Author: musicalitywrld

In this tutorial we’ll examine some famous melodies that were transposed into minor keys, and we’ll show you a simple process to help you create your very own macabre nursery rhymes.

While the traditional version of “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star” might bring back memories of bedtime stories or Kindergarten classes, the minor version just might give you goosebumps.

Parodies of old folk tunes certainly aren’t new. Children have been changing the words of well-known nursery rhymes and carols for ages. (Poor Batman!)

Minor Moves

Likewise, musicians have been transposing songs from major to minor keys since… well, probably since the aeolian mode (a.k.a. the minor scale) was created sometime in the late middle-ages.

Why? Because it’s fun. And it’s a great way to engage with an audience. You’re giving them something familiar, but also something unexpected at the same time.  

“Haven’t I heard that song before? Oh wait…”

Let’s take a look at a twisted nursery rhyme from a famous composer. Does this tune sound familiar to you?

Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 1 in D Major features a macabre version of the French nursery rhyme “Frère Jacques” (“Are You Sleeping?”) in the opening of the 3rd movement.

Instead of the playfully sweet children’s round, his audiences were treated to a slow death-march inspired version of the melody with sparse ornamentation.

The resulting melody sounded downright creepy — a perfect match to the strange wood carving that inspired Mahler to write a funeral march in the middle of his symphony.

 

Let’s take a look at what Mahler did to the beloved French nursery rhyme. Here’s the original tune:

And here’s the solo that opens Mahler’s 3rd movement.

The melody is almost verbatim, with a few extra notes added in the first and second phrases, and also again in the sixth and seventh phrase. (Marked in red.)

What makes it sound so creepy?

Mahler transposed the melody from major to minor by lowering the 3rd and 6th notes of the scale. Add really slow tempo, and suddenly a happy tune sounds like a funeral march!

Ready to make your own creepy-sounding song?

Recipe for Macabre Nursery Rhymes

Follow these instructions to cook up your own spooky minor stew:

Step 1: Pick out a song.

Nursery rhymes typically have simple melodies that are easy to figure out by ear. Since most nursery rhymes are also really old, they’re considered public domain, so it’s also easy to find free (and legal) sheet music online.

Here are a few song titles to give you ideas:

• Baa, Baa, Black Sheep
• Did You Ever See a Lassie?
• Farmer in the Dell
• Hot Cross Buns
• Itsy Bitsy Spider
• Lavender’s Blue
• London Bridge is Falling Down
• Love Somebody
• Mary Had a Little Lamb
• On Top of Old Smoky
• Pop Goes the Weasel
• Rain, Rain, Go Away
• Ring Around the Rosie
• Row, Row, Row, Your Boat
• The Muffin Man
• This Old Man
• Three Blind Mice
• A-Tisket, A-Tasket
• Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star

Step 2: Figure out the key of your song.

This will help you know what notes to change. If you’re working by ear, look at the ending note of the piece — most pieces will end of the tonic (or “Do“). That’s the name of your key! If you’re working from sheet music, use the key signature to figure it out. Reference the Circle of Fifths if you’re not sure.

Step 3: Time to Transpose

Now it’s time to transpose the melody into a minor key. We’ll use “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star” as an example, but first, let’s take a look at the major scale vs. the minor scale:

Notice that the 3rd, 6th, and 7th scale degrees are all lowered one semitone (or half step). This is what gives the minor scale its spooky sound.

It’s worth mentioning here that there are actually three different forms of the minor scale. Depending on your preference, you may wish to use the harmonic minor scale, which doesn’t lower the 7th note.

Don’t worry though — most nursery rhymes use a very small range of notes, and the song you choose may not even use the 7th scale degree. If your song does use it, experiment and see which sound you like better: “te” (flattened) or “ti” (same as major).

Now let’s take a look at what you have to do to change the melody of “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star” from major to minor.

Here’s what the original melody of “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star” in C major:

And here’s the transposed melody, where we’ve changed the la and mi to le and me by lowering them a semitone. Listen to the difference those tiny changes make!

If you’re playing a melodic instrument, then you can skip over the next step. But if you play a harmonic instrument or if you want to collaborate with someone or create a backing track for your song, continue to step 4.

Step 4: Minor Harmony

Now it’s time to add some harmony! Remember that you’ve changed several notes of your scale, so the chords you used with the song in a major key won’t necessarily be the same in a minor key. We have a handy guide on minor chords, if you require a refresher.

Here are the chords for “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star” in major:

And here are the chords in minor:

One more note: while the melody of “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star” doesn’t use the 7th scale degree, one of the chords does use it. The G7 chord contains the notes G – B – D – F.

If we stick to the natural minor scale and use a B♭ it produces a Gm7 chord which doesn’t quite have the intensity as the regular G7 chord:

You may come across this in your song! Experiment and see which sound you prefer.

Crafting Chilling Tunes

Whether you’re a soloist, playing in a band, or just playing at home for sheer enjoyment, we hope you find this major/minor tutorial helpful. Exploring familiar tunes such as nursery rhymes, folk songs, or other traditional music can be a great way to hone your musical skills and creativity. It can also be a jumping point for further composition — perhaps it will inspire you to write some of your own Halloween tunes!

The post Transpose and Terrify! appeared first on Musical U.

Now if you’re not into jazz you might already be thinking about skipping this episode – don’t!

This conversation tackles exactly that question of whether jazz has anything to offer musicians who aren’t necessarily dedicated to jazz. And also the core skills you can learn to help you find musical freedom in jazz – or any other genre.

Brent has been running Learn Jazz Standards since 2011, publishing new articles and podcast episodes every week. He also performs and teaches around New York and is the author of jazz books for Hal Leonard including “500 Jazz Licks” and “Visual Improvisation for Jazz Guitar”.

On today’s podcast, we pick Brent’s brains about what does (or doesn’t) make jazz unique as a genre, and ask him a few questions that frequently come up among Musical U followers and members on the topic of jazz.

We talk about:

• If jazz is an “advanced” genre or one you can start with right away.
• Whether being a good jazz musician requires mastery of complex music theory or having an incredible ear.
• How to start training your musical ear, for jazz or any other genre, and Brent shares his four-step system.

We also talk about the new ear training course from Learn Jazz Standards and the two things that really set it apart. Brent has kindly set up a terrific freebie for our listeners that can help you get started with musical ear training – stay tuned to the end of the conversation to learn more about the freebie, and how you can get your hands on it!

Listen to the episode:

Links and Resources

• Learn Jazz Standards
• Learn Jazz Standards Podcast
• The Ultimate Ear Training Blueprint
• The Jazz Ear Startup Guide: Five Master Tools

Transcript

Christopher: Welcome to the show, Brent. Thank you for joining us today.

Brent: Christopher, thank you so much for having me on the show. I’m really excited to be here and share some knowledge with your audience.

Christopher: Terrific. So, I’d love to start at the beginning, if we may, and talk a little bit about how you first got started learning music.

Brent: Sure. Yeah. I mean, it’s interesting, because I didn’t come from a musical family at all, really. There wasn’t a lot of music going around, so I’m not entirely sure where it came from, but I just, always — since I was a kid –was always really fascinated with music. I just loved it, and I loved listening to it. I loved when I saw musicians playing, wherever I was at, if it was at a restaurant, or, you know, I always thought it was just really interesting, and so, I saved up money — my parents were really good about, you know, helping me out, but, you know, “You got to save for it if you really want it,” you know, they wanted to, sort of, vet me. “Do you really want to learn how to play an instrument?”

And for me, that was the guitar. So, I got my first guitar when I was ten years old. It was, like, a $300 acoustic guitar. I remember buying it from this particular music store, and, just, going home right away and playing it, and I didn’t know what I was doing, but I was just exploring different sounds and just, kind of, mesmerized by the process, and I, you know, I think I got a guitar teacher, eventually, who mysteriously disappeared one day. He just didn’t show up for the lesson, and I never saw him again.

So, I don’t know what happened with that, but, kind of, after that, you know, I got my footing there with learning how to play the guitar, some introduction to navigating the instrument and, just, kind of, kept going from there, myself and sporadically, you know, as I continued my training, just, you know, learning on my own and discovering my own musical vision and moving forward from there.

So, that’s kind of the very beginning roots of how it all started, for me.

Christopher: That’s fascinating. And I’m sure we’re going to be talking a lot more about jazz and the idea of having a musical ear. It sounds like you started out with an ear-based approach. You said you were exploring and trying things out on guitar. Is that right? Were you learning mostly by ear?

Brent: Yeah. You’re totally right. I mean, obviously, like, you know, every musician, or every instrument, rather, when people learn to play it, for some reason, there’s lots of different approaches to it, and, you know, I find that, like, piano players, they tend to be reading out of books right away and they’re learning how to read notation, and, traditionally, at least in, you know, this age, I guess you could call it, a lot of guitar players don’t really learn by reading music. But I did learn how to read chord symbols and chord charts and lead sheets and things like this.

But, yeah, I was very much so primarily by ear, and I became very interested in music that was, I guess, music that pushed the creative boundaries, and I don’t know if it was my personality or what it was, but I became really interested in progressive rock. I’m talking about bands like Rush and even Pink Floyd there. I would consider them to be in that topic, there.

And then, you know, heavier bands like Dream Theater, Planet X, things like this, you know, bands that really had this improvisational freedom and elastic feeling to them and a story being told in music, and I was just really drawn to that, and I think that that lead me to those records, and just sitting down by ear, because there’s no music for that. So I was just trying to figure out all that stuff, myself. So, long story short, yeah, I’ve always been driven to learn things by ear.

Christopher: That’s so interesting, and I think it gives a real insight into where you’re coming from as a jazz musician and a jazz educator, because I think a lot of people in our audience probably associate jazz with learning by ear and improvising.

Brent: Yeah.

Christopher: And so it’s really interesting to hear that even though now you are someone teaching other people that kind of skill actually from your own background, that was something you picked up along the way, teaching yourself.

Brent: Absolutely. Yeah. And jazz was something I really found. I — when I think about it, I — there’s a lot of things that got me into jazz, but it really started with appreciating it, you know, I think, like, a lot of people from my generation or even generations before me, you know, learning about jazz is something that could happen in, you know, your junior high school or high school band class, which I was certainly a part of, and just being exposed to jazz in that sense, and just being interested by it. It’s not necessarily that I loved it, at first. I think a lot of people have that relationship with jazz, is, you know, it’s something that really has to be focused on and listened to and appreciated to really get the full value out of it.

So, I think it started out by, just, being exposed to it, but coming from that background of progressive rock and this virtuosic element of music and, you know, who knows what’s going to happen, you know, what’s going to happen next in the music? I don’t know, and I think that curiosity kind of pushed me a little further into being interested in jazz.

Christopher: And apart from the, kind of, mythological or maybe idealized vision of the jazz musician who is born with a trumpet in their hand that just, kind of, wails from day one, I think a lot of people would say jazz is something that does require quite a formal education to really have your head around what it means to play jazz and how to do it at the highest level. Were you entirely self-taught, before you became a professional jazz musician, or was there some formal training involved along the way?

Brent: I did have, like, sporadic lessons in there, where I would go find — are you talking specifically jazz, or just music, in general?

Christopher: Music in general, I suppose.

Brent: Okay, yeah. I would, just, I would have sporadic lessons where I would meet somebody and be, like, “Hey, I’d like to take a lesson with you,” and I would take several lessons, but it was never something, like, really long-term. You know, I would just learn something, like a little lesson and go from there. And, yeah, certainly, when I was in high school I took some music theory classes, and, of course, you know, we’re going a little further down in the story, here, but in college, of course, I was really immersed in that stuff, and — but, in general, yeah, it kind of started with learning myself, but when it comes to jazz, it just so happened to be that I got involved in a community of people in my town.

I grew up in Boise, Idaho, which is a place where there is — and I mean no offense to anybody who is listening who lives in Idaho, but there’s not as much music there as, for example, where I live here in New York City.

It was a great place to grow up, but there wasn’t as much musical exposure, and to find a pocket of musicians there who were really hard-core about jazz was — it was almost lucky, in a sense. I had a friend who was actually in a progressive rock band that I was in in high school, which, we had a blast doing it, you know, practicing every single Saturday. We were nerds about it, it was so great, and I have a lot of great memories from that time, but the keyboard player was meeting this teacher who was, kind of like, for lack of better terms, the guru, the jazz guru, out in my city, my smaller city in Idaho, and he, my friend, kind of introduced me to him, and got me involved with him. And there was an arts school that he was starting up, and so, for my senior year of high school, I was actually going part-time to my local public school and then part-time to this art school and kind of being integrated into this small community.

We — the school was just starting up, so it was, just, like, trailers, basically. Like, my practice rooms and the classrooms were, like, trailers, and we’d pile in there, and classes were, you know, combo classes and private lessons, and I had, like, three hours of practice time during the day, you know, it was great, and I think that setting, as far as jazz goes, is kind of what got me really wrapped up into it. So, certainly at that point, really getting a teacher, a mentor but also just being in a community, because, and I think that’s really where music of all styles, not just jazz, but music of all styles really comes to life is within a community where you start getting influenced by others, listening to the music that they’re listening to. And so that’s kind of where that developed into, for me.

Christopher: And what did the next few years look like, once you were into that community? How did you go on to become a professional jazz musician?

Brent: That’s a great question, Christopher, because that’s sort of like the pivotal — my life took a big change. I mean, that’s where I see how things really changed for me. I started getting really into jazz, and, I mean, really hard-core into jazz, like, I listened to records all day long, all night long going to the arts school I was just telling you about. I would be listening to the music. I was learning all the tunes that everybody was doing. We had a jam session once a week at this local coffee shop and everybody from the school would show up. We would all play together, that community I was talking to you about, and I was just, really inspired and really energized, and this is when I was about eighteen years old, seventeen, eighteen years old. That’s where I started really coming into this place where I was like, “I love all kinds of music, but this jazz thing is just what I’m really excited about, right now.”

And I was looking to apply to colleges. I wanted to go to college for music, even though everybody told me not to. I was very stubborn, and I said, “Forget about it. I’m going to do this, anyways. I don’t care what you say,” though my parents were very supportive. And every college — I got in to every single college that I wanted to get into, that I applied for. The problem was, you know, the funds weren’t really there. I wasn’t getting enough scholarship money, and I didn’t have that money to go to school, and I was really discouraged. I was trying to pull as many strings as possible and it was just — for me, it was really heartbreaking, because I was seeing all of my other friends, you know, society’s all telling everybody, “Okay, now you go to college. That’s what you do,” at least, in the community that I was a part of, and I felt like I was gonna be left behind, because I couldn’t quite afford to go to the colleges that I wanted to go to.

So, one day, at the arts school, my teacher, my mentor, came up to me, and it was like, “Hey, what’s up? What’s going on with college?” And I told him, “Hey, I just — you know what? I don’t know what to do. I’m stuck. I can’t afford it. I don’t know what I’m going to do with my life after this.” And what he told me — and it happened to be that my friend who had introduced me to him, the guy that was the keyboard player in my progressive rock band, was kind of in the same spot, too. And so, he told us, he said, “Hey guys, I have this great idea for you. I’ve thought about your situations. What I want you to do — I know this sounds crazy. Maybe you’re going to have a hard time convincing your parents of this. I mean, it’s — but I’ll meet with them. I’ll do whatever it takes, but I want you to stay here for one whole year, and I’m going to set up a program for you guys, and you’re going to practice all day long. You’re gonna play your Monday night gig that you have. Keep doing that. You’re going to teach some students to keep making some money, and you can volunteer at the school,” and stuff like this. And, you know, that’s — “I’m going to set this up for you, and you’re just going to have this intensive, and we’re going to have these big goals for your training, and then, you know, we’re going to re-apply for these schools and get these scholarships.” And that was — at that point, things really took a dramatic turn where it was, like, “Wow.”

And so, for the next year, that’s what I did. I just practiced and studied and did this program and went with my teacher for one whole year.

Christopher: Wow. And that was all jazz-focused, was it?

Brent: This was all jazz-focused at the time, yeah, because it was really just trying to get into these particular conservatories and schools that were really jazz programs that I was going for.

Christopher: Amazing, and was the the goal there to get you to higher level where you would have more options in terms of funding in universities?

Brent: It was the goal. The goal was just to basically — not that we weren’t, that I wasn’t, you know, a decent player at the time, but I wasn’t anything spectacular, especially when it comes to jazz music, which, as you kind of alluded to earlier, can be a little bit brainy, it can be a little bit heavy, and so the idea was just to jumpstart those skills and to give it a little more time. You know, it hadn’t been that long. I’d been really training in jazz, so give it a little more time, and then see what happens, you know, of course, just the other side of things, me making a little bit of money from teaching guitar lessons to, you know, get ready for going to college the next year.

So, yeah, that was the ultimate goal, and so, if you don’t mind, Christopher, I’ll just tell you about the program that I was doing. It was kind of insane.

Christopher: Mm-hm. Please do.

Brent: The program was, essentially, the goal was, I needed to learn a hundred jazz standards by the end of the year, so in a whole year, I had to learn 32 bars of a solo every single week. I had to — I don’t know, I forgot what some of the other things were, like, show a new voicing or a new thing that I learned to my teacher. But, really, the core of it was — it, kind of — and I wouldn’t say this is a good program for almost anybody to take, but this was the program that I was involved in, and it was, you know, practice for five or six hours a day. All that sounds really impressive. I don’t know that I would ever say that that’s the best thing for, like, I would say, a large majority of the people to do, but that’s what I did, and I did that for a year. So it was just, it truly was. It was a big jumpstart to my playing, my musicianship in general, and my jazz playing.

Christopher: Wow. And, if we can separate out into, maybe, I don’t know, instrument technique, ear training, music theory and performance practice, what would the balance have been over the course of that year between those different areas, or, if I’m forgetting any important areas, let me know.

Brent: Yeah. I mean, actually, this particular teacher just really didn’t — he wasn’t really a theory person, which might come as a surprise to maybe some of your listeners, and so, that was actually something that I lacked in knowledge and I had to kind of gain a little bit later. It was really very heavy on learning things by ear, which, I guess, translates into ear training, not even necessarily fundamentals of ear training, which I truly believe are incredibly important, like, recognizing intervals and being able to sing them, and chords and hearing them, and stuff like that, but it was more of a really immersed musical approach to that where I was learning jazz language by learning solos by ear, and at the same time I was building that connection from my brain to my instrument, and I was learning songs by ear, so I was training my ear to listen even more, you know, intentionally, intensely, than ever before.

You know, it was a lot of hard work, and like I said, I wouldn’t — anybody listening right now is just, like, completely, like, “Okay, well, I’m never going to study jazz.” Like, don’t listen to anything I’m saying. I mean, it doesn’t even have to be this way. Sort of, I’m probably starting off, you know, confirming everybody’s biggest fears, and it’s just not true, but — it’s not true, but, yeah, I would say, to answer your question, it was very ear training heavy, in the sense that I was just learning lots of stuff by ear.

Christopher: Gotcha. And that sounds like a pretty hard-core year. I imagine it had a happy ending.

Brent: It had a happy — yes — it had a happy ending. I did end up going to college. I went to Cornish College of the Arts in Seattle. It’s a great art school. And I was there for a year, but then ultimately decided I wanted to be in New York City where all of the action was and I moved out to New York City, was going to the City College of New York out there and up in Harlem studied with some great teachers and the rest is history, I guess.

Christopher: And we’re going to talk a little bit — a lot — about learnjazzstandards.com…

Brent: Yeah.

Christopher: …in a little bit, but before we do that, I would love to unpack just a couple of the things that came up, there…

Brent: Sure.

Christopher: …regarding jazz, because I think there are some in our audience who are jazz musicians and probably know it inside out, to some degree or another, but I know there are probably a lot of people in our audience, too, for whom jazz is quite unfamiliar and maybe quite intimidating. I think a lot of musicians think of jazz as an advanced genre. It’s something particularly complicated and they’d have to master, say, pop and rock before they ever thought about getting into jazz.

But others I’ve come across are singularly jazz-minded, you know, they know jazz is the only thing for them, and so they skip the pop and rock and anything more seemingly simple, and dive straight into, you know, bebop licks and 2-5-1’s and that’s all they are interested in learning. What’s your opinion on that? Would you say jazz is advanced skill and you need to work on some easier stuff first, or is jazz something that you can dive straight into and make sense of?

Brent: Mm-hm. Well, there’s a lot to unpack with what you just said. I’m forgetting some, already, but one thing that you did say, I kind of want to debunk right away is, those who are just about jazz and think, you know, “I’m just gonna learn jazz, I’m just gonna do all this stuff,” you’re making a big mistake, and it’s fine to be someone like me, where you’re focused on jazz and that’s just simply because you like it a lot, and that’s totally fine, and you’re interested in that. But, you know, jazz may be complicated, and I’ll talk a little bit about that, but, you know, also other styles of music are really complicated, too.

Like, rock is complicated. Pop is complicated. Folk music is complicated. Like, if you listen to the best musicians of all these styles, I mean, there is so much to learn. Like, I can’t play funk properly. I can fake it, but I’m not really playing it like someone who really knows how to do it. So I would say, just with that statement there, that, you know, all music is worth diving into, and spending a little bit of time on, and it’s okay to be focused on one or the other, but always try to explore other styles, because you can learn so much. You can strengthen your playing, and to go and to break off into the real main core of your question here is, do you need to learn other styles of learning first before learning jazz? I don’t necessarily think so.

I think that for anything, to learn any style of music, you have to know the fundamentals of your instrument, and so that means just knowing how to get around it, like, not, do you have to know all your scales? Of course not, but, you know, do know some of your scales? Because scales are a way we can organize the notes on our instrument. Are you able to play a basic chord, whether you’re a saxophone player or just playing arpeggios or a piano player playing actual block chords, can you do that? Like, and do you know how to play those chords in different keys? Like, those are some fundamentals of knowing your actual instrument. And I think if you know your actual instrument to some basic level, you can start, you know, going out into other styles of music. And I think a lot of people think jazz is really complicated, but they over — I think they overthink it a little bit. Like, it is complicated. There’s a great reason to study jazz for any musician out there, and I’m not trying to sell it too hard. It is simply that there is so much harmonic knowledge to be gained from it. So, even if you’re, say, a pop musician or a folk musician, if you learn a little bit of jazz you can learn so much about how harmonies move. You can learn so much about, you know, just, voice leading, and these are terminologies that you may or may not be familiar with, but stuff that can help you become a better composer. Stuff that can help you write better melodies.

So, I do think jazz is something that everybody can get into and just to study a little bit of it can really grow everything else around it. So, I don’t want to say that it’s so hard that you should learn other styles, first. I think, just, see what you can get out of it, you know, try something, you know, try taking a few lessons, like, maybe learning how to play a seventh chord when you didn’t know how to play a seventh chord before will open up your world to something brilliant. Maybe learning what a 2-5-1 chord progression is will be, like, “Whoa. That’s insane. I didn’t know that that’s how that worked.” And it’ll open up a system of how to build chord progressions in the first place. You know, it’s all these kinds of skills that you can learn from jazz and it’s okay if you’re just dipping your foot in it, you know. So I hope that answers your question, Christopher.

Christopher: It definitely does. I think that’s such great advice to explain that, you know, any genre can be complicated and any genre can be simple and accessible and jazz is no exception. I think one reason musicians maybe feel like jazz is a bit further out of reach is that they are less exposed to it in regular culture. Like, the less you go seeking jazz, you’re not going to hear it as much on the radio or on TV, and I know, like, certainly from my own experience, if you, kind of,take that first step of, “I’d like to learn some jazz on my instrument,” often the books or the courses kind of take for granted that your ears or your theory knowledge are already of a certain level…

Brent: Mm-hm.

Christopher: …and I love that you broke it down there, and said, actually, you know, if you’ve got the basic instrument ability, that’s enough to, kind of, start exploring this world of jazz and start drawing out some things that might be useful.

Brent: Yeah. You’re absolutely right. Yeah, having those fundamentals is important, and that totally makes sense. I’ve experienced that in my own training materials sometimes, where I’ve gotten great, positive feedback from people who have said, “Hey, I really like that blog post, but, you know, I just, I don’t know what you mean by a minor 11th. Like, I don’t know what you mean by that.” And then I’m like, “Oh, I need to send you to this other blog post that’s going to explain to you what that means.”

You know, so it’s — yeah. I totally understand where you’re coming from. You know, I’m not gonna sugarcoat it. Yeah, there is a lot of theoretical elements involved in jazz, but the good news that everybody should take a lot of encouragement today who’s listening, is that none of the greatest jazz musicians in the world that are ither living today or the guys that innovated it or the ones that started it, if you can say only a certain group of people started it — they learned all this music by ear. In fact, there are some musicians that I have met before that literally don’t even know the names of the notes on their instrument. They just — they just have great ears and they can start playing this stuff.

Of course, having the theoretical knowledge, and, like I said, the fundamentals of your instrument is really important, but, you know, it’s not going to — if you really want to be exposed to it, like you said, you have to listen to this music, right? If you want to become a great rock musician, listen to it. If you want to become a specific, like, a specific style within rock, listen to it. If you want to become a great folk musician, I mean, I’m generalizing styles, here. We can get really detailed. Listen, listen, listen, listen. And you’ll eventually start to get it, and combined with some private instruction, provided, you know, with some sources from online, perhaps, you can start to, you know, piece these puzzle pieces together.

Christopher: Fantastic. And you’ve maybe touched on it, there, but, the other big question that comes up in our audience when the topic of jazz comes up, is, kind of, the great “Theory vs. Ears” debate.

Brent: Yeah.

Christopher: You know, I think jazz is associated with both, you know, having really complex theory and also having an amazing ear, and some people think you just need one or you just need the other. I’d love to hear your perspective, you know, if you wanted a good jazz musician, maybe not world-leading, maybe not innovative, what’s most important?

Brent: I hands-down would say the ear is the most important. In general, when it comes to improvisation, which — jazz is a music that is mostly based off of improvisation, I mean, there’s so many different styles of jazz, but, the general, basic traditional law of jazz, I guess you could say, is, you play a melody and then everybody takes a solo. Everybody says their piece. It’s sort of like a little democracy, you know, like, “Okay, now it’s your turn. Now you tell me what you think, then you tell me what you think. Tell me what you think. Okay, now let’s all join together at the end and say something.” At least, that’s how it’s supposed to work, right? So, you know, that’s kind of how that goes. It’s a music based around improvisation.

And when it comes to becoming a great improviser, having a great ear is way more important than knowing what scale to play over this chord, or, you know, any kind of theory like that. You know, in fact, sometimes I’ll even go this far, Christopher, to say — um, and there’s people that might disagree with me, but sometimes I think that scales and thinking about scales in order to play over chords or chord progressions can be a barrier for actually creating great music, you know, it can actually stop you from creating great melodies. And scales are great, I think they’re really important if you think about them in the right way, and all that theory that’s attached to scales, but at the end of the day, if you have a great ear, I mean, that’s — hands-down, I would take that in a student, any day than someone who is, “I know everything there is to know about theory.” It’s like, “That’s great, you have all that knowledge, but can you actually make music with it?” I think that’s the big thing at the end of the day, for me. So, I would hands-down say, theory is great, but ears, all the way.

Christopher: Fantastic. I love that explanation, and it gels really well with the way we approach improvisation at Musical U, which is to say, theory can be really helpful and the idea of a fixed chord progression or a fixed scale can really help you when you’re starting out in improvisation by giving you, kind of, a safe zone where, you know, the notes you pick are going to sound okay.

Brent: Absolutely.

Christopher: But actually, the trap is — and particularly with — you know, rock guitarists are the classic example, but you can get trapped in those patterns and those ideas and frameworks where you’re just playing robotically. You know, you’re not actually hearing what you play before you play it, you just play it and see what comes out, and I love that you’ve explained that what lets you get beyond that is the ears, because that’s very much our philosophy.

Brent: Yeah.

Christopher: And I think it’s what you need to really feel free as an improviser.

Brent: Yeah. You know, Christopher, I like to think about scales, and maybe this will help your audience to think about, but I like to think of scales as pitch collections, and what I mean by pitch collections is, I mean it’s sort of like a map of the notes that you can use. They’re really guidelines. It’s not like a definite, if you stray outside of this, then you’re going to be in trouble, but there are a map of notes that you can use. So it’s not necessarily a play-it-in-this-order, or you have to — this note has to be followed by this note. It’s simply a map of, like, you know, if you can visualize on your instrument, you know, where things are, like, then that can be really helpful. So scales aren’t a means, necessarily, to create music. They’re just a structure. They’re pitch collections that can help you visualize the notes that you can play.

Christopher: That’s a really helpful mindset, I think, for people to keep to get that balance between safety and freedom and improvisation. That’s great advice.

Brent: Absolutely.

Christopher: So you are the man behind learnjazzstandards.com.

Brent: Yes.

Christopher: I think I first discovered the site when I was learning walking baselines, and, you know, I was playing base and I needed a set of chords to play some jazz standards, and you have this huge database of jazz standards with all the information people would require.

Brent: Yeah.

Christopher: But you also have a lot of teaching material on the site, too. Can you tell the audience a little bit about what they can discover at learnjazzstandards.com and how it can help them with some of the things we’ve been talking about?

Brent: Yeah. Absolutely. So, learnjazzstandards.com really just came out of the place of, you know, having a resource for people to learn jazz standards. I guess that’s why it’s called that, you know? And so, that’s always been something from the very beginning, where we do have a database where you can, you know, read a bio about the song, you can — there’s a play along we just uploaded, like, years ago, tons of play alongs onto Youtube of these songs that you can practice along with, and chord charts so you can follow along, just, like, a place to learn jazz standards, but over the years it’s become, I mean, so much more than that.

We have a podcast, the LJS podcast where every single week I’m, you know, interviewing people just like you’re interviewing me and talking about music and jazz, and I also do a lot of solo shows where I’m just giving out jazz tips and advice. And also, on our blog, you can find all of that stuff, too. You know, whether you’re just interested in jazz and you’re not, you know, you just want to dip your toe in, there is something there for everybody that they can look up, or if they have a question, my goal always when I am creating content for learnjazzstandards.com is to think about what questions could people possibly have, and if they type that into my search bar, would they find that question? And so, you know, I might not have the answer to every question, but I’m working on it. So you can try me and see if that’s happening or not. But it’s really a place for everybody, whether you’re just starting out, whether you’re, you know, an intermediate player, or maybe even if you’re an advanced player, you can still get some value from what we have at learnjazzstandards.com.

Christopher: Awesome. And I think one thing that I love about the site is, apart from the huge database of jazz standards, you have these great portal pages where people can dive in to learn specific things and kind of navigate their way through all of the blog posts and tutorials you have, there. So, yeah, I think if anyone listening is intrigued and wants to get into jazz at whatever level, definitely take a look at the website. I’m a huge fan of the “Learn Jazz Standards Podcast.” It’s one that is definitely on my listening rotary, each week.

Brent: Oh, thanks so much. I appreciate it.

Christopher: And September for you guys — for September, you were doing ear training month.

Brent: Yeah.

Christopher: And the — I definitely encourage anyone who is listening to that show to go and check that out, because you did some really powerful episodes on intervals, chords, chord progressions, and more, and this was leading up to the launch of your brand new ear training course. Can you tell us about that, Brent?

Brent: Yeah, I’d love to, and I’d also like to say right up front, like, for those listening, that I have, like, a really great freebie to give to your audience, today. I’m really excited about this freebie, so I’m not going to tell you what it is, yet because, you know, I don’t want you to — I want you to listen to the rest. But, so, I will talk about the course, though, yeah.

The course is called, “How to Play What You Hear,” and, you know, when I think about ear training, you know, and this is a course, by the way, not just for jazz musicians. This is a course for everybody. Everybody can get some value out of this course, no matter what kind of music you play or what you’re going for. But when I think about ear training, I try to think about what is the end-goal of your training? Like, is it just, simply, like, what’s the point of hearing intervals? What’s the point of hearing chords? What’s the point of hearing chord progressions?

The point of it is so that you can play what you’re hearing in your head, and I’ve heard that — I get emails all the time from people asking me questions like, you know, “How do I learn songs by ear? How do I learn solos by ear? How do I play the music that I’m hearing in my head?” And that got me just thinking a lot. I started reaching out to colleagues asking them, you know, how did you get to this point in your musicianship? And I started looking back at myself, at my college days, and I became convinced that the fundamentals of ear training are critical. They’re crucial for becoming a better musician in general and playing what you hear. So, at the end of the day, why do we ear train? It’s so that we can play what we’re hearing in our head.

So the course is called, “How to Play What You Hear,” and it walks you through my four steps for playing what you hear. And those four steps are, number one, hearing intervals, not just recognizing them, but also being able to sing them. Like, if you heard a reference note, could you sing a major sixth up from that? Could you sing a minor third down from that?

And then, step number two is hearing the chords. So, being able to recognize, what does a major triad sound like? And if that sounds intimidating to anybody, you’ll learn what that is. What is a triad? It’s three notes. You’ll learn what that is. Everything is explained. But, you know, if I heard a major triad, could I recognize it? But, even further than that, could I actually sing the arpeggio, could I sing the chord tones, you know? Could I pick out what the third or the fifth or the root is? And again, if that’s, if that’s over your head right now, that’s all explained pretty clearly.

And then, step number three is hearing chord progressions, because a big part of playing what you hear is being able to hear a song and, I mean, imagine for a second, like, again, no matter what genre of music, if you heard a song on the radio and you just automatically knew what those chords were, like, wouldn’t that just, like, I don’t want to, I don’t know, I don’t like when people say, change your life, that much, because it’s, like, well, that’s a strong statement, but it could change your musical life, right, if you could actually do that. And so, this step number three is all about, you know, hearing chord progressions and it’s amazing in the course how you learn how in intervals, it influences if you can learn chords, and chords influences how you can learn chord progressions. It’s sort of like a stepwise process.

And then step number four is translating what you hear to your instrument, and this is a really important step because at the end of the day, we’ve got these fundamentals of ear training, right? It’s sort of like, you could sort of think of it like the scales of learning your instrument, I mean, maybe you could consider it like that. Well, there’s this part missing, though, and that’s the — connecting what you’re hearing to your instrument, right? I mean, whether it’s learning a song, whether it’s improvising, or anything — or just playing a melody, you need to be able to make that connection. And a lof of musicians don’t have that connection. It’s like the instrument and their ear are separate entities. And what we want to do is, we want to build that relationship with each other, right? And eventually, the ultimate goal — and I’m still working towards it — I think everybody’s working towards this stuff for the rest of their life — we want it to be one sold unit. We want the instrument and the ear to be the same thing, right, like, when you see the best musicians in the world play, it’s almost as if, like, they’re not playing an instrument, they’re just — I don’t know what they’re doing. They’re just playing, and that instrument is just the vessel for them to express and create music. And so, that’s what step number four is. So it’s steps one through four. It’s hearing intervals, hearing chords, hearing chord progressions, and finally translating what you hear to your instrument. And in this course, I just kind of walk you through this process of how to actually do that.

Christopher: Fantastic. And for anyone listening who is thinking to themselves, “Well, I’ve seen ear training before, or I’ve heard about interval recognition apps before,” I’d love to just point out two really powerful things you said, there, Brent, I love are a part of your course, and the first is that you incorporate singing, and, you know, we’ve had an episode of the show all about worrying that you’re tone deaf and whether you can sing in tune. I just say, you know, you don’t have to be a star singer to leverage your voice to train your ears. It’s such a powerful technique and I love that that’s included in your course.

The other really critical thing is, as you said, there, step four, which is connecting with your instrument, because so many musicians make the mistake of doing ear training totally isolated from anything else, or maybe connected with music theory, but that’s it, and we’ve just found time and again what makes the difference to people actually succeeding and enjoying and using their ear training is that connection to the instrument. So, I’d really encourage anyone listening to take those two things seriously. That really does set this course apart from a lot of the other material that’s out there.

Brent: Thanks a lot, Christopher. I appreciate it. And, yeah, absolutely. Singing is really important, because it’s sort of the difference between, you know, if you can hear an interval, you can hear a chord. That’s really helpful, to be able to recognize that and put a name to it, but it’s ony one step of it. To really, truly know if you’ve internalized those sounds, which is ultimately what we’re going for, is if you can actually reproduce that yourself.

And in the course, I talk about if you feel really uncomfortable singing, because sometimes, you know, sometimes for a lot of people, actually, like, singing, it’s hard to hold a pitch. And I totally understand that. I mean, I don’t consider myself a bad singer, but I sometimes, just the technique of my voice, I don’t work on it every day like a vocalist might, but you can hum or you can whistle, too, and a lot of people feel more comfortable with that. The whole idea is that you’re just able to make some sound yourself that will produce the pitch and essentially prove that, you know, you can actually hear that. You can hear that sound.

Christopher: So, apart from heading to learnjazzstandards.com and tuning in to the “Learn Jazz Standards Podcast,” if someone is listening and wants to get involved with this new ear training course, where is the best place for them to go, or how can they take that first step?

Brent: I’m so glad you asked. So, I mentioned before — I mentioned before that I have a freebie for your audience, and I really think that anybody — again, any style of music, not just jazz, any skill level can benefit from this, and I want to give you — it’s “The Ultimate Ear Training Blueprint” and a video training series. It’s a great handout, it’s completely free, and I’m just giving it away, basically, just, kind of walking you through those four steps that I just talked about in the little video series and also, at the same time, just a little pdf ebook for you to follow along, “The Ultimate Ear Training Blueprint.” So if you want to check that out, just go to learnjazzstandards.com/musicality and you can find that there and get started.

Christopher: Terrific. Thank you so much for setting that up. It’s been such a pleasure to have you on the show today, Brent. Thank you for joining us.

Brent: No problem. Christopher, thank you so much, and I really appreciate everything you’re doing at Musical U. It’s just, it’s really important to spread music education to other people, and so, I really appreciate you having me on the show.

The post An Ear for Jazz, with Brent Vaartstra appeared first on Musical U.

Hi, this is Christopher Sutton, the Founder and Director of Musical U, and I’d love to share with you what’s new in Musical U this month.

You can watch the video below or read on to learn more.

There were three big additions at Musical U this month. The first was a preview of our upcoming Scale Degree Recognition module. The second was our latest Resource Packs for our Instrument Packs, this month on “rhythmic precision”. The third is the return of our Halloween module, because it’s October, and we made a big addition to that module this year. Oh, and details of our next free live masterclass, stay tuned to the end of the video for that.

Preview: Scale Degree Recognition 2

First up, we shared a preview of one of our forthcoming modules. We already have a great module for scale degree recognition. If I go here to training and look at all our training modules, and go to melodies, you can see our existing scale degree recognition module here, which covers the major pentatonic scale so the notes Do, Re, Mi, So, and La in solfa.

This is a really good module and it has a bunch of training and testing MP3s to help you learn to recognise these notes by ear, as well as our interactive training widget to check that you are able to do it.

We have all of this material for the major pentatonic, but what we’ve been working on is a followup module for the full major scale. This month we shared a preview of that.

We explained how the module is going to work, as well as sharing some of those training tracks from the module. We have male and female voice singing the solfa for these little exercises and we share tracks from there of the lessons, one introducing the note Fa, one introducing the note Ti and then one, which covers the full major scale. Let’s have a little listen.

“Do, Re, Mi, Fa, Sol, La, Ti, Do-”

So the idea with these training tracks is that you’ll hear a scale in solfa and then you’ll hear one note from that scale and your task is to identify which of the notes it was.

So by practicing with these tracks, you get more and more able to recognise the notes of the scale by ear and you can then take that to our melody practice exercises which lets you recognise the notes of whole melodies by ear too. So this was just a little teaser of that module and we’ll be releasing the full module inside Musical U soon.

Resource Packs: Rhythmic Precision

The second big addition at Musical U was this month’s resource packs in our instrument packs. We have Instrument Packs for guitar, piano, bass, and singing that help you connect up the ear skills you’re working on at Musical U with the actual playing of your instrument. And each month we release a new tutorial video as well as accompanying MP3s to help you practice and a quick reference sheet to remind you of what you’ve learned.

This month the topic was “rhythmic precision” and how to get a really good inner metronome and sense of the beat. Let’s take a quick peek at what Dylan Welsh did in our guitar pack this month. Here’s the tutorial video and I’ll just skip in a little bit.

Subdivide in your head, divide the beat up in your head or even do so verbally out loud into 16th notes. So what I’m thinking when I’m hearing this pulse, one, two, three, four. Notice, I’m even subdividing with my body. I can’t stop myself, but I’m hearing it as taka taka taka taka taka take taka taka taka …

So each of our Pros presented exercises you can do to hone your sense of rhythmic precision directly on your instrument.

Halloween training!

The third exciting edition at Musical U this month was the release of our Halloween module. And I’m a massive Halloween fan and I’m afraid I inflict that on my team. But fortunately, there are some members at Musical U who love it as much as I do. And the reality is that digging into what makes songs sound scary can actually be a fantastic way to draw together all of the listening skills you might have been working on and put it into practice for a fun and different activity.

So as you can see it’s quite a big module at this point and each of these lessons so far had taken a track that was composed with kind of horror movie traditions or scary creepy musical elements and the lessons unpack it. So you can see in this one we’re talking about audio effects, the different scales you might use, how you orchestrate, the different types of harmony you might use to give a spooky flavour, and the rhythms that can contribute to a spooky sound.

This year the new lesson we added is called “Transpose and Terrify” and it was actually our Resident Pro for piano, Sara Campbell who put this together for us. And the idea is to explain to you how you can take the well known major song like a nursery rhyme, for example, and transpose it yourself into a minor key. Let’s take a quick listen to how that turns out.

So this new lesson in the module explains step by step what it takes to turn a major tune into minor and gives you an easy process you can follow to do that yourself. It’s a really fun activity to try out at this Halloween-y time of year and it draws on your listening skills and your music theory to be able to transpose major into minor and come up with own spooky creations.

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So those were the three big additions at Musical U this month.

1. We had our preview of the upcoming scale degree recognition module for the full major scale.
2. We added this month’s resource packs for guitar, piano, singing, and bass to work on rhythmic precision
3. And we updated and re-released our Halloween module so that our members can have fun putting their new skills into practice at a spooky task at this time of year.

Before you go, just a shout out to our live masterclass coming up this Saturday 28th of October. This is again, with our resident pro, Sara Campbell. She was also a guest on the podcast this month. This is really Sarah month at Musical U.

She’s presenting a masterclass all about four-chord songs and this is such a powerful idea in music if you’ve wanted to understand chord progressions by ear, or write your own, or you just want a deeper sense of what’s going on in the music you hear on the radio or the music you’re playing, this masterclass is really going to help you get to know it all in a fun and practical way.

So I’ll put a link with this video for where you can sign up free to attend that live masterclass.

And of course, if you are a member of Musical U, you’ll get access to the recording afterwards as well.

Thanks for joining me for this look inside what’s new at Musical U this month and I hope to see you inside soon.

The post What’s New in Musical U: October 2017 appeared first on Musical U.

This can mean revisiting an instrument you used to play (and learning some new lessons along the way!), sharpening your rhythm skills, discovering the hidden uses of a simple, oft-forgotten scale, or going back to the basics of improvisation…

…or all four!

Violin As A Second Language

Marisa hadn’t picked up her high school instrument, the violin, in over 20 years when she was asked to play second violin in a rock symphony orchestra. She was an opera singer who was confident that her musical skills and violin experience combined would carry her through the challenge.

Until she picked up the violin. Navigating difficult key signatures, complicated rhythms, rusty muscle memory, and a lack of instrument care know-how, Marisa learned that returning to an instrument you once played isn’t always like riding a bike – you cannot necessarily just pick up where you left off.

Thankfully, Marisa had a massive advantage – she had transferrable musical skills in her corner from her years as an opera singer. Learn how she put these to good use and picked up some new tricks on violin in How I Resurrected My High School Instrument!

As a violinist, Marisa had to adapt to key signatures that were transposed to make it easier for the singers to perform. But, as a singer, key signatures weren’t something that she had to regularly be concerned with! If you’re a vocalist trying to learn an instrument, Mella Music has you covered with their guide to key signatures.

Having good practice habits greatly benefited Marisa as she sought to relearn her instrument and the complex parts in a short period of time. What are some habits that can destroy a good practice session? Eddy from The Practice Journal writes about what not to do during music practice.

Marisa was very cognizant of how she needed to prepare for a vocal performance, but was not nearly as sure about the stresses that playing violin would have on her body. Music can take a toll on many parts of the body, and it is very important to take proper care of joints and other aches that can arise as you start playing more. Music Consultant gives some great tips for avoiding muscle fatigue, pain, and injury.

Five Little Notes

Whether you’re new to improvisation or a seasoned pro, the creative well can run dry sometimes.

Enter the pentascale – a scale consisting of the first five notes of a regular major scale, that you can riff off. Those new to improvisation will be delighted with how easy it is to play (and play around with), while experienced musicians will find that the five-note constraint actually inspires creativity, rather than stifling it.

In our podcast About Pentascales, we discuss the unique relationship of pentascales to chords, the difference between pentascales and pentatonic scales, the simple trick for playing this scale on the piano, and how this underestimated scale can get you thinking about musical dimensions other than just pitch.

Pentascales are great for piano students! One of the reasons that this type of scale is so popular with pianists is that they are able to play with all five of their fingers without having to change position. Music Motivation explains how to get moving with pentascales.

Once you get started with pentascales, move around the keyboard until you can play them in all 12 keys! Galaxy Music Notes has a handy resource to help you move throughout the key signatures!

After those exercises, you are ready to see how pentascales can be either major or minor. Changing just one note will dramatically alter the way that this scale sounds. For a full tutorial, check out this video lesson from the Hoffman Academy.

Remembering Your Rhythm

This month, our resident pros tackled the topic of rhythm from the perspective of ear training and musicality. The question they set out to answer is, “How do you develop your inner sense of rhythm and apply it to your instrument?”

Needless to say, they rose to the challenge beautifully.

Bass master Steve Lawson shares the secret of rhythmic precision and shows you how to train your “inner metronome”. A great framework for playing elaborate rhythms is given by guitar pro Dylan Welsh. Meanwhile, piano pro Sara Campbell addresses specific rhythmic problems that plague pianists, and offers tips and exercises to help you conquer them.

Head over to Rhythmic Precision: Resource Pack Preview to learn more about what the pros have in store for you for the month of October!

Developing a keen sense of rhythm is a very important part of becoming a proficient musician. And, like ear training, it can be accomplished by allocating a small portion of your practice time to developing your rhythmic ear. Simon from Classical Guitar Corner has a 15 minute lesson to get you started.

The Musical U Resident Pros took us through some fascinating tutorials on developing rhythm. Rhythm is often confused with the beat of a song, which is a different aspect of the music. Kim Foster from Precision Musician talks about how understanding the differences will improve your ability to perform in an ensemble.

Ready to get started with your own rhythmic mastery? Here are 10 tips for more effective rhythm practice from Rick at ninebuzz.com!

Improvisation Made Simple

On this week’s interview podcast, our piano pro Sara Campbell takes you back to the basics of improvisation.

At first, improvisation was a topic Sara herself approached with caution in her own teaching. However, wanting to give her students a piano experience beyond just learning songs, she found resources that helped her teach improv to her students in an intuitive, straightforward way.

Whether you’re a devoted piano player or are just starting to plunk out notes on your keyboard, you’ll want to tune into Finding the Notes Yourself, with Sara Campbell to learn how to develop musicality, begin improvising, and what helped make things click for her as a piano player.

Sara talked about her early experiences playing the piano and how much she was encouraged to experiment in her playing. This is such a great exercise to really push the boundaries of your musicality and learn without consequence! For some fun exercises for younger students, Susan Paradis has compiled a wonderful list of free resources.

While in college, Sara was first exposed to lead sheets. This was a pivotal moment in her musical learning and forced her to move past her boundaries into areas that weren’t as comfortable. Teach Piano Today provides you with 18 fun pieces to get started!

In her workshops, Sara mentioned that they would bring in professionals and show the students that even seasoned musicians make mistakes, especially when improvising or jamming. This helps to overcome the fear that so many of us have when trying to perform in this type of setting. To give you some ideas of how to calm those nerves, Skoove has six foolproof tips to make you more comfortable playing in front of others.

Building Blocks

A solid inner sense of rhythm, the ability to master a second instrument, a simple-yet-versatile five note scale, and a good foundation for improvisation are four tools that will take you far in your music journey.

The post Violin As A Second Language, Five Little Notes, Your Inner Rhythm, and Improvisation Made Simple appeared first on Musical U.

The pentascale (not to be confused with its cousin, the pentatonic scale) is an excellent starting point for piano improvisation. Learn why it’s an incredible tool for beginners, and how the constraint of using only five notes can inspire creativity in your playing.

Links and Resources

• Interview with Sara Campbell
• Improvisational Freedom Through Constraints
• Pentatonic scales (different from pentascales!)

Transcript

We recently had Sara Campbell join us on the show and one thing she talked about was how pentascales had given her the opportunity to see the keyboard in a new way and start making a visual connection to how scales and chords are arranged on piano.

I wanted to pick up on that and talk a bit about pentascales and what makes them interesting – and also how they’re different from the pentatonic scale.

First things first: What is a “pentascale”?

You’re probably familiar with the idea of a scale in music. It’s a set of notes arranged in pitch order, ascending or descending. The most well-known kinds are major scales and minor scales – but there are many more beyond those. Scales are closely related to the key of a piece of music, the set of notes used for its melody and harmony. And they can provide us with an insight into how music is constructed and how the melody and harmony relate to each other.

A pentascale is a type of 5-note scale. The name gives it away, with “penta” meaning “five”. It’s actually just the first five notes of the regular major scale. So if we take C Major as an example, the major scale runs C, D, E, F, G, A, B, and C again.

[ Demo ]

The C Major Pentascale is simply: C, D, E, F, and G.

[ Demo ]

So what’s interesting and useful about pentascales?

Pentascales came up in conversation with Sara because she is primarily a piano teacher, and they’re a type of scale that’s particularly popular with pianists.

The major reason, as Sara explained in that episode, is that humans have five fingers!

If you want to play a full major scale on piano with one hand you’ll need to move the whole hand partway through the scale. This is a tricky skill to get the hang of for beginner pianists!

A pentascale makes life easier, especially for kids, because you don’t need to move the hand to play the whole scale. All the notes are within reach.

Of course, playing scales as scales is not all that interesting or useful. But the same thing extends to everything we use scales for: specifically, melodies and chords.

When you first start out at the piano it’s easiest to learn pieces which don’t require you to move your hand around. With your wrist staying still, a pentascale lets you assign one note to each finger (and thumb) and have the maximum variety of notes available without moving the hand around the keyboard. So there’s a lot of beginner piano repertoire designed to be played without moving the hands, and it will often be built using the pentascale.

Pentascales are not just for piano though!

Funnily enough Sara is also very familiar with the other group of musicians that know pentascales well: singers. She’s a wonderful singer herself and also a vocal teacher, so she knows well where pentascales come into the picture for singers, and that’s warmups.

If you’ve ever heard a choir warming up you’ve probably heard something like this:

[ Demo of chromatic pentascale warmup ]

They’re just singing pentascales!

[ Demo with numbers and solfa ]

Pentascales are nice for vocal warmups because they let you explore and warm up your vocal range a bit more gradually than the full major scale.

So pentascales are particularly familiar and useful to pianists and singers – but they’re actually interesting for all musicians.

Pentascales can be interesting for improvising.

The way we teaching improvisation at Musical U is very ear-based – which gives you full creative flexibility but can be a little overwhelming at first. So we also use the idea of constraints and “playgrounds” that limit the notes you’re going to play and give you a bit more confidence that what you improvise will sound good.

Constraints can provide you with a “safe zone” for improvisation while actually sparking greater creativity too.

By restricting yourself to the notes of the pentascale rather than the full major scale you’ll probably find yourself coming up with new and different musical ideas than you would with the full major scale at your disposal.

In fact we actually pare it back to just three notes, do re mi, for some exercises, to really bring out creativity in rhythm, dynamics and the other dimensions of music aside from pitch.

Pentascales are also interesting for their relationship to chords.

The notes 1 3 and 5 from the major scale give you a major triad chord, the most prevalent type of chord throughout music. And of course those notes are in the pentascale too – they’re just the top, middle and bottom notes!

You can also create a minor pentascale with the first five notes of the minor scale, and taking the first, third and fifth notes from that gives you a minor triad chord, the next most common chord type.

So pentascales encompass those chord notes and that means they give you a nice compact framework for thinking about melodies and chords and how they relate.

If we come back to the example of a beginner piano player, once they’ve settled their hand with a finger per note of the pentascale it’s pretty easy to explain that if they just play their thumb, index finger and pinky together they’re playing a major chord. Magic! Of course that same relationship holds true for other instruments and can provide an easy insight into how chords fit in with the scale and melody.

Now you might have been listening so far and wondering about another common type of scale with a similar name: the pentatonic.

Pentascales are not the same as pentatonic scales!

They are both five-note scales, hence the similar name, but there’s a small but important difference.

As we’ve talked about, pentascales take the first five notes of the major scale. Pentatonic scales actually take a different five notes, skipping the fourth and adding the sixth.

So where a pentascale is: do re mi fa so, a pentatonic scale is do re mi so la.
[ Demo ]
Or in numbers, it’s: 1 2 3 4 5 vs 1 2 3 5 6.
[ Demo ]

The pentatonic scale is amazing and we’ll definitely be devoting an episode to it in future. But for now just remember that a pentascale and a pentatonic scale are not the same thing, and everything we’ve talked about today was about pentascales specifically.

So I hope that gives you a clear sense of what a pentascale is, why it’s important for pianists and singers, and also how the implications for improvisation and the connection to chords make them quite interesting to all types of musician.

Oh, and if you are a piano player or vocalist, remember that Sara Campbell is kindly providing her pentascale reference sheet free to podcast listeners. Just head over to the shownotes page for this episode or her interview to find the link.

The post About Pentascales appeared first on Musical U.

What happens when an opera singer revisits the violin after a 20-year hiatus?

Violin as a Second Language

I was recently offered the opportunity to play second violin in a very cool rock symphony orchestra. Considering that I’m primarily a classical singer and hadn’t played violin in over twenty years, I knew that I would have to work very hard at it, but felt that I could do it if I set my mind to it.

Everybody laughed.

My friends laughed. My boyfriend laughed. My family laughed. “But… you’re an opera singer,” they all said to me. “You don’t play the violin.”

I reminded everyone that years ago I played violin in my middle and high school orchestras.

Their faces fell from an amused smile to a concerned gaze.

“It’s the second violin part of a rock orchestra,” I reassured them. “How hard can it be?”

Sharps, Flats and Rock N’ Roll!

As it turns out, the second violin part of a rock orchestra can be very hard.

The key signatures were full of sometimes five and six accidentals to accommodate singers (karma!), the sophisticated syncopated rhythms were as complex as any I’d ever had to learn and numerous triplet arpeggios and flourishes were just some of the endless technical challenges.

For a moment it seemed that everyone was right. Yet, I already had a built-in set of musical skills and experiences that I learned as a student and professional singer and from childhood piano lessons (not to mention those years in school orchestra) on which to draw to rise to the task of learning a second instrumental language.

Memories of Muscles Past

When I picked up the violin for the first time again in over twenty years, a few of the skills that I had learned as a child, such as fingerings and how to hold a bow, immediately came back to me (vibrato, on the other hand, was an entirely new concept). There’s definitely something to be said for starting children early on an instrument such as piano or violin, as the associated motor skills are largely retained by the brain and are beneficial for adults looking to pick up an old instrument or learn a new one. This adds to the very strong case for the importance of music education in schools.

I discovered quite quickly, however, that starting over on the violin was a stark reminder of my age. My fingers did not respond to playing as they did when I was young and were often swollen and stiff. They also needed to be strengthened to avoid hyperextension.

I found that my brain was sluggish as well – it no longer had the sponge-like absorbency it did in my youth nor did it retain the violin parts as efficiently as it would if I were learning new vocal tunes with ready-made synapses. This made for a constant source of frustration which required time, patience, self-discipline, and some wine to overcome.

Musical Crossover Skills

It’s true that we singers can get a little lazy about paying attention to key signatures because we can “get away” with just knowing the melody and intervals.

Not so with the violin. I’d had plenty of formal music theory education in my life, as I studied at a music conservatory for several years. This music theory training came in particularly handy when trying to read key signatures with four or more accidentals and having to understand in a physical way where the intervals are in a scale and on my instrument, not just in my head.

Another skill applicable to the violin that I had developed as a singer (and had focused on more recently as a jazz singer) were aural skills. There are no frets on a violin, and when you have to learn to coordinate finger positions with pitches on an instrument where there’s no indication of where to put your fingers to achieve the correct pitch, this skill was useful. Having someone (or yourself) play the pitches on a keyboard was also very helpful.

As I mentioned, the rhythms of the parts were remarkably advanced. Had I not had rhythmic training throughout my career and musical education, I would not have been able to learn the parts because assimilating the rhythm was probably the most difficult part of the process. The essential – yet often overlooked – skills of being able to keep a pulse in your innermost musical being and to compute complex rhythms are a necessity for all musicians.

Know Your Instrument

I’m accustomed to a certain set of pre-performance singing rituals to maintain the health of my voice. These include avoiding talking, using steam, and eating a certain diet. I had no idea what these rituals were for string players (slamming my left hand in a drawer on the day of the first performance was likely not one of them). Was I supposed to steam my hands? Knowing how to care for my body to play a new instrument was an unexpected requirement.

More importantly, I also had to learn to take care of an instrument that was an appendage, which was a new concept to me. Getting to know a good luthier and knowledgeable people at a local music store to help me care for my external instrument was important. For example, they taught me the difference between different types of strings, which rosin to use, and how to keep my violin clean. A new bow, strings, and bridge made a huge difference in my sound.

Practice Makes Prepared

Did I mention that I only had six months to prepare the symphony parts? Due to time limits, practice techniques became very important. I practiced. A lot. Sometimes up to four hours a day for months on end.

Yet, on some days my muscles just didn’t respond or the dizzying page of black dots was a blur. I gave myself permission to have good and bad practice days and to not panic when I hit the plateaus one commonly reaches when learning to play a new instrument. I knew they were temporary.

The Rewards of Proper Practice

The time I spent practicing, however, was effective, because earlier in my life I had learned very good practice techniques under the guidance of a skilled teacher who was very helpful in teaching me to practice in such a way that my muscles retained what I was learning, which would be my saving grace once I reached the first performance. There’s no substitute for a knowledgeable teacher.

These practice techniques were very tedious and took a lot of time, but they were absolutely essential. There are simply no shortcuts in learning to play a second instrument.

Believe me.

I tried in vain to apply quick techniques that I use as a singer to learning the violin and just ended up wasting time. If you’re considering learning a new instrument, you must choose to make the time in your everyday life to practice.

A Musical Second Language

Even with its innate frustrations, learning to play a second instrument was a rewarding choice. If you’re considering a career as a professional musician, having a second instrument opens up a new world of employment opportunities.

Also, having ability on a second instrument automatically gives you additional musicianship “street cred” because it’s assumed that you have more than one set of abilities.

Besides, it’s never a waste of time to flex and strengthen your musicianship muscles.

Most of all, setting a goal and working towards it is hugely rewarding in itself. Just to be able to try something new and different (even if everyone laughs) and succeed at it is deeply satisfying, even if that success is modest. Don’t give up on your second instrument. It’s worth the effort.

The post How I Resurrected My High School Instrument appeared first on Musical U.