Repertoire - When the Saints

Lesson 9 - Practice Strategies 1

Throughout this course you will learn how to create and develop your own practice strategies. The one presented in this lesson provides a model for you to use.

Step One

Decide in advance of your practice time which chords you're going to work with. Initially, limit yourself to just two chords either both major, both minor, or a combination of major and minor:

• D major and E major
• D minor and E minor
• D major and E minor
• D minor and E major

Step Two

Using your Chord Construction Formulas chart, find the notes for each of the two chords you've chosen to work with and play them in different positions on the piano.

Step Three

Once you're satisfied you can find the notes for each chord and change easily from one chord to the next, create yourself a short chart that uses your two chords. This requires you to think of a time signature and the form (how many bars long?) of your chord song. Then write the chords into the bars where you want them to change and play what you've written.

Step 4
Initially play through your two-chord song by simply playing and holding the chords for the duration of the changes. In the example above, all chords can be held for 4 beats, except the two in bar 7 (2 beats each). Once you're comfortable making the transition from one chord to the next, play the chords more frequently - i.e., play all the chords twice per bar and then, after that has become easy for you, play chords one every beat.

Step 5

Return to Step 1, choose another two chords, and repeat the process. Also try using more combinations of the same chords within one song:


Additional Tips

Chords commonly move in one of two ways:

• to a chord based on the note adjacent to it in the Major scale (such as in the examples above)
• to a chord based on the note that is (the interval of) a 4th away. These are easily found using your Major Scale & Chord Construction chart by reading down any of the columns - e.g., Column I is C, F, Bb, Eb, etc. (See below)

Online Ear Training Sites

Learn to Hear is an easy to navigate and use site that will enable you to hone your listening skills.


There are four sections (Intervals, Scales, Triads and Tetrads) each of which presents ear training games of varying difficulty. In the Intervals section, you'll see one they've called "Primo". This is just a regional variant of "Unison".

The Triads section contains ear training games to test your abilities to distinguish between Major and Minor.

In the Scales section you'll see this page:


Check the "Practice Isolated" box for "Ionian/Major". The exercises then ask you simply to be able to distinguish between Major scales and scales that aren't Major.

There are plenty of other more advanced ear training games at this site for you to play. They're the sorts of things you won't be examined on for the MUSI course but I encourage you to explore them once you're confident with the basics.

Lesson 8 - Intervals & The Major Scale

The ability to hear and identify musical intervals is the most useful skill you can learn! There are only 12 intervals - each with a unique, individual sound and a name. The names given to the intervals are all based on their relationship to the Major scale. This is why your knowledge of the Major scale is fundamentally important to learning everything else in music.

The term "Major scale" (Major scale - singular) is used deliberately to emphasise the fact that there may be 12 possible starting notes for it but that the pattern of interval steps is exactly the same, regardless of the starting note. Column I lists these 12 possibilities. Each row thus becomes the Major scale from C (C Major), the Major scale from F (F Major), from Bb (Bb Major), etc. and takes its name from the note in column I.


Some Music Theory Trivia

The Major scale rows for Gb Major and F# are separated from the rows above and below purely to highlight that the notes used in both are exactly the same. It is also done to draw attention to a common misconception - that sharps and flats are "the black keys". This is partly true but it's to your advantage to understand that sharps and flats perform a special function. They are symbols to indicate that a written note, whatever it's name, is to be "altered" - i.e., a sharp instructs the player to play the note a half-step higher than the one written; a flat says play the note that is a half-step lower than the one written.

For example, in the Gb Major scale, step IV is Cb. The flat sign here refers to a white key (B). So, why name it Cb and not B? Because in the (theoretical) construction of Major scales, the 7 note name letters can only be used once and the note name B is needed to name Bb (step III of Gb Major). The same is true for seemingly weird notes such as E#.

Major Scale Construction Formula

At first glance the Major scale might appear to be constructed of 8 notes, labelled using the Roman numerals of I through VIII and coloured pale blue in the illustration above. The pale yellow columns indicate where the notes not needed for each Major scale are located. The red column is used for a note not used in the Major scale which is located exactly half way between Step I and Step VIII. It should be visually apparent that the Major scale is actually created using two identical 4 note patterns - i.e., steps I, II, III and IV have the same pattern as steps V, VI, VII and VIII. More on this below.

The Relationship of Intervals to the Major Scale

The names of the intervals are listed in the second row of the illustration above. Each of them relates to the column in which they appear and they all take their name depending on their distance higher than the note (or sound) in column I. Because intervals occur between sounds, two notes are required in order to create an interval. The first of these is then used as a reference point and can be thought of as "Doh" where Doh is any of the notes in column I.

Naming the 12 Intervals

One note sound following another can only be one of three things:

• the same sound
  
• higher in pitch, or
  
• lower in pitch

When one sound follows another and it's the same, it's called a Unison.

If the second sound is higher than the first, the Interval is "ascending" and it can be located using the "Relationship to Major Scale" column and named using one of the "Interval Names (Ascending)"

If the second sound is lower than the first, the Interval is "descending" and it can be located using the "Inverse (Descending)" column and named using one of the "Inverse Interval Names".

For example, if the first note is C and the next note is an E that is higher than C, then C is I and E's relationship to it is III - i.e., E is a Major 3rd higher than C.

If the the first note is C and the next note is an E lower than C, then C is VIII and the lower E's relationship is still III, but the interval drop is a Minor 6th.

Trivia:

The sum of an ascending interval with its corresponding descending inverse adds up to 9. Furthermore, an ascending interval's quality is also inversed by its corresponding descending partner. Examples:

• an ascending Major 3rd (C up to E) is the same note as a descending Minor 6th (C down to E)
  
• a descending Minor 7th (C down to D) is the same note as an ascending Major 2nd (C up to D)
  
• an ascending Perfect 4th (C up to F) is the same note as a descending Perfect 5th (C down to F)
  

Lesson 7 - How To Practice

There is an old maxim among musicians that says you only need to do three things to become an accomplished musician: practice, practice, practice.

While there is an element of truth to this, what does the word "practice" actually mean? To begin with, it's an unavoidable fact when learning to play an instrument that nobody can do it for you. Furthermore, it is an intensely personal experience that requires you to spend time - as much as you can devote to the pursuit - sitting with your keyboard and on your own between lessons. Therefore, "practice" essentially is that time between lessons during which you learn to teach yourself.

There is a traditional stereotype of practice for piano students as hours of learning to play scales through mind-numbingly repetitious exercises and tunes one note at a time. It is an approach that relies heavily on teaching music as a reading skill instead of as an aural skill and many thousands of books have been written as methods to develop reading skills at the expense of developing aural skills. In short, "method books" ultimately don't transform piano students into piano playing musicians.

This isn't to dismiss the values inherent in being able to read music or the necessity to develop technical dexterity. However; learning to read music is analogous with learning to read any new language and without the aural skills - to actually hear in your mind what you're reading - you'll never achieve anything more than a superficial fluency in music.

The approach used in this course is to concentrate initially on developing your aural skills so you can hear the simple mechanics that lies at the heart of music. It is a three-step process of learning.

Firstly, each week you'll be introduced to a few basic concepts about melodies, chords and how each of these develop and progress in the realm of time.

Secondly, you'll be shown techniques you can use to "experiment" with these concepts. In other words, how to create large numbers of your own patterns using a minimum of raw, conceptual materials.

Thirdly, you'll learn how to translate the things you hear and enjoy into music notation that will form part of your own personal "repertoire" of music.

So, the key word in all of this is "experiment". That's what musicians do when they practice...

Lesson 6 - Introduction to Music Notation

The very simplest form of music notation is a chord chart (sometimes just called "a chart"). It is a set of instructions that should, as a bare minimum, convey a number of things crucial to creating a performance - especially if the piano is used to accompany a person singing or playing another instrument.

The following illustration is a chart for one of the exercises learned in the previous lesson - i.e., to count a beat in groups of 2 and alternate between playing a C major chord and a C minor chord.


A chart such as this doesn't specifically tell you what notes you should play for C major and C minor and any music note symbols written on the staff (the 5 lines and spaces) would be meaningless because there is as yet no clef. What is important is simply that you know that C major contains a C, an E, and a G and that Cm contains C, Eb and G. When reading and playing chords from a chart like this, where all you have are chord symbols, you're free to interpret and play whatever voicings of chords you want. The only requirement is they're played in time - in this case, to counting in groups of 2 beats. The following illustration labels all the important elements of this simple chord chart:


Title: Strictly speaking, a chart doesn't need a title but using them is a good habit to get into.

Tempo, Time Signature and Bar Lines: These three elements go hand-in-hand. The time signature informs you of what number you're counting to (represented by the top number of the fraction - in this case, 2) and the tempo is an indication of how fast your counting is. Bar Lines visually demarcate the beats indicated by the time signature.

Slashes: These symbols are customarily used in chord charts to mark the beats in each bar. Later, when specific musical notes are written in bars, the slashes aren't necessary. However; for the beginner first learning to read music, they are a handy visual aid.

Final Bar Line: This is one of several symbols that can be described as music "navigational" signs. The final bar line (thin line together with a thicker one) is, as the name suggests, a symbol that defines where the chart ends and the performer stops playing.

Activities:

Create your own chord charts using -

• a different time signature (3 beats per bar; 4 beats per bar)
• a different sequence of chords based on chords you should know by now (C, D, Cm, Dm)

When playing the chord charts you create, experiment with variations of rhythm. For example:

• play the chord on every beat instead of playing and holding it for the duration of the count in each bar
• if the time signature is 2/4, play the chord on every even numbered beat (i.e., one TWO one TWO one TWO)
• if the time signature is 3/4, play the chord twice in each bar - firstly as 2 + 1 beats and then as 1 + 2 beats
• if the time signature is 4/4, subdivide the beats in each bar as above - i.e., as 2 + 2, 3 + 1, 1 + 3, and 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 (playing the chord on every beat)
  

Lesson 5 - Minor Chords

In the previous lesson you learned to create Major chord triads. Playing these you will have noticed they all shared an aesthetic tonal quality - i.e., that Major chords sound "bright", "happy", etc. The other main chord quality - the opposite of Major - is called Minor. It's formula is almost identical to that for Major chords:

I - bIII - V

The only difference between Major and Minor is that step III (of Major) is flatted - i.e., lowered by a half-step. So, where C Major is C - E - G, to create C Minor all you need to do is lower E (the third step of C Major) a half-step to become Eb:



Activity:

• Alternately play C Major and C Minor as simple, three-note triads
• Listen to the difference in tonal quality between Major and Minor
• Repeat the C Major to C Minor alternations using different chord voicings with both hands - hands separately, and then together

What if Step III of Major is a Sharp?

In the previous lesson you learned step III of D Major is named F#. To change D Major to D Minor, the flat sign used in the formula for Minor (bIII) has the effect to simply cancel the sharp sign - thus, F# becomes F when D Major changes to D Minor:


What are Chord Symbols?

In the very most basic form of music notation (chord charts - see next lesson), chord symbols are used as written abbreviations for terms such as minor and major.

Major chords are represented using simply the note-name of the chord thus a C Major chord is simply named using the symbol C; D Major is named D; Bb Major is named using the symbol Bb; etc.

Minor chords are represented the same way as Major chords but with the addition of a lowercase letter "m" to denote "minor". C Minor thus has the symbol Cm, D Minor is Dm, Bb Minor is Bbm, and so on.

Tips For Practicing

When playing simple exercises such as alternating between C and Cm chords, play and hold each for a predetermined number of beats or counts. For example, once you have located the notes required to play each of the two chords, count slowly "one...two...one...two..." until you are feeling relaxed in in sync with your count. Then, play the notes you've selected for C and hold them pressed for two beats (or any multiple of two) and then change to play and hold Cm for the same duration. Change back to C and repeat until you feel confident you can play the correct notes for C and Cm and that you can change between the two chords easily and in time with the tempo (speed) of your counting.