It's not braggadocious of me to say that I'm a very good musician. I'm humble, but I'm not an idiot.
If you have listened to the show, you know that one of my specialties is music theory--that is the breakdown of the musical inner workings of a song. I love to listen for chords, progressions, intricacies and interesting choices. It's one of the things that excites me most about music.
That being said, I've only just recently realized that a single, offhand comment from a friend my freshman year in high school completely revolutionized the way I understood music--and today I've come to give him his flowers.
It was chair tryout day for the percussion section at East Ridge High School--the day we drummers went through our various paces to determine who would sit as the leader of the percussion section for concert band. We'd play rudiments and rhythm parts, tune tympani drums, and play scales on the marimba, and our band director (shouts out to Mr. Vandergriff, one of the other great musical influences in my life--rest in beats) would then arrange us in chair order based on our performance.
When it came time to do the marimba scales, I had a few scales memorized (I'd been taking piano lessons for years at this point), and I was hoping for the best. And then my friend Don Cho said something about how he learned the scales:
"I just remember whole step - whole step - whole step-half step, whole step - whole step - whole step - half step."
This sentence was a time bomb in my brain. There was no way I could fully take it in at the moment, because we were all sweating through the tryouts and I had to focus through that first. But the first free second I had, I went back to the marimba and put this theory to the test.
Ok, let's try it in G. Wow, ok, that worked. Let's start on an E-flat. Holy cow. No way this works in B thoughOHMYGOSH. *brain explodes, I die, they revive me and I try D-flat*
Don had just literally changed my life and unlocked something for me that set me on a path of exponential musical growth and understanding.
See, Don--who I believe would admit is no musical guru--hadn't memorized his scales. He had learned the pattern of a major scale. And every single major scale follows the same pattern. As he put it: whole step - whole step - whole step-half step, whole step - whole step - whole step - half step.
See it this way:
Whole step - whole step - whole step-half step,
Whole step - whole step - whole step - half step.
Could that possibly be any simpler?? I was an eight-year piano student at this point and was still memorizing my scales based on, "Ok, A-flat has 4 flats, and they are A, B, D, and E," and then trying to play it over and over until it became muscle memory. Don's simple memory trick told me how to instantly know how to play any scale, and it would eventually teach me how to instantly play and recognize chords and progressions in every key.
Now it's at this point that, for the sake of total accuracy, I will say that the first part of Don's pattern should be "Root" or "Tonic," being the first note of a scale, rather than "whole step." It's not moving from anywhere, it's just the starting point. But I knew what he meant, and you probably knew what I meant.
Root - whole step - whole step-half step,
Whole step - whole step - whole step - half step.
My musical life, and much of the understanding I have about how music works, stems in one way or another from learning this simple concept. I didn't have to search for chords anymore when I was playing guitar. I didn't have to peck around on the keyboard to find the right scale degrees for a melody. And perhaps even more importantly, I learned that this was not the only pattern.
My next several years would be a journey of finding, discovering, and being blown away by the patterns in chord theory--Oh, this complicated chord is really just a combination of these 2 simple things. Oh, this chord extension is just a fancy way of applying this pattern. Because if all scales are built of patterns, then so are all chords. So are all progressions and melodies and harmonies--it's an otherworldly realization.
So today I honor my friend Don. I don't know if or when I would have ever learned or realized this on my own, but it certainly would have been at least a few years in the future, by which time my musical pursuits may not have survived.
Every band I've started, every song I've written, recording session I've played on, and every musical thing I'll ever produce has a little piece of Don Cho in it. And I'm only now realizing how grateful I am for that.
To Don.
You can't see me.
