Timbre or tone color is the unique sound of an instrument. It’s the specific sound of an instrument or piece of music that makes it unique. Imagine a flute playing “Happy Birthday.” Now imagine it being played on a piano. Those two instruments sound very different, even though they’re playing the exact same notes and rhythms. They’re playing the same melody, but they sound different.
It’s the sound of an instrument that makes it sound like that instrument.
Timbre and tone can be described in lots of different ways. Some sounds are shrill or tinny. Some are warm and full. Some are screeching or thin or muddy.
There’s also a difference between hearing a single instrument versus a section of instruments.
If we take a listen to the Schindler’s List theme by John Williams we can hear this difference.
The solo violin sounds much harsher and grittier than a section of violins. That difference is timbre. I know that’s a small difference to be able to hear, but a solo violin has a lot more sound from the bow than a section of violins.
You can hear this with singers as well. A section of multiple singers sounds different than one solo singer. That difference is timbre.
One big reason is that you hear multiple starting points and multiple slightly different pitches. If you have one person playing violin you only hear the sound of that one bow attacking the strings. You only hear one amount of vibrato. If you have sixteen people playing violin you have sixteen different starting points for notes and sixteen different amounts of vibrato. You’re hearing sixteen ever so slightly different pitches. They’ll all sound in tune and be the same note, but on violin there are no frets. That causes there to be these tiny differences in pitch between different players. That creates a completely different sound than just one player.
It’s the same with singers. Singers all have slightly different ways of using vibrato and of attacking notes and transitioning between notes. They can all be on pitch and all be singing the right rhythm, but they’ll be ever so slightly off. All of those tiny little differences create this new sound that can’t be made somewhere else.
This idea is something that producers use to make really big and massive sounding synths.
Porter Robinson does this a lot.
That huge sound halfway through the song is created by having all of these ever so slightly different synths added together. Reason Studios even has a plugin built into it that does this. It’s called Unison.
And Reason isn’t the only DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) to have a plugin that does something like this. It’s a fairly common thing to do specifically because it gives this bigger, fuller, and larger sound than leaving it at just one synth.
That’s an intro to timbre. There’s definitely more to get into, but those are the basics.
Harmony is multiple notes being played together. That’s all it is. Different combinations of notes being played together. If we define it this way then we have many different ways of creating harmony. It doesn’t just have to be triads, or seventh chords. It could be clusters. It could be fourths.
To use a quote from Vincent Persichetti’s book Twentieth -Century Harmony:
“… any tone can sound simultaneously with any other tone or tones …”
I like this definition because it includes everything and well it’s true. Any notes can be played together. They might sound harsh and dissonant, but there’s nothing preventing someone from composing dissonant music.
As an example of harmony we can listen to Eric Whitacre’s Virtual Choir 6: Sing Gently. This has one type of harmony.
This song has 17,572 singers, but that doesn’t mean that each of those singers is singing a different note. I participated in this video and there were only 5 unique parts. It was arranged for soprano, alto, tenor, bass 1, and bass 2. And even then there were doubled notes between those parts.
At most that’s five different notes, but a lot of the time it’s four.
That’s one type of harmony. Another type of harmony can be heard in Jacob Collier’s arrangement of Moon River by Henry Mancini.
Here we have fewer voices, but more notes being sung together. Jacob Collier often uses extended chords that have five or six or even seven different notes all being played together.
This creates a different kind of harmony. The more unique notes you have the more colorful the harmonies become. Think of the notes being vertical. What’s all being sung at the same time is what the harmony is. So it can change pretty quickly if all of those notes are constantly moving.
One thing that makes singing harmony difficult is that you’re singing a part that you’re not hearing. If I’m singing a tenor part in a four-part choir and I’m the only tenor singer, I’m only hearing the soprano, alto, and bass lines. Those are all musical lines that I’m not singing. So I need to be able to concentrate a little more and sing a little more independently than if I were singing the melody or singing in a group.
Hearing the part you’re singing becomes a little more important because I need to be able to hear it purely in my head. I can’t rely on other singers to help me.
In following with our quote from Vincent Persichetti above; some harmonies can be more harsh than those examples. Pieces of music like “Dash” by Jennifer Higdon have harmonies that create a harsher sound.
These harmonies sound harsh often because there are notes that are close together.
Some words we can use to describe the differences in harmonies are consonant and dissonant. Consonant means that the harmonies aren’t very harsh. They’re a little more pleasant. Dissonant means the harmonies are harsher.
The harmonies used in the Eric Whitacre video above are often consonant.
The harmonies used in the Jennifer Higdon video above are often dissonant.
The harmonies used in the Jacob Collier video above are mixed. Some are dissonant and some are consonant.
Often in music there’s a swing between consonance and dissonance. Slowly the music gets more dissonant and creates tension and then that dissonance is resolved to consonance. This is the idea of tension and release, which is a very common idea in all types of music.
Try to figure out if a harmony is consonant or dissonant. It can be tricky at first, but eventually it will get easier until you notice it right away.
Melody is the singable or hummable part of a song. It’s the “tune.” It’s often the most prominent or highest voice or instrument because that’s easiest to hear and pay attention to. It doesn’t need to have words, though it can.
Imagine the song “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star.” Now take away the words. Imagine it being played on piano. Now imagine it being played on violin. Now imagine it being hummed by a singer. That’s the melody. All of those things are the melody. It can be played on any instrument.
It’s the specific grouping of rhythms and notes to make one single line.
Now let’s imagine the “ABC” song. Let’s take away the words. Imagine it being played on piano. Now violin. Now hummed by a singer. Sound familiar to another song you know?
Those two songs “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star” and the “ABC” song share a melody. They have different words, but have the same organization of notes and rhythms. We can do the same thing with “Baa Baa Black Sheep”, because it shares the same melody with those two songs.
Not all music has a melody. Pop music almost always does. Most songs with singers do. But it’s not required for a piece to have a distinct melody. Lots of film music is more about texture than melody. There may be parts of it or pieces of it that are melodic, but it doesn’t have a single distinct melody.
It’s a bit abstract because it’s not about specific instruments or notes or rhythms. It’s the combination of notes and rhythms put together into one single line.
That’s a thing to remember too. It’s one single line. Not two. Not three or four or however many. It’s only one. You can sing a melody. But if it’s multiple notes played at the same time then it’s one melody, that’s two melodies.
Try to pay attention to the melody of the next song you listen to. Can you hear it as it’s own thing? Take it away from the song and see if you can hear just the melody.
Rhythm is notes or beats organized in time. They can be fast or they can be slow. Some beats might be longer than others. Some beats might be slightly stronger or more heavily accented than others.
If we take the song “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star” and imagine clapping the rhythm of that song we can figure out the rhythm of the song. Sing it first. Then clap every time you sing one syllable. That’s the rhythm. It should sound fairly similar to the song. As if you take away the notes and only have how those specific beats are organized. That’s rhythm.
There are also other pieces of rhythm, like tempo. Tempo is speed. How fast or slow a song is. It’s often measured in beats per minute. That’s how metronomes work. They play one sound at a specific speed over and over again.
Rhythm can also be how strong beats and weak beats are organized. Let’s say we look at these two rhythms:
strong – weak – strong – weak
strong – weak – weak – strong
They’re both the same number of beats and have two strong beats and two weak beats, but they sound completely different. That’s because of where those strong beats are. Something as simple as that changes the rhythm of a song drastically.
This can change ever more depending on how many beats you have. What if you had three beats?
strong – weak – weak
That sounds a whole lot more different than the two above it. But this also sounds different than the one above:
strong – weak – strong
Try clapping those rhythms keeping all of the claps even, just changing which claps are accented (louder) and which claps aren’t. You can feel just how much the rhythm changes depending on how many beats there are and where the strong beats and weak beats are.
You can get even crazier by adding odd numbers like 5.
strong – weak – strong – weak – weak
Trying to clap that rhythm can be tricky because it’s not symmetrical. It gets more difficult the faster you do it. Some composers like Igor Stravinsky take this to another level because they use rhythms like the one above, but constantly change it so it rarely repeats.
This is just the beginning of what rhythm is, but it can drastically change the feel of a song. Where the strong beats are. How they’re organized and how many beats there are can change a lot of things about a song.
I ask my students this question every single time I play them a piece of music. I ask them to tell me whether or not they like the piece of music, and why they like it or why they don’t like it. I don’t accept answers like “I love it because it’s the best” or “I hate it because it’s the worst.” And they’ve all gotten used to that. They’ve learned to be able to say specifically what it is that they like or dislike about a piece of music. It doesn’t matter to me whether or not they like it, but they’ve got to be able to articulate why they like it or don’t.
It’s a great thing to do if you don’t normally think about music much. It’ll change how you listen to music. Here are some questions you can ask about the music:
Does the melody skip or is it step-wise?
What does the harmony sound like?
What does the rhythm sound like?
What meter is it in?
What emotion is being conveyed?
What is the form?
What instruments are you hearing?
What songs does it remind you of? Why?
What type of scene in a movie or TV show could it be placed?
Some of these questions might seem simple, while others seem very involved, but they’re all different things to ask about the music.
Can you articulate exactly what emotion you think a song or piece of music is conveying? That’s a fairly surface-level question, but even that question tricks people up sometimes.
What about the instruments? Can you actually hear and pay attention to every instrument in a song? Can you identify what instruments you’re hearing?
Does it remind you of anything? This one is tricky because it could remind you of a song for any reason at all. But once you’ve found something that it reminds you of, try to figure out exactly why? Are there similarities between those two songs? Do they share any aspects of music? Or maybe there’s a memory that it reminds you of?
Once you can start doing that you’ll be much better equipped to listen to music on a deeper level.
But that’s just the beginning.
Can you identify what harmonies are being used? Can you identify what scales are being used? Can you identify any key changes that happen in the music? Can you identify themes or repeated sections?+
Try to think of a piece of music like a film soundtrack. Film soundtracks often have themes for different characters. Those themes aren’t only played when that character is present, but they have musical themes that represent certain ideas in the film. Throughout the film, those themes will come back. You might hear the theme for the main character played when someone is thinking of that main character. You might hear short snippets of that theme at the beginning before they’ve been introduced as the main character.
When you’re listening to any piece of music try to listen for repetition. Is there any repeated musical material? Repeated melodies. Repeated chord progressions. Repeated rhythms. Try to really be aware of those things when they’re repeated and pay attention to how they’re repeated. You’ll learn a lot about a piece of music if you do that. You’ll learn about the form of the piece of music.
Maybe it’s too repetitive and you don’t like that. Maybe you like that it has multiple sections where it repeats the same material.
Try to really figure out what’s going on in a piece of music and see what you like about it and what you don’t like about it.
It’ll help you better understand the music you listen to. It’ll also help you better understand what you like about the music you listen to.
Maybe you really like the sound of a certain instrument, but you’d never realized it because you never noticed that that’s what all the songs you like have in common. Pay attention to that. It’ll add a lot to the act of listening to music and appreciating music.
I personally love virtual choirs. We’ve seen them from lots of different places. We’ve seen them from Eric Whitacre with his Virtual Choir 6: Sing Gently, which I was a part of. We’ve seen them from high schools and elementary schools.
They’ve become a bit of a cliché recently because of COVID-19 and stay at home orders, but I still enjoy them. They’re a great way for students choir members to feel like they’re still part of a community and still with their friends. Even though they’re all recording themselves at home and not hearing the other students, they can feel like they’re a part of a larger community.
If you’re thinking about putting something like that together, and you have the resources, then definitely do it. I’ve made a few with my students and they’ve always enjoyed them. Even the students that didn’t sing enthusiastically enjoyed seeing the finished product. So definitely do it if you have the resources.
If you don’t know how to make them then see my video How to make a virtual choir … in 5 time consuming steps. That has some tips on how to make a virtual choir so definitely check it out. If you’re still confused feel free to send me an email or send me a DM on Twitter or Instagram. I’m happy to help any other teachers out.
I also think there’s something magical about them. It looks like it’s something that’s really hard to edit and put together.
As someone that has put together a number of these I know the process. It’s not magical, but it is incredibly time consuming and tedious. If you can imagine it, it’s not a bunch of different things. It’s a lot of the same thing. It’s a lot of timing videos and adding fade ins, and adding fade outs, and adding EQ and compression.
There’s a lot of that. Lots of the same thing. There’s nothing really fancy about it.
Some people have done some fancy things, that I personally don’t know how to do yet, but still the main idea of it is pretty simple. Get all the videos. Sync them up. Then put them all together. That’s the main idea. Pretty simple, but incredibly tedious.
That’s it for this post. Make sure to sign up for my newsletter. Thanks for reading. Have a good day. Peace.
If you want to be able to make better music and you want to be able to make music like the music you listen to, you need to study it. Learn how it’s made.
How do they program their synths?
How do they mix their material?
What’s the form of the song?
What types of chords are used and what types of chord progressions are used?
What type of rhythms are being used and what’s the meter?
What type of samples are they using and where do they get their samples?
How are they combining sounds?
Try to figure out as much about the music as you can. Even if it’s just from listening. Try to figure out how the music you like is made. It’ll not just give you a deeper appreciation of the music, but it’ll give you a look into the music-making process. You’ll have a greater understanding of music composition, music production, and the whole entire music creation process.
You might want to learn some tools to help you understand music like solfege or music theory. Then you could learn tools like harmonic analysis and how synths can be programmed. All of those things will help with being able to understand music while listening to it. That’s the goal after all. We don’t just want to be able to understand the written version of the music. We want to be able to hear these things. Start from that perspective.
It takes a long time to learn how to do all of those things, but with practice it’s doable. All the music producers and music makers that you listen to once didn’t know how to make music. They had to learn it. You can learn it too.
I played this for my students a while ago. A lot of them liked it. Some of them didn’t.
I really like this song. It reminds me that to making something groove it has to be “imperfect.” There has to be something in it that isn’t quantized and timed absolutely perfectly as if to be timed by a computer. That doesn’t mean that computer-generated music like chiptunes aren’t good music, but that they don’t have the same rhythmic groove and feel as songs that are played by real people.
This idea is something that you learn about at Berklee College of Music in the Film Scoring department. When making mockups (virtual “recordings” of orchestral music) of film cues you often think a lot about this. To get some of the best results you need to start by playing every single part into your computer. Then maybe you adjust the overall “accuracy” of the rhythm by quantizing or adjusting it to be more evenly timed.
But if you quantize everything too much then it becomes robotic and no longer sounds like a realistic orchestral recording. The goal with mockups is to make it sound like a real, in-person, live orchestra performed and recorded it. That orchestra wouldn’t have every single player playing everything at exactly the same time. If you’ve got a violin section of 16 players, you’ll have 16 slightly different starting points for a note. That’s the effect that you want to create when making a mockup. Obviously, that becomes a little difficult when you have one single track that plays a violin section patch. But you get the idea.
It also reminds me a bit of the song “Didn’t It Rain” by Sister Rosetta Tharpe which I have a blog post about.
There’s a call and response in this song, just like “Didn’t It Rain”. It’s not the exact same type of call and response, but at the beginning of the song, Daniel Caesar and Jacob Collier are alternating what they’re singing.
Something I really like in the song is the contrast between the two voices. They already have contrast naturally because they both sing in two different styles. Jacob Collier’s voice is very round and warm and soft. Daniel Caesar’s voice is a little harsher. This contrast is amplified because Daniel Caesar is singing in a low register by himself. And when Jacob Collier sings he is in a high register and has multiple layers of voices combined. This increases that contrast and I think it’s a nice element to add to the song.
When Jacob Collier leads the verses this contrast is still present. Jacob Collier is singing in a high register and Daniel Caesar is singing in a low register. They both have multiple layers of voices, but one is singing words and the other is singing fewer words, often only being vocables like “oh” or “ay.”
This contrast is even present in the music video.
Jacob Coller has all of these different and eccentric costumes and costume changes while Daniel Caesar stays in gray sweats the entire time. It makes sense because Daniel Caesar’s voice in the song stays relatively the same. It doesn’t change as much as Jacob Collier’s voice does.
I also like that at the beginning there’s this short riff that’s played repeatedly throughout. It’s a fourths based riff and it’s used kind of like a transition riff to go from one section to another. I like having that short one bar transition there. I think it adds some continuity and structure to a song that has a lot of chaotic and different bits to it.
That’s it for this post. I hope you enjoyed reading it. Make sure to sign up for my newsletter and thanks for reading.
I love Esperanza Spalding’s music. I think she’s an amazing singer and composer and bass player.
This time let’s try to look at this song through four different ideas or aspects of music. I’m a fan of these four because they can be used almost universally for all types of music. They’re also the main focus of Aaron Copland’s book What to Listen for in Music, which I highly recommend.
Rhythm
It sounds like it’s mostly in 4/4, but has a lot of syncopation and often has instruments accenting the upbeats. This gives it a funkier sound and makes it a little harder to follow because it’s not super symmetrical.
There’s also a contrast often between the drums and the other instruments. The guitars and the bass often change chords on the upbeats, but the drums don’t always accent those beats.
Melody
This song has a pretty clear melody because Esperanza Spalding is singing the melody most of the time. It jumps around a lot especially in the chorus, but it sounds like she’s singing repeated notes, but jumping around.
At one point she’ll be singing a certain group of three or four notes, then she’ll jump up and sing a different group of three or four notes.
Harmony
Right at the beginning of the song, there’s a nice moment when you first hear the words “unconditional love” where all of these harmony parts are added that haven’t been introduced before. It’s a really nice way of opening up the song that kind of catches you by surprise.
It doesn’t happen every time you hear those words, but it does repeat later on in the song on those same words “unconditional love.”
There’s a lot of chromaticism in this song and a lot of chords with 7ths and tensions. Lots of jazz chords and some of the changes happen pretty quickly.
Honestly, I’m not sure what type of chord it is, but it sounds like one type of chord is being used over and over in the verse. I think it’s a Maj7#11, though I’m not entirely sure.
Timbre
We’ve got a bunch of instruments being used here. There’s bass, guitar, some type of synth, drums, and voices. But the voices have different timbres depending on how they’re used. The harmony voices are a little warmer and softer sounding. The main vocal is a little harsher and clearer.
I like the tone of the guitar. It’s got a little bit of distortion on it, but it’s not too much distortion where the notes become unclear. There’s also a bunch of reverb which sounds super cool. It’s got a softer attack and it sounds like the guitar player is playing with their fingers or has the tone knob on their guitar turned all the way down.
Each different instrument can be heard really clearly which is nice. There’s sometimes a lot going on with each instrument playing different rhythms and different notes, but each instrument can still be heard clearly.
I also like the texture. The bass, guitar, and often drums accent the same chord changes and rhythms, and those beats are often upbeats, but the constant hi-hat in the drums keeps everything together. Without that constant hi-hat I don’t think it’d sound as fast-paced. It probably also would sound rhythmically a lot weirder because there isn’t that other thing keeping everything together.
That’s all I’ve got for this song. Thanks for reading.
Confidence when performing on an instrument can be difficult, but I like to think of it as a skill. The more you practice performing music in front of people, the more confident you’ll be when performing music in front of people.
A few years ago I started working as the music director at a local youth theatre program. At first it was nerve wracking. Every time I showed up for work I was nervous to play piano. And it wasn’t because I was new to the instrument. I’d been playing piano for somewhere around 8 or 9 years at this point. And it wasn’t that I was bad at piano. The first musicals I directed and played were Grease and Alice in Wonderland. Not easy musicals to play. But I was still nervous. It was a new job. It was new people and I was terrified of playing in front of anyone.
What helped?
Playing. Continuing to play for that program and continuing to regularly play piano in front of people helped me feel more comfortable performing in front of people.
So keep playing. Find an audience to play for. Regularly play for that audience and you’ll get better and more confident while performing. It’s a skill.
There’s a quote from Carrie Fisher that goes, “Stay afraid, but do it anyway. What’s important is the action. You don’t have to wait to be confident. Just do it and eventually the confidence will follow.” As far as I’ve seen that’s true.
You’ll learn how to be confident by doing it more and more.