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How Two Princes Works

Support 12tone on Patreon to see my next video right now! https://www.patreon.com/12tonevideos The early '90s were a wild time. Rock was coming out of the age of hair metal and arena rock, and into... well, it wasn't quite clear yet. Grunge was on the rise, hip-hop was breaking out, metal and punk were both driving themselves deeper into underground scenes, and dancing around the fringes was a weird little movement of happy-go-lucky jam bands. It's that last one we're interested in today: The upbeat funk-rock fusion of the Spin Doctors stood in stark contrast to the prevailing narrative of ha

The Controversial History of Do-Re-Mi

Support 12tone on Patreon to see my next video right now! https://www.patreon.com/12tonevideos How do we know how modern music came to be? We tell stories and imagine clear evolutions, but the process of cultural change is rarely simple enough to track with such straightforward tools. And yet we find them irresistible. The stories of the great innovators of centuries past, who laid the foundation for the modern musical world, have echoed throughout history, and they're great stories, but what do we do when we don't know what's true? One of the greatest figures in European music history is Gui

Why Does Emo Sound Like That?

Support 12tone on Patreon to see my next video right now! https://www.patreon.com/12tonevideos More than any other genre, emo music, along with its close cousin pop-punk, captured the bizarre, directionless angst of adolescence in the early 21st century. Stuck in the shadow of global events we were too young to really understand, with new information technologies exploding our social networks, a stage of life that has always been confusing and disorienting was made even more so by the unique circumstances of the era. Emo spoke to that confusion in a unique way, making sense of the senselessne

Understanding Somebody That I Used To Know

Support 12tone on Patreon to see my next video right now! https://www.patreon.com/12tonevideos Gotye. To my generation, that name causes an almost pavlovian reaction, conjuring up a simple guitar loop that all of us heard thousands of times and could recognize from multiple rooms away. But what made Somebody That I Used To Know so infectious, and more importantly, why did we never hear from him again? Gotye is a mysterious figure in the history of 21st-century pop, but much of what makes him such a unique artist is on display in the one song that made him famous, and I think it's time I took

Linkin Park's Most Confusing Song

Support 12tone on Patreon to see my next video as soon as it's done! https://www.patreon.com/12tonevideos Recently, I got called out. Or, ok, not called out exactly. More like tagged in. Another music youtuber, Michael Jesse, made a whole video about this bizarre mystery surrounding Linkin Park's Breaking The Habit, but he couldn't come to a satisfying conclusion, so at the end of his video, he asked for my opinion. Like, me, specifically. A lot of people forwarded the video to me and there seems to be a lot of confusion, so it seemed like a perfect opportunity to not just solve the mystery,

Understanding 99 Luftballons

Support 12tone on Patreon to see my Linkin Park video right now! https://www.patreon.com/12tonevideos The New Wave movement is a fascinating cultural moment to me, with new technologies merging with older practices to create some truly weird and wonderful music. But within that scene is the Neue Deutsche Welle, a specifically German take on the genre that grew up in a country living more than most in the shadows of the Cold War, and perhaps its most famous members were the band Nena. A surprise breakout hit that crossed language barriers to rise up the charts, 99 Luftballons is a fun, access

The Lost Genius of Randy Rhoads

Support 12tone on Patreon to see my next video right now! https://www.patreon.com/12tonevideos The history of metal music can be broken up into a couple distinct periods, and the early '80s saw the beginning of one of its most important phases. The Neoclassical movement would become one of the most influential ideas in metal, with its focus on elaborate, technical guitar work making it a clear forebear to subgenres like tech death, djent, and mathcore, and leading the charge was a young virtuoso named Randy Rhoads. Though his career was short, he left an indelible mark on the genre, and decad

How Crazy Train Works

Check out my next video on Randy Rhoads solos: https://www.patreon.com/12tonevideos It's hard to pick just one song to pay tribute to the Prince of Darkness: With a career spanning over 50 years, Ozzy Osbourne has touched so many lives and made so much incredible music. But to me, and to a lot of metal fans, his greatest works were set in motion in 1979, when he met his greatest collaborator, Randy Rhoads. Though the two of them worked together for only a few short years, their innovative collaboration helped change the face of metal forever. Even among just those couple albums, there's so ma

Is Meter The Same As Rhythm?

Support 12tone on Patreon to see new videos early! https://www.patreon.com/12tonevideos When I first started studying music, there were a lot of things that confused me. It felt like there were whole languages of practice that musicians all knew, and I had no idea how to speak any of them. With a lot of work and some very patient teachers, I eventually got fluent, but one problem that stuck with me is, in hindsight, a fairly simple question: What's the difference between 3/4 and 6/8? It feels intuitive now, but in order to understand it you have to really understand meter, and that's a lot ha

Understanding Alanis Morisette's "Ironic"

Support 12tone on Patreon to see new videos early! https://www.patreon.com/12tonevideos Few songs are as misunderstood as Ironic. Or maybe few songs are understood as correctly while still missing the point. It's a straightforward song, but one fateful choice has made it the subject of decades of pedantic debate and mockery. Which, don't get me wrong, I love a good pedantic argument, but I do think it's a shame 'cause once you look past the word choice, there's a lovely song there waiting to be discovered. Plus there's one really cool chord that I want to talk about. Can I please just talk ab

Why Your Chorus Doesn't Work

Support 12tone on Patreon to see new videos early! https://www.patreon.com/12tonevideos A great song is about more than just having interesting parts. That's enough to make it good, but to become truly great, you need cohesion: Each part should flow seamlessly into the next, properly managing listener expectations and crafting a dynamic journey, but that's... I mean, it's hard. How do you do that? The answer depends a lot on genre, style, and what the song is trying to say, but there are some general techniques that get used a lot, so let's pull back the curtain on section transitions and see

Understanding Testify

Support 12tone on Patreon to see new videos early! https://www.patreon.com/12tonevideos Rage Against The Machine are musical arsonists. They're loud, angry, and always ready to break stuff. But in all the noise, it's easy to loose track of the deeper messages that run through their work. So I want to pull one of those messages out. I want to look at Testify, a song that, perhaps more than any other in their catalogue, perfectly captures the hope of Rage Against The Machine, and see how they make something so jagged and jarring to listen to also feel... important. Merch: https://store.nebula.

Why Don't Songs Have Sequels?

Does this matter? Probably not. But it matters to me. Support 12tone on Patreon to see new videos early! https://www.patreon.com/12tonevideos Sequels. They're everywhere, from TV, to movies, to books. But not music. It's not that it never happens, but it's really rare compared to most other mainstream art forms, and as a true believer in the narrative potential of music, I find that kinda disappointing. So I set out to understand what makes them so uncommon, and what, if anything, we can do about it. Merch: https://store.nebula.tv/12tone Discord: https://discord.gg/pq2QBEw Bluesky: https://b

Understanding Sweet Dreams (Are Made Of This)

FIXED VERSION: Sorry about the audio issues, this one should be all good! Support 12tone on Patreon to see new videos early! https://www.patreon.com/12tonevideos The early '80s were an exciting and scary time in the world of music. The first wave of truly affordable electronic instruments were just hitting the market, and pioneers from across the musical spectrum were trying to figure out what to do with them. These new machines were bulky and unreliable, but they offered powerful new ways to create and conceive of sound, and they turned out to be a lifeline for a struggling pair of artists w

I Listened To One Song On Repeat For A Month

I live in an endless void of my own creation. Support 12tone on Patreon to help us keep making cool videos! https://www.patreon.com/12tonevideos Watch this video on Nebula: https://nebula.tv/videos/12tone-i-listened-to-one-song-on-repeat-for-a-month This was a... surprising experience. I'm always looking for ways to become a more engaged music listener, and one of the best ones I've found is listening games. I do these fairly often in my personal life, picking some restriction and making myself do it for a while to see what happens, but now that it's become a part of my musical practice I wan

Understanding Sympathy For The Devil

Support 12tone on Patreon to help us keep making cool videos! https://www.patreon.com/12tonevideos Watch this video on Nebula: https://nebula.tv/videos/12tone-understanding-sympathy-for-the-devil Check out Noah's video: https://youtu.be/--nH88lTzuY Listen to Ghost Notes: https://nebula.tv/ghost-notes?ref=12tone Who is the Devil? As a longtime rock and metalhead, I've heard hundreds of songs trying to answer that question, and the thing that strikes me most is how varied those answers are. As an artist, the Devil is whoever you need him to be, a symbolic chameleon taking whatever shape best fi