Type a chord symbol or a scale name and go straight to it, or search tools, glossary terms and every article. Results are ranked by where the words appear.
Tuning & Temperament
Pythagorean tuning builds every interval from pure 3:2 fifths. Here is the seven-note scale it produces, its whole tones and semitones in cents, and the wolf fifth it leaves behind.
Guitar & Fretboard
Every fret is one semitone, so the fretboard is a grid of note names. This covers standard tuning, the landmark frets and a two-week routine for learning the whole neck.
Tuning & Temperament
Twelve equal semitones solve the problem pure intervals create. The cost is small in fifths, large in thirds, and paid by every fixed-pitch instrument.
Guitar & Fretboard
A capo raises every open string by one semitone per fret, so a G shape played at fret 2 sounds in A. This shows how to find the sounding key and how to choose a capo position.
Orchestration
Score for trumpets, horns, trombones and tuba: open vs close voicing, dynamic balance, chorale style and fanfare writing.
Acoustics & Sound
A vibrating string or air column sounds a fundamental and a set of partials at whole-number multiples of it. Here are the first sixteen, their cents, and where they differ from equal temperament.
Acoustics & Sound
Timbre is the shape of a note's spectrum: which partials are present, how strong they are and how the sound begins. Here is why a clarinet, a flute and a piano differ on the same pitch.
Orchestration
Which woodwind doublings blend and which stick out: unisons, octaves, registers, dynamics, and practical balance.
Fundamentals
Middle C is C4 in scientific pitch notation, C3 on some manufacturers' labelling, and MIDI note 60 in every sequencer. The numbering is a convention.
Tuning & Temperament
Quarter-comma meantone, the wolf fifth and the well temperaments in between: what keyboard tuning did to each key before equal temperament settled the argument.
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Tuning & Temperament
A cent is one hundredth of an equal-tempered semitone. Here is the formula, what the common intervals measure in cents, and what a tuner is showing you.
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Guitar & Fretboard
A barre chord is an open chord moved up the neck. The E shape and the A shape are the two to learn first, and each one is built from its open chord by a simple rule of offsets.
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Guitar & Fretboard
CAGED turns five open chords into movable shapes. This explains how the shapes connect, how to name a moved chord from its root string, and how to find one chord in several places.
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Counterpoint
A fugue's opening notes commit the piece to more than a tune. The subject's shape and the answer's adjustment decide what can happen next.
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Ear Training & Practice
Interval recognition comes faster with a method: three intervals tied to a tonic, sung before they are named, and a short daily routine you can keep.
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Guitar & Fretboard
Tab shows strings and frets rather than pitch names, and a chord diagram is a small grid of the same information. This explains both, with an arpeggio you can check against the fretboard.
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Harmony
A sus chord swaps the third of a triad for the second or fourth. Here is what Csus2 and Csus4 contain, why neither is major or minor, and how they resolve.
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Form
Rondo form alternates a returning refrain with contrasting episodes. Learn classical key plans, sonata-rondo hybrids, and why refrains return altered.
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Tuning & Temperament
Pure intervals come from small whole-number ratios, and beating is what stops them sounding pure. What just intonation gives, and what it cannot fix.
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Form
Simple and rounded binary, ABA and da capo: the cadence plans that define each section and how dances grew into art forms.
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Orchestration
The quartet is four registers, not four violins. What each instrument can sustain, where the texture muddies, and which double stops lie under the hand.
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Counterpoint
Species counterpoint isolates one compositional decision at a time. First species isolates the hardest one: how to make two voices sound like two voices.
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Form
Sonata form is a tonal argument, not a set of labelled boxes. What matters is which key you are in, and how the music gets home again.
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Harmony
Parallel fifths, tendency tones, spacing and doubling, read as solutions to one problem: keeping four lines heard as four lines.
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Jazz & Popular Harmony
Shell and rootless voicings keep the third and seventh of each chord and leave room for a bass player. Worked examples use Dm7, G7 and Cmaj7.
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Counterpoint
Strict and free canon, interval and time distance, inversion and crab canons: how canons work and how to write a singable one.
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Harmony
The flat-II chord that darkens minor keys: how the Neapolitan sixth is built, voiced, resolved, and used from Bach to Schubert.
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Harmony
Authentic, half, plagal and deceptive cadences, and the real reason a close sounds strong: what happens in the bass, the top voice and the metre.
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Harmony
The chordal seventh falls, the leading tone rises, and the tritone at the centre of V7 resolves by step. What each diatonic seventh chord is for.
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Jazz & Popular Harmony
Ninths, elevenths and thirteenths are chord tones stacked above the seventh. Which of them fit a chord depends on its quality, and some clash with the third.
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