101 music theory terms you should know

This video is sponsored by my new music theory course that's available right now at artmaster.com. Music theory is effectively a language that musicians can use to communicate ideas to each other and what's the best way to get better at speaking a language? Expanding your vocabulary. So today we're going to look at 101 music theory terms starting with conjunct. If a melody is conjunct it moves by step up and down the scale. With a little help from my friends has a conjunct melody. The opposite of conjunct is disjunct. A melody that doesn't take steps up and down the scale but instead takes leaps. For example the melody of here there and everywhere is disjunct. Now just a moment ago we mentioned the word scale. A scale is a set of notes usually ordered by lowest to highest in pitch which we group together to evoke a certain sound. Most scales in western music are built from seven different notes separated by a series of tones and semitones. A semitone is the smallest distance between any two notes in typical western music. For example between B and C is a semitone or between C and C sharp is also a semitone. But of course semi means half so a semitone is half of a tone. A tone effectively being two semitones. The interval for example between C and D or B flat and C that's a tone. Now a moment ago when I was talking about tones and semitones I used the word interval. An interval is the relative space between two pitches. For example the interval between the note C and the next note named C in the scale is an octave or the interval between the note C and the note G above it is a perfect fifth. Different intervals have different levels of consonance and dissonance. If an interval is consonant like the perfect fifth it sounds harmonious to us. The two notes sort of marry together into this very pleasing sound. But if an interval is dissonant like a tritone for example the two notes clash together making our ears yearn for a resolution. And if you're wondering the reason that a tritone is called a tritone is because it's literally three tones. If we take intervals like the tritone or the perfect fifth and we stack them up we wind up with what's called a chord. A chord is three or more notes played together to create a sense of harmony. The most common type of chord is a triad, a three note chord. A major chord is an example of a triad and as we can see it's just a stack of intervals. A major third and then a minor third on top. Another common type of triad is the minor triad or minor chord which is also a stack of major and minor thirds but the other way around. This time the minor third is on the bottom. Chords are an example of harmony when notes are played together to create a sense of movement or colour and most harmony in western music is built by stacking thirds in what's called tertiary harmony. Tertiary obviously meaning third. We can alternatively though have quartal harmony chords built from fourths rather than thirds. For example we can see some quartal harmony in Herbie Hancock's Maiden Voyage. Now if we take a chord and rather than playing the notes all at once we play them one after another that's called an arpeggio. For example the song Clocks by Coldplay opens with these arpeggios played on the piano. These arpeggiated chords are forming the opening riff of this song, the opening piano riff. A riff is a short repeated melodic phrase used throughout a song and of course when I say melodic I mean it's like a melody, it's a short melody. Melody unlike harmony is notes played in order resulting in what you might call a tune or something you could hum along to. Now the term riff is quite closely associated with pop and rock music. The classical equivalent of the word riff would probably be ostinato. An ostinato is a repeating pattern or phrase that sort of underpins a piece of music. For example the iconic 5-4 marching ostinato from Gustav Holst's Mars. A motif is a short reoccurring phrase or idea that's used almost as a building block to a melody. Perhaps the most famous motif of all time is... Now as I said motifs are often treated like building blocks, small fragments of a melody that we can then adapt to create a full melody and one way that we can adapt the motif is with sequence. Sequence is when we repeat a motif but either at a higher or lower pitch to where we previously heard it. For example... We could also diminish the motif. To diminish a motif or a melody is to cut all of the note values in half like this... But of course as you might be aware diminish can mean more than just this in music. Diminish is one of those terms that has several uses in music. We just saw what diminishing a melody looks like or what we can call diminution but we can also diminish an interval. If we took our fifth interval, our perfect fifth, and lowered the top note, in this example lowered G down to G flat, we have now got a diminished fifth. Diminished of course meaning to make smaller. So in the case of the melody we were making the note value smaller and in the case of the fifth we were making the interval smaller. We can also have a diminished chord or a diminished triad. This is a chord that's built from a diminished fifth interval. A similar musical term is augmented. Augment of course meaning the opposite of diminish to make larger. Just like with diminish we can have an augmented melody or an augmented phrase by doubling the note value, in other words making the melody last twice as long. We can have an augmented fifth and just like with diminished we can have an augmented chord or an augmented triad. Another musical term that has various different applications is inversion. If we're talking in terms of melodies and motifs we can invert a motif by effectively flipping it upside down, the same intervals but just going in the opposite direction. So that's inverting a melody but we can also invert a chord. To invert a chord we take its lowest note and we place it at the top instead, giving us the same three notes and thus the same chord but with a different note at the bottom which effectively changes its character. And yet another musical term that has various different meanings is modulation. If you're thinking more in terms of music production then modulation actually refers to things like a chorus effect or a phaser but in music theory a modulation effectively means a key change moving from one key to another and the most effective and simple way to do this to modulate from one key to another is using a cadence. A cadence is like a short chord progression or a short phrase that acts to resolve or complete a musical sentence. The most common type of cadence is a authentic cadence or what the British call a perfect cadence. The movement from the fifth chord of the key, the dominant chord, to the first chord of the key, the tonic chord. If we wanted to modulate for example from the key of C to the key of D all we really have to do is play an authentic cadence in that destination key of D major like this. So here we have modulated from the key of C to the key of D. However if we didn't want to fully modulate, fully change key and instead just wanted to dip our toe in another key before returning back home we could use what's called tonicization. Tonicization is when we treat a chord that's not the tonic chord as if it is the tonic chord effectively creating a very brief key change or modulation. For example here Bach temporarily treats the D chord here as the tonic chord as a point of resolution despite us being in the key of G but this is only a tonicization not a modulation because immediately after this point of resolution on the D chord we continue back in the key of G major. Tonicizations are achieved by using a secondary dominant chord. We mentioned before that the dominant chord is the fifth chord of the key while the secondary dominant is the fifth chord of one of the other chords in the key. So to achieve his tonicization here Bach has used the dominant chord of the D major chord the fifth chord of D major which is A major. So by using it here he temporarily treats the D chord like the tonic. Recently I've made a music theory course with Artmaster here in Prague and I think it's a fantastic course for anybody who wants to learn music theory from the ground up. We go from the absolute beginning of music theory and then build it up learning about chords, chord progressions, different scales, the beginnings of reading notation, time signatures. If you've ever been watching one of my videos and you think wait a minute what was that you just said? This is the course for you it's a brilliant way to lay that foundation so you can learn more and more about music theory. If you're interested do check out the links down below in the description. So that's modulation and tonicization but what if we wanted to change the key of a piece of music before we even started playing it? Perhaps the original version is in a key too high for us to sing and we want to lower the key. Well that's referred to as transposing, rewriting the music out in a different key. Now a word I've been using a lot so far but not actually explained is key. What is a key? Well the key of a piece of music is effectively its gravitational centre. Where does the music want to resolve back to? If music's in the key of C major then it has a tendency to want to resolve back to the note C, to the tonic note. And when we play music that just stays within the key it's described as diatonic. Diatonic means to play within the key. If we chose instead to play outside of the key well now we would be playing chromatically. The note Gb for example in the key of C is a chromatic note, it doesn't belong in the key. And if we wanted to write this down on a piece of sheet music we would write it like this with a little flat symbol before the G to indicate that this is not the normal G that's in the key, it's a chromatic note. And this little flat here is an example of an accidental. An accidental is when during the course of a piece of music we want to use a chromatic note so we use either a flat, sharp or natural symbol like this to indicate that that note will not be within the normal key or scale. Now we notated our note here as Gb but we could have alternatively notated it as F sharp. Both Gb and F sharp are actually the same pitch, the same key on our piano. These two notes are what we refer to as enharmonic, effectively two different spellings, two different names of the same pitch. Now Gb in the context of C is what we can refer to as a blue note, particularly if we're playing jazz or rock or blues music, using some chromatic notes from outside of the scale can give it a bluesy flavour, that sort of dissonant yet satisfying sound. And these notes are referred to as blue notes. We might throw a blue note into a lick. A lick is a short melodic phrase used as a building block of a larger melody or solo and the term lick is closely associated with blues, rock and jazz music. Now there are certain music theory terms that only really get used in jazz. For example if we were sat at the piano playing chords accompanying the saxophone player as he soloed, well we would be comping, comping being slang for accompanying. We might be comping just by going back and forth between two chords in what we could call a vamp. A vamp is a repeated short chord progression often played on an indefinite loop until we get a cue from someone else to move to the next section of the music. Or we might instead be comping by going through the changes. The changes are the chord changes of the piece of music we're playing. When we improvise a solo in jazz music we usually do it over the chord changes of the head. The head is the main melody of the jazz standard that we're playing. Many jazz songs are in what's called a head arrangement where we open by playing a famous and recognizable tune and then we go through the chord changes of that tune again but instead of playing the recognizable melody we instead have each band member take turns improvising a solo over those changes. Now something that's quite common to do in jazz music with a chord progression is to reharmonize it. So you've taken this famous jazz standard but rather than playing the chords that were used in the original version you swap some of those chords, you reharmonize the melody giving it a different quality. A common way to reharmonize in jazz music is what's called a tritone substitution. A tritone substitution is when we substitute or swap out one of the chords for the same chord a tritone away. This is most commonly done with the fifth chord of the key so for example in the key of C major we would be substituting our G7 chord for a Db7 chord and what allows this to work is that both those chords G7 and Db7 both contain the same tritone so they both have the same effective resolution back to the tonic chord. Another very important element of jazz music is swing. Swing is when the notes in the rhythm aren't lasting for identical periods of time. When a rhythm does feature notes that are all identical in length this is called straight. In practice different musicians will play around with the timing of the rhythm to get different swing feels but one type of swing is what we call a shuffle. A shuffle is where the eighth notes are not straight anymore but instead they are the first and last notes of a triplet giving us this rolling shuffling sound. A triplet is where we have three notes in the space where we would usually have two notes. A triplet is an example of a tuplet. A tuplet is when we're playing more or less notes in a space that we would usually have. For example if we played five notes in a space where we would usually only have four notes or that's a quintuplet or if we played seven notes in the space where we normally would only have four notes we now have a septuplet. However the triplet is by far the most common type of tuplet that you'll encounter. If we have music that's based on a triplet feel throughout then we can describe that music as having a compound time signature. A compound time signature is where each beat of the bar is effectively a dotted quarter note i.e we have three eighth notes or the equivalent of a triplet on each beat of the bar giving the music that shuffling sound. 6 8 and 12 8 are examples of compound time signatures. Now a time signature is the amount of beats we have in each bar of the music and can also be described as a meter and of course a bar is a small unit of music. For example in the time signature of 4 4 which is the most common time signature that we'll encounter each bar of the music has four beats in it. 4 4 is such a common choice of time signature that it's sometimes actually just referred to as common time and can be symbolized by the c symbol rather than the full 4 4 symbol. We can also have what's called cut time which is symbolized by a c with a line through it and is the equivalent of 2 2 time so the same as 4 4 really but rather than feeling each quarter note in the bar as our prevailing beat as the thing we tap our foot to we're instead latching on to two half notes each bar. The half note is the beat that we're perceiving. Now our time signature sits on these five horizontal lines what are called the stave or the staff. The lines and spaces on this stave represent different notes different pitches and we know which pitches they represent by looking at the clef. If we have a treble clef for example we know that the pitches in the spaces of the stave will be f a c e like that and that the pitches on the lines will be e g b d and f. Now let's talk about some other symbols that we might encounter on notation for example this symbol which is called a simile. The word simile means the same so a simile symbol in music means that we should play the same thing that happened in the previous bar. This symbol is a fermata and it means that we should hesitate on that note the performer should drag that note out. The tempo of a piece of music is the speed at which we play it. The tempo will be written on the piece of music using a tempo mark like this where it tells us the bpm how many beats we should play per minute. If a piece of music is not played at a fixed tempo it's said to be in free time. Rubato is when a piece of music is largely in a fixed tempo but the performer allows the tempo to swell to speed up and slow down expressively which is a very common thing to do in classical music. Now even if a piece of music isn't using rubato and is instead in a fixed tempo consistent tempo we might want that piece of music to slow down at the end to give it a nice sense of conclusion and this can be described with two different terms ritardando which means to slow down usually to then stop or rallentando which also means to slow down and is often also used at the end of a phrase or a piece of music. Now when we have notes on the piece of notation we'll often have different symbols telling us how exactly we should play those notes, what articulation we should use. For example if we have a dot above or below the note head then we should play that note staccato meaning to play it with a short snappy rhythm preventing the notes from ringing after we've played them or we might have the opposite of staccato we might want to be playing it legato where we're sort of slurring each note into the next so you can't really tell where one ends and the next begins this is indicated with a line like this a slur line we might want to accent a certain note to show that that note has rhythmic importance we might also get these little notes before the main notes these are called grace notes a very brief grace note is referred to as an acciaccatura this is a note perhaps only a semitone or a tone away from the true destination note to add a little bit of colour and tension before we get the main note this type of grace note will be depicted by a small note with a line through it a longer grace note is what's referred to as an appoggiatura this grace note is held longer to create a suspension the appoggiatura sits on a non-chord note a note that's not in the chord and then resolves onto the true melody note which is in the chord creating a sense of tension and release appoggiaturas won't always be notated as little grace notes they'll sometimes be notated in normal notes an example of an appoggiatura is the melody from yesterday where we open on a non-chord note and then resolve down onto the chord note grace notes are examples of ornaments small decorative additions to the main melody that are sometimes notated and sometimes added at the performer's own discretion a common type of ornament is a trill a quick pivoting back and forth between the main melody note and an adjacent note and this trill won't be notated out note for note we'll just have this symbol here to indicate to the performer that they should perform a trill or we might have a turn a turn is asking us to start by playing the note that is actually notated then play a note one above in the scale return to the main melody note then play a note below in the scale and then once again return to the main melody note this is done in very quick succession creating a little decorative turn of the note and just like the trill this isn't notated out it's instead indicated with this symbol another type of ornament is a mordant this is like a half version of a turn in an upper mordant we play the note that's notated then quickly go up one note and then return to the note that was notated and in a lower mordant we do the opposite we play the notated note go down one note and return back to the notated note all so quickly that we don't really perceive the individual notes we just hear this decorative ornament effect a word i've used a lot so far but not actually defined is rhythm rhythm is pitches or notes played in time the relative time between the different notes so now let's have a look at some other rhythm related music theory terms for example a flam a flam is when we get two quick notes usually on a percussion instrument in quick succession so close to each other that we're almost perceiving them as one note this is a common thing to do for example on a snare drum this is a single hit on a snare drum and this is a flam on a snare drum a push in music if we push the rhythm of a piece of music is when we effectively land on the next beat of the bar earlier than we should have so for example if we land on this d minor chord not on the main beat not on the downbeat of the bar but instead here we have pushed that beat the downbeat is the first beat of the bar what you might describe as the one and it's described as the downbeat because when a conductor is conducting as their hand or their baton moves downwards towards the floor it's indicating the first beat of the bar the downbeat the offbeats are the weaker beats in the bar for example in 4-4 time beat number two and beat number four are considered offbeats if we emphasize these offbeats using the snare drum of the drum kit this is called a backbeat one of the essential parts to the classic rock drum beat and a skank is a term from reggae and ska music describing a guitar rhythm where we play up strokes of chords on the offbeat if we have a rhythm that actively avoids playing on the main beats of the bar particularly the downbeat we can say that that rhythm is syncopated for example most of the notes of this rhythm don't land on the main beats of the bar meaning that it's syncopated if a melody begins before the downbeat effectively before the first bar of the music it's said to have an anacrusis or a pickup for example the melody of happy birthday has an anacrusis these two opening notes happen before the first downbeat of the song so far i've given definitions for three of the six main elements of music the three that we've looked at so far are harmony melody and rhythm but there are three other key elements to music and one of them is dynamics dynamics is the relative loudness or softness of a piece of on sheet music dynamics are notated using these little f and p symbols f indicating the word forte the italian word for loud and piano meaning soft the italian word for soft and if you're wondering why there's an instrument called a piano if piano means soft well it's because originally when the piano was invented it was called the piano forte an instrument that unlike its predecessor the harpsichord could simultaneously play softly piano and loudly forte piano forte so dynamics is the fourth main element of music the fifth main element of music is timbre timbre is the particular character of a note and can be best described as the difference between a piano playing the note a and a violin playing the exact same note a although both of these instruments are playing the exact same note they sound different and that sound is their timbre the unique characteristics of each instrument the sixth and final fundamental element of music is texture texture is the different layers that a piece of music has the different interacting parts that create the sum of that music the most basic texture we could have is monophonic texture when a piece of music is comprised of simply just one line of music unaccompanied by anything else if we were to add other lines to this music together then we could describe it as polyphonic and if these other lines that we added worked together to create a sense of chords and harmony together we would describe it as homophonic homo meaning the same so these different lines of music despite being separate are acting together to create one cohesive sense of harmony homophonic now let's finish off by just ticking off a few other music theory terms that i haven't covered yet a glissando is when we smoothly move from one note to another without any discernible fringe between the two different notes for example rhapsody in blue by george gershwin opens with this iconic clarinet glissando a very similar idea to a glissando is a portamento portamento is where rather than stepping from one note to the next we sort of glide between the two the difference between portamento and glissando though is whereas glissando is a very deliberate and obvious slide between two notes where we spend an extended period of time between the two notes a portamento is more of an ornamentation a small glide at the end of the note that guides us into the next note so the main duration of that note was not sliding tremolo is when the volume of a note quickly fluctuates creating this sort of fluttering sound this is sometimes achieved for example with a tremolo guitar pedal a term that often gets muddled up with tremolo is vibrato unlike tremolo which is a fluctuation in the volume of the note vibrato is a fluctuation in the pitch of the note creating a similar but different fluttering sound vibrato for example is what you would achieve by using the whammy bar on your guitar and our final music theory term today will be a cappella a cappella means vocal music that's unaccompanied by any other instrument a cappella is literally the italian for in the style of the chapel i.e the sort of music you would sing in a church or chapel and remember to watch out because a cappella is not one word as you sometimes see it written down as it is two words a cappella if you can think of any important terms that i've missed out do leave them in the comments down below and maybe i'll do a follow-up video to this