Snippets of Music Theory
I get a kick out of playing my own tunes.
Some of them are pretty ugly, some are beautiful, some fun, some moany and dreary (dont you feel like that sometimes?)
I especially love playing any music in harmony.
What I'm going to add to these pages is a whole stack of snippets and thoughts on techniques I use, rules of western harmony, some originals and anything else I can think of relevant to sharing music and compostion with y'all.
The Parts
I think of music in terms of rhythm, harmony and melody.
Rhythm is in some sense fundamental. It give music live and energy (or lack of)
Melody (the tune) is what sticks in your head, its usually the most complex of the three with lots of notes moving all over the joint.
Harmony underlies the melody and fills the tune out with other notes that sound good together.
When you can look at a piece of music and isolate the recurring rhythms, melody patterns and harmony flows you can see that it isnt a jumble of zillions of notes on a page. Its actually a few simple ideas bound together in a well recognised framework.
One of my favorite pastimes is taking a fewelements from a piece of classical music and slamming it with a solid bluesy feel.