@BaSsDuDe I've been following, as much as I can. My ' knowledge ' is slightly above Major and Minor triads and their inversions.
I recently realized Maj7 and m7 were simply two fifths. Now what guitar player doesn't like power chords..... two power chords stacked?

 

I used the word ignorance in only the best way, not as a put down but rather as only lacking knowledge , as in one of my musical heros Tommy Emmanuel's relationship to reading music. It is a rather touchy word and surely can be taken as a miff, but not in my instance. For most of my life I too was ignorant of technical and mechanical theories of music and did my best to sidestep it if it came near to under foot.

 

You can see it that way , any way that helps you put info together is good Then you can learn the academic way and names but
you will have 90 % of the job done already .
One tip if you want to think "stack" and know your triad and inversions :
You can think a C Major 7th chord as Cmaj and Em stack on top
You can think a Cminor 7th chord as Cmin and Ebmaj stack on top
What counts is the way you enter and connect with the theory if it is of any use to you .

See the Tommy Emmanuel videos posted , they say he did not know theory . But man !
What a musician and artist ! Those chords he played with harmonics were so beautiful !
Any one can learn theory and get strong knowledge .But not anyone can reach the level of Tommy Emmanuel , for sure ...

The winner is the one that creates , play or compose , not the one who explains what the creator player or composer is doing !!!
So simple as that !

 

That was an eye opener too.

I agree, most of us need to practice trying to hear inversions as different ' shades ' of chords.
Robben Ford has a great TrueFire video.
In the Key of E maj starting with low E, B and G# he played the inversions, moving to F#m in the same 1 5 3 manner he played all inversions. After learning these different ' flavors ' of chords the fun began by connecting these new choices.
We are not ready for 7ths yet.

I love how Jacob Collier calls chord voicings = deciding where to distribute the tension.

 

There are many rules for different types of music, but there is nothing like THE rules for music. In every culture, in every age, for every purpose, different rules apply. Rules are there to achieve a given goal in the most effective way. But goals are diverse, as are people who try to reach them. A set of rules that fits perfectly for one goal may be completely worthless to another.

Schoenberg developed the "Method of composing with twelve tones which are related to one another" for HIS artistic purposes, but he never taught them theoretically. In his opinion, HIS rules could not be of interest to OTHER composers. Nevertheless, his students (Webern, Berg, etc.) later extracted the rules from his work and applied them with great success in their own music.

Nowadays, there is a demand for music for commercials, and there are strict rules for that as well. However, if a contemporary commercial music composer would use Schoenberg's rules, he probably would starve to death. A trained composer knows when to apply certain rules, and he does so conscientiously. An ingenious composer knows the rules as well, but he also knows when to deviate from them in order to achieve his artistic goals.

 

yawn

 

@superliquidsunshine
Dear Super I should have been more precise. That was directed at MMJ putting up such ridiculous open-ended challenges that were doomed to fail the moment they were posted because they were not only completely inaccurate, they were inflammatory past the point of common sense.
Every time he reverted back to the same incorrect information and challenged others and then did not answer when they challenged him.
I got where you were coming from and did not disagree. Music is to be enjoyed and passed along but not with the wrong information. It does not matter how scholastically educated someone is, a person's limitations are those they place upon themselves.
Ignorance is one of those words that very rarely gets read in a positive way. It has more negative connotations than positive, which is why I am not partial to it.

Sorry for not being succinct enough.
Cheers

 

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Thinking in terms of the harmony is the biggest obstacle for having an open-minded view toward music. It makes the musicians suppress their beautiful feelings. Harmony must be felt and let heart rules the head. I don't know whether it's another stupid belief or not but as you can see in this thread, it causes a sense of alienation and estrangement among the music lovers a thing that was supposed to bring them together.

 

You do not have "to think in terms of harmony" in the way you present it .The most horrible way is showed by MMJ :
Pages of abstract formulas , no fun , unrelated to real music : absolute useless bullshit .
Take some minutes to hear how a real musician talks about it and relates to music .
Harmony "is" , no "belief" about it
Just listen , you will probably not understand the technical terms he uses but that is no important !
What is important is that this guy shows the relation between the feelings and the science of harmony .
It makes it alive !
That is what a talented teacher is : Someone who helps one make relation with what can be felt as abstract and relates it to
something "organic" .
I have been writing about this on these pages ...

No , if this kind of stuff does not say anything to you wait, it might come , or not ...

 

I really enjoyed the music examples to illustrate, Stevie, Miles etc.. great choice. Perhaps you should have posted before MMJ and that might have removed about 5 pages

Instead we would have been looking at good videos and musicians and artists that people like and links everyone can benefit from, instead of truly wasting our energy on something that none of us should have needed to.

 

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I was sure you was going to like this
Just an advice if you did not do it already , check this guy's you tube channel , he is really a great guy !!!
His tone on soprano sax is a dream . His examples of triad pair improvisation (3 videos) is incredibly musical , and so much more from this guy
CU

 

I can feel his suffering from exhaustion of teaching harmony.

 

Harmony is sometimes misunderstood (and also taught!) as a mere set of rules, how chords are "properly" fit together, just like a brick wall. If that were all, the "Thinking in terms of the harmony" would actually be an obstacle to the understanding of music.

 

"Music's path is full of stupid beliefs and all is the stupid Harmony's fault."

Foster,
you tone-deaf lazy tot

cmon now. let us know this most relevant info regarding your wacky posting-mania.

how old are you?

 

That was my huge issue in 11th and 12th grade while I was taking the offered Harmony and Composition class taught by our school's orchestra conductor. He was so caught up in rigid rules that he sucked the air out of our collective lungs making what could have been an amazing experience into one that had us all struggling for breath from the very moment we crossed into his domain. It was also the 1st class of the day which didn't help much with our teenage constitutions, my brain was pretty much running in reverse until at least 11am.

 

I think what people misunderstand is that the point of learning harmony is to learn 10,000 individual instances of separate things you can do, in order to build up a database in your mind. over time you can see every possible option.
any specific instance shown is to add to the rest of the database you are building.
once you cover ever single possibility and memorize them you now can do anything possible with music.( with intent, dont have to rely on doing things on accident)
there is a way that music works, just like there is a way everything in reality works that worked that way , way before we were born.
the whole point is to find out how it really works in a type of way where your brain has every possible option mapped out , so that when you go to make a musical choice in any moment you can make the one that most expresses what you want to come across (we call that art)
those that have to accidentally come up with something are unreliable, and those who have to audition each step of the process never finish anything. and don't forget writers block.
creativity comes from existing knowledge you have, creativity cannot come from ignorance you have.
me knowing jack shit about dolphins cannot cause me to write a great song.

 

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Don't forget! Everything is written here are some stupid beliefs except @superliquidsunshine 's and some others'.

 

@famouslut .. @MMJ2017 .. @foster911 .. @EddieXx .. @retsoff119 .. @BaSsDuDe ..@dragonhill .. @Lambchop ...and anybody else so interested.

Anyway...I threw together a quickie version of the song that I wrote called 'Love'd Not Been Lately' which uses every chord in our chromatic spectrum in the form of either a major or minor variety with the exception of D# and A#, but of course the root of each are inherent in the weave of others, so yes, chromatically all the bases are covered. Someone with a better grasp of formal theory can tell me what key this is in because it's too weird for me to make a call on it. The song is very accessible to the "average" listener though, and when I used to play it people always let me know how much they liked it, as much for the lyrics as well as the feeling it gave them overall. I used to sing it better by listening to my slightly at times off kilter, but maybe a third take woulda helped.

The strange chord sequence goes like so...

C# G# F C C# G# G F (Verse)

A D F A A C#m B F#---G (Chorus)

F# E D (3rd Part)

...or something like that, I might not have written it exactly as I play it, but if you want to play along you'll figure it out.

Love'd not been lately, more you bait me than you love
This trip is getting old
Now I know darling you won't let anybody into your skin and bones
Woke up one day to find I'm someone else, someone I'd hope to be
Looked in the mirror and I was not there, 'looked just a lot like me
I hear what you're saying as you bang your head
No longer feel that passion, hear my own words instead
Stiletto beauty, you are the lover, I the leap bleed to the edge I've honed
It's not so bad when floating, just butterflies that go away
Or so I've been told
Woke up one day to find I'm someone else, someone I'd hope to be
Looked in the mirror and I was not there, 'looked just a lot like me
I hear what you're saying as you bang your head
No longer feel that passion, heed my own words instead
Love'd not been lately, more you bait me than you love
This trip is getting old

For the interested...
Vocal: Microtech Gefell umt70s>>Daking Mic Pre One
Martin D-15M, a little Cuban bata, a little wooden shaker and a very big wooden afro pick, the tines scraped and played with a tiny little piece of wood >>Beyerdynamic MC930>>Warm Audio Tonebeast>>Warm Audio WA76 ... all into my little RME Babyface.

https://clyp.it/3q5hrb54

 

Last edited by a moderator: Apr 9, 2018