Discord Office Hours Halloween 👻: minor and diminished sounds
Every Saturday from 11am to noon, I run Office Hours over on my Discord Server. This past Saturday the Office Hours landed on Halloween so we worked on identifying minor scales and chords. Check out the transcript below.
You’ll find links to ear training exercises and warm-ups in the minor scale. All comments are mine unless otherwise noted. Participant’s comments are in italic.
My Discord server is open to ALL singers. Here’s the link: https://discord.gg/XTWHcCu Join the discussion!
[11:00 AM]Welcome to Office Hours, friends!
Today being Halloween I was thinking we could delve into minor and diminished sounds! I'll post some stuff about that but jump in with your questions!
[11:04 AM]Ok, let's start with some ear training. I'm going to post links to some customized exercises and you can do them along with me.
The first exercise is to distinguish between a major and natural minor scale
[11:05 AM]Just for the purposes of reviewing for those who'd like it after the fact: the natural minor has a flatted 3rd, 6th and 7th both up and down the scale
[11:05 AM]Here's the link to the exercise: https://www.musictheory.net/exercises/ear-scale/8yybyyngneyyyy
[11:06 AM]Do a bunch and then we'll make it harder
Using the same link above, I've added the harmonic minor scale.
[11:10 AM]It's important to get answers wrong here so that you can really hone in on what's different, aurally, between the natural and the harmonic
[11:12 AM]The main difference is that the harmonic adds a leading tone. This short YouTube video does a good job explaining why we want a leading tone, what it is and how it sounds:\
[11:16 AM]You can play the example in the exercise as many times as you want before choosing the answer. After listening to it once, try challenging yourself and singing along before selecting your answer.
Depending on the range you may need to sing an octave lower or higher for it to feel comfy.
[11:17 AM]Try singing each pitch on a "da" or a "la", or you could lip trill the whole thing
[11:20 AM]While you're singing, here are some tips on identification:
[11:21 AM] 1) The main indicator for whether a scale is categorized as major or minor is the 3rd note in the scale. Either the 3rd has that recognizable "lift" that makes it major, or the 3rd feels "depressed", or lowered, which makes it a type of minor scale.
2) There is another type of minor scale taught in music school and that's the melodic minor. This scale is different going up than it is going down. This scale is not quite as important for singers to memorize. When you're practicing an instrument besides singing, or you're working on composition, then you'll likely need to remember your harmonic scale, but since we're only singing today, we'll skip it.
[11:25 AM]Let's move onto chords. Chord types are SUPER important to singers. All of our sung notes relate in some way to the overall harmony occurring in that moment. Being able to quickly identify common chord types will help you sing more in tune, learn songs more quickly, and will help you to melodically vary a song.
[11:26 AM]Let's start with identifying either the major triad or the minor with this exercise: https://www.musictheory.net/exercises/ear-chord/dyyybyyngneyyyy
[11:26 AM]Triad means there are three notes in the chord: the root, the 3rd and the 5th.
[11:27 AM]In minor chords, just like in the minor scale, the 3rd is flatted, a.k.a. lowered by a half step.
[11:27 AM]See how you do. I'll make it more challenging in a minute.
[11:28 AM]For an extra challenge, see if you can sing all three pitches being played in the chord. Even if you just get one pitch matched you're doing great!
I tend to hear the 5th, the highest pitch, most strongly so sometimes it's easier for me to start high and sing the chord descending.
[11:30 AM]Try it both ways!
[11:31 AM]I just added the diminished chord to the exercise. Hit refresh and you should see it.
[11:32 AM]The diminished chord sounds extra crunchy. It also sounds more like it belongs in a horror movie. Not only is thee 3rd flatted, as in the minor triad, but the 5th is as well. This means we have two stacked minor thirds, or you could think about it as the notes all being much closer together. They're kind of smashed together harmonically and it sounds like that.
Definitely challenge yourself to find the notes in the diminished chord even if you need to hit the play button 20x!
[A] I really really need to work on this. I can't figure out the notes and I'm having a hard time just telling major from minor.
[11:38 AM] It's hard work! Initially the brain kind of blurs all the sounds together - it's trying to figure out which neural pathway this information belongs in.
[11:38 AM]Go back to singing any note at all that you hear. The brain wants any identifiable information. It'll start to parse it out after some repetition (like maybe over several months).
[11:38 AM]I just added one more chord - the dominant 7th!
[J] I get it if I sing the first note and the last one. okay now to the 7th.
[11:39 AM] Imagine that all chords types have their own unique color and personality. However, both the diminished chord and the dominant 7th both inherently contain tension.
[11:39 AM]We need a little tension in every song in order to keep things interesting and the dominant 7th is the most common type of tension chord you'll encounter.
[11:40 AM]The entire 12-bar blues form is comprised of dominant 7th chords. You may hear it as sounding "bluesey" and that would be accurate.
[11:41 AM]It's also commonly used in country, pop and folk music. It's often thrown in right at the end of a verse or a chorus. The dominant 7th chord really, really, really wants to bring us back to our home base major triad.
[11:43 AM]In this exercise the dominant 7th is out of context so it may not sound like a tension chord leading to a resolution, but when you're working on your own songs look and listen for indications that a dominant 7th is happening. There's a 99.9% chance any song you're singing has a dominant 7th chord - that's why it's "dominant".
[11:44 AM]A final note on the dominant 7th is that it has 4 chord tones rather than 3. The 7th chord is NOT a triad. The chord tones, in order of scale degrees, are: root, 3rd, 5th and 7th.
[11:44 AM]There are a bunch of different types of 7th chords (and that's why jazz sounds like jazz), but the dominant is dominant for a reason
These links are permanent. You can access them at any time and work on your ear training.
[11:46 AM] Now I'm going to try out some vocal exercises that are in minor scales. Let's see how they go. It will show the Spotify track I'm playing next to my name in the top right hand corner.
[A] When I was identifying major vs minor chords, I was trying to key off of whether a chord sounded "sad." Sometimes if there were two major chords in a row, I would mis-identify the second as minor. Is it possible for a major chord to sound sad or ominous depending on the major chord it follows? Or is that just in my head?
[11:53 AM] Yes @A ! the major chord has a major third and then minor 3rd stacked above that (the distance between the 3rd and the 5th in the major scale is minor 3rd interval). So lots of people hear that upper minor 3rd in the major triad and it has that "sad" sound to them.
[11:54 AM]That's why the "sad" vs "happy" method is good as an entry point for hearing the difference between major and minor but isn't really reliable.
[11:54 AM]I like to think of the chords as having their own complex personalities that I'm trying to learn and recognize. That helps me some.
[11:56 AM]Here's the link to the first minor scale exercise I did on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/track/1rvhgkeZF0KfThRRYvxzAs?si=jQUN0lvoR22nEV3oKP2ABQ
[11:56 AM]It's a good run of doing the scale up and down while modulating on the keyboard. I recommend.
[11:57 AM]I'm working on a chromatic scale exercise. The chromatic scale is particularly Halloween-ey sounding!
I recommend singing each note on a "da" or 'la" or "va"
[12:00 PM]Here's the scale exercise album that has the chromatic exercise as the first one: https://open.spotify.com/track/1rvhgkeZF0KfThRRYvxzAs?si=jQUN0lvoR22nEV3oKP2ABQ
[12:00 PM] That’s it for today. Thanks for hanging with me today! I hope you all have a spooooooooky Halloween