Unraveling Music

I love playing and listening to music to the point that they have become a single activity to me. My brain plays along with everything I hear. 

I'd gotten into the habit of using my 70 minute work commute listening to songs on my iPhone and opening my Evernote app, and challenging myself to figure them out by ear in a "keyless" sense, by notating what I think is the home chord (the I), the IV and the V, and their minor brothers and sisters in the key: ii, iii, vi. An activity like this would be a pipe dream to me even a few years ago, but your ears are like any other muscle in your body; work them out and you shall see results. After you tab out enough songs (about ~40 in my case) you begin to unconsciously start noticing this tendency to hear chords and relationships in music. 

Like any other study in an academic field, sometimes all it takes is nomenclature to classify commonly occurring elements. Imagine trying to understand chemistry if you didn't know what an electron was vs. a proton; you would have so much trouble continually trying to describe the element you are talking about instead of focusing on the problem at hand. Although that sounds like a ridiculous pursuit or example perhaps, at some point some scientist centuries ago named these elementary pieces of matter and established a common language for Chemistry. The same goes for Physics, Calculus, and amongst others: Music.

I have been a musician for 17 years and it's quite amazing the awesome and talented people I meet who rely on haphazard ways of describing the "atoms" of music, even if it is not verbally to others but within the way they themselves think about music and how chords and notes relate to each other. This is how I used to think of music, and in hindsight I was lost. Blissfully lost. I was having fun but was constantly searching for the why, the backbone of how musicians make decisions when composing. Was it happenstance? Drugs? Luck? Tons of experience as a professional, resulting in insanely great radar for what works and what doesn't musically? Or was it some crazy combination of the above? 

Perhaps all of them in varying amounts depending on the individual. I was totally unsatisfied with this way of looking at things. I have always been a person intent on knowing the options or what is possible before embarking down any one path; I like to know the tools at my disposal when creating. People come at music from so many directions, instruments, tastes and backgrounds that it is staggering. There is rhythm, key, timbre, tone, scales, theory, and of course lyrical content paired with melody to name just a few building blocks or focuses of songwriting. Through my years playing, growing up playing with my Dad and Brother, I had to find a way to accompany the others around me. As my dad is a great singer and guitar player, he would carry the tune and strum rhythm. Because it's never the best solution to have two people playing the exact same chords on the exact same instrument, I began to feel my way through playing lead, stumbled upon scales and began to borrow music books from my dad. I learned what worked (slowly), what didn't (quickly), and most importantly what was right for the song's feel. 

This brings me to back to nomenclature. I was operating with a set of diagrams and tried and true practice principles for what worked for me. I had three categories of sounds: happy, sad, and bluesy (somewhere between happy and sad). I think I can still classify most music or segments of songs in this way: Happy meant a song largely in a major key, sad meant it spent a lot of time using minor chords, and of course my parents inevitable influence on me with the constantly playing rule-breaking music of their youth: The Blues and of course, Rock & Roll.

It wasn't until about 4 years ago that I began to tire of knowing the same pantheon of songs I learned from Hal Leonard books, or shabbily formatted tablature I retrieved from the internet. It was then that I sat down for the first time with purpose: to begin a songbook I would always have the rest of my life. It would be a book of my favorites from artists old and new, but skewing newer as I could not wait to bring my generations' music to the table at Thanksgiving or other holidays I spend with my family playing until the sun comes up. My dad had the older classics covered; I wanted to see what trends musically the songs I liked exploited relative to each other regardless of the key they were in. I wanted to know them on an atomic level and hopefully, someday reassemble bits and pieces of these scraps and build something new and beautiful I could call my own. At the same time, I do not read music and I don't feel I need to. I wanted deep immersion in the why without worrying about notation and sight-reading any music class would first make me go through in trying to reach deeper understanding. I was in luck; there was another way. 

With this as my mission, I had a few rules. Among them: I would sit with a recording as long as it took without using the internet for anything except for lyrics retrieval (for accuracy and formatting the songs for word processing and eventual output as pdf). The first day (or should I say days) I struggled. I made missteps, assumptions about the key we were in, was puzzled when unexpected chords arose out of nowhere... it was rough. From perseverance comes understanding however, there were easier songs and harder songs and each success bred a hunger for more. These days, the formatting of the lyric and chord sheets take me longer than the unraveling music part. I can do 5-10 songs an evening on average, compared to the hours or days it used to take.

After 13 years of playing, why was I just suddenly getting it? Hard work is all I can say. I was listening. I was suddenly very aware that I had been wandering in the dark, either getting lucky in choosing the right musical answer from experience or by following "safe" templates I had been using for years in the form of scales or chords I had commonly seen together in other songs. Even looking back then through my progress and being satisfied having studied and played this long, I have an intense hunger for learning new musical tricks and sleight of hand my favorite artists used, and each day I get a little closer to understanding what attracts me to the music I like. It's almost like your ear is a Pandora station, and you are reverse-engineering the sounds it reacts to. 

Throughout the posts on this site, you will see references to more Roman numerals than most Roman citizens ever saw in a lifetime. This is the language of music that took me from literal chords to placeholders of a certain mood sans musical key or center. It took me from numbers to algebraic moveable variables, from... I don't have another example that makes sense. All you need to know is: 

A key contains 7 chords, only 6 of which you need to worry about right now: I, ii, iii, IV, V, and vi. Uppercase denotes a major chord, and lowercase denotes a minor chord.

A Song = Happy (Some combination of I, IV and V) + Sad (ii, iii, or vi) + Bluesy (Rulebreaking chords from outside of key)

When you hear a happy chord, it is one of the three capital numerals: I, IV or V. When you hear a sad chord, it's ii, iii or vi. When it's not clear, we're probably talking a rulebreaking bluesy major or minor chord, of which there are patterns to finding. (we'll come up with a better name for these later)

No song needs all of these building blocks, in fact an entire song could be built with any combination or any one or two of them and be wildly popular, amazing, tearjerking or life changing. It's characterizing the pieces when you hear them relative to each other that I am concerned with. 

So here we are. Sad, happy and bluesy. There's a better way and that is what this blog is about. I pledge to the following: 

1) As a musician, I will take you through my interpretations of my favorite songs, focusing on independent groups and music of the 2000's and beyond. I don't do top ten bullshit, pop-country or classical.

2) As a songwriter I will take you through the trials and tribulations of my hyper-critical thought process in my struggle to write my own music. 

3) As a professional designer and illustrator, I will be creating artwork that stems from my love of music and using this site as an outlet when I find the time. 

Thanks for reading. 

Sean

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