Jump to content


Mjazz

Member
  • Posts

    233
  • Joined

  • Last visited

Everything posted by Mjazz

  1. When it comes to keyboards, nothing says Modern Times quite like this audience-facing back panel ... You can explain to those who ask WTF that it's your personal on-stage decontamination and viral containment unit.
  2. OT, but kinda interesting ... The keyboard player in the live performance posted above (the redhead at the keys behind Christoper C) is Kiki Ebsen, She's the daughter of Buddy Ebsen ... who was, for those of us old enough to remember, Jed Clampett in the Beverly Hillbillies, and Barnaby Jones.
  3. Here's the guitar chart that Christopher Cross prepared for publication on his website. He doesn't show the bass player's bass line, just his own guitar part, but it's interesting to see how he conceptualizes the chords.
  4. From their website: Requirements: FULL version of Kontakt 5.5 or higher
  5. [video:youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IqN7lq4NQB0
  6. Thanks, understood. Thinking of it that way is harder for me because it treats each of the four-bar sequences as its own different thing. I hear those sequences as being essentially the same thing, transposed and repeated: subdominant - bVII7 (pivot V7) subdominant - bVII7 (pivot V7/ii) subdominant - bVII7 (home key) then 3 - 6 - 2 - 5 in home key back to the tonic.
  7. ... correct, because: (a) all the melody notes within each four-bar sequence are in those respective keys, (b) the first chord in each four-bar sequence is one of the subdominant chords (either IVma7 or iim7) in the respective key (IVma7 of Db in the first four bars, ii7 of E in the second four bars) (which is why substituting an Ebm9 for Gbma7 works and sounds great in the first bar of the bridge; it's ii7 in Db), and © the second chord in each four-bar sequence is the bVII7 relative to the respective key, functioning *as if* it was going to be a bVII7 backdoor dominant approach to the tonic, but which turns out instead to pivot to function as V7 in the new key in first sequence or V7/ii7 of the new key in the second sequence. You can hear the bVII7 function, as it would've sounded without a pivot, by just ending each four-bar sequence with the tonic of the respective key: first four bars, play Gbma7 ... B7(Cb7) ... Dbma7, End. Second four bars, play F#m7 ... D7 ... Ema7, End. The brilliance is in never hitting any of those tonics, and using a bVII7 -> V7 pivot chord to change keys. Same analysis applies to the third four-bar sequence, in F: Gm7 (ii7) ... Eb7 (bVII7) ... Here, though, the bVII7 doesn't pivot to become V7 of a new key, it just sets up a iii7 - VI7(V7/ii) - ii7 - V7 in F: Am7 - D7 - Gm7 - C7.
  8. For this exact problem, piano elbow, I started doing a physical therapy exercise called the Tyler Twist Protocol. It worked great, eliminating the pain, and I've continued to do it daily over the years. It stretches out the top of the forearm. The exercise is demonstrated in the video on this page. Here are links to PDFs of the underlying research article and the exercise protocol. It requires a simple rubber twist bar, which can be had on Amazon for about 13 bucks. (There are different color versions with different degrees of resistance. I've always used the red.) Alternative products would probably also work. I don't have any stake in this, by the way. It's just something that worked - extremely well - for me. I first heard about it from a New York Times article 10+ years ago. Press articles about it are linked on that page with the video.
  9. [video:youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ecKmcF1_rpY
  10. [video:youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fzVF2pcwtME
  11. Sleeves? Who needs sleeves? Woodstock 1969:
  12. Not an accident. I did it on purpose. Thank you!!!
  13. So unequivocally a #9, not approach tones; hardwired into the harmony there. Yes. You can really hear it when he's playing live on a six-string ... (around 0:28) [video:youtube]
  14. This just popped back into mind ... McCartney actually talked about that particular chord in Michelle, and how it came about, in this 2014 interview at Rollins College. The story starts at 17:01, when the interviewer asks, "Were there some chords in the early songs that were surprises ...?" McCartney's answer takes a couple of minutes. Funny. www.youtube.com/watch?v=N8OY2MKVhpY [video:youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N8OY2MKVhpY
  15. Very interesting, never noticed. It's actually even a little bit more dissonant than that, listening closely. He sings the word "ma" as a slur starting on B-natural (the b9 relative to the Bb7) up to the D-flat (the #9 relative to the Bb7)! (Excerpt here at 35% speed, original pitch)
  16. Great video, thanks for posting. Truly, JC is unreal. I don't know who the other musicians are, but that's Becca Stevens on the right. Great voice, super talented. https://www.beccastevens.com/about [video:youtube] [video:youtube] [video:youtube]
  17. I can't help you, but sure wish I knew the answer. Every USB drive I've tried on my CP4 (even when formatted on the CP4) chokes when I try to record. Usually the most I can get before it fails is a little over a minute, even with plenty more capacity on the drive. I finally gave up.
  18. The combination of this thread and watching a couple of PBS shows about the Apollo program made me wonder, hey, what it you wanted to whip out a keyboard in space? Yup, sure enough ... [video:youtube] Piano in space
  19. Responding to comments above that we can't really know what's going on in konaboy's 4-chord progression (which he then uses in a loop to create his song Dorothy) because we don't have enough context, we don't know what comes next, etc.: Listen to Dorothy, which konaboy linked above. It consists entirely of the Gmaj7-Dmaj7-Fmaj7-Em7 loop, repeated for the entire song until the very end, when he hits a final Dmaj7. But that ending doesn't come across as inevitable. He might just as well have done a fade-out on the loop itself. Or ended on Cmaj7. Or Em9. Etc. Nothing about how we relate to listening to the song, as it unfolds, depends on that eventual ending. That's a fundamental characteristic of many songs built on chord shuttles or loops: There IS no "next". There's the loop, and it repeats. The loop is its own context. The Philip Tagg book I mentioned above, Everyday Tonality II, observes that in songs built on chord loops "the identification of a tonic is not always an easy or necessarily possible task." A chord's position in the loop is by no means conclusive. He gives a series of inquiries that can help identify a tonic: He then illustrates by discussing at length two famous loop tunes, La Bamba and Sweet Home Alabama, and others. But he also asks: So what? Does it really matter? Do we gain anything by trying to fit these structures into euroclassical movement-towards-a-tonic analysis?
  20. Honestly, to me it seems like everybody else tried their best to come up with an answer with what was given to them. Maybe some strongly believe that's the only possible answer with no other strong candidates? Totally possible. I'm sorry you find my answer strange, but that doesn't change the fact that you can take 4 chords and twist them in so many different ways depending on what happened before and what comes next. You can take the same 4 chord and use them to module...or just use them to create color/contrast and stay within the same key. Call it strange, but there's no one right answer to this. Your example is too short. One thing this discussion points up is that a LOT of popular music is constructed using chord shuttles or chord loops. A 2-chord shuttle or a 4-chord loop can be an entire song (as in konaboy's Dorothy), which may or may not resolve at the end (his does); often they just fade out. These shuttles and loops very often have no V-I cadence. There's a very interesting modern harmony book, Philip Tagg's Everyday Tonality II, that addresses this phenomenon at length. What he concludes is that trying to fit this type of music into the Euroclassical theory of directional movement toward a tonic often just doesn't work. (For example, from the Preface: "Explaining something as common and as ostensibly simple as the La Bamba chord loop (as in La Bamba, Guantanamera, Wild Thing, Pata Pata, Twist & Shout etc.) in terms of tonic, subdominant and dominant had for some time struck me as about as productive as using theories of combustion to explain electricity. And yet some music scholars still try to apply Schenkerian notions of harmonic directionality to tonal configurations in which notions like dominant and perfect cadence are at best questionable, if not altogether irrelevant.") His view is that often these shuttles and loops should be viewed as essentially entities unto themselves, not directional movements toward a tonic. The repetition is its own purpose.
×
×
  • Create New...