Music 30/30 – Day 6
Not a whole lot to report today, though I did learn some interesting things about the minor scales and keys. The main takeaway revolved around the cyclic nature of the patterns for major and minor scales, and how each major scale has a relative minor scale that shares all of the same notes, simply centered around a different starting note as its base.
The other interesting bit of learning came in the form of the harmonic and melodic minor scales, which are essentially adjustments that are made to the natural minor scale to account for it essentially just being an offset major scale. Basically, in a major scale there are certain tones and chords that naturally try to resolve back down toward the root, or tonic, of the scale, but since a minor scale, or a minor key, is essentially just a major key or scale with a different tonic, you run into issues of these leads being missing, or worse, sounding like they are trying to lead back to the root of the major scale. So the harmonic and melodic minor scales make small adjustments to the pitches, borrowing some notes from their own major counterparts to provide those leading tones and chords. Pretty neat stuff.
I’ve finished the videos for the first batch of courses, which according to the instructor puts me pretty firmly around 3/4 of the way through the first semester of his collage music classes, which is encouraging. I say finished the videos rather than finished the course because I still have outstanding homework left to do, including a couple of full analysis projects, entirely aside from the analyses I still intend to do for my two Final Fantasy pieces. Even so, I’ve jumped ahead and started in on the next course anyway, as we are really starting to get into some of the nitty gritty for writing music. Homework will be coming soon, but I’m still soaking in knowledge before the review.