After you’ve had a little practice, it’s easy to add chords to any melody. You just have to play the melody with your right … and hit the chords with your left hand. It’s as simple as that. And this combination of notes makes our music sound a lot more interesting. But things get even more

The nice thing about chords is that they use the same 12 notes we all know and love. Sure … we have to play those notes together in a chord … instead of only one at a time. But there’s nothing too special about that. In fact, you might even say that chords are easier to play

Has anybody noticed how cheap black-and-white TVs are these days? It’s crazy. A new color TV can cost thousands of dollars (USD). But you can get an excellent black-and-white set for … well, for nothing, actually. Because nobody sells that stuff anymore. I mean, who would by a black-and-white television? Unless they were living in the 1950s.

Now that we know how to play music’s most popular chord—the major triad—let’s see it in action, shall we? In our next song, we’ll focus on hitting each major chord with the left hand … while playing the melody line with the right hand. In music notation, we show this by splitting the bass staff and

Wow … have you seen Muse’s new album cover for “The Resistance”? The record came out last September. And the artwork is crizazy. (In fact, it kind of reminds me of Escher.) I haven’t heard any of the songs yet … but the cover art gets an A+ in my opinion. Check it out…. Seriously, this is

I may have mentioned this before … but M.C. Escher was a genius. Seriously, it’s like he had some kind of x-ray vision that let him see things in a totally unique way. When he looked at the world, he definitely saw it as a bunch of patterns. I mean, how else could someone draw a

Now that we know how to illustrate time (or “duration”) in music, we can play anything we’d like. After all, music is really about two basic things: Pitch (that is, the 12 notes of the chromatic scale), and Duration (like whole notes, half notes, quarter notes, etc.) All we have to do is combine these

I think you’d be lying if you said you don’t have a favorite holiday. I mean, everybody has a favorite holiday, right? Some people like St. Patrick’s Day. And others prefer New Year’s. But it seems like most people (by far) favor x-mas. Maybe it’s all the presents. Or it could be because the very best songs

Color is everywhere. And every day, we’re surrounded by a full spectrum of blues, greens, reds, yellows, and so on. Color is what makes life interesting. And frankly, it just looks cool. Which is probably why artists love using color in their projects. Picasso was a fan of combining different colors and shapes. And so was

Music is cool because we can always come up with new and interesting patterns. For example, we’ve already seen how the major scale can be rearranged into other note patterns … like the minor scale, pentatonic scale, and blues scale. It turns out that music is simple because it’s all just a bunch of notes … in different combinations …