Often, that moment where you feel that something catchy has happened is a case where the bluesy minor mode has peeked its head into a song in major. Nirvana’s album Nevermind is drenched in it. This article on “Old Town Road”, we mentioned that mixing a bit of minor into a major key was a characteristic sound of early-1990s alt-rock. Although the effect in rock isn’t quite the same, the concept still resonates in our ears. Mixture - when a composition in a major key borrows a chord from the minor mode, or vice versa. Major/minor mixture in alternative rockĬlassical music theory includes the notion of

Put those together, and you get a song that contains sharp, attention-grabbing major/minor contrasts yet retains coherence. Often the blues influence manifests as minor-key tonality, and the non-blues influence results in major-key tonality.

And one convenient technique involves contrasting blues-influenced harmony with harmony that stems from other influences - classical music, the harmony used in pre-rock 20th-century pop, and so on. Sometimes rock songs create hooks by juxtaposing elements from different influences, using contrast and surprise to make music catchy. That’s another common way to emulate a blues note. In the key of G, those notes would be B ♭ and B ♮, and that might sound something like this:Ĭlarinet comes in with the tune, notice that tune contains an A ♮ with a grace note A ♭. On a piano, this is often expressed by playing both of those notes simultaneously, or sliding between them. Sometimes it lies between the major second and the minor third, but it spends most of its time between the minor and major thirds. Once again, people don’t quite agree on what this third is, except that its pitch is flexible, roaming in the space between a major third and a major second. Briefly, blue notes are pitches that lie ambiguously between two pitches of the European twelve-note scale. People do agree on at least one thing: theīlue note is a defining feature of the blues. (See the same article for a nice summary of many other theories.) In this article, Ethan Hein proposes the idea of a blues tonality. Although I think this idea is somewhat reflected in actual blues and blues-influenced music, I’m not convinced that such music uses these two scales distinctly, and not everyone else is either. Some people distinguish major and minor blues scales, tying them to two commonly used pentatonic scales. Although everyone knows the blues when they hear it, the style defies theorists’ efforts to define it. The musical language of the blues has a completely different sense of major and minor modes than classical music. Part of why rock is so different from classical music is that the blues is so different, drawn from sources remote from Western Europe.

a different technique used by 1990s Britpop bands.

a technique American alt-rock bands used in the 1990s to mix minor chords into songs in major keys.

Let’s explore! Minor-major conflicts in rockīefore we explore the major-minor conflict in “Say It Ain’t So,” let’s get some vital context in three areas:

Putting on our best analyst hat: might this dissonance kick off a journey, a story that’s traced throughout the song?.

Is this chord a G major, a G minor, or something else?.So I had to ask myself - what is Cuomo doing here? And in 1995, a few months after “Say It Ain’t So” was Suppressing his experience with more complex music. In interviews, he talks about how starting Weezer meant He began as a metal guitarist who loved complex instrumental music. But Rivers Cuomo was no stranger to more elaborate music. Weezer is known for relatively straightforward power pop songs any complexity tends to lie in the attitude and cultural meaning, not the notes. And I meant it.” It’s as if he’s asking us to notice that this chord carries extra meaning. The charming video, he smiles and looks proud as he plays this atypical bit, as if he’s saying, “Yeah, I just did that.

E aural training cadence journeys