The Most Simple, Yet Most Effective Musical Exercises.

Music is an interplay of three sonic realms: Melody, harmony, and rhythm.

Music is also a language, which is an interplay of phrases, concepts, and expression.

In language, whether it be natural language or music, expression is often dismissed, but it has the power to transform a simple phrase or concept into something completely different. In musical terms,  the use of expression in musical language is often called "phrasing".

Phrases and phrasing are two different things. Phrases are "what" you play, and phrasing is "how" you play it. With the realms of melody, harmony, and rhythm in mind, a simple concept in any category can be expressed in innumerable ways.

Example 1 - Rephrasing of a rhythmic pattern:

This is quite a simple beat. A bass drum being played in crotchets in 4/4 timing. What we want to do from here is dismiss the particular drum being played, yet retain the rhythmic pattern.

Doing so can provide results such as these:

Example 2 - Rephrasing of a melodic pattern:

The melodic equivalent of the previous exercise is to have a selection of pitches or intervals, retain their specific ordering, but change their rhythmic allocation. With a simple ascending C Major scale such as this one.

 

We can make alterations like these:

Example 3 - Rephrasing of patterns in harmony:

And lastly. All one has to do to rephrase harmony is to keep a tonal reference and choose other pitches to accompany it. The most basic harmonic concept would be that of a C major chord, whose tonal centre is C.

By retaining C as a tonal reference, alterations such as these are possible:

What's great about this way of recontextualising your musical ideas is that you're building off a reference point. Therefore, every new idea is interrelated, giving you great command over your musical choices and familiar interpretation of all sorts of musical patterns that could otherwise be foreign and challenging.

I Invented A New Music Theory And Notation Framework!

I was playing bass just a few weeks ago and thought to myself how odd it is to count intervals with conventional theory. They say that music theory is "descriptive, not prescriptive" but I'm of the opinion that is a lie.

Western harmony favours diatonicism, everything is seen from the lens of the major scale. There are twelve tones per octave in our Western music tradition but they are numbered one to seven with modifiers such as major, minor, diminished and augmented. This locks a lot of musicians into a predominantly diatonic mindset of creating music and it becomes difficult to access tones outside of the diatonic framework.

The stave is also uneven in a few ways. Its organisation around the major scale means that intervals displayed on the stave aren't uniform. What looks like a major third in one position or key signature may actually be a minor third. This wouldn't be an issue if the scale that the stave was based on the chromatic scale. It is also uneven in the sense that from first line to fifth line, the range is a ninth rather than an octave.

So, I developed a new approach to music theory and notation. Traditional theory and notation has too many unnecessary complexities that make it difficult for beginners to learn, and requires too much cognitive processing. I will be writing a series of articles that explain exactly how my new system works, and also producing some tutorials and explanations on my YouTube channel.

I call it "Melbourne Music Theory" (or MMT). I actually don't know how Nashville Numbering works but I thought naming my method after my own city (which just so happens to be considered the art capital of Australia) was appropriate and similar to how Nashville numbering is named after that city.

What you can expect in these next few articles and upcoming videos are these:

• Better naming conventions for pitches and intervals.
• A new stave and ways to navigate it via symmetry.
• A new rhythmic system.
• The benefits of using this system compared to traditional theory and notation.

I'm looking forward to sharing this as a contribution to the music world. Big things happening haha.