This is the Circle of Fifths, you may have seen it before:
Some people think it should look like this:
And there are people who call it the Circle of Fourths.
None of those differences really matter because it all comes down to the same thing. We will use the circle from the first picture.
You can find a large portion of music theory in this mysterious circle, and I’ll show you some of these fun facts in this article.
If you play from leadsheets or you downloaded a chord chart from the internet, you may occasionally find chord symbols that you don’t know yet how to play.
Here’s the trick: the only thing that really matters about a chord is whether it is major or minor. You can safely ignore anything else about the chord.
For example, you may encounter the chord symbols Am9 and D13.
The first one is an “A minor” chord with an added 7th and an added 9th.
The second one is a “D dominant-7″ chord with an added 13th but it could also have a 9th and 11th, depending on how you voice it.
If that didn’t make any sense to you and you have no clue how to form these chords, then keep what you know and throw away the rest.
If you know the “key” of a song, you’ll know which notes the melody uses, and which chords to play. Finding the key of a song is the first step of transcribing.
Playing from sheet music, you can find the key by looking at the key signature. But if you’re playing by ear, you’ll have to do some experimentation.
First, I play along with the song and try to find the scale that matches the melody.
There is a wonderful program called Transcribe! that can help you with this. It can loop endlessly through sections of the song and even slow the music down while keeping it at the same pitch. Very handy!
Most songs are in a major key and there are 12 possible major scales. If you know these scales by heart it shouldn’t be too much of a problem to find the right one.
“Normalizing” is a post-processing step that is done to make recordings as loud as possible.
It works like this: the computer scans the recording to find the loudest part. Then it determines how much louder it can make this part. Finally, it amplifies the entire recording by that amount.
I explained in a previous article how to normalize your recordings with Audacity and other audio programs.
That method works fine. However, there is an alternative method and that is to use the free program MP3Gain.
A “lead sheet” is a simplified form of sheet music that only contains a single staff with the melody, and chord symbols that give an indication of the harmony. It’s up to the players themselves to create the arrangement.
Lead sheets are very popular with many musicians, especially those who play Jazz and popular music.
A lead sheet gives you a quick idea of how a piece is supposed to sound, but it also gives you the freedom to play it however you feel like.
Often lead sheets are sold in thick books called “fake books” that can be pretty expensive. I have a couple of them and they are well worth the money — together they contain more than 2,000 songs — but they are not exhaustive (and there is quite a bit of overlap between them).
Speaking of chord progressions, there is a very cool web site called chordmaps.com where you can learn all about them.
For example, here is a chord progression map for the key of C.
In the key of C, the C chord is the home chord, the most important chord. This is where chord progressions begin and end.
Here is how to read the chord progression map: from the C chord you can go to any of the other chords, and then you have to follow the map back to the C chord.
A “chord progression” simply means: a series of chords. Most tunes are harmonized with three or more chords, and the order of those chords is called the chord progression.
A verse or chorus of a song often starts out on the home chord (the I chord in the key), then moves through a series of other chords and finally ends up on the home chord again.
Many songs (as well as classical pieces) use the same sequences of chords, and in this article we’ll look at some of the most common ones.
If you have a digital piano, electronic keyboard or MIDI controller, you can easily get access to many more sounds by hooking it up to the computer using a MIDI interface. Instead of being limited to just the on-board tone generator of your piano, you can now use an almost infinite number of “virtual” instruments.
In this article we will look at this quick and relatively inexpensive method to make your digital piano sound even better. Some of this software will cost money, but we’ll also look at free options.
In another article, I explain how to convert a MIDI recording to MP3 using software instruments. Although the idea is similar, the article you’re reading now focuses on live playing: you press keys on your piano and sound comes out of your computer in real-time. Of course, you can also record your live playing and we’ll talk about that too.
NOTE: The article was written with Windows in mind. If you use another operating system such as Mac OS X, the directions are similar but the software will be different.
Music software doesn’t have to be expensive. There is a lot of good free and almost-free software on the web, you just have to know where to find it. On this page you’ll find links to legal versions of music programs that I use and recommend.
This article explains how to convert MIDI files — music files with the extension .mid or .midi (or .kar for karaoke) — to MP3 and/or WAV.
The advantage of MIDI files is that they are very small — easily 1000 times as small as an MP3 of the same music — but the disadvantage is that they usually don’t sound very good. And you can’t put them on your iPod either.
So if you want to learn how to convert your MIDI files to MP3’s and how to make them sound good doing so, then read on.
NOTE: The article was written with Windows in mind. If you use another operating system such as Mac OS X, the directions are similar but the software will be different.
(For live playing with software instruments in real time, read how to use virtual instruments.)
