Tumbling Down
Fourths in all twelve keys
Play along. The recording stays in concert B-flat; the notation follows your instrument.
The music, the voice and the scrolling score slow down together; the pitch stays the same.
Drag A and B (they snap to the bar lines), then press “Loop this section”.
Four bars to a line. It follows the instrument you choose above.
Fourths give a line its open, modern sound, and this chorus is built from them more than any other in the set. It starts with three notes stacked a fourth apart, C, F, B-flat, and then moves the stack to a new starting note: B-flat, E-flat, A-flat in bar 2, F-sharp, B, E in bar 4, D, G and up to the high D in bar 9. Nearly half of everything played here is a fourth. Fourths do not lie under the fingers the way scale steps and thirds do, so a line like this cannot be improvised from nothing. It comes from playing the fourths exercise on every starting note until the shape is as familiar as a scale. Listen for how each new stack begins somewhere unexpected and still sounds certain.