I’ve been learning to play “The Other Father’s Song” from the movie Coraline. It’s got some new things that I haven’t ever played before, but the chord progression is something I’ve played in a number of different keys. Not the exact chord progression, but I’ve played I vi IV and ii V I and IV V vi and all of the different combinations of chords in that song.
I’ve also played arpeggios in my right hand, and the accompaniment pattern of the chords.
What this all means is that even though it’s a new song for me to play, the patterns aren’t all new.
Many of the patterns are familiar.
And the more music you learn the more patterns become familiar.
The more music you learn, the more patterns you know.
This is something my high school guitar teacher told me when I was first learning how to improvise. I was always so impressed by people who could easily improvise and come up with melodies on the spot.
That was a number of years ago, and now I really understand what he meant.
When you’re watching someone improvise, and they’re playing really well, you’re just seeing all the things they’ve practiced.
They might be putting those things together in new ways, but each separate piece is something they’ve practiced before.
Each articulation and chord voicing and lick is something that they’ve practiced before. Maybe they’re putting two licks together that they haven’t put together before, but they’ve practiced those licks separately before.
This mentality helped me in high school because it made me realize how much preparation and practicing and getting used to improvising helps. Improvising solos is how you practice improvising solos. If you improvise a lot, eventually you’ll get better at it and it’ll be easier to do.
It’s also how I improvise.
I don’t make up completely new ideas right on the spot. I’m almost always playing some combination of things that I’ve practice before. And even if it is a fairly new idea, the finger patterns, rhythms, or some other part of what I’m playing isn’t new.
As tired as the analogy of language and music is, it’s very similar to speaking.
Every time you speak you’re putting together words into a sentence to say something that you may or may not have said before. Some sentences you’ve definitely said before, but sometimes you might be putting together a long sentence that you’ve never said before. Or at least you’ve never said that specific order of words before. But you’ve likely said some combination of those words. Maybe pairs of words you’ve put together before. Maybe you’ve put together groups of three of those words, but not that exact combination of words.
Improvising is similar to that.
And eventually after doing it for a long time you have such a large vocabulary of words and phrases and sentences that you’ve both heard and played that you don’t have to think much about how to say what you want to say.
Or you don’t have to think much about how to play what you want to play.
When learning an instrument or how to compose music, there’s often a lot of things to learn and it can be overwhelming at first. But if you think of it as building lots of habits, then it can be less overwhelming.
Separate all of the different things that you want to learn into chunks and practice one thing at a time.
Build each habit separately.
Then build habits on top of that.
Then once you’ve built one habit, add another. And another. And another.
Eventually the things that you worked on at the beginning will be second nature. The things that gave you trouble when you started will be incredibly simple.
They’ll be something you do natural … out of habit.
This might be obvious, but chords are just groups of notes.
Now we have names for a lot of those groups of notes, especially groups of notes that are often put together and certain ways to change those groups of notes, but they’re still just groups of notes.
Those groups of notes can be whatever you want them to be.
In the words of Vincent Persichetti, “Any tone can succeed any other tone, any tone can sound simultaneously with any other tone or tones, and any group of tones can be followed by any other group of tones, just as any degree of tension or nuance can occur in any medium under any kind of stress or duration.”
Try out different groups of notes and see which ones you like and which ones you don’t like. You might enjoy some that you don’t know names for. You might enjoy some that there aren’t any names for.
But it can be a great way to expand your musical palette because you’re looking at notes differently than chords and functional harmony and scale degrees and scales. It forces you to think about music as just sound and groups of sounds.
The other day I was helping one of my co-workers learn a song on piano and mainly what I helped them with wasn’t learning the notes or figuring out what fingers to use or how to play the rhythms. I helped them with learning the idioms of the piano.
Piano players often play things in a specific way because of how the instrument is designed. With this also comes the history of piano playing. Playing piano isn’t just about playing the instrument how you want to play it, though that is important. Playing the piano also includes knowing about how the instrument is typically played and how it has been played in the past. Learning the common idioms of the instrument and the common ways that piano players will play something.
An example of this is playing chords. Experienced piano players often play chords in their right hand in inversions. They voice lead the notes in their right hand. This means that the first chord may be in root position, but the notes are kept as close together as possible. The second chord may be in second inversion and the third chord may be in first inversion. In the left hand piano players will often play the bass line. If the bass line is mostly the root note, then they may also play the fifth or an octave in their left hand.
These aren’t rules that need to be followed all of the time, but they are what people commonly play and hear from the instrument of the piano.
These are ways of making music that are specific to the piano and how it is set up.
They don’t have to be followed, but when making music it can be useful to learn how things are commonly done to know whether or not you want to do things that way to.
You might find that some things sound better one way or the other, but in order to know this you need to learn the common ways of doing things.
I’m currently teaching my middle school students how to read music and how to read music for a mallet instrument.
Very few of them can already read music. Most of them can’t.
When learning to read music, the work is figuring out how to do it. The work is going back and forth and trying to figure out what notes are written and how the rhythms are played. That’s the work.
Figuring out how it goes is the work. If it’s given to you and you don’t have to try, there’s no work being done.
But if you sit with it and spend some time figuring out the correct notes and correct rhythms you’ll be much better off next time you need to read music.
The chord progression is bVII | bVI | I in a major key. bVII and bVI are not diatonic to major scales. They’re modal interchange chords from the minor scale.
“Dire, Dire Docks” from the Super Mario 64 soundtrack has a very similar chord progression. It’s in a major key and has both bVII and bVI. It also has a similar descending line cliche in another section of the song.
The chorus for “After All” is IV I I/3 | ii-m | V. These chords also appear in “Dire, Dire Docks.”
These aren’t specifically unique chord progressions, but the first song I heard both of them in was “Dire, Dire Docks”, so that’s the song I associate them with.
The more you listen to music and the more music you listen to the more this will happen. The closer you pay attention and the more detail you hear in will also make this happen more. You’ll start to hear more songs that are similar, even if they’re similar only in a few beats.
When writing music we often get caught up in creating something that will be popular and that will sell and that people will want to listen to.
That can be useful if that’s the only goal you have, but if that’s not the only goal you have then you also want it to communicate something personal.
So you need to ask yourself “does this communicate what I want it to?” Even if it goes against convention or common practices. If that’s the idea you want to communicate then it needs to be written that way.
This isn’t to say that constantly going against the grain and against convention is always useful and good, but if it’s purposeful and the only thing that communicates the correct emotion or feeling is going against convention, then go against convention.