Hayden Tutorial, Chapter 3

[judyhawkins]

Chapter Three of Judy's harum scarum Hayden tutorial

---------------- Section One -----------------

[For those of you with minimal musical background.]


---------- A bit of reading here; skip down to "Try this" if you'd
rather just play.

The First Leaves of Spring is in what is known as a "major key". Why
major, you might ask? well: the answer to that takes me into a more
lengthy explanation than I want to throw at you at this stage. "Major"
is a different sound than "minor", the same way "red" is different
from "green".

If you can get comfortable making the association between "major" and
the sound of The First Leaves of Spring, you'll have learned something
quite useful.

In a couple chapters I'll show you what "minor" sounds like, but first,
I'd like to move you and this little major tune to a different place
on the instrument: to "G".

The First Leaves of Spring is written out in the "key of C" -- it's
first note is its "root" or "key" note (two words for the same thing,
here, like "red" and "scarlet").

You could also play the same tune in the "key of G", and it would
sound very much the same, except for being higher.



------------- Try this: ----------------

Using your button chart, find the "G" on the second row of your
instrument. The next two buttons over are named "A" and "B". (Huh???
not H and I? I'll explain later...)

Starting on "G": play "The First Leaves of Spring", just in the right
hand. It should sound the same except higher.

Next, find "G" on the left, and add those notes. This is what it would
look like, written with letters:


G A B B A G A G A B A G G A B B A G A B A G - -
G - - B - - G - - B - - G - - B - - G - - B - -


When you're comfortable with that, go back to playing the tune in the
original key.

Swap back and forth between the two versions, in G and C. Keep in mind
that this is the sound of "major", and that one version is in the "key
of C major" and the other is in the "key of G major" -- depending on
which note you started on.

This idea extends to all the different notes: for example, you can
play this same tune in "the key of D major" if you start on the "D"
note.

There are lots of things in music that use this little group of
concepts: "major", "minor", "key", "root", so I'm throwing them at you
now to get you started on them!

Next chapter, I'll expand the left hand part to be more interesting.

------------------ For the impatient among you -----------------

tired of this tune? want more tunes NOW? try googling on "three note
songs" -- EEk: they're in musical notation, which may be completely
unfamiliar and baffling. Try translating them into C, D, E, writing
that down, and playing from that.

I'll get into musical notation before long...


-------------------- Section Two ---------------------

[For those with more musical background]

Pinkies: there was a comment on my first chapter about pinkes... the
use/non-use thereof...

If you find that using your pinkies is comfortable, go for it.

If you find that using your pinkies is uncomfortable, don't bother
with them: the evidence of my ears is that you can become a fine
player either way.

If you get into the habit of not using your pinkies and then wish you
had learned to use them, here's how I would go about changing that
habit:

I probably wouldn't bother to do it unless I had a musical reason to
do so -- a piece or genre of music that I really wanted badly to play
AND that demanded a lot of pinky usage -- something I wanted badly
enough to be motivating. It's hard to change a habit without there
being a driving need.

But, supposing I did: I'd create myself an exercise, or a set of
exercises, to isolate the difficulty of developing a habit of using
pinkies.

A simple one would just be the four notes of the whole tone scale,
played all over the instrument

| C D E ^F | ^F E D C | D E ^F ^G | ^G ^F E D |

etc, played on both the right and the left at octaves. That'd get my
pinkies working in parallel with the index finger on the other hand.

I might also play some scales... but I really hate scales. They're so
not musical...

My favorite approach to creating exercises for myself is to pull
chunks out of the actual musical material containing the challenge,
and turn those chunks into exercises.

Turning things into exercises, playing them slowly and thoughtfully,
speeding them up until I start to stumble a lot, going back to playing
them slowly and thoughtfully: that's been my most effective tool for
learning something difficult.

I'll talk more next time about how to turn things into exercises,
especially my favorite technique for smoothing out chronic stumbles.

Edited May 9, 2013 by judyhawkins

[shades]

Yay!

 

My Elise tutor book is now in the post so I have no excuse to start learning properly now.

 

I'm in a folk club and regularly floor sing but didn't intend to take "Elsie" along for at least six months as I know how hard it is to sing and play until they are both second nature. However our resident guitar and fiddle duet have suggested that they can knock up some single note semibreve (whole note) sheets for me to accompany them as a sort of pseudo bass/drone. So they do the hard work in the jigs and reels and I get unison practice, sounds like a plan!