Music Theory

Ionic, dorian, phrygian, lydian, mixolydian, aeolian, and locrian: otherwise known as the church modes. These influential scales originated in the church music of the middle ages and are still used today in classical music, pop, jazz, rock, and even metal. So, if you want to try something new or take in a little musical history, it’s worth learning a few church modes. In this blog, you’ll get an idea of how these modal scales work, an impression of the kind of sound they can produce and learn to play them in any key.

This blog covers the widely used blues scale. Even if you wouldn’t call yourself a blues musician, this magic scale is something that every musician should know, since it not only helps build the fundamentals of blues, but pretty much everything that followed it – including pop, rock, and everything in between.

We’ve already covered the most used scales – the major and minor scales, and found out that the major scales have been solidly ingrained in Western musical heads for centuries already. What you might not be so aware of, is the dominance of the pentatonic scales which have helped shaped pretty much any popular contemporary music ever made. Just like the natural major and minor scales, there are major pentatonic scales and minor pentatonic scales. These scales are also easy to learn and can be quickly used for improvising.

Are you tired of being dependent on music books? Then you might want to browse through this blog and look at some of the strategies and tips that can help you memorise sheet music and play pieces off the top of your head. Next time you walk by a piano at a railway station, you’ll be able to sit down and steal the show!

Introducing the C-minor scale, this blog follows up on the ‘Learning to Read Music: The C-Major Scale’ blog and aims to teach you how to play the scale in different keys (D, E, F, G and A). Again, it doesn’t matter if you play piano, recorder, guitar or violin – any instrument can be used here.

It makes sense to feel deeply impressed whenever you see and hear a musician play a complex piece of music reading it from a sheet of paper. A justifiable feeling on one hand, because it’s likely they have practiced and studied intensely to hone their skills. On the other hand, reading music actually isn’t all that difficult. No matter if you play piano, keyboard, guitar or drums, any instrument can be used to start with the basics, which include the commonly used C-major scale, also called the key of C. Don’t freak out now, it’s easier than you think!

If, as a musician, you find yourself staring at sheet music like an illiterate puppy staring at an episode of Countdown, then you’re not alone! It can be endlessly frustrating if you’re more than able to play your instrument, but learning to play a new piece costs you weeks if not months of your precious life. Maybe you give up halfway through, maybe you just keep plodding on; in any case, you probably wish you were just better at reading music. Or maybe you’re good at it, but just want to speed the process up. All of this is possible!

You’re likely to have seen a musician perform, or at least heard of one who performs with feeling as they play or sing. This particular musical feeling or expression is not only created using tempo, rhythm, and a melody, but conveying expression in a piece also has a lot to do with dynamics. This blog has been written for beginners who want to understand what dynamics mean when it comes to music, how this is notated by symbols and terms in a manuscript, and how to interpret these signs and symbols.

It’d be a shame if you avoided sharp (♯) and flat (♭) notes simply because you don’t know their exact meaning. However, this is important information to know if you want to play a wide variety of music using sheet music, chord progressions or another kind of music notation. As such, in this blog, I’m going to teach you the difference between sharp notes and flat notes, and how you should use them.

“That’s major!” some might exclaim when hearing that one of their mates has had a day of it. But in terms of music, Major can refer to something that feels a lot more cheerful, while minor tends to have a more sad vibe. But is this always the case? And how does this difference actually happen? In this blog, I’m going to be saying a lot about how ‘Major’ and ‘Minor’ actually works in music so that you can not only hear the difference, but actually understand it and why it happens at all.

And so we come to the third edition of our blogs about reading music. In the last two, we covered the C-Major scale and the Minor scale, which hopefully gave you a better idea of how to read notes on a stave. We also showed you how to find all of these notes on a piano, keyboard, and guitar. If you’re a drummer, you can find some helpful tips for reading drum notation in our blog, Drum Notation 101. In this blog though, we’re going to cover the mystery surrounding rhythm, tempo, and measure. Of course, if you understand all of this already and want to dive a little deeper, then feel free to check out our written-for-purpose music books.

In this blog, you can learn how chords are built and how to read particular chord symbols and notation. Understanding this will only help you progress whether you’re playing a guitar, keyboard, piano, or in fact, most other musical instruments, or if you simply want to know what lies behind the magic of chords and how they actually work. You’ll also find a useful list of other blogs about chords and music theory, along with our collection of music books.