https://www.musical-u.com/learn/who-moved-the-tonic-part-1-hearing-key-changes/
If you’ve been working on playing by ear – with or without solfa – you know by now that the tonic gives you most of the information you need to play and/or transcribe a melody without written music.
It tells you the key, the scale, the accidentals, the potential chord progressions and more.
And if you can pick out the subdominant (fa) and the dominant (sol) by ear then you can figure it out even faster.
https://www.musical-u.com/learn/choosing-music-performer-bandleader-studio-musician-and-educator-dylan-welsh/
Freelance guitarist, bandleader, arranger, and music educator Dylan Welsh is already an eight-year veteran of the vibrant Seattle music scene.
When he was still too young to hang out in bars and network, internet-savvy Dylan built a career by creating an online presence that now includes remote session work, Skype lessons, arranging/chart preparation and more.
This episode is part of the Musicality Unleashed series. Learn more and get a bonus “cheat sheet” at musicalityunleashed.com. In this episode, we talk about how you can connect the music theory and ear training you’re learning with the music you want to play and are passionate about.
Learning music means learning to play songs or pieces – right?
Actually, if you approach music that way you’re drastically limiting your musical potential.
Yet songs *can* hold the key to the most enjoyable and effective kind of music learning there is… How can that be?
Music education normally focuses purely on learning to reproduce songs on your instrument.
That can be satisfying at first but it quickly makes you start feeling like a robot rather than a real musician – painstakingly learning new pieces note-by-note and always worried about playing a wrong note.
At the other end of the spectrum you could focus purely on your “inner musician”, training your ears and brain to understand music on a deep level.
That’s really valuable and often it’s really helpful to rebalance things by including more of that kind of work in your music learning.
The problem is that kind of music theory and ear training is often taught with dry, abstract studies and exercises. You develop the understanding but it’s completely separate to the songs you’ve been learning to play and the real music you’re passionate about.
It can feel like you’re bending over backwards to connect the two worlds: of understanding musical concepts intellectually, and playing “real music”.
So how can you have the best of both worlds?
Learning with songs and real music, and gaining that deep intellectual and instinctive understanding of how music works?
It turns out you can do this, using an approach called “song-based learning”.
With this kind of approach you learn real musical pieces, like songs – but you don’t learn them for the sake of just replicating them note-perfectly.
Every song is carefully selected because it features the new musical concepts you want to understand next.
The music itself is used to teach the concepts so that you actually get to understand what’s going on instinctively even before you’re explicitly introduced to the concepts underneath.
When you do it this way, music theory and ear training aren’t separate activities from learning pieces of music – they all go together, and the whole process of learning music becomes more effective, more efficient, more enjoyable, and – most importantly – more musical!
So any time you’re trying to understand a new musical concept or learn a new musical skill, ask yourself: could I do this through a song? And any time you’re learning to play something new, take a moment to ask: what could this song teach me about music, what can I learn here that will empower me in the rest of my musical life?
Do this and you’ll start to experience the power of song-based learning – and you’ll soon wonder how and why you ever did it any other way!
This kind of song-based learning is the ideal environment for exploring the kind of new mental models we’ve been talking about in this Musicality Unleashed series.
https://www.musical-u.com/learn/identify-major-and-minor-keys-two-shortcuts/
Learning to identify major and minor keys is an essential skill for musicians.
Once you know the key of a song you’re free to play it by ear or improvise over it. Keys come in two “flavors”, major and minor and so it’s valuable to learn to identify major and minor keys by ear.
https://www.musical-u.com/learn/discovering-minor-chord-progressions-minor-scale-basics/
While most of the music that you hear on the radio sticks to basic major chords, it is important to learn how to use minor chord progressions in your music, whether you are a performer, producer, or songwriter.
You can hear minor chords in all musical styles from rock to hip hop and pop music.
This episode is part of the Musicality Unleashed series. Learn more and get a bonus “cheat sheet” at musicalityunleashed.com. In this episode, we share an intuitive model for counting rhythm: rhythm syllables! Learn why this method trumps the “1-e-and-a 2-e-and-a” method by a mile.
If you’re like most musicians, you’ve wanted to play by ear but found it didn’t come naturally to you. But what you might not have realised is that of the two major aspects of music, pitch and rhythm, it’s actually only the pitch that you really struggle with.
If you’ve been playing music for a while then the chances are good that your ability to mimic back a rhythm are actually really solid.
Try it now – clap or tap this rhythm back [clapping followed by pause]
So you have the rhythm instinct – but could you write that down in notation? Or if you saw the rhythm notation, would you know how to clap it or play it?
There’s clearly a piece missing – and that’s having the right mental model to interpret and understand what you’re instinctively able to do.
You probably think about rhythm in terms of counting beats: 1, 2, 3, 4 or “1 and 2 and 3 and 4” or even “1 ee and a 2 ee and a” and so on.
That’s understandable – it’s the way we’re taught rhythm in traditional music education around the world.
And it’s a fine system.
But clearly it isn’t enabling you to write down the rhythms you could clap back by ear, or perform them from sheet music – at least not without stopping to slowly and carefully think through the 1-e-and-a of it all!
So there’s some kind of mismatch between how our brains are understanding rhythm and how we’re consciously thinking about it.
What if we could put in place a mental model that let us leverage that instinctive understanding of rhythm to actually know exactly in terms of notation and note durations, what’s being played?
That would empower us to write rhythms down or read them from sheet music easily, as well as enabling greater freedom to improvise or compose our own rhythms.
It turns out there is just such a system, called “rhythm syllables”.
In this mental model you have particular spoken patterns which correspond to particular rhythmic patterns.
For example that pattern I clapped before (clap) would actually be “ta ti-ti tika-tika ta”
It may sound like nonsense syllables – but there’s a carefully-thought-out system to it all, and when you’ve learned it and practiced a bit, any rhythm you hear automatically just gets translated in your head to the corresponding rhythm syllables and that lets you easily write them down.
And the reverse works too: you can look at the notation, know the rhythm syllables and then be immediately able to speak, clap or play the right rhythm.
This is compatible with counting rhythms so although it can be used independently, for most musicians it’s an amazing sidekick for counting which suddenly gives greater insight and understanding of all the rhythms we understood instinctively but couldn’t make sense of intellectually.
Learning rhythm syllables gives you a new mental model which can empower you in a new way in music. We’ll talk more about mental models and putting a new foundation in place in the rest of this Musicality Unleashed series.
This episode is part of the Musicality Unleashed series. Learn more and get a bonus “cheat sheet” at musicalityunleashed.com. In this episode, we delve into the oft-debated topic of how to learn pitch – and the answer doesn’t lie in intervals! Learn about the power of solfa and how it can help you understand the relationships between notes that is natural, intuitive, and simple.
5: Mental model: Solfa – “A Better Mental Model for Pitch”
If you want to play notes by ear you can learn to – but don’t follow the common advice: intervals are not the solution.
Learning to recognise notes by ear is a dream for many musicians: to hear music and be able to name, play, or write down the notes you heard.
This isn’t magic – it’s a learnable skill. And it doesn’t take an innate “gift” like “perfect pitch”.
You can develop what’s called your “relative pitch” using simple proven exercises.
The most well-known approach uses what’s called “intervals”: training your ear to recognise the different distances between pitches such as a “major third” or “perfect fifth”.
The interval approach has some strengths but it’s actually not the best way to quickly learn a useful level of relative pitch.
What you find if you study intervals is that you can get very good at recognising intervals – but it’s then actually very difficult to put it into practice when you hear a real melody or try to improvise something.
Your brain just can’t think through and process each of the intervals fast enough.
And what’s worse: as soon as you hit an interval you don’t recognise, you lose your ability to name every note that follows – you’re lost.
If you want relative pitch to play by ear, write down music, improvise, or write your own music then there’s another approach that will get you there much faster and give you a much more reliable ability to recognise notes by ear.
It’s called “solfa” and you might have come across it as the “do-re-mi” system for naming notes.
I should mention this isn’t the same as the “solfege” system used in some European countries where “do” is always the note “C”, “re” is the same as “D”, and so on.
We’re talking about what’s called “movable do solfa”. It sometimes gets called “solfege” like the European “fixed do” system, which is where it can get confusing.
So I’ll be super clear: With “moveable do solfa”, we call the first note of the scale “do”, whether that note is C, D, E, G♯ E♭, and so on.
Okay, what does that have to do with relative pitch? Well, adopting this mental model for thinking about note pitches produces almost magical results in your ability to identify notes by ear.
That’s because solfa actually matches how your ear already understands music
Our ears tune in to the relative pitch distances between notes and the tonic, that first note of the scale – not the absolute pitches of notes.
This must be true because otherwise if the DJ on the radio sped up a song and all the pitches went up a bit, you’d hear it as a completely different song. In fact, we don’t even notice because our ears are tuned into the relative changes in pitch – and those haven’t changed.
If I sing the melody of “Mary Had a Little Lamb” [sing] and then sing it again starting on a different note [sing] you still hear it’s the same song – even though literally every note pitch has changed.
So that’s how our ear inteprets music already.
That means if your mental model matches up with that, you don’t need to start from scratch to develop your relative pitch skills.
You can leverage the work you’ve already been doing for years, passively training your ears to understanding instinctively how music works.
The result is that learning the solfa mental model can be done fast – we’re talking a few weeks to get to a decent standard – and pays off immediately.
This means that it’s far more effective and rewarding than the interval approach for the practical skills like playing by ear or improvising.
As I said before, intervals aren’t wrong or bad – they have real strengths in certain contexts and the great thing is they’re totally compatible with and complimentary to solfa, so you don’t need to choose one or the other.
But if you want to learn relative pitch and name and play notes easily by ear, adopt solfa as your mental model and you’ll be able to take advantage of the existing ear skills you didn’t know you had – and go far fast.
That’s one example of a mental model that you can put in place to quickly find new freedom in music. Learn more in the rest of this Musicality Unleashed series.
https://www.musical-u.com/learn/and-three-makes-triad-hearing-triads/
Triads are the basic form of chords, and can be combined to create harmonies and harmonic progressions.
Learning to distinguish between different types of chords is immensely beneficial for improvising and hearing backing harmonies.
https://www.musical-u.com/learn/tension-release-bitter-sweet-relationships-chords-scales/
One of the best ways to begin playing by ear is to play chord tones and find your way around the scale by targeting the chord tones through a given chord progression.
But music is about Tension and Release. Release is an important aspect of music and life. If you think about it for a while you would realise our world is full of tension and release.
The following exercises explore the next step after learning to hit the chord tones. https://www.musical-u.com/learn/tension-release-bitter-sweet-relationships-chords-scales/
https://www.musical-u.com/learn/the-lydian-scale-part-2-lydian-meets-major/
Previously we began to look into the Lydian scale, constructed from the natural tonal gravity of the circle of fifths.
George Russell—the originator of the Lydian Chromatic Concept—places the Lydian scale as “Sun Absolute” in the center of the musical universe. What are the implications for music theory and for the venerable major scale?
Let’s compare the Lydian and major scales and we’ll find they answer these questions for themselves.
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