social.noyu.me

i'm still terrible at keyboard, but my improvisation has gotten a lot more musical sounding, because i tend to place my fingers so that they have nice intervals between them like 3, 4 or 7 semitones, or sometimes 2

‪oh and i stay within some kind of improvised scale while doing that‬

‪i never learned the standard scales in a proper fashion, but it turns out that if you know the pattern in your head of how many semitones there should be between things, and get into the habit of counting them out, eventually you get used to the finger placements anyway…‬

‪what i really need to get a good grasp of is functional harmony and such things. i know when a chord progression works, but without knowing “why”, it's hard to solve problems when writing things, or trying to improvise for that matter‬

@hikari This isn't the standard theory but I like the way she explains it and puts it into practice. https://youtu.be/K-XSTSnqXxo?si=Mt8x7OquhWlrHC3a

@hikari uuunnnh... my extremely rudimentary knowledge is that there are three functions (tonic, dominant, subdominant) and every chord has one of these in a given key, tonic makes you feel at home, sub makes you lift of to places and dominant feels tense and unstable.

In a major scale the functions are from I to vii:
t s t s d t d

(ii and IV are subdominant, V and vii° are dominant, rest are tonic)

And you can swap two chords with the same function in a song and it will still sound right.

@hikari so for instance if you use only white keys you have:

I C tonic
ii Dm subdominant
iii Em tonic
IV F subdominant
V G dominant
vi Am tonic
vii° Bm5- dominant

And then the idea goes that moving in cycles of tension (dominant) and release (tonic) makes harmonies pleasant

Disclaimer: I'm just a hobbist and very amateur musician, all of this could be wrong

@hikari Did any of this make any sense?