Matt's Music Class
Lessons, games, and discussions for learning about and exploring the most fundamental concepts, skills, and elements that make up the inner mechanics of all types of music. It's sort of like an elementary school music class for grown-ups!
- Update frequency
- every 25 days
- Average duration
- 39 minutes
- Episodes
- 10
- Years Active
- 2018 - 2019
Bonus Episode: The Best Parts of the Song
In this episode we’re taking a break from our usual lessons to practice noticing some ingenious song structures used equally effectively by two brilliant composers a couple centuries apart. I wanted …
Episode 9: Chords
In this episode we learn about Chords: the abstract packages of pitches that create (consonant or dissonant) Harmony when played at the same time. We also learn why the Triad is the most common type …
Episode 8: The Major Scale and Consonance v Dissonance
In this lesson we look at the abstract mathematical form that defines the Major Scale (our familiar Do-Re-Mi sound), how it can be moved around to different starting (or Tonic) pitches on the keyboar…
Episode 7: Tonality
Today’s bite-sized episode introduces the concept of Tonality. This is the first basic concept that undergirds the arcane world of Harmony. It may be a fancy sounding name, but the concept of tonalit…
Episode 6: Summary and Review
Since we’ve completed our first big batch of concepts (Beat, Rhythm, Meter, and Melody), I figured it’s time to have an episode that brings them all together and demonstrates how much we can now list…
Episode 5: Melodic Evolution
In this episode, we’ll learn a new simple melody on the keyboard (this time in the ‘ta-ki-de’ or skipping meter, but still with the classic ABA structure), and discover how complex a melody’s evoluti…
Episode 4: Melody, Keyboard, & Syncopation
In this episode we learn:
- How the standard keyboard is arranged
- The seven pitch names of the 'white keys' (CDEFGABC), the 'major scale' (Do Re Mi Fa Sol La Ti Do), and why it starts again at Do (o…
Episode 3: Advanced Rhythm and Meter
In this episode, we review the basics of Meter (from Episode 2); put together rhythm compositions (ta-di feel) from Episodes 1 & 2 to create polyrhythm; and discover what happens when we use longer a…
Episode 2: Rhythm and Meter
In this second episode, I do a quick review of topics from lesson 1 (beat and rhythm subdivisions), then we look at a sort of meta concept related to beat (meter), and finally we discover some new rh…
Episode 1: Introduction and Lesson 1
In this first episode, I explain the reasons I'm making this podcast and the reasons you might want to listen to it. Then we dive in to some thinking tools, exercises, and listening examples for how …