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https://www.musical-u.com/learn/8-excellent-halloween-music-activities/
It’s that time of the year again! Halloween costumes, crazy and freaky Halloween-themed food and parties — and none of it would ever be complete without some spooky, scary Halloween music… https://www.musical-u.com/learn/8-excellent-halloween-music-activities/

https://www.musical-u.com/learn/roadmap-to-rhythm/
Rhythm is a challenging area for many musicians. Most musicians must dedicate regular effort to improve their sense of rhythm and what they need is a clear step-by-step process to get good rhythm. Get started with this helpful roadmap! https://www.musical-u.com/learn/roadmap-to-rhythm/

https://www.musical-u.com/learn/how-does-ear-training-work/
Ear training is anything you do to improve your ear for music. There are 3 stages to ear training that we will explore in this article: https://www.musical-u.com/learn/how-does-ear-training-work/

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.

https://www.musical-u.com/learn/chord-ear-training-101-2/
What do you do when you need to play without a piece of sheet music? Why, you just need a little chord ear training fairy dust and you’ll be ready to rock! https://www.musical-u.com/learn/chord-ear-training-101-2/

https://www.musical-u.com/learn/four-ways-write-better-melodies/
Want your new song to be a classic? Writing a memorable melody is perhaps the single most important thing when it comes to writing music that will connect with the listener. So how do you improve your melody writing skills? In this post we’ll look at four techniques which you can use to improve every melody you write. https://www.musical-u.com/learn/four-ways-write-better-melodies/

https://www.musical-u.com/learn/open-your-ears-to-halloween-haunt-music/
Halloween is coming, slowly creeping up on us. And now, we are giving you the opportunity to open your ears to some haunted music that will give you thrills and chills. https://www.musical-u.com/learn/open-your-ears-to-halloween-haunt-music/

https://www.musical-u.com/learn/how-to-play-chords-by-ear-roadmap/
Have you wished you could hear a song and instantly know what the chords are? To be able to pick up a guitar or sit down at a piano and play along – or maybe improvise a solo over the top? It is possible to learn to recognise chords by ear, and if you take the right approach you might be surprised how quickly you can start doing it. https://www.musical-u.com/learn/how-to-play-chords-by-ear-roadmap/

https://www.musical-u.com/learn/getting-track-process-goals-vs-outcome-goals-musicians/
Any health guru, athletic instructor, or life coach will tell you that there is power in telling someone your goals. Why? Telling someone keeps you accountable to your goals. What are your goals? Share your outcome goals and process goals in the comments below. We’d love to hear from you. https://www.musical-u.com/learn/getting-track-process-goals-vs-outcome-goals-musicians/

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.