SongTrellis
Music and Musical Know-how For You

Author:  David Luebbert Posted:  11/11/05; 10:37:20 PM Msg#:  4607 (top msg in thread) Prev/Next:  4606/4608 Reads:  3470

It's time to tell you about some of the good  new things I've been working on for the SongTrellis site.

The first thing I'd like to bring to your attention is the Chord Grid (http://www.songtrellis.com/chordGrid). There's a new Chord Grid  link in the link bar that's available on most pages in the SongTrellis site.

The Chord Grid is something I invented for the SongTrellis Music Editor quite a long time ago. I've recently figured out how to do the web plumbing necessary to let the SongTrellis server ask a copy of the SongTrellis Editor running on a Mac in our facility to produce musical materials in response to web requests. With this plumbing available, I have been able to produce a Chord Grid web page that will run in a web browser for any SongTrellis user. This seemed important to do because the Music Editor runs only on Macs and a Windows version seems a far way off. With a web interface, many more people will get to try this out.

The Editor, nearly from it's inception, has had the ability to record a chord given only its root name, chord type and duration. When a chord is played, the editor knows how to voice the chord and arrange a chord's pitches in a way that sounds musical. It also knows how to arrange the voices of chords in a sequence so that they sound properly connected as they are played in succession.

Most of the music production systems I'm aware of, require the user to have to individually select the octave positions of each pitch in every  chord that they enter in a musical score. Users must know enough music theory to produce a pleasant sounding chord and arrange them into a pleasant sounding sequence.

Experienced pianists can frequently play a chord into a sequence recorder and import that into a music score with many editors. Those folks can get enter a progression into their music editor pretty quickly. I'm not one of those people and many musically interested people are in the same boat.

The number of the fluent, though, is dwarfed by those who are trying to learn harmony well enough to get an idea of how a chord progression in a tune should sound. These folks are pretty much out of luck until they learn the proper harmonic tricks AND increase their keyboard fluency. The bootstrapping problem they face is a bitch! If they know the proper harmony rules but aren't fluent keyboard players, entering the individual notes of a single chord and dragging them into proper position could take 15 or 20 seconds for someone who is super fluent in their editor. If they are beginners, this process could take a minute or more per chord.

I remember when it took me five or six hours to enter John Coltrane's Giant Steps progression into an early Mac music editor. It's just a 16 bar progression! I was running to a piano in the next room to memorize a voicing and then transcribing that into a chord specification in that editor.

In the Chord Grid provided on the SongTrellis site, a tabular grid with 44 rows is presented to you. The leftmost column in each row in the grid lists one of 44 chord types that is known to the SongTrellis Editor. To the right of each chord type label, are a list of 12 grid cells which contain the names of the 12 possible chord roots within an octave upon which that type of chord can be built. The names you will see in those grid cells in some order will be C, F, Bb, Eb, Ab, Db, Gb, B, E, A, D, and G. (You may think of Bb, Eb, Ab, Db, and Gb as synonyms for A#, D#, G#, C#, and F#) Each one of the root names in a chord type row are linked to cause a chord to be played which is built on the selected chord root and whose chord type is the type that labels that row.

If you go to the row in the grid labelled '7' and click on the link in the cell of that row labelled 'Ab', the SongTrellis server will play a instance of a Ab7 chord as a background sound on your web browser and will present a piano staff which shows how that chord instance would be notated, displaying the chord notes on a musical staff with the chord symbol for that chord displayed above the notation on the staff. It responds usually within a second or two after you click on a link in the grid.

With that fast response from the web browser, you can start to develop your intuition about musical harmony, even if you don't know how to decode the musical notation for a chord. If you've never played with this before, I would advise you to choose a particular root column (say C, or any of the other 11 roots), and touch a good number of the root links in many different rows of the grid. This will give you an idea of what the different chord types mean musically. You'll find some chord types have a very pleasant consonant character, and a larger number of others that are quite dissonant. 

You're going to notice that the chord roots in the grid are arranged in a funny order. The order which is used by default arranges the chord roots in a cycle which results when you start with the pitch C, and repeatedly visit those roots that a perfect 4th interval higher than the previous pitch. When chord roots are arranged this way, the chords that appear in adjacent grid squares are going to sound closely related to those that are in neighboring columns of their row. Because of this, I would recommend that you pick several different chord type rows and visit every root in of that chord type from left to right and in reverse order.

That action of building a chords on roots that are fixed distance from one another, produces a consistent reproducible sensation that somehow feels similar for many different chord types. When composers invent new chord sequences, they are very aware of the different sensations that result when they move chord roots by different distances.

I would recommend playing along different diagonals in the grid. If you choose a column in the grid, and click in the mi7 row, pick the next root to the right in the 7 row, and then pick the next root farther to the right in the MA7 row,you'll hear a harmonic cliche that was used in thousands of tunes composed in the 20th century.

If you go to a grid square, visit the square to the right, jump back to the square that is left of the original square, and visit the original square again, you'll be hearing a harmonic cliche that's been used since the earliest usages of harmony in western music and which are repeatedly used in many pop today and that have been used in folk music over the centuries.

Do this especially in the rows labeled MA, mi, mi7, 7, MA7, mi7(b5) and 7(b9) and also try these root jumps as you jump between these chord types.

The next thing I'd recommend, which might keep you busy for hours if you really get into this, is to change the organization of your chord roots. By default, the "Organize chord grid roots" control that appears at the top of the Chord Grid page is set to "Perfect 4th up", there are 11 other root organizations that are available in the grid. The default organization causes the roots to fall in a 12 root cycle before any roots repeat. There are three others that cause roots to fall into 12 root cycles. There are others that cause the roots to fall into 2 cycles of length 6, 3 cycles of length 4, 4 cycles of length 3, and 6 cycles of length 2.

Each of these cycle schemes have an entirely different harmonic flavor that you can easily experience for yourself.

This announcement describes how you can use the chord grid to do your own harmonic explorations. There's another way to use the Chord Grid to build your own progressions on the SongTrellis site. Instructions for that will show up in a few days, after I point to some other cool new SongTrellis website features that you'll need to know so that you can use the Chord Grid in a more productive manner. 

If you have questions or comments, post them in Song Discussions if you are signed up as SongTrellis member or else follow the feedback link and send me an email.

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