Beginning pianists are often drawn to the white keys. They are orderly, collectively making up a major scale; it's easy to noodle on white keys and come up with something that sounds loosely musical.
But the black keys are not without their charm. Making up a pentatonic scale, they allow young players to play some familiar sounds and melodies without worrying about hitting an off note. Pedagogically it is often preferable to start young students on the black keys, as they are grouped in twos in threes, allowing players to start seeing patterns on the keyboard.
I have a theory that Stevie Wonder was drawn to the black keys from the beginning because of his blindness. To a blind man the white keys are uniform and indistinguishable without noodling for a bit. But the groupings of the black keys allow him to find his place immediately. Where many pianist/songwriters are drawn to common keys, I feel that Stevie is more comfortable in the deep keys. For example, here are ten famous Elton John songs and their keys:
Your Song - Eb
Goodbye Yellow Brick Road - F/Ab
Tiny Dancer - C
I Guess That's Why They Call It the Blues - C
Saturday Night's Alright - C
Crockodile Rock - G
Bennie & the Jets - G
Someone Saved My Life Tonight - Ab
Can You Feel the Love Tonight - Bb
Daniel - C
Not too adventurous. For contrast, here are the top 12 "frequently mentioned" Stevie songs (according to Google):
I Just Called to Say I Love You - Db, modulates to D and Eb
Superstition - Eb minor
You Are the Sunshine of My Life - C, modulates to Db
For Once in My Life - F, modulates to Gb
Isn't She Lovely - E
Higher Ground - Eb minor
Living for the City - Gb
My Cherie Amour - C, modulates to Db
Boogie on Reggae Woman - Ab
I Was Made to Love Her - F
I Wish - Eb minor
Sir Duke - B
7/12 of them are in what I would call uncommon keys - Gb, B, Db, Eb minor - and those in common keys usually modulate at some point.
Playing in these keys also allows Stevie to do some glissando tricks on the black keys at times. As mentioned, the black keys constitute either an Eb minor pentatonic scale or a Gb Major pentatonic scale. Running your hand up and down the black keys makes for a pretty cool effect, when used well. Stevie uses it on several keyboards for the intro of You Haven't Done Nothing:
It also works well over certain chords, particularly the Ab11 chord. This type of chord is called many different names - sus9, Ab/Gb, 7sus, etc...I like calling it an 11 chord. Its function is typically to act as the V chord, in this case in the key of Db.
In Knocks Me Off My Feet, you hear Stevie go to town on this when the big Ab11 chord sets up the modulation. Check it out around 2:40:
It also works well over a BMajor7 chord, as the black notes turn it into a BMajor13 chord. In Summer Soft, which modulates constantly, you can hear Stevie do this around 3:40:
There is no physical reason one key should have a different sound than others; it all depends on the song. But anecdotally speaking (as a musician) there is a definite warmth to the darker keys. It may just be that they are less cliche, and thus sound more novel. I'm sure the musicians who played with Stevie were pushed out of their comfort zones and probably in to much more explorative areas by having to play in uncommon keys. It is one of the ways that blindness may have contributed to his musical brilliance, by simply giving Stevie a proclivity for the ebony keys.
The church service I played yesterday started with this video clip from the intro of Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood:
That brought back some memories. I knew that the show had a great band, but I hadn't really watched it as an adult or noticed the music when I was a kid. As with many people, Mr. Rogers was a big part of my childhood. It's not that the show was popular; it was just ubiquitous, in a very unobtrusive way. We only had a handful of channels and PBS was one of them. So, like Sesame Street, Mr. Rogers was always just kind of there.
The song itself was written by Fred Rogers, as were most of the pieces on the show. Rogers had a B.A. in Music Composition, and was an excellent pianist. The trio on the show featured jazz virtuoso Johnny Costa. I love that such great musicianship has been in the background of our childhoods, exposing kids indirectly to rich chords, rhythms and melodies. Rogers also frequently interviewed musicians and even introduced his band:
The show's opening song "Won't You Be My Neighbor" has a pretty busy intro, but the song itself is a simple AABA form with a short tag at the end. I'm surprised - given its nice chords, familiarity and simple form - that I don't really ever hear piano trios playing the song. Maybe some people find it a bit hokey, but if someone's too cool for Mr. Rogers then who really cares what they think?
As it turns out, a bunch of Rogers' songs are featured on the show's website, complete with PDF simplified piano music. I'm guessing this site was build at some point during the dot com boom, given the late-90s look and the Real Player audio files. The chart to "Won't You Be My Neighbor" is quite good and includes the chords for those who want to improvise. My gripes with it are that: a) it's not in Mr. Rogers' key and b) it's two pages long with three staves, unlike a typical lead sheet style chart that most jazz musicians would use. I figured I'd write it out in C as an iPad-friendly one-page PDF, for those who might like to play it:
The PDF can be downloaded HERE, along with versions in D, F, G, A and Bb. Enjoy!
So why is this song great? I don't know. Most of this blog is an excuse for me to be a theory nerd, or to point out some profound cleverness in well-known pop songs. There's nothing particularly clever about the song. It is profound only because it connects so many of us to our youth.
As I said, Mr. Rogers was always just there. No matter how much you grow up, he knew you before you were an adult. He knew you before you were cool, angry, smart, selfish, or hurt. No matter how brilliant someone might be, there is no guarantee that they will write music that connects with people. It matters where the music comes from, and in the case of Mr. Rogers it came from someone who saw the best in people and asked us to be better to each other. For that, I am grateful that he was around when I was a child.
For those of us enjoying care-free youth in the mid-80s and early 90s, the beep-boop tones of the NES are the soundtrack of our childhood. When it comes to music, everyone has some bias toward the music they grew up with, and I am aware that there may be some nostalgia in my love of NES music.
As an art form, video game music has grown to the point where major releases are often fully scored and orchestrated, sometimes with a budget on par with Hollywood movies. Great art is everywhere and composers continue create amazing, enduring melodies with the resources available to them.
But I continue to be amazed by those early Nintendo games. How did the composers for those early games create such indelible themes with so little? There are few who wouldn't immediately recognize music from Super Mario Bros or The Legend of Zelda, and those early composers had a tiny fraction of the capabilities of modern soft/hardware. It wasn't even close.
My theory, and I believe most artists would agree, is that limitation breeds creativity. This is the paradox of choice in practice. I've noticed it throughout my career. Drop a piece of manuscript paper and a pencil in front of me and I will stare blankly. Tell me I need to write a 2-minute piece for oboe, violin, and organ, and my creative mind will engage. I noticed in theory classes that I had a wealth of creative ideas when my parameters were defined (say, by the rules of counterpoint). Bach himself seemed to have very clear "rules" he worked with when writing fugues, inventions and choral works.
At a point, too much limitation is constricting. Music from early Atari consoles is pretty much non-existent or completely forgettable. There just wasn't much that could be done with them. The NES seemed to have just enough tools to unlock the creative minds of composers at the time.
Before I dig into the NES music, first a clarifying point: there is really no such thing as "8-bit" music, in the sense that most people tend to mean it. The term 8-bit in this context refers to the capabilities of the microprocessors of that generation of consoles, not the quality of the sound. The capabilities of the music were limited somewhat by the hardware, and that affected the sound, but the term "8-bit" doesn't really tell you anything about the sound of the music. It's an important distinction to make, but I do think "8-bit" is a useful colloquialism for "NES-like" so I won't make too much of a stink over it.
So what are the limitations/capabilities of the NES? The biggest is probably its polyphony, or how many sounds it could play at once. The NES had 5 channels to work with:
Most of the melodies that people recognize are on the first two channels. The third is typically a bass part and drum tracks are usually on the fourth. The fifth track can have samples, but these would have to be loaded on the game cart itself, and storage was at a premium in those days. (the Super Mario Bros/ Duck Hunt ROM is a whopping 82kb, smaller than many emails!) Nevertheless, this track was useful for adding musical variety such as orchestra hits, or the tympani that can be heard in Super Mario Bros 3.
So the composers essentially had 3 voices and a drum track, plus some sound effects. Keep in mind that they also had to cover the game noises: jumping, hitting things, coins. All of these challenges were addressed in often clever ways, and the limitations of the NES were used to make some brilliant music.
Let's start at the beginning, with Super Mario Bros:
Listen carefully and you will notice that the melody often drops out to make room for the sound effects. It is especially noticeable at :35 when Mario gets a bunch of coins in a row. The melodic coin noise is obviously on one of the first two channels, along with the music. Many composers wrote music with this in mind, knowing that parts of it might have to drop out and the music should still carry with fewer parts.
The first thing you might notice about the bass channel is that it is much higher than a typical bass part. This might be due in part to the limited frequency response of most TVs in that era. Lower bass parts just wouldn't be heard. But moving the bass into the upper registers was a way to fill out more parts. Like Bobby McFerrin, the third channel was often dropping a quick bass note then harmonizing or arpeggiating in a higher register. Much like the cellist in a string quartet, the bass part played a larger role in the music than, say, Tom Petty's bass player.
Mario's power-up sound (at :26) is an example of a fast arpeggio, or rapidly alternating notes on a single channel, which was the best way for the composers to make a few tracks sound like much more. Games like Soltice and Silver Surfer used arpeggios to make a huge sound! (both composed by Tim Follin)
Another ingenious trick was to use the first two channels in unison, instead of harmony, with the second track slightly softer and delayed. This created a reverb effect, a kind of audio depth not seen in many video games at that time. It also meant that the composer only had two melodic parts to work with, instead of three. One major benefit of this was that, if the second channel needed to switch to a sound effect, you would only lose the reverb, not any notes. Check out the reverb effect in Mega Man 2, at :08 and especially at the bridge (:22). Anytime the sound becomes reverby you will hear that it is in two parts instead of three. You can also hear how much busier and higher the bass is at those parts to fill out the space.
One of my favorite and earliest examples of the reverb effect is the dungeon music from The Legend of Zelda. Check it out at :45.
Technical issues aside, it is an unusual and brilliant piece; the melody is in the bass, it's seven measures long with an extra beat in the last measure, and there are some unusual note choices in a few places. Pardon this transcription - I believe I did it in high school, but as far as I can tell it's accurate:
The arpeggios keep it from sounding too thin, and the reverb effect is perfect for a dungeon. The curious part is that it does not appear to have been arranged as I wrote it above with a doubled track for reverb. Instead, the alternating 16th notes are on different tracks, creating an echo sound by overlapping. This is done so that the "warning" beep can occur on the second channel when Link's health is down to one heart or less. In that case the 16th notes turn to 8th notes, as can be heard in the clip above from 1:37-1:54. My transcription:
The same effect can be heard in the clip at 8:32, on the overworld theme. The piece is in three parts: bass, melody and a countermelody. When the beeping starts the countermelody will drop out. The other two parts work fine without the inner voice, and it has the added benefit of not sounding overwhelmingly cluttered. The alarm sound gets your attention but isn't too jarring because the dropped part makes room for it.
There is a long list of ways that NES composer used the tools available to them, from using volume adjustments to create an echo effect on one track to reinforcing the drum parts with the bass track. My point in all this is to illustrate the way composers benefitted from their limitations. To artists struggling to create, I would recommend taking inspiration from the early video game designers who created long-lasting memories for millions of people with a fraction of the tools we have available today. To a painter, maybe limit the number colors you work with, just to get the juices flowing. For someone working in design, maybe start with a couple pencils. For a recording engineer, maybe you don't need 200 reverb plugins. Less is usually more. Creativity requires space and boundaries, and if they aren't provided for you sometimes you have to define your own parameters.
Since watching the new X-Men movie I have been on a bit of a kick lately, going back and watching the original films. While watching X-Men First Class last night, I was particularly enjoying Magneto's theme:
There is very little to the theme, melodically speaking. It goes to show how powerful harmony can be when two chords can provide so much energy and drama. I wonder if the composer (Henry Jackman) started out with the intention to add a melody over the chords, but then decided it was strong enough without. The closest thing to a melody is in the strings, seen here:
It's really more of an ostinato than a melody. What really interests me is the chord progression, as it instantly reminded me of my post on The Imperial March theme. In the post, I mentioned how movie scores often use minor chords moving to other minor chords in different keys as a way to create a mysterious, ominous sound...perfect for Magneto.
Darth Vader's theme also goes back and forth between two minor chords a third apart - Gm and Ebm - which I discuss exhaustively in the original post. Jackman's score slows them down and really milks the flow between the chords. The cool thing about these two chords is how well they flow back and forth. Each note voice-leads smoothly:
The theme uses this flow in the ostinato and in the harmonies throughout. Jackman, surprisingly, seems to avoid using the common note, Eb, to bridge the two chords. Instead, if he carries a note over the bar line it is to add some awesome crunchiness. The B on the Ab chord becomes a Major 7 over the C, or a D carries from a sharp 11 on the Ab chord to a 9 on the C.
For whatever reason, there must be something about two minor chords a Major third apart that just screams "conflicted super villain with a tortured, sympathetic back story." And that is what Magneto and Darth Vader have in common.
Some chords are so distinct - either in their timbre, instrumentation, or originality - that they are immediately evocative of a song, movie, or TV show. Here are some of my favorites, many of which I believe you will find familiar:
1. Minor Major 9 - This is a minor chord with a Major 7 and a Major 9, seen here:
Why You Know It - I call this the "James Bond" chord as it has a distinct ominous spy movie quality to it. You can hear it at the very end of this clip from Dr. No (1:39):
Since the first Bond movie, lazy composers have used this single chord for an easy scene transition.
2. D9 Chord- this is a dominant 7 chord with a natural 9 on top. I call it the "I Feel Good Chord" because my first guitar teacher taught me to play the James Brown song with this exact voicing:
How You Know It - 90s kids can relate; this is the chord played on guitar, combined with a whammy-bar bend, when Clarissa's friend Sam puts his stepladder up to the window in the Nickelodeon show Clarissa Explains It All (it's in the first 10 seconds):
3. The Augurs of Spring Chord - From Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, it's one of those "how the heck did he ever dream up that combination of notes?" chords:
This is a famous chord, well known to music students. It is a classic polychord, with E (or F-flat) on bottom and Eb7 on top.
Why You Know It - I'd like to think that people know The Rite of Spring from itself, but failing that the next-best thing is from Disney's Fantasia! Check out the chord at 3:54:
4. E7(#9) - Sharp 9 chords are unique in that they are not really major or minor, they are kind of both, having both a natural and a flatted third. This one has both G and G# (or F## if you want to be nitpicky):
Why You Know It - Most young guitarists learn this chord from Jimi Hendrix's Purple Haze, which uses this as its primary tonic chord. Hear it start around 00:23:
5. Dm7(add4)/G Chord- There are a lot of different names you could call this chord, but that would be missing the point. This is one of those chords where it is not the notes, but the exact instrumentation and arrangement of those notes that makes it so distinct:
It is the unique tuning and slight out-of-tunedness of the 12 string that makes this chord so memorable.
How You Know It - This is the opening chord to Hard Day's Night.
Besides being cleverly arranged, it is also a bit unusual to open a major key pop song with a minor v7 chord. Now it is impossible to think of it any other way. Can you imagine Hard Day's Night starting with a regular dominant 7 chord? Quelle horreur!
6. C Phrygian Chord- Now we finish with my favorite. This chord is the final crunchy climax of "Mars" from Gustav Holst's The Planets. Skip to 6:55 to bask in its glory:
Why You Know It - John Williams almost exactly borrowed this chord in Star Wars. It is no secret that Williams' score is heavily inspired by The Planets. In this case he uses almost exactly the same notes and rhythms. Check it out at 1:41:
I looked at the original scores to both and condensed the notes of every instrument to the grand staff for easy comparison:
At a glance they don't look too similar, but in practice they sound nearly identical. The first has the notes C, G, Ab, Db, and the second has the same plus an F. I suppose you could call it a Db(#4)/C, but I don't think that label really shows its purpose. In this case I prefer to describe how the chord sounds and feels. It is like a modified Neapolitan chord over the pedal tonic, crunchingly begging to resolve to a clean I chord. That phrygian sound is key, and sometimes the mode is the best way to describe a chord; if someone gave me a lead sheet with a "C Phrygian" chord on it, I would probably voice it similarly.
There are some differences; Holst's chord does not include any woodwinds, so it is lower and brassier. Williams opens it up and adds the F. In practice, however - because most of what you hear is the brass, tympani, rough strings, and the mix of straight punchy rhythms and triplets - both sound nearly identical.
I'm sure its been mimicked repeatedly since. Check out 1:44 in this clip from Rocky III as Rocky is getting pounded by Clubber Lang:
Variations on the chord can be heard throughout the fight. I can't blame Bill Conti or John Williams for wanting to use it. Sometimes a particular voicing or instrumentation just has a magic to it. Something about that orchestral chord just says "WAR!" It really speaks to the art of music that you can't just have a formula to use a particular collection of notes to evoke a certain emotional response. The context, instrumentation, voicing are all part of the puzzle. In practice the art of the chord is much more abstract, interesting and beautiful than a dry theory book might lead you to believe.
Now that the Frozen hype is starting to abate (it is, right?) I thought I'd take a look at the ubiquitous hit song and see what makes it interesting. I recently played the piece for a middle school chorus, and was able to dissect it a bit. No matter how tired you are of this song, I promise there is some interesting musical nerdery to be had!
There is no mystery as to why the song is popular: it is featured in a hit movie, is paired with a beautifully animated sequence, and has a super catchy powerful chest-voice chorus sung by Idina Menzel. The chorus follows the never-fail I-V-vi-IV chord progression, which you might remember from Cryin' and Hide and Seek. I swear you could put those four chords in any order, any key, and you are halfway to having a hit song.
While the chords might not be especially inspired, there is a lot to chew on, musically. Here are my favorite parts:
1. The Band Is Excellent - It is easy these days (and cost-effective) to synthesize all your parts and quantize them to a tight click track. Upon listening with good headphones it is clear that this song has a core rhythm section of studio musicians - bass, drums, piano. I would love to hear a stripped down version with just those parts and the vocals! I appreciate how ad-hoc their parts are, especially the bass and piano. It really breathes life into the piece. The orchestration is excellent as well. There really is no substitute for live musicians.
2. The Second Verse Makes No Sense - Musically, that is. It might seem obvious now that everyone knows the song cold, but the first time I heard the second verse I had no idea what was happening. When the strings come in at 1:28 it sounds like the beginning of a I-V-vi-IV, but then she starts singing two measures in, on the Fm chord. So I figured that was the start of the verse, just like in the first verse - very clever. It appears that way at first - Fm, Db, Eb, Bbm, but then the next four chords (Fm, Eb, Bbsus, Bb) are different from the first verse, for no apparent reason. It's very unusual, but one of those things that gives a song character!
3. It Has A Perfect Arch - Writing a good story arch, in music or otherwise, is no big mystery. Still, it is impressive how well it is done in this song, from the tentative beginning, as she builds confidence in the second verse, through the brooding bridge to the explosive last chorus and the ominous last IV chord - so well done.
4. It Sounds Icy - This is a little more subtle, but the use of bright percussion instruments and open fourth and fifth intervals gives the song a distinctly cold and icy sound/feel.
5. The Bridge - The middle of the song is where it really gets interesting. It starts on a long pedal Db (IV) but the mode is brilliantly ambiguous. See the first lick in the strings:
I love the way it drifts between major and minor thirds and sevens. Then in the next measure the percussion/piano/woodwinds take over the lick, but this time twice as fast, so it fits twice in the two measures. Makes sense, right?
Note the mix of C-flats, C-naturals, F-flats and F-naturals. The same thing happens when she sings; the melody has major and flatted sevenths in it. The orchestra does as well. This part of the song is clearly meant to reflect the heroine's tumult, and the orchestration does so brilliantly.
Bonus: Dat Bass - I mentioned the rhythm section earlier, but it is worth listening to the song on good speakers or headphones. I love the way the bassist plays the choruses. It's not particularly clever, it just drives hard. The best part of the song might be the perfectly-placed bass gliss at 3:02, right at the climax.
I've heard plenty of people roll their eyes and talk about how tired they are of Let It Go. Maybe I'm speaking from the advantaged perspective of someone with no preadolescent daughters (though my girlfriend's obsession with Frozen would rival any tween), but I always try to find something to like in any music. When I'm burned out on a jazz standard I like to find a recording of the Keith Jarrett Trio playing it. That almost always breathes new life into the song for me. Remember, the song didn't change, you did. There's no benefit in holding a grudge against a song. Just...let it go...
A blog post comparing the vocal ranges of famous pop singers has been making the social media rounds, and I feel obliged to dig in and explain its shortcomings. The problem with articles like this is that, to an audience with little musical training, it can lead to news feeds like this:
Any collection of data or study really needs some context when presented for public consumption. And, to be fair, the source post is a little more nuanced in its discussion. I'd like to think that they would have fact checked it further had they known it would go viral. Here, in order, are my five major beefs with this one:
1. Range Means Nothing
This should be self-evident, but there is absolutely no reason why a large range should equate to great singing, and yet nearly every post on the Facebook feed made that ridiculous logical leap. Singing tastes are, of course, completely subjective. In practice, Otis Redding might make me feel more with a few mid-range notes than 1,000 virtuosic singers.
2. What Is A Note?
I took a little time to listen to some of the samples given and found them to be incredibly dubious. Can Axl Rose really sing an F1? The recording sounded like it had some rumblings in the backgrounds, but I heard nothing resembling a well-formed note. The same goes for David Bowie's supposed low G. Any supposedly sung note much below C2 should be met with great skepticism. Axl's very high Bb also sounded more like a harmonic squeak than anything he might be able to reliably reproduce in a melodic way. Prince's high notes are much more fully formed, but not particularly pleasant to listen to. For any list like this to be remotely informational there needs to be a stronger definition of what it means to produce a tone.
3. It Is Skewed Toward Male Singers Who Use Their Falsetto
Some men are capable of very squeaky high notes, well into soprano range, if their music calls for it. If comparisons were made on a chest-voice-only basis, AC/DC's Brian Johnson would have a strong showing as he belts out high F#s and Gs in Back in Black. Singers like Johnny Cash and Leonard Cohen have actual shockingly low voices, but neither would be likely to sing in their falsetto so the range they use is purposely smaller.
4. It Is Inaccurate
I don't have time to factcheck all of the data, but at a glance I can already find some errors (besides the dubious definitions of what a note is, mentioned above). For one, Mariah gets up to an E7 in Emotions, not a G7. Steven Tyler's high E in Crazy is debatable; it sounds like the guitar is playing the note, but he might be there. It's certainly not anything he would repeat live. Almost every extreme note that I checked out on the list was highly debatable.
5. It Focuses On A Very Small Group Of Singers
If you're looking for the greatest singers (or those with the largest range), well-known pop singers represent a pretty small part of the human species. I once watched Ravi Shankar's cousin fill a concert hall singing a sustained low A2 with no microphone, but he'd never be on this list. If you opened this study up to the rest of the world, I bet the Tuvan Throat Singers would have a pretty strong showing.
A list like this is inherently flawed because it asks the wrong questions. If you wanted to make a case for which popular singers regularly use the largest part of their range in a musical way, I would probably throw out Prince, Mariah, and Bobby McFerrin as top contenders. But that would not be the reason I, or most others enjoy their singing.
When I was young, just getting interested in music, I loved the idea of "the greatest" anything. The more I learned and grew, the more I realized that there is no such thing as the greatest anything. Superlatives are an exciting, simple way to looking at things; but in the real world, especially in the arts - and especially when it comes to singing - real greatness usually lies in connecting with people, not in doing an impressive trick.
