Music history and theory, recommendations, making-of notes and original music — organized by category.
The chord written on the page is identical, so why does a pro's version sound wider and clearer? The answer is where the notes go. Wide at the bottom and close at the top, root in the left hand and colour in the right, and the trick of barely moving your hands as the chords change — all by ear.
Free CC0 sounds will get a track finished. Then, at some point, they stop being enough. Here's exactly how the credits work, what happens if you cancel, and how the plans differ.
From a 1948 piece built out of train noises to the six seconds of drumming that created an entire genre — what a sample is, how you work with one, why it ended up in court, and where we get ours today.
Is there any reason to stop stacking thirds at the 7th? Keep going and you get 9, 11 and 13 — colors an octave up. Learn the rainbow of tensions, the avoid note, and the feel of "a tension isn't dissonance, it's seasoning" by ear.
The chord family has seven members, yet Part 4 handed out only three roles — home, away, tension. Are the other four unemployed? Learn harmonic function — the job system and its understudies — and you'll see why pop loops can spin forever.
Sad songs have grammar too. The seven-chord family born from the minor scale, the harmonic minor that revives the leading tone, and why the V in a minor song is major — learn the architecture of the dark house by ear.
Play the same three chords and a pro still sounds different. The secret is the chord's posture — inversions. Root position, first and second inversion, how to read slash chords, and the descending bass line that makes the bass sing.
The same C chord — so why does the C drifting out of a jazz café sound so much softer and more refined? Stack one more third on the triad and you get seventh chords. Learn the faces of maj7, m7 and dom7 by ear, and finally meet the true identity of V7.
If one chord is a photo, a chord progression is a story. The chord family born from one scale, the three roles of home, leaving and tension, plus I-IV-V and cadences — learned by ear.
If a melody is a line drawn one note at a time, a chord is a color made by stacking notes at once. Why we stack in thirds, and why major, minor, diminished and augmented chords feel the way they do — learned by ear.
Music's brightness, darkness and tension aren't born from a single note but from the distance between two. From how to count intervals to the major third, perfect fifth and tritone — learned by ear through melodies you already know.
Do-re-mi-fa-sol-la-ti-do isn't a rule someone invented — it's an answer that sound itself worked out first. We follow the octave, the perfect fifth and the harmonic series to hear *why* it had to be these seven notes.
Hip-hop's 'instruments' are a little different — not things you play, but tools that build the beat: turntables, the 808 drum machine, the MPC sampler, the synth, and finally the voice on top. Hear each one, one video at a time.
Meet the instruments of jazz one by one, each with a video. From the singing horns of the front line (sax, trumpet, trombone, clarinet) to the rhythm section that holds it all up (piano, bass, drums, guitar) — hearing them makes it click.
A fresh set of classics that our 6-part History of Hip-Hop never got to — 21 tracks from old school to trap, in chronological order. Just hit play from the top and 40 years of hip-hop rolls by.
"Trap" out of Atlanta becomes the world's default sound and streaming changes everything from the 2010s on. The music born on a Bronx street finally becomes the biggest genre on the planet.
The long-dismissed South rises as hip-hop's new center, and hip-hop finally conquers the global pop charts in the 2000s — the era when producers became stars, too.
The mellow G-Funk of the West and the rough, dense boom bap of the East collided head-on in the 1990s — the hottest, and most painful, era in hip-hop history.
From political messages to street reality to jazz-smooth sound — every style bloomed at once in the Golden Age. Hip-hop at its most colorful and daring.
Drum machines and samplers arrive, hip-hop shakes hands with rock and conquers MTV, and rap technique explodes — the 1980s laid the foundation of "boom bap."
Hip-hop was born at 1970s block parties in the Bronx. The moment a DJ stretched out the "break" and an MC started talking over it, a story that would shake the whole world began.
Jazz meets rock, funk and electronics. From Miles's 'Bitches Brew' to the hip-hop generation's Kamasi Washington — jazz still alive and moving.
Unchaining the chords. Miles's 'Kind of Blue', Coltrane's spiritual quest, and free jazz that threw out every rule.
After bebop's heat, jazz flowed in two directions — the cool, elegant West Coast sound, and hot hard bop that returned to blues and gospel.
The revolution led by Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie. From dance music to an art you concentrate on — the moment jazz changed most.
The age of big bands and dance halls. From Duke Ellington to Billie Holiday's cry — the golden era when jazz became America's popular music.
Jazz was born in New Orleans, where blues, ragtime and brass bands collided — up to the moment Louis Armstrong invented the idea of the "solo."
I read several theory books and nothing changed in my ears. So I started building tools that make sound in the browser, right where you read the sentence. Here's what the six modules and this blog are for.
A scale is the palette of notes a song draws from. Bright major, shadowed minor, the go-anywhere pentatonic, and even modes and the blues — a light tour of what the main palettes feel like, by ear.
From the Theremin and Moog to polysynths, the DX7 and software synths — a century of the instruments that made electronic music, at a glance.