“This world is huge, and there is so much space for everyone to do something great.”

Americana 'AmerAfroEuroLatin' theory nutshell. Truth be told and in theory too (amazing), that the pentatonic colors in our 'Amer' ~ Native Americana melodies also re-revolutionized a new improvisational and composing paradigm, the next modern jazz, that came about in the late 1950's and forward. It's true, just the same five group of notes, but now in the modern jazz music these ancient notes can be fully supported by stacks of modern tuned up pitches sounded together as arpeggios and you guessed it; chords.

Chords, which with a twist of an interval or two, can easily flip a minor toned motif or melody of traditional Native Americana music to sounding major, and bring the 'spiritual gospel bliss' that has foundationed Americana musics all along now through our collective history, through the joyous songs and stories that have been told in the the major tonality.

'Afro' contributions through our Americana centuries, including both the early blues and spirituals, is in good part with rhythm and syncopation, and form too, as the four bar phrase finds the 'iambic pentameter' rhythms for telling stories in the 12 bar form to the dancer's delight. Afro drumming riffs mixed into the 4/4 'boom boom boom boom' of marching parade musics of the 1880's foundationed the magical swing rhythms, invented in the U.S.A., that is just a joy to create as an artist, a driving rhythm that bring smiles, get toes tappin' and has gotten folks up on the dance floor for the last 100 years or so.

A bit more historically recent in Americana musics is the addition of all things 'Latin', which also centers on time, rhythm and its syncopations, often for creating dance steps and dance forms, which have brought folks of all our melting pot cultures into communities together, in the shared joys of dancing through musical time with the red hot spicy steamy rhythms.

Latin influences also bring the Spanish language into our vocabulary of rhyming words and phrasing of lyrics and melodic ideas, while rhythm players bring claves, timbales, guiro's and lots more to 'motor' the groove along. Language is rhythm too, and mixed into English language rhythms, improvisors find a whole new sense of swing with 'even 1/8's and its influence of the advanced time concepts of 'forward motion' into their lines; aiming ever further and further ahead to the cadential points in their songs.

And all through our first half millennium of Americana history as a blended populous in the Americas, we've had the 'Euro' originated system of 12 pitches (there's a rumor going around some parts of academia that there was some sort of piano ~ keyboard instrument, that survived 10 weeks at sea, on the MayFlower, I believe :) Thus, giving us the lines and changes (melody and chords) all along now these last 500 years or so.

All that glorious array of harmony; those precisely tuned, stacked up pitches sounded together into chords, to aurally (emotionally) support any melody note's mood and groove all helping to aurally tell the story of songs. A system of harmony fully capable of supporting all of Americana's myriad of styles, genres and grooves.

AmerAfroEuroLatin theory all combined today. Foundationally, our system of theory today comprises 12 pitches. The pentatonic five ~ 5 usually centers the remaining 7 (of the 12) pitches into a key center that generally creates the composing architecture of songs for folk (kids), country and the pop styles and genres. Flipping the number of pitches around while retaining a key center; now to seven and five notes, we've now the diatonic seven note scale ( major / minor ) for melody and chords, interspersed with the five non-diatonic blue notes, which double as both 'blue' notes in melody and the color tones for building bluesy, jazzier chords.

Thus, Americana music's melodies easily express with pitches tuned 'naturally', which include the blue note (s) special tunings, providing the Americana pure 'blue hue', a weave of melodic color easily found throughout most of the melodies, songs and improvisations of the Americana collective songbook.

That we also have a loop of pitches that require a very high precision of tuning to properly (aurally in tune) function together and create our chords, their bass line stories, progressions and cadential motions for telling stories, through all 12 paired key centers simultaneously is remarkable indeed.

This gives the artist a consistent aural rock (bass note) and hard spot (chord) to lean their natural pitches and blues into and helps in making collaborating with many instruments and artists a breeze and everyone gets to play how they hear 'in tune' together.

'#'s of pitch theory' ~ musical style. With our many styles of music across a wide spectrum, understanding the music theory that creates these songs can initially be based on the musical elements that have traditionally created the songs, and more specifically; how many different notes are involved in creating any musical component; a riff, a melody, # of pitches in the chords, beats in a rhythm pattern et all. Our spectrum of styles can look like this. Example 1.

'# of pitches and chords.' The '2' pitch 5th's of metal, the '3' note triads in folk and country, the '4 note' dominant 7th flavored chords for blues, '4 and 5 note' major 7th chords for gospel, pop and bossa nova, and the blues funk and jazzier '9' color tones above a triad; the 7th's, 9th's, 11th's and 13th's, and their alterations, for creating all those 'Hollywood chord voicings', jazz up the potentials of the harmony through all the styles.

Americana harmony academia of all the stripes, and spots, can come to love the Euro master of diatonic changes and really all 12 tones, J.S. Bach; an early pioneer of tempered tunings as applied to the piano forte keyboard back in the early 1700's. We use the same chords today, same system of pitches and harmony, and quite frankly have all along now.

For even a cursory study of a Bach keyboard song, or a choral or two, becomes a game changer for the 'by ear' players; as there's 'only a couple of places it'll go' and the 'hearing where too it goeth' is super clear in Bach. Sift and cipher through the pitches and chord progressions of just one piece, and a lot is revealed; especially in spelling out chords and identifying non-diatonic tones within a chosen key center.

'# of pitches for melody.' While there's some give and take here, it all kinda runs the same; there's numerical magics as with the chords; the more different notes in a melody line will tend to move us along our music style spectrum. And the more different pitches in a melody, the more involved the stories tends to get. Songs for kids are a few pitches, so easy to learn and always remember. Folk and country is usually 5 or 6 pitches so pentatonic colors, pop and bossa 6 maybe or 7, so the diatonic scale, and from 7 to 12. we're leaning way towards the jazz horizon line of our Americana spectrum of styles.

Rhythm ~ syncopation ~ # of beats / subdivisions. In Americana's musics, rhythm rules the dancefloors, where the cultural weave of all American peoples come together to share in a common 'time' together. Our AmerAfroEuroLatin combinations each have their own unique languages and way of speaking, thus the melodies of their stories capture the rhythm of their native language. Once in place, all else of musical time, rhythm and syncopations naturally fall in with the rhythmic nuance of a language (s), each with its own 'local slang magic' too ! Passed from generations forward through history, we inherit traditional language based grooves as well as creating new ones today.

A diatonic melody and chord progressions ~ style. Thinking of our style spectrum, the majority of styles; folk, country, blues and rock ... and pop to hip hop are mostly about constructing elements along a diatonic basis; so three chords and the truth or the mixing of the 'diatonic 3 and 3'; that blending of the major / minor ~ 'One, Four and Five' diatonic triads of any chosen key center, the weaving of these six chords creates the Americana chord progressions of like a half a gillion great American songs, ranging from folk essentials all through to the Hollywood orchestrated pop arrangements and stylings, while the gospel hues are always right nearby from within these same pitches. Alter or borrow a chord or two from a close key center and our pitch resource and theory, for creating most of our Americana musics, share this theoretical foundation.

And then ... there's jazz (theory) When we pass by pop a bit and bump into bossa nova, which is new 'pop' music of 1950's Brazil, and with it bring the Latin musics into our own Americana pop mix, the pitch components for charting out a fuller jazz theory, past to present, begin to manifest as the complexity of the combinations of pitches, in relation to a mostly diatonic, triad based palette, totally kabooms; for now near every chord in a song's progression expands from three and four different notes per chord to five and six with the addition of the various color tones, the motion of how the One chord gets to Four and then back in a song, is way more complex often through a bass line story.

Modulation through multiple key centers within one song is common and the musical forms expand out from '2 chord vamps' out to '32 bar sonata allegro hybrids.' When the '251' cadential motion covers for '451', its sleeker root motion enables an acceleration of the tempo, with no real limits, helping arpeggios and chord progressions to change keys near instantaneously, as found in bebop and then beyond.

Evolving by chord substitution. There's also a rather academic harmonic theory evolution to improvising, mostly one as the playing (improvising) through the changes of jazz standard songs. Chord substitution means different chords in common progressions and artists jazz up their single note melody lines by utilizing the notes from the subbed in chords. Most common ... ? Prolly the tritone sub :)

When we add a 'b9' to any V7 chord, we kaboom the theory of where historically our chord substitutions organically have grown. As V7 has motored a lot of blues, the addition of 'b9' brings that wee bit deeper blue of the diminished color to bare, which we theorists then divvy up into four separate leading tones and V7's, and building up four '2 ~ 5's for really any occasion :) Once this theory is in place, it's worth exploring its history; the cats who discovered these chord substitution pathways.

A next evolution, once the written changes of a song ( a diatonic jazz standard song ) are mastered, evolve the whole tamale by simply place a V7 chord before each written chord change and begin to accelerate the tempos. Pepper in these changes through the song and form, adding in their notes when improvising your melodies. The 'sharp One' is common a jazz players usually roll with the Two / Five / One cadential motion.

Next, just make all of the written chords a dominant, V7 chord type and add 'b9' substitution properties and altered color tones to find the modern sounding guide tone lines that still wheel through cycle of 4th's styled bass line stories.

And for melody, once the fundamental diatonic scale / arpeggio / chord of 'through the changes' is understood, exploring the modes, the melodic minor substitutions and Lydian Chromatic concepts provide avenues to explore. There's the modern scheme of a 'pentatonic modality' that initiates back with Coltrane's "Giant Steps", and Coltrane's improv approach to soloing through changes whereby each chord in a progression can have its own parent, pentatonic hued scale, just as it would a diatonic mode within a chosen key center. Advance time and phrasing through the principles of 'forward motion' where we aim for future points in the form of a song.

Improvisation melody approach. While there's a near endless array of melodic, chord substitutions and their parent scale choices to discover in jazz improvisation, the filtering of motifs through the academic shedding of sequence and permutation puzzles develops into being a solid melody player all by playing the melody of a song.

For way back there was; play the 'theme' and improvise 'variations' of it. In Euro musics there's a fascinating musical evolution to discover whereby 'suggested' rules to pairing up pitches into chords dictated where the melody took them, termed counterpoint; 'point (note) to point', which also had its own set of guidelines which often determined 'where' and when to modulate and shape 'written out' improvisations.

That playing melody just feels good, for we as the lead, surely the dancers and listeners of all stripes and spots too, sounding out the line is just a joyous thing to do. So ... fear not the melody and just learn it :)

Rhythm ~ syncopation. Saving the best for last, and also most challenging, the mastering of time and swing provides the essential start point. A metronome's clicks can foundation this development. Any rhythm imaged can then be sounded out; play from your heart be singing the lines you want to play :) Cool ...?

Author's note. Music theory and jazz theory in particular, can provide a sort of endless puzzle to the curious minded, for as the message matures as an artist evolves, so can the complexity of nuance in mixing music's essential jazz colors, providing a career long exploration of search and discovery of new coolness.

"It's amazing how much you can learn if your intentions are truly earnest."

Ways to start. Any beginning theorist here can begin their studies in any number of fundamental spots. Once engaged by picking a skill to learn or topic of interest, from that point forward till ya run out of juice, pure curiosity energizes the creating your pathway through the foundations of music theory.