Audiobus: Use your music apps together.
What is Audiobus? — Audiobus is an award-winning music app for iPhone and iPad which lets you use your other music apps together. Chain effects on your favourite synth, run the output of apps or Audio Units into an app like GarageBand or Loopy, or select a different audio interface output for each app. Route MIDI between apps — drive a synth from a MIDI sequencer, or add an arpeggiator to your MIDI keyboard — or sync with your external MIDI gear. And control your entire setup from a MIDI controller.
Download on the App StoreAudiobus is the app that makes the rest of your setup better.
Comments
@Michael_R_Grant - try Berklee Online through Coursera. I haven't tried the course personally, but others I've taken through them have been quite good.
I've heard some microtonal techno by Jacky Ligon that I liked a lot. A bit of "world music" influence but he also participated on the old tuning list discussions. He did it Bruce Lee style - absorbed what is useful, discard the useless.
Oh there's also Robert Rich - love his music and seems like a super nice and reasonable guy too.
@dwarman I haven't met Charles Lucy so my earlier comment doesn't apply to him. Jacky Ligon sounds like someone I'd like to meet - he was cool (and cool-headed!) on that old list.
There’s no need to understand anything if you don’t need it for what you do. A7#5b9 is just as applicable on a keyboard. Nothing strange about it if you play jazz. “A-seven, sharp-five, flat-nine.” Just one of many common jazz chords. If you only have a chord chart, then notation isn’t going to help. If you want to play substitute chords like this as is common in jazz, you should understand what they are.
True dat.
As far as jazz and pop charts, go:
A7#5b9, A7#11, A7#9 are all A7 (A dominant 7) chords.
So these charts - especially jazz charts - tend to just put "A7" on the chart and let the person providing the chordal accompaniment decide on the specific alterations to the A7 chord. I attended a workshop by a local pro-level pianist. He said that if he saw an A7 would play it as an A7 - without alterations at all - for blues and some gospel. On a jazz gig, he'd start altering the chord and/or adding extensions.
The choice of alterations/extensions tends to be determined by how he plays the chord before the A7 and the chord after it. It's part of voice-leading - you keep the low voice (bass) in the low register, the middle voices in the middle, and the highest in the high register. So the decision on whether to sharp the 5 or the 11 or whatever is doesn't just come out of the blue.
If anybody reading the paragraph gets confused, just try recording a 3 or 4 part sequence (no drums of course) in your favorite sequencer and press play. Now you're hearing harmony and how each note in the harmony is a voice.
Yes, dominant seventh chords extended or altered as described above. It's been a long time since I was handed a chord chart for anything, but I'd assume it hasn't changed much. Jazz is improvisational, so you typically are going to go with the bare bones to be expanded upon. Providing a chord backing, what you choose to play depends on what you're accompanying. You may use these types of chords as merely quick passing or lead-in harmonies to other chords. However, especially in band arrangements, explicit chords are often specified. A jazz musician should be able to play any chord, and there must be a way for the arranger to be specific when needed, but without having to supply the exact voicing of the chord. Hence, the conventions in notation we have.
I don't think there is to much theory behind all the jazzy sounding chords,
it's more like look what I found under the carpet, most of the time the stuff with the un> @lovadamusic said:
It's a 7th chord on A with a 5 and a 9 (#/b to taste)
Most of the jazzy sounding chords are kind of lets play this out of scale note with it to me or let's pitch these two up or down or play the next note with it on the scale or ad parts of the melody into the chord ... that makes weird looking chords if you look at it on a keyboard...
In jazz music, up to the end of the bebop era, the songs were built on chords rather than scales. You put some chords together and a melody on top, and tweak the chords (alterations, extensions) to match the melody however you like. These tweaks may seem arbitrary to someone who is not familiar with jazz (no offense intended) - "let's do this just because we can" -, but they're really not.
There are precedents in classical music. JS Bach composed pieces that were supposed to be in the key of C major, or the key of D minor, etc. but none of them seem to stay in the key For example, the famous Cello Suite #1 Prelude in G Major ends up using all 12 notes of the chromatic scale (when played in today's tuning, not in the historical tuning of his time - whole other subject!). It doesn't sound like a piece in which the composer thought "let's throw in some non-G-major notes cause its cool man!".
The modal jazz era introduced tunes built on scales instead of chords. These tunes would have like 4 measures in a row of D Dorian, F Mixolydian, or whatever scale. You could play any chord you want as long as it's not "out of the scale". When it's your turn to solo you're free to use any pitch you want.
The reason a plain A7 works in a blues is because of something called tension and release. In a blues the dominant chords are not always functioning dominant chords ie heading toward a resolution at the I chord. In a progression where a dominant chord is heading toward it's one you can put more tension on the dominant chord (b9, #5 etc) even when those notes are out of the key because it makes the resolution more satisfying.
Modal I find interesting
But I have to be careful so it doesn't get to random
Still trying
That's the art, that goes beyond the science.
Music theory is just a tool for analysis, and it can get pretty scientific. It's not meant to limit you as a composer/songwriter/improviser - the things that you do when you want to be artistic.
There'll always be a place for a plain, unaltered, unextended A7.
Speaking of sus chords and Steely Dan, here's a video excerpt on how Donald Fagen (and presumably Becker) of Steely Dan transformed a typical blues chord progression into the Peg chord progression:
On a side note, I love how he shakes his right hand, as if he could introduce vibrato. He needs to get a Harpejji or Linnstrument.
Feel like a dumbass reading all this stuff about diminish this and chord pregression that, minor this, hadoken fireball that!! MY TRACKS ARE STILL ON FIRE THOUGH, HA HA HA HA HA!!!
Cool. Thanks for the video. Theory is organizing, categorizing, and coming up with basic principles that explain music that exists, and also so that it can be applied to music being made. It's interesting to hear Fagen talking about the thinking behind the chords. It's magic and inspiration grounded in "scientific" principles.
You're welcome.
Yes, theory can indeed be used to make your own music too, but it's a sensitive topic I tend to avoid, since songwriting can be such a personal endeavor.
I don't know what you mean by sensitive topic. Theory is just information. One can use it or not however they wish.
Indeed, the dim7 is handy bridge between almost any keys because it creates a two-way tension that can resolve outward or inward. If you want to see some esoteric music theory, check my theory of holistic tonality at: http://www.holistictonality.org In a nutshell: All music is really timbre on a different time scale. Thus Different Drummer is a musical structure synthesizer on a slower time scale but if you speed it up it becomes a sound synthesizer, which are one and the same in a relativistic sort of way. For the record, major and minor refer to the size of intervals, not the greatness of the sound.
Interesting. So there’s an overall “width” of the sound, and types of distribution within the sound.
Whenever discussion of theory turns to creation of original music, instead of analysis, people think rules are being imposed on them. Even good friends start getting defensive.
I've found it difficult to convince them that music theory can be a tool for liberation, not imprisonment. Perhaps it's because my communication skills have never been great.
At least that is my experience.
Thanks, I'll check out your theory site.
Agreed. My son is one of those who can listen to music and figure it out by ear. I am not that sort at all, and I find theory helps me in understanding structures and concepts which I can then apply within the "rules" or outside if I choose to do so. Bottom line for me is there are no rules, but theory still helps me make more sense of some of the options that are available. I have to remind myself that along with the theory, listening and feeling are even more important.
Put another way....if I'm trying to come up with a chord progression, I can take the approach of just considering chords I know and run through several by ear until I'm happy, and those who are better than I can do that effortlessly, but if I have some guidelines regarding what is known to work, I can get to those quicker. Still, I might decide to break the rules and use something different if it isn't what I want or sounds too cliche.
I think one has to come to theory; it isn't going to come to them. In my late teens, I became interested. Like with a lot of musicians, it was part of the natural process of development, through private lessons and school. That's what they teach---theory. It was a little startling to see Ted Greene mentioned here. I took lessons from him as a teenager.
Communicating with other musicians usually involves a shared language. It depends where we get our training. I played in garage bands, and we didn't talk theory. It was all by ear. We knew what chords we were playing, but not why the ones we chose made sense on an intellectual level. I don't think you can make good music with just theory, but it's like any art form. We tend to build on what we know. Knowledge can come from just listening to the music, but in many cases, what we're listening to was created by people with training in music theory. So why not know what they know?
One quick question: is there a correlation with “happy” and “positive” and “outgoing” with wider intervals and spans of consecutive or concurrent frequency choices or notes?
Or alternatively, is there a correlation with “moody” and “introverted” and “insular” with narrower intervals, jumps or changes in frequency choices and notes?
It’s just occurred to me that a lot of the people on the outside of music reject the taught regime of music theory, often go toward the idea of quarter notes or microtonality. There are hardly any pop songs in the top 40 using quarter note microtonality, and I’d venture to say, never have been. Is it because it wouldn’t be a ‘popular’ song, if it did? Is there a correlation between people who are insular, introverted with not knowing or working with many other people in their realm of pursuit? You don’t get many bands where everyone is constantly throwing microtonal ideas around and nothing else.
I suspect that the more of a loner a person is the closer together their notes will be. Or maybe that’s just me.
You are getting into the massive topic of consonance and dissonance which is subjective but has its roots in mathematics and the way air and our ears physically vibrate. In classical, the tritone is said to have the most dissonance. You can train yourself to enjoy dissonance and dissonance creates tension that gets resolved by consonance. A lot depends on how you use your intervals in a sequence. Wind Cries Mary creates a pensive, non-happy sound entirely out of major chords because Jimi bluesifies them.
Most speech and sounds are 'microtonal' so we are actually pretty used to it in my opinion.
Music covers all the emotions and then some and can quickly switch between them to create a vibe. People like good vibes so the pop masters create good vibes that are inviting. But most of us love all the other vibes music can put out such as fock off, whatever, get away, danger, I dare you, mystery, darkness, chill, drone, fancy, hallucination, syrup dripping, saws buzzing, etc., etc., but I personally like variety.
Not if you count pop hits that use blues bends and the like on guitars, vocals, sax, etc.
This hit tune uses a sampled melody that includes a quarter tone or two. The riff was sampled from a Moroccan pop song. A lot of music in the Arab-speaking world uses quarter-tones, playing them straight up (no bending required) as well as pitch-bending into them.
No, I haven't heard of wider intervals being associated with happiness and closer intervals with sadness. I don't however, discount the possibility of an individual personally making those associations for himself/herself (and not sharing it with the world except possibly one post on this thread).
I don't know about the theory of wider and narrower intervals, but what's popular appears to be what people are accustomed to hearing. The language of music---speak what sounds like gibberish, and it's not going to make much of a connection, at least not a positive one. Language must be learned. What would have sounded like noise ( or draught disgorged from the bowels of hell
hundreds of years ago is today's most popular music. Western music has been built from the 12-note tempered scale, so as a culture we've been trained to expect it and to understand it. Deviations introduced, like in the blues, are meaningful in the context of our musical language because we recognize the shift in tone and have attached feelings to the sound of it. A hundred years from now, we'll have adopted new twists of language that will have become evocative to ears that understand.
Getting back to basics with intervals and realizing that the ability to recognize them by ear and map them across the key/fret board will be so much more effective than memorizing chord shapes or scales.
I would say both of those things are important. Understanding theory informs my ear. All of it is intertwined together.
There's a free app I've been using for this with good results:
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/mockingbird-lessons-ear-training/id936628514?mt=8