This guy gets it. Severely long two-part nerd item alert— the following post is an embarrassing mess that will be perhaps useful/entertaining for music teachers and others who think about this stuff all day every […]
Category: music theory
What time signature it’s “really” in
A little sidebar on the subject of time signatures, everyone’s favorite topic to be confused about. We’re resolving a lot of little outstanding issues here lately. Time signatures (I prefer the word meter) are a little […]
A player’s analysis of drumming
For a long time I’ve been thinking about developing a system of analysis for drumming, like the harmonic analysis you do in college theory courses, deciding the function of every note in a composition. Doing […]
Here is the deal with 6/8 time
I had an interesting interaction on a drumming forum recently— it’s ongoing actually— there was an extremely long and frustrating conversation involving a whole lot of basic misunderstandings about rhythm and meter. A user is […]
Common time
The pedant is a disturbingly-slender, reedy-voiced, scrutinous man. There’s a lot of confusion about rhythm, making the subject an easy target for low-grade, often barely-informed pedantry. See any internet music forum, or rehearsal of college […]
All about rolls
Some examples. This is more or less the complete practical theory of drum rolls as I know it, as gleaned from about 38 years as a student, player, and teacher in a community of professionals […]
Triplets vs. not-triplets
This is a pretty fine point of theory, but it comes up a lot on this site, so I want to state my thinking about it, so I can link to it every time it […]
Time signature figure-outer
Gah! What? I’m not sure my title is actually grammatically correct- a time signature “figure-outer” sounds like a job description, when what we are dealing with is more of a figurer-outer– a method to help […]
Drumming/jazz glossary roundup
Here I have briefly reviewed a selection of drumming and related glossaries from around the web. Writing definitions requires a special type of mind and writing skill, and is a pretty tedious, thankless task, so […]