Musicality World

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Possibly the most important question every artist has to answer is what goes into making your own signature sound. Let’s listen to some good music and break down the aspects of branding your sound. 🎧 https://www.musical-u.com/learn/define-signature-sound/

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Pitch control is one of the most important aspects to developing your singing skills. Here are 3 simple exercises to help you improve your vocal pitching. https://www.musical-u.com/learn/3-singing-exercises-to-improve-your-vocal-pitching/

This week was about developing four of those core skills: including dynamics in your playing, learning the basics of playing, working on active listening, and making the connection between scales and chords. If you’re looking to deepen your understanding of how music works and play naturally and expressively, this is a fantastic place to start!

But before we dive into all that…

Are you interested in what goes into running a company like Musical U? This week, Musical U founder Christopher Sutton gives two interviews about why he started Musical U, the highs and lows of the entrepreneurial journey, and the tools he uses to keep the company running.

Musical Entrepreneurship

This week, Musical U founder Christopher Sutton heads over to The Music Entrepreneur HQ and Midnight Music for guest podcast episodes on musicality and entrepreneurship.

On Music Entrepreneur HQ, he discusses his own music journey, why he started Musical U, the tools he uses to run his business, the entrepreneurial decision-making process, and the ups and downs of running your own company (and advice on getting through the lows!).

Head over to The Music Entrepreneur HQ to listen to How to Become a More Confident Musician & Living the Entrepreneurial Life – with Christopher Sutton of Musical U!

Meanwhile, over at the Music Tech Teacher Podcast, Christopher is interviewed by Katie Wardrobe, music technology education trainer, speaker, and consultant from Midnight Music. On Improving Musicality with Christopher Sutton, he discusses musicality, ear training as a means to an end, and how to tie your training to what matters to you, whether that is improvising, playing by ear, or learning the Für Elise.

Christopher and Katie also talk about how technology can help in your ear training progress, with the availability of ear training apps and games that help contextualize and liven up the learning process.

Last but not least, Christopher shares some lessons and anecdotes from his entrepreneurial journey – from his transition from a day job to running his own company, to his early aspirations of starting a porridge blog!

Dynamic Music

Out of the countless ways you can add interest, variation, and expressiveness to your playing, dynamics are one of the most powerful and immediate – you can build and release tension, change the mood of a piece, and effectively tell a story with your music.

In this month’s Instrument Packs, our guitar, bass, and piano pros show you how to train your ear to better recognize dynamics and apply them in your playing, provide practice tracks to give you a place to start, and teach you instrument-specific techniques for controlling dynamics.

Head over to The Power of Dynamics: Resource Pack Preview to read more about how Dylan Welsh, Sara Campbell, and Steve Lawson can help you express yourself musically through dynamics, and to learn more about Musical U’s offerings for instrument-specific training!

As we are all too aware, most musical notation relies upon Italian musical terms to convey how loud or fast a song is to be played. Skype Guitar Lessons Online has a quick cheat sheet of the dynamics you can expect to see in your musical reading.

Dynamics play such an important role in music, and not just from the individual musician’s perspective. An entire band’s dynamic presence and contrast can greatly enhance the listener’s experience. Production Advice recently discussed this topic in relation to the new Foo Fighters album, and how lowering the volume created a more powerful recording.

The Musical U Resident Pros talked about how dynamics are not just about a volume knob, but in how the instrument itself is played. In no instrument is this more true of than the drums. Online Drummer shows how dynamic contrast can be achieved by playing the drum set in a particular way, and how doing so greatly enhances the drum parts.

A Musical Toolbox

Countless mental roadblocks may stop people from picking up music: they think they are “unmusical”, too old to learn a new instrument, or that they’ll never understand music theory.

The truth is, anyone who enjoys music can successfully teach themselves to play an instrument, improvise, and write music. Sometimes, all it takes is a little help.

Scott Sharp understands these mental roadblocks from first-hand experience, and has created a wonderful resource called Fretboard Toolbox to help musicians understand notes, chords, scales, and the ways in which the three go together. This, as he explains in A Toolbox of Musical Understanding, with Scott Sharp, is the foundation for playing by ear, improvising, and writing memorable melodies and chord progressions. Best of all, the Fretboard Toolbox functions as a musical shortcut, and will have you playing in no time, without needing to understand complicated music theory.

Starting with the basics when learning to play music will help build a solid foundation for later skills (and build your confidence!). Scales are an excellent place to start to get your fingers moving and acquainted with your instrument. Many of us begin with the major keys when first learning scales. Fretboard Toolbox has developed major scale worksheets to give you a leg up!

Scott talked about how he accidentally learned music theory from one of his students. While theory may be intimidating to learn, it is largely based upon practical application of musical techniques from generations of musicians. Check out Online Piano Coach’s set of resources to get a solid start on your theory journey.

After understanding how chord progressions work within their corresponding scales, you are well on your way to creating your own masterpieces. Many musicians have developed their own systems to understand what chords work well together. This is a great way to help develop your own sound and basis of music theory. Born Hero talks about how he has created chord maps that speed up his music creation process and help ensure his creations always sound great.

Scott talked about how useful jam tracks were to his growth as a musician. In our digital era, jam tracks are very easy to find, and can be a great tool for your musical growth. To get some blues music under your fingers with a jam track from Next Level Guitar.

Keep An Ear Out

When was the last time you really listened to a piece of music?

Not as background noise while you were commuting to work, cleaning the house, or doing your taxes. But putting your headphones on, tuning the world out, and listening to a song completely undisturbed.

This sort of deliberate listening is called active listening, and it greatly pays off for anyone wanting to deepen their understanding and appreciation of music.

In Getting Your Ear In Gear, pianist and music educator Ruth Power shares the secret of listening in layers, and the power of repetition in active listening. Showing you what to keep your ear out for with each consecutive listen, she provides thought-provoking questions that you can ask yourself as you listen.

A recent article indicated that streaming services have resulted in more music being listened to than ever before. But most of the times we are listening to music for recreation, in a very passive way. Learning to actively listen to music can be difficult for many, but there are specific qualities that you can pay attention to that will enhance your understanding of a piece of music. For more tips, check out Adam Estes Winds’ listening points!

Ruth discussed that is important to practice mindfulness when consuming music, and deliberately working to be “present in the moment”. This can not only be applied to listening to music, but also playing music, as JB Music and Mindfulness discuss.

With all this talk about learning to hone your musical ear, have you ever thought of deconstructing your own musical consumption? This will help you gauge just how much active music listening you do per day, and figure out how you can increase your intake of learning through listening. Looking for a way to begin? Follow the example of Dan from the Composer’s Toolbox, as he examines and analyzes his own music listening habits!

Scales to Chords

Scales are often the first thing we learn on our instrument – a sequence of notes that sound good played together and that can be used as a basis for improvisation.

Out of these scales, we can put together combinations of notes that also sound good when played together and can be put to good use in improvisation: chords!

The connection between scales and chords is tighter than you think, and every scale has certain chords that can be built on each scale degree. Understanding this relationship will help you create chords on the fly, write memorable songs, and combine chords and scales in your improvisation.

In the Musicality Podcast episode About Finding Chords in Scales, we share one simple trick you can use to build a chord on any note in a scale, to get you started!

As discussed in this podcast, chords have specific qualities depending on the scale that they are based on. For most musicians, the major scale is the first that you must master to be proficient in scales. Oliver at oolimo.com has created an interactive tool that will spell out the chords that can be found in the major scale.

The next step to chord and scale mastery is to be able to use your chord progressions as a foundation for creating a solo. This was touched upon in our podcast on chord tones, but is expanded to include the full pentatonic scale in this fantastic lesson from Eric Haugen.

When learning to play chords within scales, you may find yourself referring more to what scale degree the chord is based upon instead of a chord name. This is often called the numbering system, and is discussed in detail by Instant Piano Lessons.

Basics to Masterpieces

Including a range of volumes in your playing, getting a solid grasp of musical building blocks such as scales and chords, and learning to actively listen to music (including your own!) are basic things that can make the difference between uninspired, by-the-book playing, and a relaxed, natural, confident, and moving performance.

The post Musical Entrepreneurship, Dynamic Music, A Musical Toolbox, Keep An Ear Out, and Scales to Chords appeared first on Musical U.

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Can you hear the notes in your head when you look at a piece of music? Get started with solfa sight-singing and develop your musical ear 🎶😁 https://www.musical-u.com/learn/beginner-solfa-sight-singing-practice-exercises/

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Becoming a musician means much more than just learning to play an instrument. Learn 5 skills that will enhance your musicality today. https://www.musical-u.com/learn/5-key-skills-musical/

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Chord progressions are the foundation of most songs. Learn how to navigate chords by ear with this guide! 🎸🎶https://www.musical-u.com/learn/chord-ear-training-101-2/

Though you may think of scales and chords as two separate entities, they are very closely intertwined! In fact, chords are very easy to construct if you already have a scale in mind. In this episode of The Musicality Podcast, we discuss how to go from scales to chords with one simple trick, and the practical applications of this skill in playing by ear, songwriting, and improvisation.

Listen to the episode:

Links and Resources

• The Musicality Podcast: Scott Sharp interview episode
• Fretboard Toolbox
• The Musicality Podcast: Sara Campbell interview episode
• Solfa episode of The Musicality Podcast
• Christopher Sutton’s interview on TimTopham.com
• FreeJazzLessons.com

Transcript

Have you ever stopped to ask yourself where chords come from?

In our recent interview with Scott Sharp of Fretboard-Toolbox.com he explained that understanding how chords are constructed and in particular their relationship to the scale of the key was what let him finally break into improvising and playing by ear – and has been the basis of his popular “Fretboard Toolbox” books for guitar, piano and other instruments.

So today I wanted to talk about the connection between chords and scales. How you can start from a scale and “find” the various chords hidden in there. And, most importantly, why you might want to do this – aside from just intellectual curiosity about music theory!

How to find chords in scales

A big part of what makes Scott’s Fretboard Toolbox books useful is that they have one page for each key showing the scale and all the chords that are commonly used in that key. As you probably know, a key is just the set of notes that are used in a song or piece of music, with one of them being chosen as the “tonic”, the most important note.

If you arrange all the notes of the key in pitch order you get the scale. For example, here’s the scale for the key of C Major:

[ AUDIO EXAMPLE: C Major Scale ]

And, as Scott pointed out, there are also certain chords that belong to the key. When we talked with Sara Campbell about her “Four Chord Songs” camp, that’s referring to using the four most common chords in a key.

But how do you know what chords those are for a given key?

The answer is that they can be found in the scale.

Supposing we didn’t know how chords are built and we wanted to build some chords from the scale. We might begin by deciding to build one chord starting from each of the seven notes of the scale.

We know that “chord” means multiple notes played together and two-note chords sound a bit boring so we’ll aim for three-note chords. Our first try might be to just pick adjacent notes. For example if we’re starting from the first note, C, in the C Major scale we might try making a chord from C, D and E.

Now anyone who’s seen a young child go up to a piano and shove the palm of their hand down to play a bunch of notes together knows that the resulting sound is not so great! Here’s that C, D, and E for example:

[ AUDIO EXAMPLE: C D E chord ]

So using adjacent notes from the scale, what are called intervals of a second sounds too close and awkward.

The next most obvious thing is to just skip a note – so we could play every other note from the scale. That’s called an interval of a third. In our example that would be C, E, and G:

[ AUDIO EXAMPLE: C Major Triad Arp then Harm ]

Ah, much better!

This is still a really simple idea, and in fact in my interview with Jermaine Griggs he mentioned this was something he picked up as a child just by noticing that was what his Grandmother’s fingers were doing when she played chords: skipping every other note.

So that’s how we build chords from the scale: we choose a root note from the scale and then add every other note above it, and our basic chords use three notes in total. Do this for each of the seven notes of the scale and you get what are called your diatonic triads, which just means the three-note chords which belong to the scale. Three of them are major chords, three are minor, and one is a diminished chord. Let’s listen to those for C major:

[ AUDIO EXAMPLE : Triads in C Major ]

If you want to build the next most complicated type of chord, a seventh chord, we actually just do the same thing again, adding another third on top of each triad.

So how does that work in practice on an instrument?

I mentioned piano a couple of times there and it’s an easy visual because of the way the keyboard is laid out. Whether or not you play piano you can probably imagine yourself picking every other note from the keyboard. But this works exactly the same on any instrument.

If you know your scale you can find the chords. If you play a monophonic instrument, meaning it plays one note at a time, like the saxophone or trumpet, then you are probably used to playing scales and you can try this out. Start from any note of the scale and play up the scale skipping every other note. You’ll be playing the arpeggio (meaning one note at a time) version of the chord!

If you play a polyphonic instrument (meaning one that can play more than one note at once) then you’re probably used to thinking about chords as shapes, for example fingering patterns on the guitar or ukulele. But you probably also know how to play a scale and you can construct chords this way too, by skipping notes in the scale. That can give you a whole new perspective on how to play chords in interesting and versatile ways on your instrument.

Why should you find chords in scales?

I just mentioned that musicians who play instruments that can produce chords tend to think in terms of the fingering shape for that chord, rather than in terms of the scale.

So what’s the point of talking about finding chords in scales?

Well, with my music theory hat on I’m obliged to say how valuable and important it is to understand the theory of where chords come from. And that’s true! But there are also some pretty cool practical benefits of thinking about chords in this way.

The first is related to that intellectual understanding: you’re empowered to figure out the main chords for a key from scratch yourself. Just by listening to this episode you’ve learned everything you need to know: Start from a note in the scale, add two more notes above it by skipping every other note – and you’ve formed the chord.

Suppose you’re sat with your instrument trying to figure out the chords of a song by ear. If you want to play along with the recording you’ll need to know the key it’s in – you can figure that out by ear too, we have a module about that in Musical U – but if you’re playing solo you don’t even need to know that. You can pick a key yourself that you know the scale for. And now you know how to construct the chords for that key from scratch, which are most likely the chords being used probably 95% of the time in most genres. Build your chords from the first, fourth, fifth and sixth notes of the scale and you’re ready to tackle any of the thousands of four-chord songs out there.

Of course this is also super useful for song writing. Want to come up with a sequence of chords that sound good together? Find the chords in the scale like we’ve talked about and you’ve shortcutted your way to a nice-sounding progression.

And it’s not just about figuring it out from scratch yourself. As we learned in the episode with Scott, you can get a quick-reference sheet that reveals to you at a glance what chords go in each key. But there is still great value in understanding how the chords fit into the scale.

For example, that can give you insight into how the melody and chords relate to each other. We talked about this in our recent episode on chord tones. To play melodies by ear or improvise well it really helps to know which notes are in each chord. That may sound basic but it’s easy for musicians who play polyphonic instruments like guitar or piano to think just about chords as a whole object and lose sight of which notes belong to each chord. Getting your head around how those chords are derived from the scale helps give you that shared mental framework for how harmony and melody are connected. That goes for your brain and your ears. I was a guest on Tim Topham’s “Creative Piano Teaching” podcast recently talking about solfa and one thing we talked about was how helpful solfa can be for understanding harmony – because it really hammers home that connection between the notes of chords and the notes of the scale.

This connection works both ways. You can get insight into how the melody or an improvised solo works by knowing how the notes of the chords fit into the scale – but you can also understand the chords better. For example, harmonising a melody: if you just have an unaccompanied melody then a pretty good way to start putting chords to it is to just look at which notes the melody is landing on in each bar and choose the chord those notes mostly belong to.

I mentioned improvising a couple of times there. That’s another big area where understanding how chords come from the scale can really help you. An important factor in whether your improvised solo sounds good or not has to do with how well it matches the chord progression you’re playing over.

At Musical U we teach an approach to improvisation which makes use of “playgrounds” and “patterns” – things which can help you go directly to sounding good while still giving you space to explore your own musical ideas. One example of that is to start improvising by sticking to the notes of the scale for the key you’re in. That makes sure you won’t play any “wrong notes” (if there is such a thing as “wrong notes”!) But to sound one notch better you want to actually think about which notes from the scale will go best with each chord you’re soloing over. And, as we talked about in the chord tones episode, that means thinking about which notes are actually in each chord.

So learning to find the chords in the scale can help you match up your improvisation with the underlying chord progression. And actually you can get a bit more sophisticated and make use of those chords hidden in the scale whether or not they match up with the chord progression. That’s something we’re going to be talking more about in an upcoming interview with Steve Nixon of FreeJazzLessons.com, he has a great tip for doing exactly that.

Summary

Alright, let’s do a quick recap.

Although you might think of chords as each being a whole musical item, like a single blob of notes all together, they are actually constructed note-by-note from the scale.

The method is simple: For each note of the scale we can construct a triad (meaning three-note) chord just by adding every other note above it. For example in C Major, you can start on D, skip E, add F, skip G, add A, and you get D-F-A, the D Minor chord.

[ AUDIO EXAMPLE: D (E) F (G) A ]

Doing this for each note in a major key you get three major chords, three minor chords and one diminished chord. These chords (or possibly small variations on them) are going to be used for 95% of the harmony in most genres of Western music.

Learning to think about how chords fit into the scale can benefit you in a lot of different ways. On chordal instruments like piano or guitar you get a very different perspective on how you can play chords aside from the simple shapes you might have learned. On non-chordal instruments like saxophone or clarinet you get an insight into how the notes you play belong to chords and how you can imply harmony with the notes you choose even if you’re not playing all the notes of a chord at once.

You’re equipped to figure out all the most likely chords in a key from scratch yourself – great for playing by ear or writing your own music.

You learn to connect the melody notes with the harmony, so that you can harmonise melodies yourself, or improvise melodies in a way that connects musically with the chord progression underneath. And you can even take it a step further, making use of those relationships without necessarily matching up the melody and harmony notes exactly.

I hope this episode has been enlightening for you, either about how chords can be found in scales or about the why of this actually being a useful and practical thing to wrap your head around. Or maybe both!

Next time you sit down with your instrument, try finding some chords yourself. Just pick a key, play through the scale and then try finding each chord that belongs in that key. You might be surprised how this can change your perspective and deepen your understanding of how music is put together!

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