How To Determine The Scale & Key of a Piece of Music 

Interesting! A dissonance and creepiness aficionado here. This semitone shift is often used to create a sense of spookiness. I was immediately reminded of _Atuel_ by Pabellón Sintético - he's on bandcamp. Though I never analysed it to a note, the beginning with the tines and the repeating F#/F root and bass is not written in a mode, rather all notes simply transpose down and up a semitone. Secondly, I'm reminded how you can play "fake Flamenco" in the E Phrygian Dominant scale over the pair of chords on the guitar with a similar semitone shift into a dissonant chord: the standard open E, and a dominant quality chord E-B-A-F-C-E (0-0-2-3-3-0) which fits the harmony surprisingly nicely, and which I hazard to analyse as F7add11/E (everybody learning guitar discovers this simple progression, so it must sound familiar; it's just its Phrygian Dominant quality that's not patently immediate, so a dominant chord II, not V, looks weird). Something like that may be going on in your piece as well. A nice exercise in harmony, really: I don't perceive a modulation every two bars, it seems to sit stubbornly in a mode, but I can't say which. It would be interesting to look at this 8-bar movement again, perhaps later: meanwhile, I'm trying to finish reanalysing a filterbank from someone else's NumPy construction into C++… 😫

Hello Anthony, Greetings from Iraq! I admire your effort that you put into this channel and ive watched most of your playlists that are as good or even better than reading the actual manual of whatever software you're teaching. i just finished the Groove Agent playlist and i have a question i hope you can help me with. So when assigning pads to different outs, is there any way of assigning multiple pads to outs sequentially rather than assigning each of them one by one to out 1 then out 2 and such? My DAW is cubase btw. thank you for your work again!

Hi Anthony, just listened to the complete piece and very much liked it! I've transcribed "Atuel" that I mentioned in the previous post, and found that it flatly refuses traditional harmonic analysis altogether. Your 8-bar fragment does, either. Do you think it might not simply be using functional harmony at all? You already noted that the only mode that it fits into is just not it. But I don't really hear a change in the tonal centre, you perhaps know what I'm talking about - it evades establishing one firmly in the first place. I believe that it simply doesn't have one, and it's precisely what makes it's so uneasy and unnerving. The first two bars set the tension, the next two don't relieve it entirely, rinse and repeat. I was looking for similar tricks, and had come to think that they're fairly common in the modern music. I don't know, maybe I'm out of sorts, but I'm starting to pay attention to and rethink the stuff that I listened to, and by far not all of it makes harmonic sense - perhaps we're just focussing on the 200-y.o. harmony rules too much? In the end, I'm confused. You indeed prompted me to try something in this fashion! I think I'll take a children's song and turn it into something mysterious, cold and uncanny using the same technique. TIL a seriously new way to _not_ think about harmony… :)