geekery.of.all.sorts

On 2/15 we talked about musical intervals, and tips and tricks for spelling your major scales faster. We also did a little building of chords, looking at the differences between major and minor, etc. We culminated with looking at how we can build chords from the major scale. Important things to remember: Chords are built from thirds. Stacking up thirds based on the major scale gives us a very specific pattern of major and minor triads. In C, the triads are C, Dm, Em, F, G, Am and Bo. (o means diminished, but you won't need it anytime soon) The pattern is this: I, IIm, IIIm, IV, V, VIm and VIIo Knowing that the major scale builds those chords for us, no matter what key, we can memorize those chord qualities by number, and use them to communicate, transpose tunes, and call out stuff on the bandstand if needed. Here's a link to last week's slides... Intervals Diatonic triads Our homework was: Keep working on learning something from a recording ...

This week we're talking about how to get faster at spelling your major scales. Counting whole and half steps is useful when you're starting out, but is the REALLY long way to figure out what the notes are in a scale. Ultimately, you want to know the notes in each scale so well you don't even have to think about it. But on the way to that goal, you need some guides to keep you on track. By looking at the spelling of all the major scales, grouped into sharp keys and flat keys, you start to notice patterns.  The slides for this week point out some of those patterns, like the circle of 5ths, the order of sharp and flat keys, and the order of the sharps and flats in those various keys. It turns out that the order of the sharps and flats is consistent through every key - and we can use that to cheat and help us know which notes are natural and which ones are accidentals in any given key. Homework this week:  Learn the order of the sharp keys and flat keys, around th...