A Player's Guide to Chords and Harmony (3 page)

GETTING STARTED

laying music is one of the most complex human activities. It's partly a matter of athletics, involving physical strength, endurance, and the rapid-fire coordination of muscle, nerve, and tendon. It's partly a matter of pure emotion: Music that doesn't connect with listeners' feelings is of limited value. And yet passion and physical agility by themselves are not enough. To play music well, you also need a thorough working knowledge of a great many basic facts.

This book is not about the athletic part of music. Nor is it primarily about the emotional part, though we'll use emotion-laden terms from time to time when describing sounds. It's about some of the facts musicians need to know. Not all of the things they need to know, to be sure. You won't find any discussion of rhythm, dynamics, acoustics, history, arranging techniques, recording technology, group improvisation, performance skills, or the business side of music. In these pages we'll be concerned exclusively with harmony theory.

Some musicians, even some who are quite accomplished, may be unsure why they would need to know about chords and harmony. Isn't it enough to play well - to translate the dots on the page into accurate finger movements or tear through a hot solo that leaves the crowd gasping? Why plod through such dull stuff?

My answer is this: Trying to play music without knowing harmony theory is like driving a car while wearing a blindfold. If someone sits beside you and tells you when to turn and when to hit the brakes, you may be able to make it to the supermarket and back without trouble - but not only will you be dependent on another person, you'll miss out on a lot of scenery!

In the same way, you can get along for a while without knowing harmony theory. If you're content to play sheet music notated by others (as many classical musicians are), you may be able to play at a fairly high level and get a lot of satisfaction out of music simply by playing the written notes. But ultimately, understanding the harmonic underpinnings of what you're playing will give you a far deeper appreciation of the repertoire. To take a slightly different scenario, if you're into head-banging three-chord rock or one-chord hip-hop, you've probably had the experience of hearing a record and saying to yourself, "How did they do that? Why does that one note get me in the gut? How can I get that feeling into my next tune?" More often than you might expect, the way to find the answer is to develop a better understanding of harmony theory.

Some musicians have a positive aversion to learning theory. They're afraid it will get in the way of the pure, direct feeling of their music. But this doesn't have to be a problem. Yes, when you start adding a knowledge of theory to the things you already know intuitively, you'll have to go through a period of conscious mental effort as you struggle to assimilate it all. Work will be required. But once you've done the work, you'll find that you have a level of freedom and confidence that you lacked before. Your intuition will have a whole bunch of new toys to play with.

Theory should be worn as a loose garment. The way I look at it, the feeling of the music is always the primary thing. When theory starts getting in the way of the feeling, by all means toss the theory overboard without a moment's regret. As Thelonious Monk is supposed to have said, "There are no wrong notes." The point of knowing theory is not to place more restrictions on your music but to open up new possibilities.

Theory, to use a slightly different metaphor, is a road map. It will show you how to get to some interesting places, places you may never have known about before, or may have seen but only from a distance. You might have found your way to the same place eventually just by driving around, taking turns at random. But even after you stumble onto a wonderful view or a cozy little bed-and-breakfast, you may have trouble finding your way back again later if you don't have a map.

This book is your road map through the land of harmony. What sort of trip you take is entirely up to you.

HOW TO STUDY THIS BOOK

In order to provide printed musical examples in this book, I have to make the assumption that you can read standard music notation. If you can't read music, or if you read a little but you're rusty, please turn to Appendix A, "How to Read Music"

I'm also going to assume that you have access to a musical instrument that can play chords. The best way to study the examples in this book - the only way, really - is sitting at a piano; reading about chords is no substitute for hearing them. If you don't have access to a piano that's in reasonable condition and has been tuned within living memory, an electronic keyboard (preferably one that has a decent piano sound) will do as a substitute. If you don't have a keyboard of any kind, you can attempt to play the examples on a guitar, but playing even some fairly standard chord voicings on a guitar (voicing, as explained later in this book, is the process of choosing particular combinations of notes to play together) can pose peculiar problems. If your primary instrument is guitar, I recommend that you find a keyboard instrument on which to study the materials in this book. Picking out one note at a time is okay: You don't need to become a keyboard whiz.

Ultimately, learning the language of harmony is a matter of training your ears - first to identify chords and intervals when you hear them, and then to imagine what they'll sound like before you hear them. Grabbing sophisticated chords and throwing them together at random, without the guidance of your ear, is an amusing game, but it's unlikely to be satisfying for very long. You may find it helpful to study this book with a more knowledgeable friend who can give you some practice in ear-training.

Ask your friend to play intervals on the keyboard (while you're not looking at it), and attempt to identify them by name. That is, don't worry about which notes are in the interval - perhaps E and C#. Just give the name of the interval - in this case, a major 6th. As you get more comfortable identifying intervals, ask your friend to play various types of triads. Again, identifying the root of the triad - as a D major triad, for instance - is not important. Your goal is to be able to hear the difference between major, minor, diminished, and augmented triads. When you've mastered triads, proceed to 7th chords, and so on.

Each chapter ends with a brief quiz on the material covered in the chapter. The answers to the quiz questions are found in Appendix C. If you're using Chords & Harmony in a classroom setting, doubtless your teacher will want to expand on these quizzes.

Most of the information in the rest of Chapter One is quite basic - stuff you probably learned in your first or second year of music lessons. It builds a firm foundation for what follows. I like to be thorough, so I don't want to skip over this material. If you already know what key signatures, accidentals, and enharmonic equivalents are, you're probably ready to jump ahead to Chapter Two.

THE ELEMENTS OF MUSIC

Music consists of sound. Other elements, such as lighting, costumes, dancing, and smoke bombs, are sometimes combined with the sound in a musical perfor mance, but in general we think of the sound part of the performance as being the music, and the other elements as being theatre or multimedia. In another book (Power Tools for Synthesizer Programming) I've discussed the nature of sound in some detail. For the purposes of this book, we're going to take a more basic, pragmatic approach. Musical sound is made up of four aspects or components. All four are present in all music (unlike the dancing and the smoke bombs, which may or may not be part of a given piece), and making music is the process of combining them in various ways. The four components of music are pitch, rhythm, loudness, and tone color.

Together, these components form a type of language. While the language has no words, it does have the ability to express feelings and ideas. Like other languages, it has syntax. That is, there are recognized ways of putting together larger groupings called phrases and sections (the musical equivalent of sentences and paragraphs) out of smaller groupings called notes and chords (the musical equivalent of words). And as with other languages, the syntax of music is somewhat artificial and contains numerous bits that are the result of historical accidents.

The language of music works because it's shared. That is, everyone who listens to any appreciable amount of music in the European/American tradition quickly learns that certain combinations of sound belong together, and are used to say specific types of things. Other combinations are seldom used, and listeners don't find them especially meaningful. Whether they're not used because listeners don't find them meaningful, or whether listeners don't find them meaningful because they're so seldom used, is a chicken-or-egg problem, and I'm not going to try to make an omelette out of it here. Suffice it to say, the purpose of this book is to help you learn to speak one particular dialect or subset of the language of music, the subset that has to do with using pitches.

Before we get into that, though, perhaps we should touch quickly on the other three elements. They're far too important to ignore entirely, but they're not what this book is about.

Tone color is mainly determined by the choice of instruments being used. A trumpet and a violin, for instance, can play the same melody (the same pitches and rhythms, in other words). We can tell which instrument we're hearing because each has its own characteristic tone color. Likewise, a snare drum and a bongo drum - or, for that matter, a trash can lid - can play the same rhythm: We can tell which one we're hearing because their tone colors are different. Some instruments, such as synthesizers, can produce an incredible variety of tone colors, while others have a much more restricted range of available colors.

Loudness is important in various ways. If you start a piece by playing softly and then increase the volume, for instance, your listeners will tend to perceive the increase in volume as an increase in emotional intensity. But all things considered, loudness is pretty simple.

The word "rhythm" refers to the way musical events are positioned in time - whether they're close together or far apart, whether they're spaced evenly or unevenly, and whether they're arranged randomly or in some perceptible pattern. Rhythm is as interesting a subject as tone color, but again, it's not something that will be covered in this book.

Most of what we'll be discussing comes under the heading of pitch. So the very first thing we need to do is figure out just what we mean by "pitch" What is it, and how do we tell the difference between one pitch and another?

PITCH

Musical pitch is closely related to frequency. The two are not identical, but for most purposes we can treat the terms as interchangeable. Whenever you play a musical instrument, you produce vibrations in the air. Most of the time, the vibrations are so close together that you won't perceive them as separate events. Instead, they'll blend together into a more or less continuous stream. When this stream of vibrations reaches your eardrum, you hear a sound. The speed of the vibrations - how frequent they are, in other words - is the frequency of the sound.

Consider a guitar string. When you pluck the string, it wobbles back and forth. In other words, it vibrates. The vibrations pass through the bridge of the instrument into the body if it's an acoustic guitar, or through a pickup, amp, and speakers if it's an electric. Either the body of the guitar or the speaker cones cause the air to vibrate, and the vibrations in the air are what you hear.

If the guitar string is stretched tightly, it will vibrate rapidly. If you turn the tuning peg so that the string is looser, it will vibrate more slowly. If you turn the peg so that the string is very loose indeed, you may even be able to see the string flopping back and forth, but in a normal musical situation it will be moving so rapidly that it will appear to be just a blur.

In general, objects that are smaller and/or more rigid produce more rapid vibrations, while things that are larger and/or looser produce slower vibrations. If you're curious about the effect of size on vibrations, take a peek inside an acoustic piano. The strings at one end of the piano frame are much shorter than the strings at the other end.

If the sound vibrations, whether they're coming from a guitar string or any other vibrating medium, are fast, we say they have a high frequency (that is, a high pitch). When they're slower, we say they have a low frequency (a low pitch).

Beginning guitarists and cellists are sometimes confused by this usage of the words "high" and "low" On a guitar, the high-pitched strings are physically lower (closer to the floor) when the instrument is held in normal playing position. On a cello or acoustic bass, because the strings run vertically, higher notes are played by stopping the strings with the fingers in a physically lower position (again, closer to the floor). It's important to understand that pitch height is a metaphor: It has nothing to do with physical height.

While standing in front of a piano, play a key near the left end (where the strings are long) and a key near the right end (where the strings are short) and listen to the differences in sound. Some of the differences are due to the fact that the high notes of a piano die away more quickly than the low notes, but in any event you should be able to perceive a clear difference in pitch between the two notes.