At this time of year it’s easy to get distracted by all kinds of holiday fun. Decorating the tree, wrapping presents, writing Christmas cards… Or celebrating Hanukkah or just some time off work, as the case may be! But all these fun activities needn’t put a stop to your ear training: Use our new Christmas-themed Unravelling Music track to help you improve your ears and get in the festive spirit.

The new Unravelling Music ear training track March of the Candy Cane Soldiers teaches you about key modulation, chord progressions, rhythmic figures, musical codas and the circle of fifths – no music theory required! Download the tracks below and get in that festive ear training mood:

Click to download “March of the Candy Cane Soldiers” Unravelling Music pack (or right-click and “Save as…”)

Contents

• 14-page liner notes PDF with track-by-track info
• 1 full-length MP3 file, “March of the Candy Cane Soldiers”
• 6 supporting MP3 files teaching you to hear more in the song

Did you enjoy our Christmas special? Have you spotted extra musical details in the track you want to share? Leave your comment below!

An appreciation of common musical genres in important for any musician, and guitarists in particular are often called on to provide accompaniment in a specific style at the drop of a hat. Today we’re going to look at jazz guitar ‘giveaways’: musical elements that characterise jazz, which you can use to recognise it – and jazz up your own playing!

Jazz guitar is somewhat atypical compared to most other guitar styles. It emphasizes pure technical ability less than rock and metal guitar do, but emphasizes music theory more. Perhaps this is because the jazz guitar style, at least in its basic form, developed before those other guitar techniques started to become popular. Not every jazz guitarist exactly follows the conventions of the genre. They commonly hybridize the jazz style with other genres, or use unusual aspects of music theory in their playing. Still, there are some aspects of jazz playing which set it apart from most other genres. We’ll look specifically at Seventh Chords and Bebop Scales.

Seventh Chords

The presence of seventh chords, particularly the dominant seventh, is one of the best indicators of a jazz song. There are a few reasons for this. The first is that seventh chords are extremely common in jazz chord progressions. In fact, many jazz songs use seventh chords exclusively in the chord progression. Another reason is that other modern styles of music rarely use any type of seventh chord. They do crop up in Classical, Baroque, and Renaissance music, but it does not take any real amount of ear training to distinguish between those styles and jazz! In addition, those styles more typically use the arpeggio, as opposed to jazz which uses the full chord.

Types of seventh chord

The following example contains several types of seventh chord. Compare the tone of these chords against the major and minor chords. Differentiating the seventh chords is not that difficult once you know what to listen for.

The most common types of seventh chords. Compare them with the major and minor chords.

Example chord progression

Click to read the rest…

There’s an old joke that asks:

“What’s the difference between a rock guitarist and a jazz guitarist?”

Answer:

That may be true, but if you want a stone cold hit you need to write a four chord song. Don’t believe me? Check out “The Four Chord Song” by Australian comedy rock band Axis of Awesome.

Well-trained ears may even pick out what the four chords are (guitarists: no peeking at Lee’s left hand!)

Warning: This video contains a few F bombs if you are offended by such things or you want to play it to youngsters please use the following link: Kid-friendly version

It turns out that the four magical chords are E, B, C# minor and A. But with so many chords to choose from, why did dozens of hit songs end up with the same four chords?

At first glance, it seems strange that so many songs should have the same chords. After all, with 12 notes to choose from, and a choice of major or minor, there should be thousands of pleasant-sounding chord progressions and we should never need to repeat ourselves. Unfortunately for budding songwriters, the odds are that picking four chords at random will result in something that sounds horrible. So what are the secrets behind those four magical chords? To find an answer we need to understand where chords come from.
Click to read the rest…