"Correct" Music Analysis.... | Q+A #54

hey everybody welcome to question and answer time I'm your host Adam Neely I'm here answering all of your questions about Basin 2 music in general so let's get started Alice CDE writes dear Adam thank you for explaining all things music here I have a question for you could you please explain the chords in satis Polonia gymnopedie for a music theory newbie I'm trying to learn the piece and having the hardest time remembering the left hand thanks again and all the best all right so we're just gonna take a look at the first couple of chords from the first gymnopedie by erik satie they form what's called a vamp or if you're gonna be super fancy a harmonic oscillation there's not a lot of forward progress in this chord progression there's not a lot of cadential motion the two chords are just kind of they're those chords are G major 7 and D major 7 let's first check out this G major 7 the pinky first grabs the bass note G and then jumps up an octave to grab a B minor triad except you're not gonna hear it as a B minor triad you're gonna hear it within the context of the G that you just played and cure it as a full G major 7 chord this means it's technically yeah you could analyze it as G followed by B minor but that's not how you're hearing it and music theory of music analysis is all about understanding how we hear things and how we feel things and this is important let's just listen to this G major 7 a couple of times pay close attention to what note sounds the most resolved or at peace or at home chances are it's that Logie right this piece the gymnopedie starts on the g major 7 and so we accept that low g when we first hear it as the tonic what's interesting is the subtle perceptual shift that starts to occur once we arrive at the second chord in this fam the D major seven once we start going back and forth between G major 7 and D major 7 that low G doesn't sound quite as resolved as it did before when we first heard it this is because of a couple of reasons one that low D is lower than the G and generally lower things sound more resolved and final and two and honestly way more importantly the major scale and it's harmonizations are going to dictate where we hear tonal centers where we get that sensation of resolution so if we were in fact in G major like our ears initially led us to believe the second chord should be a d7 chord because that's the chord which is diatonic to the key of G major but it's not it is in fact in the piece and D major seven chord so if we look at the chords that we have so far G major 7 and D major seven were in the key of D so we're probably in the key of D here we started on the 4 chord which has sub dominant function in the key of D so there's a little bit of tension there but it didn't sound like there was tension until we got to the D major 7 this pattern is confused slightly because the D major 7 this point of resolution occurs on a weak harmonic pulse just the same way that you can have down beats and up beats you can have strong measures and weak measures it's easier to hear a point of resolution on a strong measure versus a weak measure so in this G major 7 and D major seven vamp there's a fair amount of ambiguity or at least the resolution is fairly weak now because of that if you wanted to you could analyze this in terms of G Lydian so that the one chord the point of resolution is occurring on the strong measure so in this case we have G major seven the one major seven chord and then D major seven the five major seven chord which is diatonic to G Lydian so these are two separate interpretations of the same chord progression my question is which one of these analyses is right which is correct what does it even mean to have a correct musical analysis and this really gets to the core of what music theory is to me you're labeling things based upon how they make you feel so when I analyze a G seven this first chord is a four major seven I'm associating this four major seven with other four major sevens I've heard in music and I know how they make me feel I know that certain particular form of tension that a four major seven gives me and I know how that resolves to a one major seven and I like to hear that but if you're feeling it in a more Lydian sort of way you're gonna hear that first chord G major 7 as being resolved and the second chord that five major seven as having some form of tension what it comes down to is how are you feeling the music how are you hearing the music how are you experiencing the music pain close attention to that is really what analysis is all about now eric sati was not formally trained but he probably paid close attention to the feeling of how G major seven went to D major 7 and he liked that off-kilter feeling he liked that feeling of that odd resolution of a chord that might sound like one way but then once you hear another thing it sounds a different way that's probably what he was cluing in on not the foregoing the one but that feeling that was associated with for going to one when you start learning about music theory it can feel very cold and distant and divorced from your experience so try and relate everything that you're learning back to how you're listening to music in the first place patient mental rates your theory only really applies to mindless pop sheep with no understanding of music and I don't think in 20 to 30 years people will look back and say hey you remember the good old days when the new Taylor Swift and Justin Bieber came out as the first of all the idea that you're heavily influenced by what you're listening to when you're 14 years old is not my idea I cited several different sources from several different disciplines data analysis in neuroscience that suggests this it's not my idea I didn't come up with it I'm just reporting that but more importantly and you can quote me on this yes I guarantee you that people 20 or 30 years from now will look back fondly on Taylor Swift and Justin Bieber just the same way that now people look back on between music of 20 or 30 years ago like for example NSYNC and the Backstreet Boys [Music] again you can quote me on that check back in a few years the Bradley Clark rates been watching your videos and fascinated by the human hearing spectrum and all the research you've done into it I'm asking if you know if tinnitus the ringing sensation in the inner ear from damage over time is caused by some frequency that we can't actually hear but vibrates the drum in such a way to cause the effect or is it a damage to the nerve / hair cells in our ear that causes this but from my understanding tinnitus is a neurological symptom of hearing damage so your brain is simply misinterpreting signals that the ear is sending because there are elements in the inner ear or the outer ear which are damaged now fortunately for me my own tinnitus is really not that bad but for some musicians who have bad tinnitus they try and do this thing which I'm going to call tinnitus relative pitch which is if you can identify the pitch at which your ears are ringing let's say my ears are ringing like an f-sharp or something like that you can identify other notes in relationship to that f-sharp other chords in relationship to that up sharp it's like always having a tuning fork next year ear the idea here is by having this reference you can at least approximate the benefits of perfect pitch being able to hear the world around you exactly as it is unfortunately the people that I know who have tried this have reported mixed results part of the reason is because this note right here can actually change day to day some days it might be enough sharp some days it might be a G sharp also generally speaking the tinnitus is in the upper extremes of the human hearing spectrum it can be hard to relate the pitch content of that to any notes that you might hear basically people are just trying to make the best out of a bad situation and tinnitus unfortunately can be quite quite bad Disney jazz for rights gb gigs what the hell is that GB gigs are general business gigs I also heard them call function gigs they're like weddings and corporate functions things that are a little bit higher paid and a little bit more polished than cover band gigs that you would play in a bar these gigs can pay extraordinarily well I know in New York some of the elite bands get paid $1,000 a gig and that's $1,000 per band member so musicians will naturally play these sorts of things if they want to make a living playing music and I used to do this sort of thing all the time a lot of the original gig vlogs to my channel were me playing weddings since kind of backed away from that sort of thing in the past year or so but it's a good way of making a living as a working musician Alex vs. - writes is someone editing your videos are you doing it yourself anyway whoever does it does a pretty good job yeah I edit my own videos I enjoy the process though because for me when I'm in Final Cut Pro in this instance is kind of like being in a digital audio workstation I really like to think of editing as a sort of musical process there's a cadence to it there's a flow to it that's very similar to the sort of critical listening that I employ whenever I'm editing something in a digital audio workstation I'm completely untrained in video editing but I use the same skills and intuitions that I have as a musical producer and composer and apply them to this whole YouTube editing thing the better you heart making connections between different things in your life the more equipped you'll be for anything that comes your way Leonardo NCS writes yeah Adam do you think about the names of the notes while playing them on the bass for me I find it more natural to think in shapes and positions but some people say it's better to name the notes in your head so that you don't get lost when I tried to do that my plan gets weird and stuck do you think that's something that I should work on or just another way to think music thanks no nobody is thinking about letter names as they're playing think about it this way if you're reading something off of a page are you thinking about each individual letter as you're reading it or even thinking about each individual word no probably not you're thinking a little bit bigger picture but if you needed to you could go in and say ah hi yes that's a D that's a C etc etc it's the same thing with music you're not thinking about the notes in real time rather the notes are a tool for giving context to certain shapes and being able to orient yourself in situations which demand it for example if I call the tune alright the chords are f-sharp minor D a e 1 2 ready and you better know where the notes are on the fingerboard in this instance otherwise you're not playing anything the shapes are given meaning when you choose to think about the notes in situations which demand it otherwise ideally we shouldn't be thinking at all when we're playing Raymond Visconti writes hey Adam I am new to music and I was wondering how you learn songs so fast I see your gig vlogs and you learn songs so fast it's insane to a newbie like me I know that with practice it will come but what exactly should I practice some more songs that you learn the faster you will learn new songs because generally speaking most popular songs and most popular styles follow more or less the same rubra if you get used to following the general patterns behind songs the faster you'll be able to learn new songs it comes down also to cultivating a strong musical memory musical memory comes down to your ability to recognize patterns in the music so you're not necessarily memorizing each individual note you're memorizing the underlying structure of everything it also helps that everything is written down or I write everything down because that way everything is there in black and white in case I do forget what comes next but the most important thing in all of this honestly is just to be learning a lot of songs and to be doing that regularly donkey bong writes oh well I guess I'm going to be rocking out to Skrillex when I'm rocking in my nursing home chair get used to it future generations grandpa low Sims and Skrillex [Music] please

Channel: Adam Neely

Views: 195,469

Rating: 4.9748425 out of 5

Keywords: adam, neely, jazz, fusion, bass, guitar, lesson, theory, music

Id: kHfgmyTSsk8

Length: 10min 54sec (654 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 05 2018