Quote Originally Posted by auditory hallucinations
yeh that's cool, though i really want to get to a point where i understand what sounds good and why, you know what i mean?

the way i understand it, if you have a chord sustaining for a length of time, say 4 bars, then in those 4 bars all the notes have to fit within the chord (ok maybe when you are more advanced you can use notes that don't fit, but for my understanding at the moment they do!)

but then if you have another chord play after, then you'd need a whole lot of new notes that would fit with the new chord. yeh there might be some notes that overlap...but man it just seems a lot of hard work and pretty confusing!

and scales, man what are they all about??? how many scales can you use in the one track? is it just the one, or can you combine them? if you combine then, can you overlap them etc - see it's these kind of questions, slightly out of the box, that the books and stuff don't tell you.

at the moment my brain just sees the infinite in it - you know, it seems unbounded. but there must be limits on what you can do - when i know those limits, i can start to understand how to work with them
It's not just about chords.

For example... the chord of C Major is just three notes (C, E, G), but there are 8 notes in the key of C (C, D, E, F, G, A, B, C - no sharps or flats)... all of which form the scale of C Major, so you can play any of these notes and they will sound ok next to a C Major chord. But you can break these rules to dramatic effect.

However, it would be a boring piece of music that only used C Major, so you need chord changes. Changes sound more natual from certain chords to their "tonics", but again you can break these rules for effect.

This is all just what I remember from learning instruments when I was younger. I haven't really looked at Music Theory in ages. IMHO Electronica and Techno are much more interesting when rules are broken, if not downright ignored!