Music Theory

Stack thirds and you get the building blocks of Western harmony — triads, seventh chords, the whole scaffolding of pop, classical, and blues. Stack fourths and something stranger happens. The…

Two chords, built a tritone apart, share the exact same two notes at their core — just redistributed. That structural coincidence is the engine behind the tritone substitution, one of…

Every sentence needs punctuation. So does every phrase of music. A cadence is just the moment where a harmonic idea comes to rest — or refuses to, or pretends to,…

Somewhere in your memory, intact and retrievable, are hundreds of melodies you didn’t try to learn. They arrived through car radios, film credits, waiting rooms, and they stayed — not…

The same seven notes can feel like sunshine or like dread, depending on which one you treat as home. C major and A minor share an identical set of pitches…

There is a note in the Lydian mode that doesn’t belong — or rather, one that belongs somewhere slightly above where you expect it. The raised fourth, that sharpened interval…

There’s a moment in a lot of great pop songs where a chord arrives that shouldn’t quite work — it’s darker than the key suggests, or more ambiguous, or it…

There is a moment, somewhere in the first thirty seconds of Dave Brubeck’s Take Five, when a listener who has never heard odd time before will feel something like a…

There is a moment every guitarist knows — someone picks up an instrument in a music shop, plays the minor pentatonic starting on the fifth fret of the low E…

The question sounds technical, but it’s really an aesthetic one. Key choice shapes how a song feels in your body before a single note has been consciously processed — which…