43 know yourchords
C# D# Db
Eb
F# G# A# Gb Ab Bb
C# D# Db
Eb
F# G# A# Gb Ab Bb
Conducting the audience
another boy or girl. It’s a non- intimidating way of being free.’ So it seems that dancing to
music is in-built in humans (and even some animals, according to Pets Do The Funniest Things). As well as releasing feelgood endorphins in the brain it can help improve motor skills. ‘That’s why we do music and movement classes as small children,’ Karageorghis says. ‘The patterns in music mimic human learning patterns.’ It has a cultural role too. ‘Wartime
musicals, the Twist, rave culture… Dance crazes can reflect and even change society,’ says Markson. Tempo is also important. Most
upbeat singles are between 120- 140bpm, while slushy ballads are 80-100bpm. Up-tempo examples include Lady Gaga’s Poker Face and Bad Romance at 119bpm, and Born This Way at 131bpm. Rihanna’s Only Girl (in the World) is 126bpm, while S&M is 130bpm. Even Coldplay’s Every Teardrop is a Waterfall clocks in at 118bpm. Next, you have to choose your
instruments. In the current pop climate, that means synths. Production teams have been
clever. They’ve taken a trance sound from the 1990s and updated it. Frenetic beats and lush synthesised sounds combine to make tracks you can dance to, but create an emotional impact too. Long, major synth chords are used to create a feeling of euphoria. Add the voice and face of Lady Gaga or Rihanna and you have a hit that appeals to club-goers and MTV viewers alike. Add them up and what have
you got? Poker Face. It features a traditional pop structure, a I-V-vi-IV chord sequence, a 119bpm tempo for dancing to and a ‘modern’ sound (the stuttering vocals over synths) with a catchy, upbeat pop vocal. It could have been constructed in a music lab, so is it any wonder it’s one of the biggest selling singles of all time?
go finger! It’s not just what you play, it’s how you play it
Anyone with hands can hit the keys on a piano, but researchers at the University of Southampton are using infra-red motion capture like movie animators to analyse the way leading pianists’ fingers move across the keys. As well as trying to
analyse the ‘perfect’ technique, the Hand And Wrist Kinematics (HAWK) technology aims to help combat wrist damage, repetitive strain injury and arthritis in pianists.
Motion capture technology,
widely used in
film making and videogame
creation, is now
being applied to piano playing technique
C D E F GA B
Major chords This is how C Major is played on a piano. The first dot is the C note. To make a major chord (from any starting point) you first take four ‘half steps’, or semitones. In this case that means skipping C# (C sharp – a
semitone above C), D and D# to get to E. Then take three half steps through F and F# to G. Put the three notes together and you have the C major chord
C DE F G A B
Minor chords The ‘sad’ relative of the major chord is created simply by swapping the major and minor thirds. So, drop the middle note by half a step to the black key. The best way to understand the difference is to try it for yourself, and
Brain power How your mind sorts the pop from the slop
‘We know much more about how we see than how we hear,’ says Dr Mark Tramo, director of the Institute For Music & Brain Science. ‘What happens in hearing is harder to understand intuitively.’ What we do know is
that your inner ear contains a spiral sheet that music plucks like a guitar string. This fires brain cells that control hearing and
the auditory cortex, just above your ears, to generate the conscious experience of music. Different firing patterns excite other groups of cells that associate the sound with feelings, thoughts and past experiences. Sound is made up of
low to high frequencies, much like the notes on a musical instrument. Research has yet to fully reveal why certain
frequencies trigger cells in different ways, but our response to music is genetic as well as cultural. So while your
environment (parents, friends, the media) will influence your taste, your genes can hand you a love of music and ability to play it in the same way that they govern whether you’re good at maths, English, science or sport. Enjoy!
then start combining chords to create sounds that fit your mood
Semitones You can see that C# (a semitone above C) is the same note as Db – flat – (a semitone below D) and so on. There’s no B#,Cb,E#,Fb
hit anatomyof a Lady Gaga. Who else?
Create your own smash sound with tips from composer Roland Perrin
‘What the point of an intro? To make you shut up and listen. It can be a groove, crashing drums or the burst of a guitar. But imagine you’re
INTRODUCTION
throwing a bucket of cold water over the listener.’
‘Go for a classic, recognisable pop structure – such as verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge, chorus. Pop works in cycles, and they have to flow.’
STRUCTURE
‘Make the first note of a phrase the same as the last note of the previous phrase. It’s easier to sing, and sing along to.’
MELODY
‘Use a mix of major and minor, even if the minor chords are only a progression to the next major. Very few songs only feature one or the other.’
CHORDS
‘Make sure you’ve got a good groove if you want people to dance. Use the snare drum on the second and fourth beat of every bar, and build around that. This is a westernisation of
RHYTHM
African rhythms that people have been dancing to for centuries.’
The Simpsons on Abbey Road
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