Rock and Folk
Three chords and two traditions. Rock took the twelve-bar blues and turned up the volume; folk took modal melodies and kept the guitar acoustic. What they share is that both are defined as much by what they leave out as by what they play.
- 3 chords
- backbeat
- pentatonic
In which styles
- Rock
- Folk
- Americana
- Indie
In short
Under an enormous amount of early rock sits the same frame: the twelve-bar scheme with three chords. Folk leans instead on modal loops, where a flattened seventh replaces the dominant and the music circles rather than cadences. Both avoid the pull that classical harmony is built on.
Physical and unfussy. Rock is dance music that got louder, and the backbeat on two and four is what makes it move rather than anything harmonic.
How the style works
Minor pentatonic is the tool that rock melody and above all rock soloing runs on. Five notes: root, minor third, fourth, fifth, minor seventh. What has been removed is exactly the two notes that cause the most friction in a scale, which is why you can play it over almost anything in the style without a collision.
Where you run into this
- A riff built from a flattened seventh that never resolves
- A solo that works entirely inside five notes
- A folk tune that circles two chords for three verses
What you leave out
Jazz harmony. Chains of ii V I, secondary dominants every two bars and tritone substitutions all pull the music toward a genre it is not. Also: too much production. Both traditions rely on sounding like people in a room.
Keep going
Everything in styles
- Pop
- Rock and Folk
- Singer-Songwriter
- Country and Americana