes whose lengths total four beats. This is called a piano staff because it contains separate sets of lines for the pianist's left and right hands. The first note in this C major scale is called middle C, because it's midway between the bass clef on the bottom and the treble clef above. Middle C is also near the middle of a piano's keyboard. The treble clef is sometimes called a G clef because the swirl circles the G line. Likewise, the bass clef is also called an F clef because the two dots identify the F line between them. These clefs are also used for other instruments in the treble and bass ranges. For example, Flutes and violins use the treble clef, while bassoons and tubas use the bass clef. There are two other clefs, called tenor and alto, but they're less common, so we won't bother with them here. Basic major and minor scales have only seven notes, so the letters A through G are used. Then the note names repeat again with A. This scale is called ascending because it progresses higher in pitch. When notes are to be played by the left hand of a piano, they're written on the lower staff. These scales are in the key of C, so they both start and end on a C note, though this scale is called descending because it goes towards a lower pitch. We'll cover musical keys in more detail shortly. This shows the note names for both the lines and spaces of the treble and bass clefs. The traditional mnemonic for treble clef note names is every good boy does fine for the lines and the word face for the spaces. Equivalents for the bass clef are good boys do fine always and all cows eat grass. Maybe it makes more sense to just memorize the notes. Printed music can contain a single staff as for a guitar or clarinet or as many as 25 staves or more when showing the full score for an orchestra or big band arrangement. The notes in a scale are numbered starting at 1, which is also called the root note. Here are the same C major scales as before, but showing note numbers instead of their letter names. Using numbers lets us describe the notes without regard to a specific musical key. For example, the third note in a scale determines whether the scale is major or minor, regardless of its key. The last note in the scale has the same letter name as the first, and sounds at the same basic pitch, only one octave higher, so it can be referred to as either 8 or one. The printed notes on a music staff correspond to the same notes on a piano keyboard, and of course they relate to the same notes for all other musical instruments too. A piano string vibrates back and forth very rapidly, and the number of vibrations per second is called its frequency, stated in Hertz in honor of German physicist Heinrich Hertz, and abbreviated HZ. Notes an octave apart are double, or half, the frequency. This is why all C notes, or A notes, or any other notes with the same name, are called double. have the same basic tonality, even though their absolute pitch may be different. Middle C has a frequency of 261.6 Hz, but the A above is 440 Hz, which is better for showing this octave relationship. You can hear that A octave notes also have a similar tonality, rather than sounding like harmony. Every note on the printed staff corresponds directly to a key on the keyboard. One of the first things beginning piano players learn is to relate notes on the page to keys on the piano quickly enough to play music in real time. This is called sight reading. It takes many hours of practice in order to play music at first sight, without having to memorize the notes ahead of time. Many melodies are based on simple scales, such as Do, Re, Mi from the musical The Sound of Music. Other simple melodies are based on arpeggios, which are the notes that make up a chord. These notes are the chord tones for the key of C, and they're the first, third, and fifth notes in the scale. Bugles can play only the notes in a chord, so all of the common military melodies such as Reveille and Taps are based on arpeggios. Another type of music notation is called solfège. Rather than specify notes by their names such as C, D, E, and so forth, you use the names DO, RE, MI, FA, SO, LA, and TI. These names relate to each note's position in the scale. Like the note numbers shown earlier, the value of solfège is that the note names are relative rather than absolute. So Do is always the first and last note in the scale, no matter what musical key the piece is written in. I'll also mention the Electronic Dictionary of Musical Themes website, linked in the description for this video. This terrific resource lets you search for classical music titles based on a fragment of the melody. Go to the Search by Notes page, enter the note names for the melody in any key, and the site tells you the name of the piece. Very cool. Another important aspect of musical scales is the interval, which is the distance between any two notes. Notes that are adjacent are referred to as being a second apart, while notes farther apart have intervals called the third, fourth, fifth, and so on. The interval between the first and second note is two, and likewise for other adjacent intervals. There are two types of musical seconds, half steps and whole steps. A half step was used famously in the theme for the movie Jaws. A musical octave is divided into 12 equally spaced half step intervals, but there are only 7 notes in a major or minor scale, because scales contain both half steps and whole steps. A basic scale in the key of C major uses only the seven white keys, skipping the five black keys. The white key note to the right of middle C is the D above, but there's also a black key between those notes. This black key note is called a C sharp, but it's also a D flat. Which name, or spelling, is appropriate depends on the musical key of the piece. The key of C plays only white keys, so it has no sharps or flats. The interval between middle C and the higher pitched D to the right is a whole step, But the interval between the E note and the F note to its right is only a half step higher, because there's no black key in between. The same applies for the interval between middle C and the lower B note to the left. A half step is also known as a minor second, versus a major second for a whole step. Again, most scales contain a mix of half steps and whole steps. Other intervals can also be major or minor. The distance between the 1st and 3rd scale tones establishes whether the key is major or minor. So a major 3rd establishes the key as major, and a minor 3rd makes it minor. In this C major scale, the interval between 1 and 3 is a major 3rd. If the 3rd E note is changed to E flat, the interval becomes a minor 3rd, and you can hear the tonality change to a minor key. It's not uncommon in pop and blues music for a melody to play a minor third with a major key, as you can hear in the song It's My Life by The Animals. Here the guitar plays a minor third while singer Eric Burden goes back and forth between major and minor thirds to avoid a clash. It's a hard world to get a break in. All the good things have been taken. There are three variations of the minor scale. The natural minor scale at top contains the notes that naturally belong to the key. The key of A minor has no sharps or flats, so this scale plays the white key notes starting with A. The harmonic minor scale in the middle is similar, but raises a seventh by a half step and sounds like this. The melodic minor scale at the bottom raises both the sixth and seventh scale tones. This keeps the first half of the scale minor, but makes the second half more like a major scale. Here's what that sounds like. Another scale is the pentatonic scale, which contains only five of the available seven notes, as shown here in blue. The pentatonic scale is often called the blues scale because it's the basis for many blues melodies. This scale falls comfortably under the fingers on a guitar, making it easy to play. You can also play a pentatonic scale using only the black keys of a piano. When I was a child, my older cousin Michael would literally bang this out on the old piano in our grandmother's basement just for fun. The last scales I'll mention are the whole tone and chromatic scales. As you can imagine, a whole tone scale consists of only whole steps. rather than the usual mix of whole steps and half steps. A whole tone scale has a unique character and is often used in TV shows and movies to imply a flashback or time lapse. A chromatic scale contains only half steps, though it's rare to hear more than four or five such notes in a row. One popular example of the chromatic scale is Flight of the Bumblebee by Rimsky-Korsakov. There are three basic notes in a given chord, the root, third, and fifth notes of the scale, and melodies can start on, or emphasize, any of those to convey different moods. Starting with the root note sounds fairly basic, as in the French nursery rhyme Alouette. Starting with the third gives a different character, as in Girls Just Wanna Have Fun by Cyndi Lauper. Focusing instead on the fifth gives yet another quality, as in Coming to America by Neil Diamond. All melodies comprise a sequence of notes, which in turn are based on musical intervals. Many simple melodies use fragments of various scales and arpeggios, such as the Do-Re-Mi song played earlier. Indeed, all of the notes in a melody are either the 1, 3, and 5 chord tones, or passing tones notes that pass through the chord tones. A good example is A Groovy Kind of Love, made famous by the Mindbenders in 1965, and the and covered later in 1988 by Phil Collins. The passing tone notes are shown in red, to distinguish them from the chord notes that are either the 1, 3, or 5 of the current chord. Since the chords change, the note number playing at a given time also changes. This is why the B in the third bar is the third of the G7 chord, but in the fourth bar it's the seventh for the C chord. Likewise for the last D note that's a 1 for the D chord, even though it was a 2 in all the preceding bars when the C chord was playing. Whether writing pop tunes or classical symphonies, or improvising in a jazz trio, good melodies often build over time and have a direction that goes somewhere. This snippet of the opening guitar solo from Black Magic Woman by Santana is a good example of a melody that builds. A common way to enhance a melody is with various musical ornaments. These include trills, turns, grace notes, and slides, also known as glissandos and portamento. Slides are most effective on string instruments that have no frets, such as the violin and steel guitar, though the trombone can also glide smoothly between certain note pairs. The piano and guitar, and other instruments that play only discrete pitches, can only approximate a glissando. Let's look at each of these ornaments in turn. A trill plays the written note, alternating quickly with the adjacent note above. A flat, sharp, or natural modifier can be added to the trill symbol, to specify notes that are not part of the current key. This is shown in the second example where the upper note is F sharp instead of the F natural that goes with the key of C. We'll cover sharps, flats, and naturals in more depth shortly. A turn is not common with modern music, but it was very popular in Baroque music. The first bar shows how a turn is notated, and the second bar is what the musician actually plays. Portamento glides smoothly from one note to another, and is a wonderful effect if not overused. This excerpt from Ravel's Habanera is performed by my friend, cellist Kate Dillingham, on a CD I produced for Music Minus One. Slides can also be played on fretted instruments, though the in-between pitches are in half-step increments. rather than continuous as with a cello or violin. However, the effect is similar and can add interest to an otherwise simple melody as in the instrumental Apache from 1961 by Jürgen Engman. Note the wiggly line that indicates glissando between the first E note and the target A above. A straight line can also be used with or without the gliss notation. Pianos can also emulate a glissando. Even a fast descending scale played by a synthesizer or string section in a pop tune can be considered a glissando. Grace notes are one or more notes that are so short they aren't given a specific length. Instead, they're indicated using a smaller font. The player, or the musical style, determines the duration of grace notes, and the needed time is usually taken from the preceding note. This next example from Ernest Bloch's Prayer from Jewish Life was also played by Kate Dillingham. Without sharps and flats, all music would be in the key of C major, or its relative minor key, A minor, which also uses only the white keys on a piano. But within every key are both major and minor scales. Which scale you get depends on which note you start with. Many of the examples in this video will use the key of C major or A minor for simplicity. But it's important to understand the role of sharps and flats to obtain other keys. As you just saw, the second scale in the key of C, playing only white keys, is D minor. The third scale is E minor. But the key of D major requires two sharps in order to have the correct whole step and half step intervals for a major key. So whenever F or C are played, they're preceded by the sharp symbol, also called a pound sign. However, musical keys can have as many as seven sharps or flats, and having to write the symbol in front of every altered note is clumsy for composers and arrangers and makes the music more difficult for musicians to read. Instead of writing sharp symbols every time they're needed, the necessary sharps are shown once at the start of each line. Whenever the musician sees an F or C note, she knows to play them as F sharp and C sharp automatically. A group of sharps or flats displayed once per line, as shown here, is called a key signature. So this is the key signature for the key of D major. Sometimes sharps and flats are used for brief modulations to a different key, or for specific color. In that case, a sharp or flat symbol is called an accidental, though the affected note itself can also be considered the accidental. If a D major chord is used for a song in the key of C, it's not necessary to actually change the key signature for only those one or two bars. You simply write a sharp symbol before the F as needed for just those notes. There's also a natural symbol to cancel an implied sharp or flat as needed for a particular passage. In this case, the musician plays an F natural instead of an F sharp. The last aspect of notes and staves we'll consider are ledger lines. These are used to accommodate notes that are higher or lower than the five lines of a staff. As you might imagine, when notes are much higher or lower than those shown here, the music can be difficult to read because there are so many ledger lines. So when notes are very high, which is not uncommon in violin and flute music, they're written an octave lower than intended. Then the 8VA octave higher symbol tells the player which octave to play. In this example, the notes get progressively higher, with the last group sounding an octave higher than written to continue the ascending line. Earlier, I mentioned that the note halfway between C and D can be considered either a C-sharp or a D-flat, depending on the key of the music or the current context. Knowing which name to use is referred to as spelling, and it matters in the same way as spelling for written languages. A C-sharp is not a D-flat, even though they both sound at the same pitch on a piano. However, sometimes notes are misspelled intentionally to make the music easier for musicians to read. Both of these bars play a repeating half-step figure, from C to C sharp, back to C again, and so forth. In the first bar, the sharp symbol is needed for the second note, but then a natural is needed to cancel the sharp. As you can see, this is pretty messy. The second example instead uses a D flat, even if C sharp would be the correct spelling. Making music easy to read is an important skill for musical arrangers to master. Note that sharps, flats, and naturals extend for the duration of the bar. This is why only the first flat is needed in the second bar. It's implied that the remaining D notes are also flat, unless canceled by a natural sign.

For example, to understand what a musician means when he tells you, punch in on the upbeat to bar 12, or rewind back to the augmented chord just before the chorus. Understand that music is a language, and it's as highly developed and detailed as any spoken language. You'll learn the basics in a few hours watching this video, but dedicated musicians spend a lifetime learning the intricate details of written music and the subtle nuances of musical performance. The New Harvard Dictionary of Music shown here is more than two inches thick and contains more than 940 pages written by 70 different authors. The language of music is deep indeed.

This language is also universal and can be understood by people of any nationality. A jazz big band might contain players who cannot speak each other's native language, yet they can perform together as an ensemble and interpret the printed notes on a page with the same technique and emotion. Even if you speak only English, you can enjoy and appreciate fully a performance by an orchestra from Turkey, Israel, India, Russia, or any other country. In this video I'll start at the very beginning and continue through fairly advanced concepts.

I'll also present common musical devices so you'll recognize them in the music you enjoy. Written music will be shown on screen while the examples play, but the examples are simple so you don't need to read music in order to follow along. I'm an old man, so most of the musical examples will be popular oldies from the 1960s and 70s, and works from the classical literature. We'll cover a lot of ground in a relatively short amount of time, so if you're really serious about learning all the material, you'll probably need to watch this video a few times.

When I learned music theory in college, it was a two-year course. He has been, The earliest musical instrument was probably the human voice, though historical evidence shows that cave dwellers banged rocks together and played primitive flutes made from animal bones 40,000 years ago. In more modern times, before 900 AD, harmony was primitive and consisted mainly of octaves, fourths, and fifths, which are neither major nor minor. Of course, back then people didn't know what they were missing. They were used to primitive harmony, and it sounded normal to them.

Thankfully, by the Baroque era in the early 1600s, harmony in musical form became much more sophisticated. In the 1700s, Bach was perhaps the first composer to use modern jazz chords, though my favorite period was the 1800s, starting with Beethoven, who invented rock and roll. Later in that century, the Romantic era of classical music came into prominence, providing us with numerous masterpieces from Chopin, Schumann, Liszt, Tchaikovsky, Dvorak, Grieg, Debussy, and too many others to list here. I encourage you to explore resources such as the Classical Composers Database and Wikipedia for more information about these amazing musical pioneers. Links are in the description for this video.

Music consists of three basic properties, melody, harmony, and rhythm. There are only 12 distinct musical notes available, but they can be strung together into an infinite number of combinations. We'll start with note lengths to help follow the upcoming music examples, then move on to note names, intervals, scales, and arpeggios, which are the foundation of every melody.

This shows the most common note lengths, though there are others. From left to right, a whole note extends for all four beats of the bar. 1, 2, 3, 4. Half notes extend for two beats.

1, 2, 3, 4. And quarter notes are one beat each. 1, 2, 3, 4. 2, 3, 4. Shorter notes include eighth notes that sustain for half a beat, 1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and, while sixteenth notes are only one fourth of a beat. There are also thirty-second notes and sixty-fourth notes, not shown, that are shorter still.

The last two bars show dotted notes, where the dot means the note is held for half again longer than its stated duration. So this dotted half note lasts for three beats, and the quarter note that follows completes the measure. Quarter notes can also be dotted to play for one and a half beats. We'll cover time signatures, beats, and note lengths in more detail later.

Notes are written on a musical staff, as shown here. Staffs, or more properly staves, are divided into bars, which are units of time that contain a group of notes. This staff has two bars. The first bar contains the first four notes, and the second bar holds the next four notes.

Again, these notes are called quarter notes because each represents one quarter of the bar when music is in 4-4 time. The numbers at the left of the staff identify the music's time signature, which in this case is 4-4. The upper 4 identifies the number of beats in each measure, and the lower 4 is the length of each beat, which is one quarter note.

So every bar contains four quarter notes, or some other combination of notes whose lengths total four beats. This is called a piano staff because it contains separate sets of lines for the pianist's left and right hands. The first note in this C major scale is called middle C, because it's midway between the bass clef on the bottom and the treble clef above.

Middle C is also near the middle of a piano's keyboard. The treble clef is sometimes called a G clef because the swirl circles the G line. Likewise, the bass clef is also called an F clef because the two dots identify the F line between them.

These clefs are also used for other instruments in the treble and bass ranges. For example, Flutes and violins use the treble clef, while bassoons and tubas use the bass clef. There are two other clefs, called tenor and alto, but they're less common, so we won't bother with them here. Basic major and minor scales have only seven notes, so the letters A through G are used.

Then the note names repeat again with A. This scale is called ascending because it progresses higher in pitch. When notes are to be played by the left hand of a piano, they're written on the lower staff. These scales are in the key of C, so they both start and end on a C note, though this scale is called descending because it goes towards a lower pitch. We'll cover musical keys in more detail shortly.

This shows the note names for both the lines and spaces of the treble and bass clefs. The traditional mnemonic for treble clef note names is every good boy does fine for the lines and the word face for the spaces. Equivalents for the bass clef are good boys do fine always and all cows eat grass.

Maybe it makes more sense to just memorize the notes. Printed music can contain a single staff as for a guitar or clarinet or as many as 25 staves or more when showing the full score for an orchestra or big band arrangement. The notes in a scale are numbered starting at 1, which is also called the root note.

Here are the same C major scales as before, but showing note numbers instead of their letter names. Using numbers lets us describe the notes without regard to a specific musical key. For example, the third note in a scale determines whether the scale is major or minor, regardless of its key.

The last note in the scale has the same letter name as the first, and sounds at the same basic pitch, only one octave higher, so it can be referred to as either 8 or one. The printed notes on a music staff correspond to the same notes on a piano keyboard, and of course they relate to the same notes for all other musical instruments too. A piano string vibrates back and forth very rapidly, and the number of vibrations per second is called its frequency, stated in Hertz in honor of German physicist Heinrich Hertz, and abbreviated HZ.

Notes an octave apart are double, or half, the frequency. This is why all C notes, or A notes, or any other notes with the same name, are called double. have the same basic tonality, even though their absolute pitch may be different. Middle C has a frequency of 261.6 Hz, but the A above is 440 Hz, which is better for showing this octave relationship. You can hear that A octave notes also have a similar tonality, rather than sounding like harmony.

Every note on the printed staff corresponds directly to a key on the keyboard. One of the first things beginning piano players learn is to relate notes on the page to keys on the piano quickly enough to play music in real time. This is called sight reading. It takes many hours of practice in order to play music at first sight, without having to memorize the notes ahead of time.

Many melodies are based on simple scales, such as Do, Re, Mi from the musical The Sound of Music. Other simple melodies are based on arpeggios, which are the notes that make up a chord. These notes are the chord tones for the key of C, and they're the first, third, and fifth notes in the scale. Bugles can play only the notes in a chord, so all of the common military melodies such as Reveille and Taps are based on arpeggios.

Another type of music notation is called solfège. Rather than specify notes by their names such as C, D, E, and so forth, you use the names DO, RE, MI, FA, SO, LA, and TI. These names relate to each note's position in the scale.

Like the note numbers shown earlier, the value of solfège is that the note names are relative rather than absolute. So Do is always the first and last note in the scale, no matter what musical key the piece is written in. I'll also mention the Electronic Dictionary of Musical Themes website, linked in the description for this video.

This terrific resource lets you search for classical music titles based on a fragment of the melody. Go to the Search by Notes page, enter the note names for the melody in any key, and the site tells you the name of the piece. Very cool.

Another important aspect of musical scales is the interval, which is the distance between any two notes. Notes that are adjacent are referred to as being a second apart, while notes farther apart have intervals called the third, fourth, fifth, and so on. The interval between the first and second note is two, and likewise for other adjacent intervals.

There are two types of musical seconds, half steps and whole steps. A half step was used famously in the theme for the movie Jaws. A musical octave is divided into 12 equally spaced half step intervals, but there are only 7 notes in a major or minor scale, because scales contain both half steps and whole steps. A basic scale in the key of C major uses only the seven white keys, skipping the five black keys.

The white key note to the right of middle C is the D above, but there's also a black key between those notes. This black key note is called a C sharp, but it's also a D flat. Which name, or spelling, is appropriate depends on the musical key of the piece.

The key of C plays only white keys, so it has no sharps or flats. The interval between middle C and the higher pitched D to the right is a whole step, But the interval between the E note and the F note to its right is only a half step higher, because there's no black key in between. The same applies for the interval between middle C and the lower B note to the left.

A half step is also known as a minor second, versus a major second for a whole step. Again, most scales contain a mix of half steps and whole steps. Other intervals can also be major or minor. The distance between the 1st and 3rd scale tones establishes whether the key is major or minor. So a major 3rd establishes the key as major, and a minor 3rd makes it minor.

In this C major scale, the interval between 1 and 3 is a major 3rd. If the 3rd E note is changed to E flat, the interval becomes a minor 3rd, and you can hear the tonality change to a minor key. It's not uncommon in pop and blues music for a melody to play a minor third with a major key, as you can hear in the song It's My Life by The Animals. Here the guitar plays a minor third while singer Eric Burden goes back and forth between major and minor thirds to avoid a clash. It's a hard world to get a break in.

All the good things have been taken. There are three variations of the minor scale. The natural minor scale at top contains the notes that naturally belong to the key. The key of A minor has no sharps or flats, so this scale plays the white key notes starting with A. The harmonic minor scale in the middle is similar, but raises a seventh by a half step and sounds like this.

The melodic minor scale at the bottom raises both the sixth and seventh scale tones. This keeps the first half of the scale minor, but makes the second half more like a major scale. Here's what that sounds like. Another scale is the pentatonic scale, which contains only five of the available seven notes, as shown here in blue. The pentatonic scale is often called the blues scale because it's the basis for many blues melodies.

This scale falls comfortably under the fingers on a guitar, making it easy to play. You can also play a pentatonic scale using only the black keys of a piano. When I was a child, my older cousin Michael would literally bang this out on the old piano in our grandmother's basement just for fun.

The last scales I'll mention are the whole tone and chromatic scales. As you can imagine, a whole tone scale consists of only whole steps. rather than the usual mix of whole steps and half steps. A whole tone scale has a unique character and is often used in TV shows and movies to imply a flashback or time lapse. A chromatic scale contains only half steps, though it's rare to hear more than four or five such notes in a row.

One popular example of the chromatic scale is Flight of the Bumblebee by Rimsky-Korsakov. There are three basic notes in a given chord, the root, third, and fifth notes of the scale, and melodies can start on, or emphasize, any of those to convey different moods. Starting with the root note sounds fairly basic, as in the French nursery rhyme Alouette. Starting with the third gives a different character, as in Girls Just Wanna Have Fun by Cyndi Lauper.

Focusing instead on the fifth gives yet another quality, as in Coming to America by Neil Diamond. All melodies comprise a sequence of notes, which in turn are based on musical intervals. Many simple melodies use fragments of various scales and arpeggios, such as the Do-Re-Mi song played earlier.

Indeed, all of the notes in a melody are either the 1, 3, and 5 chord tones, or passing tones notes that pass through the chord tones. A good example is A Groovy Kind of Love, made famous by the Mindbenders in 1965, and the and covered later in 1988 by Phil Collins. The passing tone notes are shown in red, to distinguish them from the chord notes that are either the 1, 3, or 5 of the current chord.

Since the chords change, the note number playing at a given time also changes. This is why the B in the third bar is the third of the G7 chord, but in the fourth bar it's the seventh for the C chord. Likewise for the last D note that's a 1 for the D chord, even though it was a 2 in all the preceding bars when the C chord was playing.

Whether writing pop tunes or classical symphonies, or improvising in a jazz trio, good melodies often build over time and have a direction that goes somewhere. This snippet of the opening guitar solo from Black Magic Woman by Santana is a good example of a melody that builds. A common way to enhance a melody is with various musical ornaments. These include trills, turns, grace notes, and slides, also known as glissandos and portamento. Slides are most effective on string instruments that have no frets, such as the violin and steel guitar, though the trombone can also glide smoothly between certain note pairs.

The piano and guitar, and other instruments that play only discrete pitches, can only approximate a glissando. Let's look at each of these ornaments in turn. A trill plays the written note, alternating quickly with the adjacent note above. A flat, sharp, or natural modifier can be added to the trill symbol, to specify notes that are not part of the current key. This is shown in the second example where the upper note is F sharp instead of the F natural that goes with the key of C.

We'll cover sharps, flats, and naturals in more depth shortly. A turn is not common with modern music, but it was very popular in Baroque music. The first bar shows how a turn is notated, and the second bar is what the musician actually plays.

Portamento glides smoothly from one note to another, and is a wonderful effect if not overused. This excerpt from Ravel's Habanera is performed by my friend, cellist Kate Dillingham, on a CD I produced for Music Minus One. Slides can also be played on fretted instruments, though the in-between pitches are in half-step increments.

rather than continuous as with a cello or violin. However, the effect is similar and can add interest to an otherwise simple melody as in the instrumental Apache from 1961 by Jürgen Engman. Note the wiggly line that indicates glissando between the first E note and the target A above.

A straight line can also be used with or without the gliss notation. Pianos can also emulate a glissando. Even a fast descending scale played by a synthesizer or string section in a pop tune can be considered a glissando. Grace notes are one or more notes that are so short they aren't given a specific length. Instead, they're indicated using a smaller font.

The player, or the musical style, determines the duration of grace notes, and the needed time is usually taken from the preceding note. This next example from Ernest Bloch's Prayer from Jewish Life was also played by Kate Dillingham. Without sharps and flats, all music would be in the key of C major, or its relative minor key, A minor, which also uses only the white keys on a piano. But within every key are both major and minor scales. Which scale you get depends on which note you start with.

Many of the examples in this video will use the key of C major or A minor for simplicity. But it's important to understand the role of sharps and flats to obtain other keys. As you just saw, the second scale in the key of C, playing only white keys, is D minor.

The third scale is E minor. But the key of D major requires two sharps in order to have the correct whole step and half step intervals for a major key. So whenever F or C are played, they're preceded by the sharp symbol, also called a pound sign.

However, musical keys can have as many as seven sharps or flats, and having to write the symbol in front of every altered note is clumsy for composers and arrangers and makes the music more difficult for musicians to read. Instead of writing sharp symbols every time they're needed, the necessary sharps are shown once at the start of each line. Whenever the musician sees an F or C note, she knows to play them as F sharp and C sharp automatically.

A group of sharps or flats displayed once per line, as shown here, is called a key signature. So this is the key signature for the key of D major. Sometimes sharps and flats are used for brief modulations to a different key, or for specific color.

In that case, a sharp or flat symbol is called an accidental, though the affected note itself can also be considered the accidental. If a D major chord is used for a song in the key of C, it's not necessary to actually change the key signature for only those one or two bars. You simply write a sharp symbol before the F as needed for just those notes. There's also a natural symbol to cancel an implied sharp or flat as needed for a particular passage.

In this case, the musician plays an F natural instead of an F sharp. The last aspect of notes and staves we'll consider are ledger lines. These are used to accommodate notes that are higher or lower than the five lines of a staff.

As you might imagine, when notes are much higher or lower than those shown here, the music can be difficult to read because there are so many ledger lines. So when notes are very high, which is not uncommon in violin and flute music, they're written an octave lower than intended. Then the 8VA octave higher symbol tells the player which octave to play. In this example, the notes get progressively higher, with the last group sounding an octave higher than written to continue the ascending line.

Earlier, I mentioned that the note halfway between C and D can be considered either a C-sharp or a D-flat, depending on the key of the music or the current context. Knowing which name to use is referred to as spelling, and it matters in the same way as spelling for written languages. A C-sharp is not a D-flat, even though they both sound at the same pitch on a piano. However, sometimes notes are misspelled intentionally to make the music easier for musicians to read.

Both of these bars play a repeating half-step figure, from C to C sharp, back to C again, and so forth. In the first bar, the sharp symbol is needed for the second note, but then a natural is needed to cancel the sharp. As you can see, this is pretty messy.

The second example instead uses a D flat, even if C sharp would be the correct spelling. Making music easy to read is an important skill for musical arrangers to master. Note that sharps, flats, and naturals extend for the duration of the bar.

This is why only the first flat is needed in the second bar. It's implied that the remaining D notes are also flat, unless canceled by a natural sign.

Transcript for:Essential Music Theory for Engineers

Transcript for:
Essential Music Theory for Engineers