(Actually, for me, it would be cool to find out what "minor key tonality" means.)
There are websites that will explain basic music theory to you.
Basic Music Theory: Lesson 1
Laptop music blows.
I never really got into Pandora for the same reason.
My solution:
First, get a Squeezebox:
http://www.slimdevices.com/index.html
Second, use it to check out the thousands of free or mostly-free (very cheap) Internet radio stations out there. I like the Live365 collections, or Radioio, both of which have plenty of 128k streams. But there are many completely free stations too.
Third, listen to the stations that generally present the kind of music you like. When you hear a song you *really* like, google the group and consider ordering the CD.
I've used this approach for the last year and a half now, and I really, really like all the new music I'm getting -- I'm talking literally hundreds of new CDs.
what if your important quality is really clever lyrics?
I'll put in that I've found Pandora to be an utterly irreplaceable path back into listening to things outside my already extant (and rather small) MP3 collection. On the other hand, my taste in music is amazingly narrow and rather plebeian in its own way, so perhaps Pandora is well suited to feed me more of the same and have me be happy about.
It does require one to be willing to vote down on a lot of stuff, though.
It turns out the music I like sounds an awful lot like the music I hate
It's all very simple: fractals and long tails. If we could only get rid of the fractals and the long tails, the world would work fairly decently.
Minor keys have a flat 3rd in the scale and major keys have a major 3rd. But that's pretty much meaningless in the absence of recorded examples. Minor keys are usually 'sad' sounding, at the risk of pointing out the totally obvious.
Let's not lord over Ogged too egregiously. I suspect that he's laying a trap for us.
Some music systems have a fractal screen which filters out the long tails so that everything sounds the same. Usually it sounds like the stuff you don't like, though.
I've rarely had that problem with Pandora. My experience is more like NBarnes, and I'm v. grateful for discovering it.
Listen to http://www.wfmu.org That will expose you to new music.
WFMU will also expose you to new "music". Try the Professor Dum Dum show.
Hey Willy, do you know what's happening with Jova and Belinda of "Greasy Kid Stuff"? That was my favorite show ever. I sort of thought they were taking a break from broadcasting and coming back -- are they gone for good?
Minor keys have a flat 3rd in the scale
Also 6th and 7th right? Or are there other minor keys besides the one I know? -- I'm totally not up on music theory, I know if I play a major scale with just a flat 3rd it sounds kind of groovy but I did not know that was a "key" let alone a "minor key".
... Is this something to do with "modes"?
re: 13
Yeah, depending on the scale.
There are loads of minor scales or modes that sound minor-ish. Melodic minor, harmonic minor (no flat 7, for example), natural minor, the dorian mode, and so on.
It's the minor 3rd interval -- e.g. from C to Eb -- that's characteristic of 'minor' chords, though and which has the distinctive minor sound.
Just to expand on ttaM's comment:
Natural minor scale: flat 3, 6, 7 (from the major scale)
But with the flat 7, you don't get the really powerful cadence from V-i, the chord based on the fifth of the scale moving to the chord based on the 1st, or tonic. (Upper case roman numerals: major; lower-case: minor chords.) Since the v chord is made up of scale degrees 5 7 2, a flat 7 means that 7 and 1 are not a half-step apart, so 7 doesn't function as a leading tone. (Also it makes the chord minor, so it's v instead of V.) This makes the v-i a lot less interesting. We want that nice resolution, so,
Harmonic minor: flat 3, 6 only. (7 back up to where it was, so V is a nice major chord that moves strongly to I or i as the case may be.)
But that gives you the unacceptably persian-sounding augmented second between 6 and 7, so
Melodic minor scale: only flat 3 on the way up, flat 3, 6, 7 on the way down.
Is it recently that Pandora has started including ads? I fired up my "upbeat pop" station yesterday, and some woman started talking to be about McDonald's cheeseburgers.
but major key with men's.
Oh, Schenkerian analysis reveals that you're gay, Ogged. Thought you should know.
And blues is in an entirely different system, with various notes, especially the third, flatter than the piano note.
And Saracens also have a quarter tone and a three-quarter tone.
And....
... and phrygian dominant/harmonic minor sounds in gypsy music, and so on.
Even in 30s swing you'll get the use of both the minor and the major 3rd together when soloing over dominant chords.
What artists or songs did you try, Ogged? My one blues station is a little uneven, but never bad.
Zidane y va marquer!
skype:?chat&id=%23davidweman%2F%24matthewjturner%3B3297f325f423df84
Fuck.
Zidane being awesome.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_zZYRH0bdwc
Vas-y Zizou! He attacks out of nowhere!
Oddly enough, probably 1/2 of the new music I've discovered over the past few years comes from Fresh Air and Conan O'Brien. Another quarter comes from pandora, even if Ogged's point is more or less true.
But I'm someone who tends to get really obsessive about a small number of bands rather than dabbling in hundreds. I suspect that's probably relevant somehow.
CA:
I believe "Greasy Kid Stuff" is gone forever. Perhaps it has something to do with Hova and Belinda's children. I'm not sure though.
Professor Dum Dum is great. As was Kenny G's Anal Magic show and OCDJ's show.
One of the advantages that I've found about Pandora is that I can simply tell it what songs I really liked and it'll just take my word for it without wanting to hear 'words' and 'phrases' that would 'describe' the sounds I like. My pop / rock vocabulary is terrifyingly limited (though much better than before I started spending time browsing through Pandora's backend and plugging terms I didn't know into Wikipedia), so it's hard sometimes for me to articulate what I like other than, 'I like that one song.' Pandora lets me take 'I like that one song' and elaborate on it until I have a bunch of songs that I like. And a lot that I'm meh about, and a few that I dislike, but the bad parts are easily remedied.
Willy, this page, which seems kind of up-to-date, says GKS is 94.7 in Portland on Saturday mornings, and can be streamed live from 947.fm.
16. bass players aren't supposed to talk about music theory, you know.
You seem to be right, CA. So I guess they moved to Portland?
One of my coworkers loved that show; I hated it.
Huh, I like that show a whole lot. I'll be eternally grateful to Hova for introducing me to The Vestibules' "Bulbous Bouffant", which has become an integral portion of my consciousness. And, I heard plenty other stuff on their show that I enjoyed.
I like: OCDJ, Kenny G, Trouble, Fabio, small change, Mike Lupica, Bethany Ryker, Dave Mandl, and Doug Schulkind. They all have really great shows. OCDJ and small change are mostly electronic. Ryker, Mandl, and Fabio are sort of contemporary classical and other weird instrumentals. Schulkind is jazz. Trouble and Lupica are mostly rock.
The other funny thing is that the town I grew up in seems to be the town you live in now.
If you're too lazy to create your own Pandora stations, check out this collection.
http://pandorastations.crispynews.com
the town I grew up in seems to be the town you live in now
The southernmost of the Oranges?