Texture is one of the basic elements of music. When you describe the texture of a piece of music, you are describing how much is going on in the music at any given moment. For example, the texture of the music might be thick or thin, or it may have many or few layers. It might be made up of rhythm only, or of a melody line with chordal accompaniment, or many interweaving melodies. Below you will find some of Continue

In Western music, there are twelve pitches within each octave. (The thirteenth note starts the next octave.) But in a tonal piece of music only seven of these notes, the seven notes of a major or minor scale, are used often. In a pentatonic scale, only five of the possible pitches within an octave are used. (So the scale will repeat starting at the sixth tone.) The most familiar pentatonic scales are used in much of the music of eastern Continue

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A chord progression is popularly considered a series of chords played in some temporal order. Chords often relate to each other in some phenomenological, tonally-coherent way—though this may not always be the case, especially when discussing more complex tonal music after 1840. Chord progressions are central to most modern European-influenced music. Generally speaking, a chord progression will invariably share some notes (assuming equal temperament), which provides linear (voice leading) continuity to the passage. In the common practice period, chord progressions Continue

Seventh chords may be thought of as the next natural step in composing tertian chords after triads. Seventh chords are constructed by adding a fourth note to a triad, at the interval of a third above the fifth of the chord. This creates the interval of a seventh above the root of the chord. There are various types of seventh chords depending on the quality of the original chord and the quality of the seventh added.Five common types of seventh Continue

A suspended chord, or “sus chord”, is a chord in which the third has been displaced by either of its dissonant neighbouring notes, forming intervals of a major second or (more commonly), a perfect fourth with the root. This results in two distinct chord types: the suspended second (sus2) and the suspended fourth (sus4). The chords, Csus2 and C sus4 consist of the notes C D G and C F G, respectively. Extended versions are also possible, such as the Continue

Parallel harmony is harmony that generally follows the melody, going up when the melody goes up and down when the melody goes down. Because parallel harmonies are not independent of the melody, they do not follow the rules of well-written counterpoint and are generally not considered to be as interesting as independent harmony parts. However, parallel harmonies are easier to play for many instruments (keyboard instruments, guitar, dobro guitar, violin, and cello, to name just a few). Parallel harmonies are Continue

Picturing a circle of fifths can help you identify key signatures, find related keys, and remember the order of sharps and flats in key signatures. The circle of fifths is a way to arrange keys to show how closely they are related to each other. The major key for each key signature is shown as a capital letter; the minor key as a small letter. In theory, one could continue around the circle adding flats or sharps (so that B Continue