Drum triggers are, put simply, a device you put on or inside drums which detect when the drum is hit and send a signal. That’s it. That signal is usually sent to some sort of controller which interprets the signal and then plays an electronic sound or sample. This is how electronic drum sets work entirely, but triggers can be added to acoustic sets as well, to help broaden the available sounds.

For instance, putting a drum trigger on a snare drum could let you have the trigger make a clap or woodblock sound, while the snare itself still makes its sound. In this way, a drummer can really expand their sound range and be more expressive when they play. What I didn’t understand as a kid, though, was that there’s no need (or little need) to mask the sound of the drum when a trigger is attached. The drummer can either make use of the combined sounds or simply turn the volume of the trigger up and/or hit the drum softly enough so that the drum sound is drowned out by the triggered sound.

That’s mostly a concern when playing live. When recording, drum triggers have a whole different set of abilities. Sending and recording MIDI signals gives the audio engineer more control over the sound, timing, etc. of the drum tracks. Small flubs in timing can be tweaked and fixed, unlike when recording acoustic drums. Also, if one or more drums just don’t sound very good, a different, better sounding drum sound can replace it. Even still, an audio engineer can leave the acoustic set’s sounds as the drum track, and use the triggers to trigger other things or set timings. For instance, when the kick is hit in the middle of a song somewhere, maybe the audio engineer ties an explosion sound to it. Having both acoustic tracks and MIDI tracks is very useful when recording. Personally, if I have to choose one or the other, these days I’d probably choose MIDI. It’s just more flexible.

There are drum purists out there who don’t like triggers because they aren’t “real”. I understand that viewpoint, but I do not agree with it. I see triggers as a tool, a technological advance, that gives drummers and audio engineers much more control over sounds, effects, timing, etc. Just because you use triggers doesn’t make you a lazy or bad drummer. On the other hand, using triggers won’t make a bad drummer better.

When the last note of one phrase serves as the first note of the next phrase.

Maestro

A distinguished musician, especially a conductor of classical music.

Jazz

Jazz started as improvisation and stylistic variations on other styles, especially ragtime, early blues, and polyrhythms from various sources. Since its start over a century ago, the genre has grown to have so many subgenres that it becomes difficult to pin down into a single description. Attempting to pin it down, one might consider the etymology of the word itself. However, even this is clouded by misinformation and misdirection. There are sources that claim origins in African-American or Creole communities, but the most credible sources seem to show the first verifiable usages of the word to be around baseball in California. It was used to describe a pitch that “wobbled”. While this doesn’t seem to indicate the origin of the word, it does show that it had a meaning of something akin to “spunky” or “energetic” as early as 1912. The origin is also clouded by rapid adoption of the word as a slang term for sexual intercourse around the same time the music style started to become popular. For more on the etymology, see the Wikipedia entry in the Sources section, below.

Schenkerian Analysis

The goal of a Schenkerian analysis is to interpret the underlying structure of a tonal work and to help with reading the score according to that structure. The theory’s basic tenets can be viewed as a way of defining tonality in music. A Schenkerian analysis of a passage of music shows hierarchical relationships among its pitches and draws conclusions about the structure of the passage from this hierarchy. Schenkerian analysis is inter-subjective, rather than objective. There is no mechanical procedure involved, and the analysis reflects the musical intuitions of the analyst. The analysis represents one way of hearing (and reading) a piece of music. More information can be found in the Wikipedia entry, found in the Sources section, below.

Sources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jazz_(word)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schenkerian_analysis

The major and minor scales differ in the 3rd, 6th, and 7th notes of the scale.  Major scales are believed to be more bright and happy while minor scales are believed to be more dark and dreary.

Octave

Why is an octave, which is 12 notes, named as if it were only eight? It is called an octave because there are eight notes in the primary major and minor scales.  Even though we recognize 12 semitones in an octave now, historically music used whole number ratios to determine the fifth and third and resulting in an eight notes (the notes of the scales) representing an octave. However, these ratios did not work well if many octaves were in play.  The Church was strongly behind whole number ratios in music as they considered them holy.  It is only recently (16th or 17th century) that we have moved to the 12 tone equal temperament scale for music.

Mellotron

The mellotron is an analog sampler invented in the early 1960s. It was used by many artists, including The Beatles, The Moody Blues, and others. It functioned by having piano-like keys that, when pressed, caused a length of magnetic tape to roll past a tape head. Each key had its own tape with a recorded sample to match the pitch of that key. Sample tapes were only about seven seconds long and had to rewind before they could be played again.

Symphony

A symphony is a musical piece composed for performance by an orchestra.

Orchestra

An orchestra is a musical group usually combining woodwinds, brass, percussion, string and others. Orchestras perform several varieties of of music, including symphonies.

Philharmonic

The word philharmonic, while it has an etymological definition, doesn’t really mean anything when used adjectively, such as in the name of the London Philharmonic Orchestra. Philharmonic comes from the words for “love” or “love of” and “music”, thus literally translating into “love of music”. Just as the London Symphony Orchestra is so named and literally means “an orchestra in London that plays symphonies”, the London Philharmonic Orchestra simply uses the word to differentiate itself (literally, “an orchestra in London that loves music”). The word itself was originally used to name a music society, so it has always been used as a pronoun or adjective, having no real musical definition.

Cent: Cent is a unit of measurement used to define a standard unit of difference between frequencies to fit the logarithmic nature of notes. If A4 is out of tune by 5 cents, it will be the same note (but different octave) as A3 out of tune by 5 cents, even though the frequency differences between each note and it’s out of tune version are different.

Circle of Fifths: The circle of fifths is a circular chart which shows related chords and scales that work well when played together. It is easy to use, as you can simply find a chord you want to play and choose any of the adjacent chords on the chart to play with it. The chart has two concentric circles, with the outer circle showing major chords and the inner circle showing minor chords. The minor chords are also considered adjacent to the major chords, including diagonally. So, if C is your starting chord, the circle of fifths shows five chords to chose from: F, G, Dm, Am, and Em. This is a good, clear version of the circle of fifths.

Drum Rudiments: Drum rudiments are common sticking patterns in drumming that have been identified, defined, and named. There are 40 standard rudiments which include different drum rolls, diddle patterns (hitting with the same hand twice in a row), and patterns that use grace notes to form flams and ruffs. Drummers usually learn most, if not all, of the patterns fairly early in formal training, as doing so builds the muscle memory to play them and gives drummers the vocabulary necessary to discuss rhythms and sheet music with a common language. [More Info]

Pickup: A typical electric guitar pickup is a combination of magnets and wire that “picks up” the vibration of the strings, converting that motion to an electric current. That current is sent to the output jack and can be converted into sound by amps, speakers, etc. There are also piezoelectric pickups that work using the piezoelectric effect.

Single-coil Pickup: The simplest type of magnetic pickup. True to its name, a single-coil pickup consists of one wire coiled around the magnet or magnets that are placed underneath the strings. Based upon a number of factors, including the resistance of the wire, the strength of the magnet(s), material and thickness of the strings, etc, the sound produced by different single-coil pickups can vary widely.

Humbucking Pickup: A humbucking pickup or humbucker is essentially a pair of single-coil pickups arranged so that the opposite magnetic poles are pointing at the strings. That is, one points its “north” at the strings and the other its “south”. The two pickups are then wired together either in series or parallel. This is done for two reasons. First, single-coil pickups act, to a degree, as a directional antenna. They pick up electromagnetic interference from nearby sources such as fluorescent lights. The opposing orientation of the two magnetic cores in a humbucker cancels out this effect. Second, because there are two pickups, the amplitude of the output signal from a humbucker is generally greater at certain harmonic frequencies than with a single coil. This leads to humbuckers having what is described as a “fatter” sound.