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

Okay, so this is how chords work … just like scale patterns, chords are totally simple. We use the same 12 notes to make them. And just like before, we label each note using the same number names, or “scale degrees.” Based on these 12 notes, we can create all sorts of cool chords. But

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

So far, we’ve been looking a lot at just notes … that is, which notes to play (pitch) and how long to play them (duration). But we can’t forget about that other basic part of music—silence. You see, all the best musicians will sometimes let their music breathe. And that helps make their songs more

After playing through a couple of songs, we already have a good feel for how music works. And with Color Music, everything is nice and easy. In fact, it’s now so easy to play a melody that it makes me kind of wonder … what’s all the fuss about? Seriously—people make a big deal about how hard music is. And some

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

So … M.C. Escher is—in my opinion—the greatest artist ever. He created some amazing works of art. And every single one of them totally blows my mind. He always made his stuff look so easy. Like it was nothing at all to draw a self-portrait like this: Obviously, the guy was talented. I mean, who wouldn’t

Once you see how note duration works, music becomes a cake walk. In fact, duration symbols can be rearranged into all sorts of patterns, so our options are wide open. We can mix quarter notes and half notes … or combine eighth notes with sixteenth notes … or play just whole notes … etc. The possibilities

So … music is all about time. And that’s why we need a way of showing exactly how long each note should last. In music notation, we can do this by using special duration symbols—which are simple because they basically follow the beat of a song. For example, the song “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” includes four