Piano Key A To G: Episode Two - Understanding Major and Minor

For Episode Two of my new piano podcast, I thought we might have a look at the distinction between major and minor in music. This difference appears at first sight to be small in nature, however it causes a profound emotional change in the mind of the listener, and is pivotal to our understanding of Western tonality. Also, it follows on nicely from our Harmonic Series discussion in Episode One. Now, at the beginning of the podcast, I explained a couple of ‘housekeeping’ matters that I thought were important, as they were direct questions from early listeners to the show! Just to recap:

• Numerous musical fragments that you hear in the episodes are in fact personal recordings of mine, and therefore within each episode webpage going forward, I will provide links to the singles, and sheet music/MIDI files, so that you may investigate further should you wish to listen to the full tracks, or learn to play them. In this particular episode, the pieces were: 1 This Little Light of Mine / 2 Give Me Joy in my Heart / 3 Early One Morning - please click the images at the bottom of this webpage for full details

• I mentioned that it would be useful to have access to an acoustic piano or digital keyboard, in order to play along during the podcasts - should you not have an instrument to hand, there are many online keyboard visualizers that you may use for free. As examples, here is a virtual keyboard called Online Pianist. If you are using your phone, a basic search such as ‘piano keyboard’ should bring up a variety of options - here is one. Please note: I am not affiliated to these companies, they are just provided by way of example

• One final point I forgot to mention is that when I was discussing notes, chords, scales and so on, I was referring to the right hand position. I should have made that clear when I was podcasting [sorry!]