The 12-Tone Shuffle
BY AJ hArve Y
For the last eight years, AJ Harvey has been
a member of the video game-inspired metal
band Last Chance to Reason. Their latest
album, Level 2, is full of mathcore riffs, face-
melting chops, and even contains a Metroid-
style video game. For more information, visit
facebook.com/lastchancetoreason.
CHOPS: Advanced
THEORY: Advanced
LESSON OVERVIEW:
• Understand how to create and
use 12-tone rows.
• Develop musical motifs by
altering tone rows.
• Combine string skipping and
octave displacement to create
angular lines.
It isn’t uncommon for me to write tunes that are often based on all 12 notes. The
notes are organized in the order of how my
ear likes to hear them. Also, I don’t repeat
a note until all the other notes are played.
I write one at a time, carefully listening to
the interval between each note and the next,
the same as anyone would when composing
a melody. I like writing with 12-tone rows
because it gives me my own unique voice.
Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951) is
the foremost 12-tone composer—he was
writing 12-tone tunes in the 1920s! Frank
Zappa composed some songs using this
technique, and Ron Jarzombek is a modern
metal composer who routinely uses tone
rows in his compositions.
Last Chance to Reason—the band I play
in—has always been a little outside of the
ordinary when it comes to tonality. We’ve
always used dissonant sounds we may have
picked up from extreme genres such as prog
Fig. 1
Fig. 1
and metal. Our drummer, Evan Sammons,
and I decided to write some 12-tone music
in 2006 for our first album, Level;1. Most
of that record contained various tone rows,
their inversions, retrogrades, and rhythmic variations. Less that 10 percent of the
record consists of tonal melodic music.
Our next record, Level;2, used tone rows
extensively, but transitioned from them into
more harmonic and melodic sections.
To compose a row, I often write down
all the notes of a chromatic scale, from A
through G#. As I compose the row on my
guitar by ear, I cross out the notes in the
chromatic scale and write the note names of
my new melody below the chromatic scale.
The intervals or distance between each note
give my tone rows a distinct sound. Like
other melodies, not every tone row will
sound good. Mine are carefully composed
one note at a time and reworked until the
whole melody rocks.
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CLICK HERE
to hear sound clips
of these examples.
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