Musicality World

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.

https://www.musical-u.com/learn/halloween-music-activities-ghouls-goblins/
It’s no secret around here that we are a little obsessed with Halloween. Luckily we’re not the only music education site that is! We’ve rounded up posts from some of our kindred “spirits” who love the festivities of Halloween as much as we do and have created plenty of eerie exercises for children to practice their ear training and rhythmic skills. https://www.musical-u.com/learn/halloween-music-activities-ghouls-goblins/

https://www.musical-u.com/learn/guest-post-the-choir-who-cant-sing-george-bevan/
Today we welcome George Bevan, Director of Music at Monkton Combe School, to share his experiences teaching the ‘tone deaf’ and encouraging singing through solfège… to build the “Choir Who Can’t Sing”. With MusicatMonkton https://www.musical-u.com/learn/guest-post-the-choir-who-cant-sing-george-bevan/

https://www.musical-u.com/learn/5-minute-guide-to-interval-ear-training/
Intervals are an essential skill for musicians, letting you easily play by ear, create your own music and improvise freely. But interval ear training can be confusing and overwhelming when you’re just getting started. https://www.musical-u.com/learn/5-minute-guide-to-interval-ear-training/

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.

https://www.musical-u.com/learn/solfa-transcription-practice-exercises/
Wish you could write down the music you hear? If you’ve been following along with our Solfa and the Score series then you’ll know that solfa is a powerful framework for easily translating the sounds you hear into notes on the page. https://www.musical-u.com/learn/solfa-transcription-practice-exercises/