This is an outstanding technical breakdown of the genre, thinking it’d be a safe bet to say the best out there. Incredibly coherent and to the point, killing it Trevor.
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Dude, you should be teaching in UC Berkley with such a knack for quality instruction. As a Maths teacher and guitar enthusiast, I fully appreciate this on all levels. Well done!
Trevor, you're awesome. Anyone that has an intermediate music theory knowledge can learn a lot from your videos. Thanks a lot for everything you post!!!
you are so unbelievably intelligent, talented and articulate. you speak theory related to mathrock with a musical verbiage, specificity, and finesse. while most people just tap around on the fret board and remember hand shapes. id love to take lessons with you
Awesome! I'm hoping to definitely make more videos on math rock and emo harmony. If you're looking for more stuff though, I'd recommend some of my analysis videos on American Football and Tiny Moving parts. There are quite a lot of songwriting / compositional tricks to be mined just from those two groups. Cheers!
Interesting point. I was just watching a video of Yvette Young (of Covet) who mentioned really liking baroque music. I wonder if that's part of the appeal for her, and if her background there is part of what has made her so successful with mathrock.
Music is def a language. Every genre & style has its own vernacular, but don't let anybody tell you to not use (or stray away from) dominant, diminished, or whatever chords. Putting limits on certain things can build creative solutions & broaden your mind, but some "rules" are nonsense.
One thing I feel like I’ve wrapped my head around is that I feel like the dominant or fifth voicing, is used as a transitional voicing in either a note or chord sense. Maybe even that the root can be semi-transitional in use of arpegaatted emo/mathrock melodies.
Oh for sure it can. Avoiding the dominant is just a general observation in this style, but by no means does that make the dominant chord a bad thing. Personally, I think it's really useful and can be used tastefully, even in this kind of music.
thank u so much for ur videos! i don't know music theory at all, and can only read/write tabs and not scores. this is motivating me to learn more on music theory :')
Can someone explain building a chord progression off other scale degrees? If I were to build off of F in the key of C would I want to be in F lydian? I'm new to this so bear with me haha.
I was sort of hinting at this with my own question, so I'll wait for Trevor's official response. But from own my knowledge of modal jazz, it would take much more than a few chord order changes to "break" our ears out of its default setting - major key harmony. To make us truly accept F Lydian as the tonal center, we'd have to heavily feature the #4 on a majority of chords, and not just on one chord (ii) as he did. That's why the key center is still in C major. However, by using the IV as the starting point (and by avoiding the G7), the tonal center gets "blurred" a bit - I wouldn't go so far as to say that it changed completely - which I suspect to be a desired effect for the genre.
This is exactly the concept that I’m having trouble understanding. I get that we need the #4 sound to be accented to really sound Lydian, but I’m unsure how to tonicize the 4 chord instead of the 1 in major harmony.
Glad I'm not alone. :P I was wondering the exact same thing. "C Ionian, but tonicize F" sounds like the definition of F Lydian, but maybe I'm missing something. I think what Trevor is intending to say is that if you hover around F a lot, but still treat it as a subdominant chord gravitating toward C, and all the other chords maintain the function they serve in C Ionian, you will maintain the C Ionian feel but with a lot of tension since you rarely resolve to the actual tonic. On the other hand, if you are truly playing in F Lydian, F serves as a tonic and feels resolved while C is a very tense dominant chord, which defeats the purpose of what he is suggesting. I'm just getting hung up on the word "tonicize," though, since hovering around an F that resolves to a C is still letting C be the tonic. Gotta admit, I'm just now dipping my toe into Math Rock, and I haven't listened to it much yet, so maybe some close listening to what the well known groups are doing will answer the question for me, but I'd also love a follow up from Trevor on this, nitpicky as it may be.
Great video. When you say build progressions off the IV, you still mean use a harmonised major scale, right? So in C you'd still draw from a palette of C, Dm, Em, F, G, Am? If so, do you mean IV is more the home chord/is emphasised rather than the I?
Great video, thanks for presenting this nice analysis of the genre! About point #5, if you base your song off the IV, doesn't that make the mode actually Lydian instead of Ionian?
5:28, when mentioning the types of intervals to play, is this meaning chord intervals/movements? E.g major and minor 3rds and perfect intervals, is this relating to chord movements to use?
Great videos as always Trevor! Is there a video where you demo the final concept you mentioned? I think i didnt understand it. Key of c and building over F thingie :p
so if we're in c major, this means that we're starting mostly from chords derived from that scale (c major, d minor, e minor, f major, going on) to use in our progression. generally speaking, the tonic chord c major feels the most "at home" and is where your chord progression tends to settle. what's trevor's saying to do is to think of f major as your home instead, and build progressions that are chosen based on their relationship to f major instead of c major. . something that may be helpful is to try this on a piano. c major is all white keys, so an easy thing to do is play triads on white keys with your left hand. these will all be derived from C. also using only white keys, explore melody with your right hand. try to improvise - with these limitations its like playing "heart and soul" - impossible to go wrong. be emo with it, and try to keep coming back to F. you might find that eventually coming back to F feels natural. using the piano helps because limiting yourself to white keys helps you visualize and interact with concepts that sometimes can seem obtuse or overwhelming on a guitar neck, so i highly suggest trying it, just for fun.
it's always fun to make music, that people analyze with theory, when I'm reality "oh i don't know theory, i just used a cool open tuning that sounded fancy and was easy to play" 🤣
What's the tune that plays during the TTNG transcription? Also, awesome video. It's helped me a whole bunch and I only watched it for the first time a week ago.
It's funny to think about math rock and it's sub groups not as a post rock kind of thing but like an alternate timeline where blues based rock never really existed.