Ep.17 : Music_Theory_Rebuild

 Music_Theory_Rebuild — Redefining the Foundations of Music Theory

THIS EPISODE IS A FULL SUMMARY OF MY FIRST 16 EPISODES.

In this transformative episode of our music theory podcast, "Music_Theory_Rebuild", we dive deep into rethinking the core principles of music theory. Whether you're a music student, musician, music theorist, or simply a music theory enthusiast, this episode challenges traditional concepts and offers a modern perspective on scales, harmony, rhythm, and tonal structures. We unpack how classical theory intersects with contemporary styles, and explore ways to rebuild your understanding of musical frameworks from the ground up.

Perfect for those studying music composition, jazz theory, or modern arranging, this episode acts as a bridge between academic tradition and real-world application. Discover how historical models like counterpoint, voice leading, and functional harmony can evolve to suit today’s diverse musical landscape.

Packed with actionable insights and deep discussions, “Music_Theory_Rebuild” is your ultimate guide to refreshing your theoretical foundation and pushing your musical boundaries.

If you're searching for podcasts on music theory, how to learn music theory, or modern approaches to music analysis, this is the episode you can't miss.

🎧 Hit play and start your music theory evolution today.

Chapters

• 0:00 Musical Introduction
• 0:40 Episode 17 Introduction
• 1:30 Explanation of the MUSIC THEORY REBUILD
• 3:48 Recall a Note
• 5:18 Recall Melody
• 6:10 Recall Harmony
• 7:07 Recall Chords
• 8:07 Recall Music Theory
• 8:29 Recall Scales
• 10:34 Recall Triads
• 13:19 Recall Extended Harmony
• 15:54 Recall Chord Progressions
• 16:36 Recall Roman Numerals
• 17:03 Recall the I-IV-V Progression
• 18:07 Recall a Key
• 20:17 Recall the Circle Of Fifths
• 21:04 Recall Key Changes, Modulation, and Tonal Center
• 22:49 Recall Arpeggios
• 24:07 Recall Intervals
• 26:51 Outro/Recap

Transcript

UNKNOWN: 0:02

So,

SPEAKER_00: 0:40

Hello out there, fellow music theory lovers and enthusiasts. Welcome back to The Harmonious Blacksmith, a music theory exploration. That opening guitar track you just heard is called Lunar Dreams, and it is an original track that I wrote many years ago. Welcome back to the podcast. I am your host, Kevin Patrick Fleming. Oh yeah, let's get fired up today. Let's have some fun today. Let's learn and let's enjoy. Let's beautify music and music theory makes your life better. Let's go. This is episode 17 of season 2 and this is a very special and unique episode.

UNKNOWN: 1:41

Music

SPEAKER_00: 1:44

That's right, today we are doing what I call a music theory rebuild, which means we are going to rebuild our music theory knowledge from where we started from square one all the way until we got to the previous episode about key changes and modulation. Now, this is an educational podcast, as most of y'all know, and in education you have reviews, you have summaries, you have But why am I calling this a rebuild? I'm calling this a rebuild because music theory is special. Music theory is unique. And there's a reason it's called music theory and not music law. I want you to think about that one and I may discuss it more later. But the term rebuild means that we are going to go back from square one and we're going to essentially put building blocks on top of each other over and over again and rebuild our knowledge of music theory. This will give you a chance to understand what you're strong at, understand what your weaknesses are, and even understand concepts that you may have even missed completely over time. And those are the holes in music theory that can really hold you back from creating the entire fabric that you need in order to have a strong and confident understanding. This directly corresponds with my first 16 episodes. So if you come across something that you're a little weak on, or you don't know much about, you will be able to go back in season one and season two and find a corresponding episode that has that concept. And by the way, welcome to all my new listeners out there. Welcome, welcome. We do appreciate that you're here. One more thing, check out the support the show link in the description of this episode. A small subscription of$3,$5, or$7 a month really can go a long way, even though it doesn't cost you much at all. I do appreciate your support. Let's get into it. So our rebuild of music theory starts with the birth of the note. So what is a note? A note is a sound created by a frequency, which is vibrations per second, that is created by some form of vibration. Instruments have different mechanisms of creating these notes, right? For me, I play a lot of stringed instruments. I play guitar, banjo, mandolin, ukulele, and even some piano, as well as lap steel and pedal steel. That's a lot of strings. But as we know, we can also get that vibration by pushing air through a medium, like woodwinds, like a clarinet or an oboe, or even blowing air through a metal alloy, like a trumpet or a saxophone. And of course, the original instrument before all of those instruments is us, we, humankind, our ability to use muscle groups to push air through our air passages and create frequencies using our ear. Singing, right? That's what I'm describing. So once we invented ways to harness these vibrations and these notes, what was the logical next step? You probably guess it. It is to make more notes, right? To create variety. So that would create very interesting sounds. And this brought us to one of the most important concepts in all of music, which is called melody. Melody is a series of individual notes played one at a time that create thematic or main tune material in any music. Think of melody as being able to stand alone by itself without any other instrument or any backing and you can still recognize it as a song or a tune. Examples include Twinkle Twinkle Little Star and Row Your Boat from childhood melodies that we all hear at some point all the way to epic melodies that span the ages like Ode to Joy from Beethoven's Chorale in his Ninth Symphony or Somewhere Over the Rainbow from The Wizard of Oz. And eventually others of us wanted to play or sing along And then that is the birth of the concept called harmony. Harmony or harmonization is the simultaneous playing or singing of two or more notes. So if a melody is a single note passage, it might sound like this. And then when you add the harmony in, it would sound like this. With harmonization grew amazing possibilities. So as you can imagine, all of a sudden music starts to sprawl out into a new dimension. Not only this horizontal dimension that melody gives, but now we have a vertical dimension where notes are stacked on top of each other. And this led to the next concept that we call chords. A chord is any three or more notes played or sung simultaneously. And I do mean any three or more notes. Generally speaking, we associate chords with sounding really pleasant to our ears because of how we use them in the system, but they don't have to be. A chord could sound like this. This is also a chord. Now, I'm not playing those just to hurt your ears today. I promise you I'm not. I'm just making the point that a chord literally is any three or more notes, whether they are pleasant or not. Okay, so now we have a note, melody, harmony, and chords, some really major and general topics in music theory. But I want to quickly remind you why we study music theory and what it is. Music theory is our ability to organize and analyze sounds in a collective fashion so that we can recognize patterns over time and make music relate to other music so that we can understand how it's being communicated how it's being constructed and because of the nature of the human mind we then devise some structures that help us organize all this kind of stuff and the most important structure that we created in all of music theory is called the scale. A scale is a group of notes that are organized in a linear and stepwise fashion that generally sound pleasant to our ears. And therefore, we end up using them to create all the previous concepts, the melodies, the harmonies, and the chords. And really, if you've been listening to my podcast, you know that scales are the building blocks of every Everything in music theory. Everything. So every time you're practicing some scales on your instrument and you're like, man, this is boring. I want to go play my other super cool stuff. Remember that those are the building blocks of all the cool stuff you ever play. A major scale sounds like this. Minor scale sounds like this. And of course, there are lots of others in between that we're going to get into, but those are the main two in our system that we use, as y'all may already know. And scales do come from definitive patterns that were basically extracted over time. For example, major scale would be whole, whole, half, whole, whole, whole, half, and minor scale would be whole, half, whole, whole, half, whole, whole. And those are universal patterns that go across all major and minor scales. They give us a starting point of organization in our system to continue to be able to create the desired sounds that we want. It gives us a template. Okay, so melody, harmony, scales, and chords. Now we're getting somewhere. These things are all organized together and they all start with the scale pattern. So there's one concept in there that I haven't discussed yet that's very important and it's called... Triads. A triad is a group of three notes that are extracted from the scale pattern using what I call the skipping method in music. And the skipping method means you're taking every other note. So if we go back to our good old friendly C major scale... If I want to create a C chord based on this scale, it would start with the first note, which is the root note. Then we'll skip the second, take the third. Skip the fourth and take the fifth. And when you put those three together, you get a triad. So essentially, people think of it as 1, 3, and 5 initially, but don't forget that there's 2, 4, 6, 3, 5, 7, 4, 6, 1, 5, 7, 2, 6, 1, 3, and 7, 2, 4. And remember, the numbers I'm referring to are just called scale degrees, meaning the order that the notes come in the scale. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8. Right? And back down. So how many triads can we create based on one scale? We can create a triad on every single note in the scale. So therefore there are seven triads for each diatonic scale. Okay, so this is how triads are formed. So what is the difference between a triad and a chord? A triad is a fixed set of three notes and only three notes that are based on that skipping method we described earlier. But chords are in fact based on these triads, but they build on top of them. So since a chord is three or more notes at the same time, technically a triad is a chord, but chords do go beyond. They add a fourth note, a fifth note, a sixth note. They also replace notes in between the skipped notes, doing all kinds of variations so that we can create many different varieties of chords. So the one, three, and five in a C scale would sound like this as a triad. But then I can double and triple them and just make the chord sound a lot bigger. Which obviously goes beyond the initial triad. It just makes a thicker, more lush kind of sound. And I'll do that with one other chord like G. We go G, one, three, five. There's the triad. And I can double and triple those and I get a full chord. So when I talked about how chords can be extended to four, five, and six notes, for example, a four-note chord is called a seventh chord. So that's a G7, for example. It would have the original triad of one, three, and five, but now we're adding the seventh note of the scale. So now we're going one, three, five, and seven. It continues with the skipping method, though. That's important to remember. When you get into extended chords like sevenths, ninths, elevenths, it really is just an extension of the original skipping method for triads. The idea that we're always going every other note in order to create chords. So extended harmony includes 7ths, 9ths, 11ths, and 13ths by stacking extra notes on top of triads. But what about these other type of extended chords? Like, for example, a suspension chord or an add chord. Where do those come from? So let's take a regular old D major chord based on the triad and you just have the one three and five there the d f sharp and a that make up a d major chord but when we talk about these other chords like suspension and add chords really what you're doing is you're replacing and adding notes right a suspension is a very common and important chord would be for example if in d if my triad in d is d f sharp and a from the skipping method What we're doing is we're replacing the third or suspending the chord by putting a fourth instead of a third. So essentially I'm going one, four and five in the chord instead of one, three and five. So if I play the full chord, it sounds like that. And then when I add the suspension and this would be a sus4, which would sound like this. Right? It's still the same bass chord. As you can tell, we're just replacing this third with this fourth. And it gives a little bit more of a tension, an interesting sound that is just a little varied from the original chord. So now if I take a C chord and I was talking about add there and add instead of replacing a note, as you can imagine, we just add a note on top of it. So a C add nine would have one, three and five. And we would just add the ninth note above that root, which is a D to make a C add nine. And okay, okay, I got a little ahead of myself there. Got a little excited and forgot to mention one other concept, which is called chord progressions. A chord progression is a series of chords that center around a tonal center or home base and work together to create the harmonic landscape or background in a music through musical tension and release. And we denote chord progressions using Roman numerals, and there are more common chord progressions that we can study that help us understand patterns over time. And those Roman numerals do correspond to the scale degrees. So if I go through my C major, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, and back to one or eight, each one of those scale degrees corresponds to the Roman numeral that goes with it. So if C is one in scale degrees, it'll also be Roman numeral one in chords, except now it'll be a chord, right?

UNKNOWN: 17:01

Okay.

SPEAKER_00: 17:02

And that brings me to the quintessential chord progression that is used to write music throughout time in our Western system, and that is called the 1-4-5 progression. The 1-4-5 progression includes the 1 chord, the 4 chord, and the 5 chord within any key because it creates the perfect chord progression that outlines music at rest or at home base and It's rise in music tension that creates interest and the return to home base or the resting place. So again, if we're in C and I go, okay, well, C is one, obviously. C, D, E, F is four, and then G is five. So if I just build my chords off of that, I get one. four and five which eventually I can turn it into five seven if you remember from chord progressions and adding musical tension right and we return back to one which gives a sense of relief and that leads us to another very central concept in music theory which is called a key A key, which is also derived from a scale pattern, is a group of notes, melodies, harmonies, triads, chords, and chord progressions that all work together to create the musical landscape that is agreeable and interesting to our ears. So back to C major land we go, and the key really is based off the scale. I need to re-emphasize that. So I take my C major scale... And everything in the key centers around those seven pitches because your melodies will come from there. Your harmonies will come from there. Remember, when we add the skipping method, we're going to get our triads from there. And from our triads, we're able to build our chords and chord progressions. So in the key, since you have seven pitches, you have seven triads to build off of. And they are one is major, two is minor, three is minor, four is major, five is major, six is minor, seven is diminished, and then back to one. A very important part of a key is what we call a tonal center or what I'm calling a home base or root note. So in the case of C major, that's obviously going to be C. C is home base. So that's going to be our resting point within the key and everything else when we pull away from that note is going to add tension. So again, if I play the C major scale... Ah, you hear this rest in the sound there. So I'll go back to the 1-4-5 progression. Resting sound. A little bit of tension coming away. A lot more tension. Even more. And then we return back to the resting point. Do you all remember the all-important invented tool that helps us organize and understand key relationships? It's the circle of fifths, of course. And remember the The circle of fifths is a tool that really just allows us to use really basic math principles to understand how keys are organized, how they're related to each other, how many sharps and flats they include in the key based on the formulas, and what the relative keys or closely related keys are to them as well. Don't underestimate the circle of fifths. That is a very powerful tool. I recommend knowing it down pat if you really want to understand how key relationships work in music. And that brings me directly to our next Rebuild concept, which is called... Key changes and modulation. A key change is when you go from one set of pitches that are agreeable to our ears to another set of pitches that are agreeable to our ears. You can also think of it as shifting from one scale to another or even one tonal center to another because now all of a sudden you're hovering around a different chord or root note. So for example, if I'm in C major, I might modulate to G major Oh, there's that modulate word. So what does that mean? Modulation is the techniques that we use to achieve a key change or to just alter the scale in general. Okay, again, we're back to the key of C major. And that is my tonal center. And remember, our quintessential chord progression is going to be 1, 4, 5, and back to 1. A key change would involve a curveball within there to go to a different key. 1, Now I'm in D major all of a sudden. Now, I did use a modulation technique that we call secondary dominance, if you recall that. I won't go too far into it in this rebuild episode, but I do have a lot in previous episodes on that and key changes in modulation. But now I'm going to go ahead and just grab a couple of fringe concepts that we've talked about in the past. The first one being called arpeggios. An arpeggio is a series of notes that come from breaking up a triad or chord into its individual notes or components. So back to C land we go. I'm going to take a good old fashioned C chord and really the basic arpeggiation that we do all the time on guitar, since that's what I'm playing here. Is that I mean, I just took a C chord and all I did was really randomly dance around the notes within the chord because arpeggios are so cool because you can do them in any order, any rhythm, anything like that. And you really have a chance to be super creative with arpeggios. It's one of my favorite things in all of music is the use of arpeggios. An arpeggio can also be melodic. So instead of just going like this, I could also go like this. And the final fringe topic that I'm going to talk about in this music theory rebuild is called intervals. An interval is the sound that is produced directly because of the distance between two pitches. The two smallest intervals in music are a half step and a whole step, and those are the two we use to create the scales and scale formulas that are used in our system. Recall that a half step on any instrument is from one pitch to the very next pitch up or down. So that's an ascending half step, descending half step, and then a whole step is just twice that. It's from one pitch to two pitches up or two pitches down. And we use those as the smallest building blocks to create scales that in turn create keys. Oh my goodness, we've gone full circle here. Granted, I'm going to do another episode pretty soon on intervals. I'm really excited about that. I do have one episode on intervals and ear training just to get you kicked off if you want to go back and check that out. But I will have a part two version of that very soon. Okay, so that was a lot of information in what I call a So it all goes back to that original note, the invention of harnessing a sound in music, then going on to create more and more of them, and eventually creating a predictable pattern using those whole steps and half-step intervals I just described to create what we call scales, the very quintessential powerful concept that all music is organized within our Western system. So the notes, when they go to the scale, and then you have the scale pattern, and the scale pattern turns into triads using the skipping method and harmonization. Melodies come from those scale patterns. Harmonies come from those scale patterns. Also, the chords come from the triads. Chord progressions come from the chords. And when you put all those together, they get organized within an agreeable sound that we call a key. And it all works together in beautiful harmony that we call music theory. And thank you again, y'all, for sharing this experience with me. I cannot do it without my listeners. Thank you so much, and I really hope you enjoyed this episode. But now it's time for Breakdown. Today's special episode was a music theory rebuild. Taking our very first concept, going all the way through everything we've learned so far and recapping it. We talked about notes, pitches, scales, triads, chords, chord progressions, melodies, chords, harmonies, intervals, arpeggios, extended chords, keys, key relationships, key changes, modulation, and the circle of fifths. Thanks again for being with me, y'all. It is absolutely one of the passions and joys of my week to be able to share this knowledge with you. And until the next episode, I will look forward to... Continuing this music theory exploration with all of you. Have a beautiful music-filled week.