Welcome To the Bible of Arrangement

Today the subject is:

Blues, Harmonies, Scales, Grids

Foreword: For a topic on arrangement on electronic music, this must seems you a little bit... offset. In fact, it doesn't. Majority of all Electronic Music is Based on Jazz. Jazz is himself a crossover between Savant music (Impressionism + Cake Walk), Blues and Folk. Jazz is a perfect Fusion of the old western/occidental musical theory (savant music + popular Music) with Old Eastern/Oriental musical theory (where the distinction between Savant and Popular doesn't exist as much as the west). Jazz is almost the Perfect genre of music in the musical theory , because it's just the fusion of everything, trying to take the best essences of all thoses genres, sometimes with succes, sometimes... less #JazzFusionLMAO . So why do we begin with Blues ? We can't talk about the jazz without talking of his origin, because jazz is just omagad fuckin' complex + I try to gives you the weapons to USE those theory in context of your music, not learn it just to learn something. So we will see all the styles and the things that those genres have gave to the Jazz, trying to take the essential. Next, we will see finally the jazz and the transmission of it to the electronic music: Jazz is far the biggest influence of Electro, (I count the sub genres of the jazz as jazz, like funk dawg). But now, lets' begin.

Really Quick Story/Must Know of the Blues

Blues is one of the fundamental genre of America With Folk (Into folk, I inclue Country too). It's based on a system called Progression, who can give a great liberty to a voice or a premiere instrument. There is many type of blues in america, it's basically a very regionalist music, there's little or big differences between blues of each town, each states (I don't know them by heart): There's some blues who're played in the natural scale, in the Blues Scale, In the Mix Major/Minor Scale... We will see all of them and what's behind this terms later. In the 40's, even before, Blues began to get recognized nationally and internationally, he began slowly to get electrified, that's, somewhere, the birth of the Electronic Music, when we just dropped the acoustic guitars for electric guitars, with distortion on them. This Electrified Blues is Called Rythm"n"Blues, in fact, that's rocknroll, the only difference is that rock singers are white and R&B singers are black, and in a time of segregation... there is some minor difference between the R&B and the R&R, but not enough to give the birth of rock to the rock'n'roll and not to Rythm'n'blues, who came before rock'n'roll. Modern Blues is proto-rock, as we know it today.

Blues artists are: B.B King, Robert Johnson, Muddy Watters, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Howlin' Wolf...

Theory: Chord Progression in Blues, what is a Grid/ Chord Progression ?

C.Progression is the KEY of many genres and... Electro have some rests of C.progression thinking.

The Chords progression/Grid thinking is opposed to the classical thinking of composition. In classical organisation of composition, we will do leitmotivs, some chorus, some verse... the difference between what we call Gird is the change of the chords, who can appear in a intro, in a pre-break, in a chorus... in a Classical vision of music, we will see the track as a line, in a Grid of blues/progression of blues, we will see the track as a repetition of loops, composed of some chords.

For Exemple, here is a Blues Chord Progression in E:

/Em/Em/Am/Em/ /Bm/Am/Em/Bm/

Those chords are repeated till the end of the song, the originality and the personality of the track will be in the manner to interpret the rhythm, the chords (who can be 2, 6, 7, 9thized), the bass, the melody... and other complex things that we will see in the future. ALL blues in E use those Chords in the same place, ALL of them. The difference is how to play them, and that's a big schism with the Classical vision of music. This's, somewhere, the invention of the loop sample lol.