https://www.musical-u.com/learn/solfa-transcription-practice-exercises/
Wish you could write down the music you hear? Solfa is a powerful framework for easily translating the sounds you hear into notes on the page.
Here is a small set of practice exercises to help you practice applying your new solfa skills to the task of transcribing music.
https://www.musical-u.com/learn/solfa-transcription-practice-exercises/
https://www.musical-u.com/learn/listening-for-diminished-triads/
You hear diminished chords throughout pop, rock, jazz, hip hop, heavy metal, and even American country music.
Learn more about this often mysterious chord and how it adds depth and color to our music.
https://www.musical-u.com/learn/listening-for-diminished-triads/
https://www.musical-u.com/learn/why-mistakes-and-failure-are-essential-for-music-learning/
Is the fear of making a mistake holding you back in your musical growth?
Making mistakes and occasionally failing can be great learning tools. And may even be the key to unlocking your musical potential.
https://www.musical-u.com/learn/why-mistakes-and-failure-are-essential-for-music-learning/
With Guest Expert Digital Piano Review Guide
https://www.musical-u.com/learn/5-minute-guide-to-interval-ear-training/
Have just 5 minutes to spare?
What if you could learn everything you need to know about intervals in a couple of minutes? 🎉
The clock starts…. Now! ⏰
https://www.musical-u.com/learn/5-minute-guide-to-interval-ear-training/
Playing by ear and improvisation are two of the most sought-after skills in music. The key to learning these skills is to train your ear to effortlessly recognize the relationships between notes – and the answer doesn’t necessarily lie in learning intervals! Musical U founder Christopher Sutton talks about the intuitive solfa method for recognizing notes and why it works.
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Hey, Christopher here from Musical U. This weekend I was invited to join Glory St. Germaine, over at the “Ultimate Music Theory” Facebook page to do a Facebook Live all about how to make ear training so fun and easy – that you’ll actually do it!
We had a blast, it was a really fantastic conversation, talking about improvisation and playing by ear and solfa vs. intervals and how to learn to sing – all kinds of good stuff.
I wanted to share just a little bit with you today, and if you enjoy it, head over to the Ultimate Music Theory Facebook page where you can watch the full replay.
—-
Glory: So tell us about how we can do ear training that’s gonna really make it enjoyable for us.
Christopher: Sure. Well, I think let’s begin by just addressing front on why isn’t it enjoyable? I think that is often people’s experience and I think teachers often struggle because they haven’t really been equipped with ideas or frameworks for teaching ear training in a way that will be fun and easy for their students.
What we’ve found is that the fundamental problem is that ear training is taught in a way that’s separate from everything else the student is doing typically. And, Glory, when you were on the musicality podcast last year, I think you and I bonded over the fact that music theory is often handled in a similar way, and it’s kind of put in a little box and people study it because they’re meant to, but actually they don’t make the connections to the things they truly care about in music, like their instrument, like the music they’re playing, like the music they’re listening to. So it becomes this kind of duty, and a chore, and it’s all very dry and abstract.
This goes for music theory and it goes for ear training, and fortunately because there’s that kind of root cause, the solution is also quite simple. Not necessarily easy. It requires some creative thought, but fundamentally the way to make ear training fun and easy is to connect it to the stuff in music that is fun and easy for you. Connect it to the things you care about and are passionate about. And we can definitely talk a little bit about how teachers can do that in the context of a lesson, because that is what transforms ear training from being … For me, it was a week before the exam, you better learn these aural skills, let’s learn the reference songs for intervals and hope you pass.
And of course, nobody did, because suddenly aural skills were a thing out of nowhere that made no sense to anybody. And if that’s your only experience of ear training, you’re not going to get very far and you’re not going to see the value and you’re not going to enjoy the benefits. That’s really what we’re trying to get away from.
Glory: Well, and when you think of the ear training too, that when you do learn to hear those intervals, I mean, even think about if you’re out and about and you hear a song that you really love, you need to recognize what is the distance? Is that ascending or descending? And if you can hear that, you can actually just go over to your instrument and play it. Sometimes that’s how … You wonder, “Well, how can just play that by ear?” Well, because I can hear it.
And in developing sort of our ear training, I guess there’s two different approaches when we’re learning to hear things. Are we learning by intervals? Or by solfa? I want you to talk a little bit about maybe what’s the difference and then what do you think is the better approach or how is it different? I guess depending on the student, sometimes that makes a difference, too, right?
Christopher: It can be a very personal thing. Yeah. If you went back a few years, I would have been very diplomatic and said they’re both good approaches, they’re both solid, choose whichever one works best, you can use them together. At this point, I’m actually a little bit more opinionated about it.
And the crux of it really is what we’ve been talking about that you don’t want to do ear training in a vacuum. And I think if you approach this topic of intervals and solfa from a purely theoretical perspective, they both work, they both make sense. You can analyze the relative pitch distances between notes based on the note that came before, which is the interval. You’re just going note to note, what is the interval each time? Or in terms of solfa, which is the same thing, but always coming back to the tonic. What’s the relationship to the tonic? The note of the key or the scale.
And so in theory terms, both of those tell you what is the picture of the note and so they should be equivalent. What we found, and I think what is quite consistently the case, is when it comes to actually applying these skills, there is a clear winner, and yes, you can use intervals for playing by ear as you just described, Glory, and you can use them for improvising and you can sit down with some blank manuscript paper and use intervals to figure out how to write down the melody you’re imagining in your head. You can. What we found is that it’s hard work.
To set the context, we started our company, which is called Easy Ear Training, with an interval training app. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not anti-intervals, but what we kept finding was that people would get in touch and tell us the same thing I had found myself, which was you can get very good at recognizing intervals and still really struggle to write down a simple melody or play it by ear.
Glory: Yes, that’s true.
Christopher: And the reason is that basically your brain can’t recognize intervals quickly enough to apply it in that musical context. When you hear a whole string of notes, if you can stop and pause and take them one by one and listen to the individual pairs, yes, you can use intervals to work them out. But in the real musical context, if you’re in a jam session or you’re hearing a song on the radio, of course you don’t have that opportunity. You need to be recognizing them immediately as you hear them.
Glory: Yes, yes, that’s right.
Christopher: And so what more and more we’re kind of taking a stand and saying is that although you can use intervals for those practical applications, solfa tends to be a much better approach for people. And the reason is simply that this is basically how our brain already interprets music. If you think about this a little bit, you’ll kind of instinctively feel it to be true. We interpret the notes we hear based on the tonic. We have this sense of the key and what are the notes in the scale and what’s my harmonic context.
And when we hear a note, its musical function, its musical role, the kind of character it has in a melody or a harmony – is based on its relationship to the tonic. Our ears are already interpreting notes that way, and what solfa does is it just makes that explicit and it gives you names to put on those notes, so that when you hear them, you don’t just hear what they sound like. You actually recognize and identify them, and that’s super cool because it means you’re not dependent on the note before. You can hear any note from a melody and immediately know what it is. And of course, that makes playing by ear or improvising or transcribing or writing your own music vastly easier because you have that instant recognition of what is the scale degree.
Glory: Yeah, and I think that is such a wonderful, wonderful skill that can be obviously developed.
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The post Intervals Versus Solfa: Which Is Best? appeared first on Musical U.
https://www.musical-u.com/learn/learning-to-sing-the-first-lesson/
Ready to begin learning to sing?
While you may feel some fear going into your first lesson, understand that you are not alone! Hear more from one singing student:
https://www.musical-u.com/learn/learning-to-sing-the-first-lesson/
https://www.musical-u.com/learn/the-20-most-romantic-renditions-of-jazz-standards/
Radio stations these days are replete with basic, ill-written lyrics about dating or makin’ whoopee.
Should we expect more from modern songs?
After a healthy dose of romantic listening to twenty reimagined jazz tunes, read through to the end for tips on recreating sultry jazz standards in your own image.
https://www.musical-u.com/learn/the-20-most-romantic-renditions-of-jazz-standards/
https://www.musical-u.com/learn/getting-track-process-goals-vs-outcome-goals-musicians/
Having an outcome-based goal is helpful, but musicians need to couple outcome goals with process goals.
Learn more about goal setting to inspire you to reach for you aspirations.
https://www.musical-u.com/learn/getting-track-process-goals-vs-outcome-goals-musicians/
A song’s form or structure is its design and shape. It’s the way a song’s sections are organised and repeat – both to make listening easier for the audience and to make sure the song’s message is hammered home as clearly as possible.
There are all kinds of forms a song can take – and many well-known songs make their own rules entirely when it comes to structure. But today, we’re going to talk about the three most common song forms you’ll find in music today: verse-chorus form, refrain form, and AABA form.
The vast majority – probably at least 95% – of songs in the charts today are verse-chorus forms, so it’s likely that you have a good idea how they work, but let’s jump in with a bit more detail.
There are two main sections in a verse-chorus structure: the verse and the chorus. They come in alternating pairs, something like this:
Verse | Chorus | Verse | Chorus
The verses typically all have the same melody – give or take a few minor differences – but new lyrics every time. The choruses typically have the same melody and same lyrics every time. In fact, short of maybe a few changes in the instrumentation, they’re usually identical.
Verses and choruses work in pairs: that’s the central idea of a verse-chorus structure. The verse’s job is to set up and build into the chorus, where the main idea of the song is expressed directly.
Here’s Avril Lavigne’s “Complicated”:
After a short intro – more on those later – the structure goes something like this:
[0:33] – Verse 1
[1:09] – Chorus 1
[1:38] – Verse 2
[2:14] – Chorus 2
[2:51] – Verse 3
[3:16] – Chorus 3
[3:41] – Chorus 4
Here’s a few things you probably noticed:
Lyrically, the verses set the scene and provide some details and clues about what the song is about. Then, the choruses really get to the heart of what the song is about – “Why’d you have to go and make things so complicated?”
Musically, you’ll also hear how the verses are much lower in intensity than the choruses, featuring a generally lower vocal register, a thinner texture, simple guitar strumming as instrumentation, and quieter dynamics – whereas the choruses tend to rock out more.
All of these dimensions ensure that the choruses are the main event in this song – the thing that really lands, and the thing you really remember – while the verses provide contrast and build up. This simple alternation of sections (though you’ll see there’s a double chorus at the end to round the structure off) is a really simple but effective way of structuring a three- or four-minute song.
Beyond the essential two sections of the verse and the chorus, lots of verse-chorus forms mix this basic structure up by adding other sections to keep things interesting.
One very common section is the bridge – sometimes called the middle eight or primary bridge – which typically goes after the second chorus, like this:
Verse 1 | Chorus 1 | Verse 2 | Chorus 2 | Bridge | Chorus 3
Let’s see how this works in an example, Katy Perry’s “I Kissed a Girl”:
Here’s the structure in a nutshell:
[0:04] – Verse 1
[0:34] – Chorus 1
[1:07] – Verse 2
[1:37] – Chorus 2
[2:06] – Bridge
[2:28] – Chorus 3
You probably noticed the same principles as we saw in “Complicated” apply: the lyrics and music work in verses and choruses, and the main lyrical theme and highest musical intensity are found in the chorus.
But in this case, we also have a totally new section: the bridge. And like most bridges do, this one has completely new music, and goes somewhere fresh in the lyrics: it starts by adding a broader perspective to the song, with phrases like “Us girls we are so innocent”.
The end result is that the bridge takes us away somewhere new, somewhere that adds an extra dimension to the song, before returning us back to the chorus.
Another section we should talk about is the pre-chorus. If you listened really closely in both “Complicated” and “I Kissed a Girl”, you probably noticed that somewhere in the second half of the verses, the instrumental texture started to build subtly but decisively. This is done, for example, by adding an extra guitar figure, a thicker drum beat, or a vocal register that starts to get gradually higher and more intense. Have another listen if you want to see what I mean.
If the job of the chorus is to be the song’s main event and the verse’s job is to lead up to it, you often find the verse beginning to grow in intensity in preparation for the chorus.
But sometimes, this job of growing into the chorus is done by a dedicated section called the pre-chorus, also called the climb or transitional bridge:
Verse 1 | Pre-chorus 1 | Chorus 1 | Verse 2 | Pre-chorus 2 | Chorus 2
You’ll see what I mean in Train’s “Drive By”:
Here’s the structure of the first minute or so, in summary:
[0:17] – Verse 1
[0:32] – Pre-chorus 1
[0:48] – Chorus 1
[1:22] – Verse 2
So what makes this a pre-chorus and not just a verse that builds towards the end?
Honestly – often you could argue a case either way. But in “Drive By”, I’d put my money on there being a pre-chorus at 0:48 because the lyrics take an abrupt turn in direction at “Oh, but that one night…” – the song’s story suddenly goes somewhere new. At the same time, the music jumps up in intensity as the drums suddenly get more insistent.
Generally, the idea that a song’s verse builds into the chorus is a universal one. But in some songs, where the writer wants a dedicated section that makes a bigger deal of this build, they use a pre-chorus to get everyone excited about the chorus to come.
And finally, two more sections we should cover: the intro and outro.
You probably heard in “Drive By” how the instrumental groove starts four measures before the vocals come in. That’s a really common way of starting a song, and gives us all a few seconds to get into the world of the song before the lyrics kick off.
There are a handful of different ways to end a song. Sometimes, you get an outro that is just a few measures of the groove over and over. Sometimes, an outro is just the chorus again with a repeat and fade out.
So that’s a quick look at verse-chorus forms. As we’ve seen, there’s no one single template for a verse-chorus form – just different sections you can combine in different ways, depending on what kind of journey you want the song to take the listener on.
Now, let’s move on and have a look at two other common song structures you’ll find in modern music.
Refrain forms are like compressed verse-chorus forms: instead of a separate verse and chorus, there’s a single repeated section (confusingly, often also called a verse) that finishes with one or two identical lines each time, called the refrain – like a mini chorus.
Here’s a well-known example:
After an extended introduction, you’ll hear how each verse has the same melody each time, but different lyrics until you get to the final “hallelujahs” repeated over and over:
Verse:
Well I’ve heard there was a secret chord…
Refrain:
Hallelujah, Hallelujah,
Hallelujah, Hallelujah
Verse:
Well your faith was strong but you needed proof…
Refrain:
Hallelujah, Hallelujah,
Hallelujah, Hallelujah
You’ll also hear how the refrain isn’t all that different musically from the rest of the verse (and in most cases is less intense than the rest of the verse), so though the repetition of the lyric might make the refrain look like a chorus on paper, in practice it works the opposite way.
Refrain forms work great in songs where the story is especially important – where you want to avoid having a chorus making a big deal of itself as part of your structure, and instead have a backseat interlude to add interest while keeping the focus on the verses.
The final form we’re going to look at is the AABA form. This structure pretty much does what it says on the tin, with two contrasting sections arranged in an AABA format. Here’s a very well-known example, The Beatles’ “Yesterday”:
In this tune, the core of the AABA form goes like this:
[0:05] – A
[0:22] – A
[0:39] – B
[0:59] – A
Then, as often happens, it continues with an extra B, then A. Finally, there’s also a short outro:
[1:17] – B
[1:37] – A
[1:54] – Outro
Here’s how the lyrics fit in with the AABA scheme:
A: Yesterday, all my troubles…
A: Suddenly, I’m not half the man…
B: Why she had to go?
A: Yesterday, love was such…
B: Why she had to go?
A: Yesterday, love was such…
There’s a few other subtleties we should mention. The two sections don’t take us on a big journey of highs and lows like the verse-chorus form does, but there are still some ways contrast is created in this form.
The A sections are more matter-of-fact and self-contained. Like the chorus in a verse-chorus form, that’s where the most direct expression of the song’s message is. The B sections, on the other hand, are more expressive and a bit more adventurous – the melody is more complex and the harmony is generally richer.
Similar to the bridge in a verse-chorus structure, the B in an AABA form is sometimes also called a bridge – the B section talks about something slightly different and has the definite feel of taking us somewhere new before returning to the A, the home base.
So there we are: three of the most popular songwriting forms.
As always, none of what I’ve said is a rule or a formula. There are tons of different ways to apply the ideas that these forms are based on.
The way you really master the ideas I’ve talked about here is analysing as many songs as you can to understand their form and structure. That way, you’ll pick up on tons of the subtleties on how these forms work, what they lend to a song, and how you can create new forms in your own songwriting.
Enjoy getting acquainted with the anatomy of your favourite songs!
How do you want to tell your story, song-wise? Do you want to re-emphasize a particular punchy idea over the course of your song? Go for the classic verse-chorus structure. Do you want to spin a rich narrative strung together by a single, powerful theme? The refrain form should work beautifully.
The post Anatomy of a Song: The Three Most Common Song Forms appeared first on Musical U.
https://www.musical-u.com/learn/musicality-means-writing-music/
Writing music requires some special Jedi mind tricks that only a few musicians possess, right? 🤔
Despite popular belief, any musician can write music! Find your muse with some helpful hints from the Musical U team 🎶
https://www.musical-u.com/learn/musicality-means-writing-music/
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