Music Mastery: Learn to Play Any Instrument, Any Style

1. Introduction: You may think that the biggest barrier to learning a musical instrument is how smart and talented you are. But that's not the case at all. Your biggest enemy is frustration. Hi, I'm Fernando Rude, a multi instrumentalist and Emmy nominated composer. I have over 15 years experience making music for film, TV, and documentaries. Currently, I play and compose about 20 minutes of original music every week for investigative reporting public radio show and podcast called Reveal. To make my soundtracks, I play electric and acoustic guitar, electric bass, drum kit, percussion, acoustic piano, keyboards, synthesizers, saxophones, flutes, clarinets, trumpet, trombone, euphonium, just to name a few. What can be confusing is mixing up learning music with learning an instrument. Learning music, you have to learn music concepts like musical grammar. Same thing as learning a language. Learning an instrument, you have to teach the muscles in your body on how to execute repetitive movements in order to play that instrument. In this class, I'll be sharing with you what took me a lifetime to understand. A simple, organized and efficient path for you to play music, regardless of your instrument of choice. This class is for anyone that wants to learn a musical instrument or get better at it. This class answers the question on what's the most efficient way to practice in order to learn to play an instrument. Whether you never held a musical instrument in your hands before or if you're simply feeling stuck and unable to progress, with this class, you'll be able to gamify your practice. You'll be able to learn strategies to curb your frustration and to visualize your progress. This class is especially for those whose dreams have been crushed by mean piano teachers. And really, it's for anyone who simply wants to reframe their relationship with learning itself by transforming this process into something fun and therefore sustainable. So if you're ready to address your learning traumas, let's go. 2. How to Approach this Class: Welcome. This lesson is like the first day of class kind of lesson. We're going to talk about how to approach this class. The end go of learning a musical instrument, it's always performance. Music is an art form that happens in time over time. So for you to be done, you have to perform it. So if you're learning a scale, when are you done, when you can perform it in time. You're learning a song. When are you done when you can play that song in time. But just playing the song in time isn't enough. A performance implies that you're performing for somebody. So ideally you're playing to your family and friends, and you're also recording that for yourself. If you're very shy and you don't feel ready, there is probably two reasons for that. One, you learned a particular thing, a particular exercise, or you learned a particular song, but you did not master it. There is a big difference between learning and mastering. In music, you have to master everything you do because it's in time. You can't stop time, think about it, and then do it. So, for example, let's say the timetable, let's say, two times one, two, two times two, four, two times three, six, two times four, eight. You know that very easily, right? But once you have the time, I introduce to you a matronom and a metronome, it's a tool that helps you divide time in an objective manner. Then do you really know the timetable? Two plus one, two, two plus three, six, plus that's too fast. So we're gonna slow down. Two plus one, two, two plus three, six, two plus four, eight, two plus too fast. You see? I know the timetable of two, but I can't do it in time because I didn't master it over time. So if I want to do this, I have to go slowly. Two plus one, two times one, two, two times three, six, two times four, eight, two times five, ten. You know what I mean? Now, at that speed, I can do it. If I keep practicing this and practicing and slowly increasing the tempo, I can get really fast. Two times one, two time, three, two the four. And I'll be able to do it. So if you're feeling shy or if you're feeling underprepared, usually it's because you have not mastered what you're trying to perform. This goes for everything in life. Let's say you don't like public speaking. Well, if you don't like public speaking, if you feel shy about it, try to really master the public speaking thing you're going to do. Memorize the entire script, write down what you're going to say, think it over, read line by line, memorize everything, all of it. If you really get down to really knowing more than learning, but mastering your performance, actually, the shyness goes away and the embarrassment goes away, and you're eager to show people what you can do. Like a kid that just learned how to speak a word. Mama, mama. Mama, mama, mama. And the kid is saying, Mama like 24 times a day wants to show off to everybody because now the kid can say that word very easily. So the key here is repetition. So you really master all these little elements that are needed to play music, like the musical grammar, right? So scales, arpegio, third exercises, we're going to talk about those. And then you learn that in your muscles, you internalize those movements by doing repetitions with the metronome, and then you're doing them very slowly at first, and gradually, gradually you increase the speed. It's like seeing your hair grow, you don't even realize. But one day, you're like, Wow, I internalized that information, and now I can play it. And when you apply that process to learning an instrument and to learning a song, you're going to get to the point that you can play very easily as easy as you can talk. So then your shyness is going to go away and you'll be able to perform for friends and family. Now, it's important to also perform for yourself because you need to see what kind of progress you're making. So it's important that you record yourself playing before you call it done. Whatever you're trying to learn. So let's say you're trying to learn C major scale. You're playing that with the metronome. I'm going to explain to you how to practice that. But once you did your practice to finish that, you need to record yourself or play for somebody, ideally record yourself, and watch that again and say, Wow, I did that well. Put it away, go to the next thing. So the cycle of learning here only ends when you perform whatever you have learned, okay? So in this class, we're going to create a friendly community where we're going to be posting our practice and our performances. This performances can be performances of songs you're learning, or it can be performances of exercises you're playing. In the very beginning, maybe you're playing just two notes with a matronom, you're playing ta ta ta ta. That's all you're playing, and you're trying to get a beautiful note and you have the right posture. If that's it, that's it. You record that, pose that, and you're done, and then you move on. Okay? So remember, the goal here is performance, and performance only can happen in a fun, relaxed and enjoyable way once you have mastery over the subject you're trying to perform. Things. One is a metronome. It's a tool to keep track of time. And you might ask, Hey, do I need to buy one like this? Well, there are metronomes apps for phones that are metronomes. You can have metronomes on your computer. There are some websites, and you can buy digital ones that are, you know, a little tablet that's digital metronome. You can buy metronomes like this with a pendulum. And my recommendation for you is to think about this in the following way. Your phone, you're probably going to be using to record yourself once you've learned a particular exercise. So it's not very good to rely on the app on your phone for the metronome. Also, when you practice, is a chance that you have to go away from your phone. Nobody's calling you. Nobody's sending you notifications. So it's nice to leave your phone out of the room, turn your phone off, and then come to a space where it's just you and music and your instrument. So if you have a metronome that is not on your phone, it's going to allow you to be more focused in my experience. Also, I really like this pendulum metronom. You know, I never runs out of battery. You just crank here on the side. It's kind of like a nice token, a nice piece, you know, to remind you of your practice and to remind you of keeping time. So up to you, but you're going to need a metronom of some kind. Also, you're going to need to have an instrument. Next, we're going to talk about music appreciation and what kind of music you want to play. I'm going to help you to think about it, how to choose your instrument or if you've already chosen your instrument, how to really be intentional about the kind of music you want to play, what kind of players you want to emulate, what kind of instruments you want to get. And then putting all of that together, two lessons from now, we're going to talk about acquiring instrument. How can we best choose what model, what brand used, new? We're going to talk about that. But eventually, you're going to have an instrument in your hands. And if you already have an instrument on your hands, this will be helpful for you to go through that thought process and making sure you are where you want to be with your music choices and with your instrument choice. Now, you have a metronome, you have an instrument. The next thing you need, you need time to practice. It doesn't need to be a lot, especially in the beginning. Ten, 15 minutes is plenty. The key of this whole class, the key of learning an instrument is never to over practice. If you over practice today, tomorrow, you're not going to want to practice. If you're tired and frustrated and making mistakes because you've been playing for too long, you've been focused for too long. Your muscles are now ready to sit with the instrument in a particular way. Like if you're playing violin, this arm is here all the time, your shoulder, if you're playing saxophone, you're kind of to the side, if you're playing tenor or baritone. So, your body needs to get used to each instrument and your muscles need to be activated to sit with that instrument in a correct posture. In a comfortable way. So in the beginning, you shouldn't practice much at all. In fact, be really careful not to over practice. Also, another reason is your brain learns best if every single day, you have a little bit of reinforcement. So today you play, tomorrow, you play, every day you playing a little bit, you make lots of progress really fast. If you try to play, you know, 3 hours on Sunday and not touch your instrument until the next Sunday, by the time you do this, you go backwards. Everything that you learn is starting to fade away and it's starting to and it starts to get not accessible by you. So when you come back the next Sunday, you feel like you have to repeat what you did last Sunday even to catch up with where you were, and then start again. So having time to practice is important. I recommend every day, and I recommend, especially in the beginning, ten, 15 minutes tops. The idea is you have to finish when you still want more. That makes you going to come back the next day. Think about ice cream. If I only give you a little bit of ice cream and you eat it, and you're like, Oh, I want more ice cream, and I'm like, you cannot have it. Next day, after you eat again, you'd be like, I want ice cream again. I'll give you a little bit. You eat it. I want more. You can't have it. Next day, you have it again. Every day, you're gonna be craving ice cream, and you're gonna want to eat it. Now, if I give you a bucket of ice cream and you eat ice cream and you're done, and you keep eating and you're done, and you stuff all that ice cream, it's not even tasting good anymore. You totally blot it. You're like, Ah the next day you want ice cream, you might be like, Nah, I'm just passed, you know, I had so much, have a fruit or whatever, right? So the idea is to tease yourself with wanting to practice, wanting to be connected with your instrument. So don't get me wrong. I could probably eat ice cream, lots of it every day, but the metaphor still applies, right? Make sure you're not over practicing, so you want to come back the next day and you have a good emotional relationship with practicing your instrument. You're also going to need lots of patience. Remember, this is going to be fun, so it's going to be easy to be patient. But your brain learns information very quickly. When I'm teaching you musical concepts, you're going to understand. But that doesn't mean that you're able to do it because your body, you know, it's a bag of meat. Your muscles are, you know, not smart like your brain. So your muscles, they need repetition. You're telling your muscle to do something and your muscle doesn't get it. Your muscle needs to repeat that movement over and over and over and over and over and over, and then eventually the muscle knows exactly what you do. So your brain tends to get frustrated with your body, and you might be thinking, I already understand this scale, I understand this exercise, and I keep making a mistake. This is just your really smart brain, being frustrated with the mechanics of your muscles that are really not that smart. So your brain needs to be patient and say, Hey, I understand this. And now I'm going to give my body all the repetition, all the over and over repetitions that my body needs it in order to internalize that movement. If you have the patience and if you have the kindness to let your body naturally evolve to learn those movements correctly, you go to learn very, very quickly. So the key here is to tell your brain, Hey, relax. Be patient. My hand needs time to learn this. I need to be comfortable in this posture. Stick with the correct technique and the correct posture and the correct fingerings. In time, boom, you'll be able to play anything you want really quick. But if you take the easy way out, oh, I don't like to be in this posture. I don't like to have my core engage. I'm going to be like this. I don't like to hold the guitar properly. I'm just going to hold like that. I'm going to sit on the couch. I don't want to sit properly. Then you're doing whatever. And then in time, you're going to get pain on your back, you're going to get pain on your hands. Your techniques not going to develop. You're not going to be able to reach the places you need to reach. And then you're going to get frustrated, and then this is not going to be fun. And after time, that adds up and you might end up quitting. So the idea here is to stick with the correct posture, correct fingering, correct technique, and practice that just a little bit every day to give your body to have a chance to catch up with what's correct and internalize that, adapt to those movements. And then once you adapt it, you're going to feel comfortable. You're going to feel great. So then you'll be able to practice more and more and more and increase your practice time. Once you increase your practice time, naturally with fun, then you're going to notice your progress going faster and faster and faster. But this beginning is very important that you come to terms with the fact that's going to be slow. You're going to be playing slow. You're going to be learning slow, you're going to be practicing little. Get your head around that and relax, buy in to a long term process and allow yourself to go through the process without pressure, without hurry, enjoying those moments. And if you do that, you're going to be flying. You're going to be playing great in a few weeks and months to come. The idea in this class is not to replace a music teacher, one that's right next to you. A lot of technique and good musical insights are going to come more efficiently from a person that's right next to you. But that's not always easy to have, and that's not really necessarily affordable for everybody. This class is not intended to replace a music teacher. There are lots of things that are better taught by somebody that's sitting right there next to you. However, for a lot of people, that's not possible and not affordable either. So this class will allow you to understand the path you have to go over. How long it's going to take? What kind of exercises should I play? What is the next thing I should be doing? How do I visualize my progress? How do I learn a song? How do I learn how to play in time? How do I learn about chords and scales? How do I learn about playing with others? So this class will allow you to get those questions out of the way and will allow you to get started practicing. And then once you have all of this information, your lessons can be much more efficient. You can show up already knowing the basics or have made progress, to a certain extent to a certain level, before you may decide to spend music before you decide to maybe spend money on a teacher, or maybe you get a teacher in the beginning, get the basics going, and then you understand what you have to do. You can go on your own and keep track of your progress yourself. And once you reach certain milestones or you get into certain that end, you can go and ask a teacher or you can go and start having lessons again with the teacher. So this class is to complement your music education, your process learning and instrument. One thing to note about this class is this class has a series of exercises for you to practice. And how long it's going to take you to practice, it's up to you. It's up to what feels comfortable. There is no right or wrong. There is no taking too long or I went too fast. Whatever is feeling right, whatever you're playing with the metronome and you're having successes, you're playing correctly and you're progressing, that's the speed that's going to take for you. Now, one thing to remember is that once you share your performances of these things, you get a reality check. You become accountable to your community. Your family and friends realize that, hey, right now, you can't even play a note. Wow. Tomorrow, you're playing seven notes. Wow. Now you can play lullabies and, you know, nursery rhymes. Nice. It's somebody's birthday and you play the happy birthday. Great. Oh, now you're learning your friends song. Nice. Wow, you're playing a bunch of exercises and technical things. So others will help you to understand your progress and to hold yourself accountable. Not that they are pressuring you to learn, but that they are witnessing your progress. And that feeling is important once you're trying to commit with a learning process, that does take time. So remember to share that to hold yourself accountable. Also, realize that because of the exercise and practice nature of this class, you can't do this class in one sitting. If you sit and binge this whole class, it's going to get more and more complicated, more and more hard to understand. And at some point you might be, Hey, why am I watching all of this? This is why you should practice and then watch practice a little bit, and then watch. There are certain lessons that you can go right away, and, you know, I'm not suggesting that you learn about C major scale, and then you turn off the class for six months until you're totally master of C major scale, and then you go back. But I'm saying something reasonable. You should test out and try it out whatever the lesson is saying. If you're learning C major scale or if you're learning rapesios or third exercises, I might take you a day, I might take you a couple of days to try that to increase your metronome speed, to become familiar with that content. So that content, it's now internalized to a certain degree, and then you can go on to intake more information. That said, I am the kind of person that does like to go ahead and watch it, and I think that's fine. Just remember two things. If you're going ahead, if you start to get confused and if you start to not understand, remember that that's happening because you are not practicing parallel. So go backwards. Also, if you go forward, just to check it out and see whatever is coming ahead, that's fine. But once your practice gets to a certain stage, let's say, the next lesson, you should go back and watch that lesson again and be like, Okay, now I'm from this lesson to this lesson, I practice, let me review whatever is next. So keep track of the sequence of lessons in relation to how you're progressing how you're practicing every day. I know that despite saying that's really important for you to share your progress with others, some might not want to and might feel that they might get negative feedback that they are not playing good enough. Remember, here we just want positive and constructive feedback, positive feedback. That might sound a little weird, like, Oh, I can't say the truth. I can't say that I don't like this or this is straight up incorrectly. Yes, you shouldn't say that, and I'll tell you why because when you're learning how to talk, nobody's going to go to a baby and say, Hey, you speak everything wrong. You're blah, blah in the whole time. Nobody can understand you. You're not going to say that because you know that a baby is just in the process of learning how to talk. So if the baby says 90% of blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and 1% of Mama, Papa, you immediately say, Good job. Way to go. Because you want to give motivation and drive for that person to keep going into the learning process. Here is the same way. Everybody can play. Everybody can be a great musician. However, it takes time. So when you see somebody that isn't playing that great or it's not sounding that great, it's just because they are in the beginning of their learning development. With a baby, it's easy to spot. Every little baby has a hard time speaking, has a hard time walking. But sometimes you might be 60-years-old and you only start practicing your instrument a month ago, or a week ago. So you might look like you should be playing well, but you are in the infant stages of practicing your instrument. So because it's harder to tell and you never know how long somebody's been practicing and how long it's going to take somebody to get to a fluency level, you should never give negative feedback and in words that are going to bring them down because learning and instruments are going to take time. So you don't want to dis encourage people from practicing. You want to give them more energy for them to practice more. Comment, give a thumbs up, give a little like, tell them, that's great. Practice. Way to go better than your last video. Help the community, and they will help you. And you're going to create an environment where you like, can't wait to finish the arpatial exercise. Let me record. Let me get this right so I can post and show everybody my new skills. That kind of, like, showing off all your new skills, it's something positive and something that is inspiring and will drive you. It's not competitiveness. It is witnessing yourself learning and progressing and being happy about that. At the very least, you should post one major scale, and then the pagios and third exercises of that scale, a minor scale, arpegios and third exercise of the class. But those milestones are important to share and it's important for you to make sure you really learned before you progress. Also, you can post yourself playing anything that you're practicing, chromatic scales, long tones, improvising. But remember to always post with a matronom. We always want to see you playing in time and in the beginning, and even later on, we can't trust ourselves to keep track of time because if we feel differently, the time speed changes. If you're very tired and, you know, didn't sleep well, everything's going to feel slow and dragging. You're full of coffee and very elatric and happy and excited, you're going to rush. You're going to play too fast. If you're anxious, you're going to play too fast. If you're on, you know, the lazy side of things, you might play too slow. So the idea is when we are practicing to always play with the matronom and have our performances for the purpose of this class to be played with the matronom so we and everybody else can see that indeed we are on time. Now, the exception for that is let's say you're learning a song and you're posting that with the matronome and you're playing that with the matronome and eventually you speed that up, o the speed of the song. And now you have totally mastered that song. You can play that song beautifully, right technique, correct posture, clean notes. You know, I took you a while you worked so hard. Now here is and you want to play that artistically. You want to express yourself. Now you're no longer practicing. Now you're done practicing. You mastered the song. Now you can turn the matronome off and you can post something that's like a regular music performance where you go and perform something for somebody. But remember, to get there, you play that same thing with the matronome so many times. So that repetition really got internalized, and now it's okay to turn off the matronome. In this class, you're going to have to decide how deep you want to go into learning music. It's okay if you just want to play campfires and sing songs on the guitar. It's okay if you just want to learn how to play beautiful melodies on the piano, and that's it. It's okay if you want to be a professional musician and be, you know, mastering everything that's possible. It's okay to go in any level you want for your purposes. Your target and your goals are what it is, and this is it. It's not good or bad. It's just whatever you're setting out for you to do, and that's okay. Having that in mind, for the guitar, playing melodies, at the same time playing chords is very advanced. And playing melodies on the guitar, like solos and improvising and even just playing, you know, melody lines, that tends to be something that people do later. So a lot of people learning guitar, they just want to play chords, and they want to sing with the chords, or they want to just play chords for other people to sing. So keep that in mind because in the beginning lessons of this class, we're going to be talking about scales, pasio, third exercises, and all of that in major and minor tonalities. And all of that is so you can play melodies. So that's going to apply very well to pretty much every instrument except the guitar because the guitar, unless you're wanting to go kind of to an intermediate level or a little bit of an advanced level where you're playing melody, solos, improvising, you might not want to be practicing all of that. If that's the case, skip down to the chords part of this class. Now, I do recommend that even if you don't want to play melodies and solos and improvise on the guitar, that you still watch the lessons because you are going to be playing with people that are playing melodies. So for you to just understand how melodies work, it's going to be great and it's going to help your ears to develop as well. Now, if your goal on the guitar is just to play chords, that's totally fine. And maybe you want to do that first. You know, learn how to play chords, get that going, and then later, you may or may not decide to go into scales, arpego, start exercises, and all that stuff. Just keep that in mind. Either way, it's okay. We're going to be using a practice journal to keep track of your practice, and so you can visualize your progress. That's going to be a very important tool to show you objectively how you're progressing and to tell you every time you come to practice, Hey, what is the thing I should be doing next? That practice journal is going to allow you to gamify your practice. Every day you wanted to pass to the next phase. You wanted to pass the next challenge, and that's going to be one of the centers of your practice that is going to allow you to always be having drive to play next, to practice the next day to move forward, so you can level up your practice journal. We're going to talk about that later. You go to the project section and you post your link there for your video. So basically, you can go to YouTube, BVmeo, whatever video platform, and upload your video as unlisted, and then you get that link that's unlisted, and you can post on the project section of this class. Let me know on the discussion section of this class, if you would like us to have a Facebook group, that way, you could just go there and upload your video as well. But for now, let's keep links in the Project Gallery of this class. As an example, I'm going to leave a few videos of myself practicing and playing songs on the project gallery. Alright, time to get started. Next, we're going to talk about music appreciation. 3. Start with Music Appreciation: Learning an instrument is in many ways like having a relationship. You'll be spending lots of your time with that person, and you should be inspired by you should have fun. It should be something you look forward to do, to spend your time there. And with an instrument the same way, you should be looking forward to play that instrument. You should have a connection with that sound. It should fit your lifestyle. So that's an important choice. The right choice, it will fit like a glove and will propel you for many months and years of practice of a relationship with your instrument. The wrong choice might make you feel you're doing homework or you're doing work or something laborious, that you might not stick around with it for the long term. So in order to choose the instrument you want to play, it's important to know what kind of music you like, because choosing an instrument can be quite intuitive process. And those feelings that you have towards this instrument or that kind of sound, we need to put some thought in it to make sure that does fit your lifestyle that does fit the kind of music you want to play. What I mean by this is, let's say you like to play jazz. If you choose to play the French horn, it will be very hard fit. How many French horn players do you know that play jazz and improvise. It's gonna be an uphill battle. Same way if you like to play country music and you decide to play Marimba. How many country music bands do you know that have the Marimba? So that's going to be an uphill battle. Can you do it? Sure. Is it going to be intuitive? Is it going to be a natural fit? No. So let's spend some time now thinking about what kind of music you like, what kind of players you like. And then we'll find out which instrument really fits your needs, your musical needs. Let's have a look at a list I like to make, and I suggest you make it, as well. It's called a music appreciation list. So in this list, we're going to put all your favorite bands and artists. Let's have a look. This is my list. What kind of music groups, bands, and artists you like to listen to. In my case, I put here Errol Garner, that's a jazz piano player, Dexter Gordon, tenor saxophone player, AmonTobin, experimental electronic musician. I Mika, she's also experimental electronic music. She's a singer. Dokey Ellington, that's a piano player, jazz piano player, Louis Armstrong, that's a jazz trumpet player, Chopin romantic classical composer for the piano, mainly the piano, Brahms, also a classical composer, and Avpart, which is also a classical composer. Your list is going to look totally different, but just put it there the things you like most, the things that truly inspire you, the music that really moves you. Once you have that, let's add the genre of the music these people play. If you don't know, you just Google. Google the band and see what kind of genre is this, and you find it. So my list looks like this with the music genres, EroGarer Jazz swing. And you can put the subgenre as well, not only jazz, but what kind of jazz swing swing era. Dexter Gordon, jazz Bebop, and Montobin electronic experimental music, but a lot of drumming bass. I Mika, electronic music, around the chill out techno music genre. Donk Ellington, jazz he wrote lots of big band music. Louis Armstrong, jazz, Dixie Land, ragtime, Chopin, classic music. What period, Romantic period. Brahms, classic music, also romantic period. Arvo Part, neoclassical classical music. So this is starting to give you a bunch of information. For example, for me, I really love classical music, but I like to listen to it. I don't really want to be playing that. And I really love electronic music and experimental electronic music, but I already spent so much of my time on the computer. I don't want to be making more music on the computer. I want something that's not computer based. So what narrows down here, given those things that are particular to me is looks like I want to be playing jazz. It's not classical, I don't need a computer for it. Great. Lots of my people that I like play jazz. So think about that. You know, start looking at your list and realize, Hey, maybe I just like to listen this. Maybe I don't want to play this. You know, I like marching band music, but I'm not in school anymore. I don't like sports. You know, I don't want to be marching in the sun. Like, just try to think about it. Hey, I love electronic music and club music, but I like to sleep early, you know, I don't like to go out. Club is too noisy for me. Maybe that's not your thing then. So start thinking about the context of the music. You wrote it down. So now, on top of that, let's look now what kind of instruments these people play. And let's see if you have a better idea of what you want to be playing. So, for example, so out of my list, I have the jazz players because I narrow down to jazz. So when instruments do they play? Errol Garner plays the piano. Dexter Gordon plays the saxophone, and Duke Ellington plays the piano. But also note that some of my other artists and band they also play the piano. I Mika, electronic music, plays the piano, Chopin classical composer, plays the piano, Brahms, classical composer, plays the piano. So when you look at my list, oh, there's a lot of piano going on. So it's telling me here that I likely want to be playing jazz piano. That's what my list is telling me. Now it's your turn. Do this list yourself, and don't forget to share that list with us in the project gallery. If you want to ask questions, if you want to show your list to somebody and invite them to help you figure out what kind of genre, instruments and players might be interesting to you, just post any questions on the discussion section of this class. Remember I said that your instrument should fit your lifestyle. So let me give you an example. I like to play the piano. Not the keyboard, the piano. But do I have space for a piano? Yeah, I have space in my house. Do I have savings enough to buy a piano? Yeah, I do. Okay, that's a good deal for me. What about traveling? A piano is really not portable? Do I need to be traveling around with my instrument? Actually, I hate to travel. I love to stay home. So the piano seems like a good fit for me. If I really like the piano, but maybe I live with a lot of people can't make that much noise, need to be able to travel, want something more affordable, the keyboard would be a better choice. So think of this way. What would fit your lifestyle? For example, you live in an apartment and you have very thin walls. Maybe playing the drums, it's not going to be a great fit for you. You're going to get so many complaints. You're going to be self conscious that every time you're practicing, everybody's listening, you're disturbing others. So that might not be conducive for your lifestyle. But maybe you can go to a music school where you can practice. Maybe you have access to somebody's garage. Maybe you can rent a practicing space, or maybe when you take lessons with a drum teacher, you can use his drums. So maybe drums will fit your lifestyle. You are the only one that will know the answer, but just think about it before you commit to an instrument. Another thing to think about that's often overlooked is how do you physically match with that instrument? Uh, to put it simply, are you big and strong enough for the instrument you want to play? Are you small enough to play, you know, an instrument that requires you to have smaller hands? Let me give you examples. Let's say you want to play the tuba Sosophone, but you're a very small person. That's not gonna be a good fit. You're gonna get a huge backache. Or let's say you're really big guy with big hands and thick fingers, maybe playing the flute or a piccolo, it's not going to be so easy for you to do that. So just think about it. Oh, I want to play snare drums and marching band, but, you know, I have a back problem. That's probably not going to be easy for you to do. So think about it like a sport, you know, you're a very tall, athletic guy. Hey, maybe you can play basketball, maybe you can play volleyball. Maybe I'm very fast and strong. Maybe I can play, you know, American football. Maybe I can be a weight lifter, you know, maybe I'm very thin and have lots of endurance, and I run really well. Hey, maybe track and field, maybe, you know, sprinting or marathons, maybe that's going to be your kind of thing. So just try also to think about it. Where does your body fit within the instruments that are available for you to play? Another thing to consider is what kind of music ensemble do you want to participate in? If you want to play in a rock band, if you play, you know, the French horn or I'm picking on French horns, but not to pick on French horns, but let's say you want to play the horpOn a rock band, that's going to be pretty hard. You know, let's say you want to play in an orchestra, Hey, an electric guitar, that's not going to be a great fit. So think about, Hey, I want to play in a jazz big band. What kind of instruments are there in a jazz big band? Hey, I want to play in a rag time band, you know, in a bluegrass band. What are the instruments used to play Bluegrass? In short, think strategically as much as possible before you choosing an instrument. You're going to be spending lots of time with instrument, and you want to make sure it's a good fit. Also consider how deep do you want to go learning an instrument? Do you want to be one of the best players in the world? You want to perform for thousands of people and travel and make your life go to be a great performer? Do you want just to play campfire songs on the weekend while hanging out with your friends? Do you want to learn some songs that are your favorite and just perform for friends and families on a weekend or somebody's birthday? Think about it how much you actually want to learn this instrument. It's enough for everybody to totally master instrument. It's only going to be fun and exciting to meet your goal, not necessarily to fully learn the instrument. So before you even start, think what's going to be your goal and set your eyes on the price, have that be your target. Alright, before we proceed, make sure you share the list you make your music appreciation list with us on the project gallery. Make sure you know what kind of genre of music you want to be playing. Make sure you pick an instrument, your chosen instrument to play, your first instrument. Or if you already have an instrument in mind, just make sure you're thinking about the things we spoke in this class and confirm if you're really going to proceed to learn that instrument, if that's really what you want to do. Also, choose one, two, maybe three of your favorite players that not only play the instrument you're choosing, but the play the genre of music you would primarily like to learn. Get those players and listen to the whole discography. There is no hurry, but try to listen to everything they ever played. Slowly listen over and over again. If they have live shows on YouTube or in other platforms, try to see them playing live, become very familiar with their playing. Narrow down to one, two, maybe three players or bands that you really like that have your instrument of choice and the kind of music you want to be playing. Once you've done all of that, we are ready to go to the next lesson. Next, we're going to talk about how to acquire the appropriate instrument for your needs. See you there. 4. Tips for Instrument Acquisition: Now that you know what kind of music you want to be playing, you have a sense of which kind of music genre you want to play, what kind of players you want to emulate, what kind of instrument you gravitate towards. What kind of skill you want to have in music? Do you want to be a beginner? Do you want to be intermediate player? Do you want to be one of the best players out there? Once you have those things, figure it out, at least for now, you're ready to start thinking about getting an instrument so you can start practicing. You might rent an instrument or you might purchase used instrument. That's my recommendation. But now you have all the ideas you need to have in order to properly select that instrument. So when we're thinking about getting an instrument, you should think about it. What kind of instrument the players I admire use? Because an instrument, it's kind of music genre specific. If you like to play jazz, you might use a different guitar than if you want to play he metal, that might be entirely different guitar and amp. Let's say you like the red hot chili peppers. The guitar player from that band, what kind of guitar he uses? What kind of sound he gets? Oh, that's a Stratocaster. Okay, great. What kind of amp? Is it a marshal amp? Is it a fender amp? Research those things and buy something similar. Let's say he uses a guitar that's from 1978 vintage, super expensive Stratocaster. Don't necessarily need to buy that. In fact, if you're a beginner, don't buy that. But you can buy entry level Stratocaster. Let's say you want to play jazz and you want to play guitar as well. Well, maybe you think about it what kind of guitar the players like use. Maybe they use a epipone. Maybe they use a kind of epipone that's very expensive. Once again, you don't need to do that. But you might look, Hey, what is the entry level epiphone guitar and get that one or find that one used? Uh, let's say an example with have metal or like a limp biscuit, let's say. Oh, I like limp biscuit. I like the guitar player from limp biscuit. What kind of guitar he uses? Oh, he uses a Jackson model, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You don't need to get the high end guitar, but you might think, Hey, what is the Jackson guitars that I can purchase that are entry level? You know, maybe you find something used that fits your budget. At first, you're not going to even use everything a professional instrument has to offer. So there's no sense in spending that kind of money. I would think about it. Hey, maybe I need to experience this instrument first. How can you experience that instrument? Well, easy way would be to go to a store and play whatever's on display. If that's not possible because of where you live or the kind of stores you have around you, maybe you can pay a private lesson to a teacher. Let's say you want to play the allo, right? Pay a allo teacher and say, Hey, I don't have an instrument. I just want to try it out. Can I hold your instrument? Can you show me around? Can I experience that instrument? So I can decide if I want to move forward. Another option is to buy an instrument online, an instrument that you can return, and buy it, play around, see how it sits with you, and you can always return. Once you know what kind of instrument you're after, I recommend first you try to experience that instrument. Maybe you can rent from a music store, maybe you can go to a music store and play whatever's on display. If you don't have a music store near you that has the instrument you're thinking about playing, maybe you can find a teacher and have a private lesson and during the private lesson, say, Hey, this is my first time. I never held this instrument before. I just want to can I play an instrument? Can you show me around? Can you introduce me to the instrument? Maybe that will make you decide if you want to move forward or not. You can also look for music schools and say, Hey, I'm thinking about playing this instrument. Is there a way that I can come here and experiment? You can try to reach out to music conservatories or maybe high school teachers that might allow you to go there at some point during the day and try out instruments. Can also think about rent an instrument from players or ask players in your town. Maybe even if they don't teach, you see somebody playing and say, Hey, is there any time before a gig or anytime I can swing by, and I can just touch your instrument or learn how to play it or you just introduce it to me. If I can't play it because you might have expensive instrument, can you just show me around, tell me about the instrument? You can do many different things to have access to that instrument. Once you're a little bit more certain, that's what you want to do. You can rent instruments online. Maybe you can rent instruments from a music store or from players in your town. Stay with those instruments for a couple of days and see if there is something that you would like to move forward with. I don't recommend you to buy a new instrument because used instruments, sometimes they are better setup. If they're in good condition, you might have an instrument that's broken in that somebody already played before that's not stiff from the box, but also Uh, you can get something cheaper and try it out first. No matter how much research and how certain you are of the instrumental music genre you want to play, once you go from a beginner to intermediate player, your understanding of music will change and your desires regarding that instrument might change, and you're most likely going to upgrade or purchase a new instrument. So don't stress too much about it, do your research, but then get an instrument either by renting, by trying somebody else's or by buying a used instrument that you can play around and see if you have chemistry with that instrument and see if you really want to move forward practicing that instrument. Remember that after you know what kind of instrument, it's a good fit for the music you want to be playing. Aside from getting that instrument, you need accessories. So, for example, for keyboard, you're going to need a sustained pedal, a keyboard stand, a power supply. For electric guitar, you're going to need pick, a strap, cable, an amp. Let's say you're going to play the saxophone, you're going to need an trap. You're going to need a mouthpiece, a ligature, a read. Right? So think about the accessories, and those accessories are also dependent on the kind of music you're going to play. If you're going to play big band music on a saxophone, you might get a metal mouthpiece. If you're going to play, you know, ballads and going to play just a duo trios around town, that's your kind of inspiration. You might want metal mouthpiece. Let's say you're going to play distorted music on the guitar or something very loud, you're going to select that kind of amp, you know, maybe bluesy, you know, a tube amp. But if you're going to play jazz or stuff that is cleaner, you might select different kinds of amps. So you can do this research. You can Google the players that you admire, and you'll find that kind of information. Remember that a case is very important. A case is where you put your instrument and you move it around. You play keyboard and you're not gigging, you might not need a case. But for pretty much everything else, for guitar, flute, to saxophone, if you want to move around and if you want to take your instrument places, definitely get a case. Your instrument is going to be protected and you're not going to have to do maintenance over and over and over. A cases might seem expensive at first, but when you realize that if you don't use a case, you're going to be damaging your instrument and paying for repairs, the case seems cheap in comparison. You play keyboard, piano, or drum kit, you might not need a case because you might not be moving those instruments around at least at first. But for pretty much everything else, you want to get a good case to protect your instrument. Alright, so you have the kind of instrument. It's going to fit the music genre you want to play. You have the accessories. You have a good case. What else do you need to keep in mind before you start playing? You should take that instrument to repair shop or to a professional that does repairs and maintenance right off the bat. Even if the instrument is new, especially if the instrument is used, why is that? Because instruments, they need to be set up for the player. For your height for the kind of finger strength you have on a saxophone, what kind of read do you need? How heavy is the read you need? Somebody needs to teach you about, you know, the posture of the instrument, and that needs to be done kind of in a physical space. We're going to talk about posture in the next lesson, but having somebody that can give you the first steps in person, it's very important. But also, once you tune your instrument, you have peace of mind that your instrument is working properly. Here is a professional or repairman that knows how to play, and he's looking at that instrument, fixing it, and saying, Hey, this instrument is ready to go. That peace of mind is important because when you're learning an instrument, you don't know if the problem is the instrument or you on a keyboard, you press a note, a note comes out. That might be a more straightforward instrument. But let's say you're playing a guitar and you connect to the amp. When you play a note, it doesn't sound right. You hear all sorts of rattlings and problems. The note cuts on and off. Is it you that didn't put the cable properly or connected the amp in a correct way or did the settings in a way that's appropriate? Or is your amp broken? Or is the connections in your guitar not soldered properly. So when you're a beginner, you might be wondering, Hey, is it si the instrument? Let's say you playing saxophone. You play a note, you can barely get a note out. Hey, is this read very heavy for me? My saxophone might be leaking. The pads of the saxophone or the flute, or if you play trumpets, the pistons, they might be misaligned. Is the instrument causing a barrier for me to play or is it me that don't know how to play yet? So, taking the instrument to the repair shop right off the gate, it gives you the peace of mind that you're starting to practice instrument that works properly. Aside from that, also keep in mind that playing an instrument or owning an instrument, it's like owning a house or a car. It requires maintenance. Once in a while, depending on the kind of instrument, every six months, every year, every month, depending how heavy handed you are with your instrument, you might need to check in with a professional to help you tune your instrument. As you progress, you're going to figure out a lot of things you can do yourself and you can save money and you can do adjustments. And when you need a major tune up, then you can go and pay a professional at first, just try to have your instrument properly set up, have properly maintenance done, keep your instrument on the case when you're moving around, or when you're not playing anymore. That's going to give you peace of mind and comfort. The instrument is working properly. It's always there for you when you want to play and practice. Owning an instrument is also like owning a house or owning a car. It requires maintenance. Depending on how heavy handed you are and how often you play, you might maintain your instrument. You might take to the shop every six months, every three months, every year. And with time, you learn how to do those smaller repairs by yourself. And in time, you know, after a longer period of time, you might want to have professionally done. But especially in the beginning, it's very important for you to keep your instrument well maintained and with a proper setup done. And if you're not playing your instrument, keep it in a case. That's going to help dust, humidity. It's going to help your instrument for not falling and be broken. You know, you leave it on the couch or against the wall. Somebody touches, smashes right on the ground. It's not worth it. So keep your instrument on a case when you're not playing, have it properly set up, and take care of your instrument. So your instrument is perfectly comfortable and inviting every time you want to play and practice. Now take time to research what kind of instrument you want to be playing and what kind of instrument is going to be a better fit for the music you want to be playing. And once you have this instrument in your hands, you're going to be ready to go to the next lesson. But if you want to go to the next lesson right now, I totally get it. You might want to see the next few lessons while you're still researching and getting your hands on the instrument. But remember to go back to Lesson five and start it again when you have the instrument in hand. Don't let this research overwhelm you. Audio engineers, they say some of them have gear nits or instrumentanits, which is just a funny way of saying that you get so caught up in research, you know, Oh, this kind of guitar, epiphone, how many pickups? What kind of amp, hard pick, soft pick? Should I play the guitar up here, down here? It's like, there's so many setups and tunings and products and accessories that some people get carried away and overwhelmed by that amount of information. Some people might just be buying instruments or buying gear or buying and selling and trying something else and not practicing as much. So don't let the amount of information and the number of possibilities regarding instrument and accessories overwhelm you and sidetrack you from your goal. Your goal is to play music. Remember, an excellent musician with a horrible instrument is still going to play good music. And musician that is not that great that hasn't practiced that much with the best setup and instruments in the world, is not going to sound that great. So remember, do your research, do the best you can, get something used that doesn't hurt your pockets and know that you have an opportunity to make this decision again once you're more educated about music and the instrument you're choosing. Once you go from beginner to intermediate, your mind is going to change and you're going to have the chance to make this choice again. So don't be too precious, okay? Just make sure that the value of the instrument fits in your pocket and that you still have money left for accessories and for the first tune up of your instrument. In the project and resources section of this lesson, I also left a list of places in the United States that I would go to look for used or places I would rent instruments. Some of these online stores, they're very good about returning gear. So you might want to be upfront, call them up and be like, Hey, I'm thinking about playing this instrument. I'm not sure. Would it be okay if I buy it. And within, you know, X amount of days, I return it if I don't want to keep it. Lot of places are okay with that. So that's another way you can find good instruments to practice, and you'll try it out before you decide to play. All right. I'll see you in the next lesson where we're going to talk about posture. And posture is going to be the foundation of your playing, the foundation of your practicing. Correct posture is going to allow you to create a clean sound, which is going to be the basis for everything we do moving forward. So that's why it would be great if you have your instrument in your hands so we can talk about how to hold it properly. But if you don't, make sure to come back to that lesson once you do. See you there. 5. Posture Matters!: You decided which instrument you're going to play. Congrats. That's a big deal. You'll be spending lots of time with that instrument. So, you probably have the instrument with you right now. If you don't, that's okay, but make sure to come back to this lesson once you have the instrument with you. So let's talk about posture. Posture not only going to prevent you from feeling pain, but also posture is going to allow for clean tone production. You have to make the sound of your instrument come out, and posture is the very basis of how to make that sound be produced in a correct way. Your body is going to be part of the instrument. The instrument in your body, they're going to sync together. And if you have the correct posture, the instrument is going to respond to that and create a clean tone. That goes for every single instrument. So we are not only looking for correct posture because we are stricklers or, you know, because of discipline for no reason. It's all about the sound and all about not injuring your body so you can keep practicing as long as you want. Have in mind that posture might feel odd at first. Think about when a baby's learning how to walk. The baby is un happy to be standing or to be crawling. Everything is weird. The body feels, it's in an odd position. But with time, those muscles that allow the baby to stand up will be developed and will get stronger and standing up will no longer feel awkward. So correct posture is different than feeling comfortable. Think about a very big couch where you slouch and you, you know, feel like $1 million. But if you stay there, you know, for an hour or two, by the end of the movie, your lower back hurts, your neck hurts. Why? Because not necessarily feeling comfortable at first is the correct posture for your body, and in this case, for your instrument. So, there is a big difference between discomfort. Awkwardness, pain, so have in mind that first, you need to have the correct posture, and in time, your muscles going to get stronger and you're no longer going to feel odd about that posture. That's the first thing. However, you should never, never ignore pain. If you feel pain, you have to stop playing immediately. You have to put your instrument aside, you have to rest. Okay? So have that in mind, correct posture. You might feel awkward, stick with it. Keep practicing. If you're feeling fatigue, that's okay. Stop, take a break, go back at it. After 5 minutes, after 10 minutes, maybe the next day. In time, your body will hold the correct posture, and you're not going to even think about it. Now, if you feel pain, stop it because that's gonna get worse and worse, and that might even prevent you from playing. So with that in mind, let's look at the correct posture of a few instruments. Let's do some research. Once you just Google posture, let's say, YouTube, piano posture. Just like that, it's not hard. I'm clicking on the first link, it appears here, and, you know, I'm not going to spend time here. You can do that kind of research, but you see the even the chapters are separated here. Lo piano bench, she's talking about how the piano bend should be adjusted. Here, she's talking about legs and feet, how your feet should be touching the paddles. This goes for keyboard as well. And then, you know, she's talking about the distance between your body and the keys. But what we want to observe here is her arms have a nice almost like a 90 degree angle. Her wrists are straight. And her knees are almost 90 degrees as well. She's not touching her back anywhere. She's on the tip of the chair. That is a correct posture for piano. So go online. Research what's the correct posture. Watch some videos about it. If you play guitar, let's say, guitar, posture. What do we have here? Let's go on Google. Guitar, posture. Let's say this person here is talking about posture, you know, talking about the back. Here, it's even I believe he's going to draw some graphics of how to position your body, talking about your neck, talking about how the strap should be adjusted if your guitar is going to be up or down. It's also going to talk about how to hold the guitar, how your wrists, you know, see the wrist should be curved. The wrist should be straight. So you can yeah, bending the wrist is hardly a good thing in any instrument, but talking about when you pressed onto the strings. So, you know, yes, the idea of this class is not just substitute a teacher, but it's perhaps you want to save your money and your time and learn the basics by yourself or by researching. And maybe once you know a little bit more, you can have a teacher that's like a mentor. It's going to talk to you about music and art. And the technical stuff, it's very available out there, but it's hard to put it together, and that's the idea of this class. So now, with posture, you see you can find posture information. So posture, saxophone. Let's see. Saxophone, posture. Let's say if I go here videos, let's say, correct. Partial for a saxophone. It's going to give you know, it's going to talk about how to adjust the nextrap, how your hand position should be. Your wrist, once again, the wrist is straight, how your fingers are curved, if you're, you know, when you press, how does the hand change? There is a lot of information out there, so do some research about that. Also have in mind that posture might be a music genre specific thing. For example, let's say you're playing cocktail piano and you're playing, you know, big chords, and you want to play really loud. Maybe you're playing a restaurant on a branch. And in order to get more pressure on the piano, more attack more volume, you might want to have your chair be a little higher so you can play downwards with more strength. But maybe if you're playing classical music, you want to be a little lower or leveled, so your finger speed can be blazing. You know, if you're playing some French Debussy music, your fingers are like feathers and you want them to run freely and relaxed, you don't really need that much volume. So adjustments in the posture might depend on the kind of music you're playing. For example, let's say you're playing guitar. If you're playing heavy metal or grunge power chords, maybe your guitar is going to be down there because, you know, look at the guitar player from Metallica. Hi picking hand is really going fast, and he needs that right arm to be down there so he can pick really fast. And this hand here, he's okay to be down there. You know, his wrist is curved, but for the stuff he's playing, that's okay. Now, if you look at a jazz guitar player, he's doing a lot of complicated fast movements with his hand here, or, you know, if you're playing a lot of solos and intrinsic passages. This hand here, you're picking, but the left hand is really where the action is, so you don't want that wrist bend. So in that case, you might put the guitar little up and play. The main essence of the correct posture on each instrument still applies. You probably don't want tension. You probably don't want to be bent on your spine. You probably want your core engaged. That goes for pretty much every instrument. So to give an example here on the piano, let's look in position at this keyboard. Wrists 90 degrees or almost. My legs 90 degrees or almost. I like to be a little higher, but everything is relaxed. My wrist is straight. My hands are as if I'm holding a tennis ball. So imagine you're holding a tennis ball, take the ball away. You see how your hands are relaxed. They just fall into place, shoulders are relaxed, core is engaged, and posture here. In time, this will feel very relaxed and you feel strong. You can stay here for hours. Now, let's talk about the guitar. A guitar, I like to elevate my leg a little bit. So I like to have a little footstool like this. You can use anything you already have in your house, the step stool or something. But when I'm playing without a strap, I like to have this leg up. So the guitar is centered here. And now my wrist, see, my wrist is straight. I can play scales. I can play chords. And I can strum it. I can pagate. See how this wrist is also straight. It's not curved. This is not curved. I'm not bent. Bringing yourself to your instrument is the worst thing you can do. You have to be comfortable and have a correct posture. And if you need to lift your leg to make the instrument come up, that's great. If you need to put an axe strap, so the instrument here, that's great. But the instrument comes to you, not you bend around the instrument, okay? The trumpet, for example, once again, I am straight. I am straight, the or is engaged. I bring the trumpet to me. I don't want to bring myself to the trumpet. I don't want to bend my core. So wrists is straight. Wrists. Don't want to do that. Don't want to curl your fingers. Wrist is straight. And now you can play. Okay. Hand position, relaxed. Let the tension go. For this lesson, just research what kind of posture is the correct posture for your instrument. And then get your instrument and just feel comfortable. Get your guitar, feel comfortable, get used to sitting on that posture. Especially if you don't have good posture when you sit at a dinner table or on your couch, this might feel a little uncomfortable to you. But remember, if it's the correct posture and you stick with it, your muscles will get strong over time if you persist, and then you'll be really comfortable pain free and able to play your instrument and enjoy your activity. Now, if you don't mind your posture and you persist playing, you're going to start getting pains and your technique is going to get limited. So have that in mind before you start and just enjoy holding your instrument. Huh. Don't get a clean note. That's okay. Huh. You can only play one note, maybe not even. That's okay. But how is your posture? If you're sitting here, this is already practice. You're already practicing having the correct posture, okay? Remember the difference between fatigue and pain and do not keep playing if you have pain, okay? Just take a breath, take a rest, and then think about it. How is your posture incorrect? Fix that, go back. The next day, when you're rested, the pain should go away, okay? All right. So next lesson, we're going to talk about clean notes and just getting one single clean note on your instrument. Your posture is gonna allow you to do that. So see you there. 6. Sound Production: Clean Notes: Now that you know the correct posture for your instrument? It's time for us to think about playing clean notes. You had some fun holding your instrument correctly, exploring your instrument. But now you might have noticed that when you play, the notes you're producing might not be the prettiest notes. It's important from the get go to learn how to play clean notes because that is the fundamental of later being able to play music sys. The goal of this lesson is to understand how correct posture will help you to play clean notes. And how does that work in each particular instrument? So we can divide the instrument into categories, strings, wind, percussion, bold strings, fret board, string instruments, instruments with keys. And for each of those instruments, the sound is produced in a different way. So we need to understand how is the sound produced when you sing or when you play saxophone, or when you play keyboard or when you play piano or when you play acoustic guitar or electric guitar. By understanding how tone is produced on your instrument, you will have a better idea of how to get clean notes. So we're going to marry correct posture with an understanding of how sound is produced, and that's going to help you to get clean notes out of your instrument. Now, I'm going to give you some examples. Percussive instruments. Percussive instruments is when you produce sound by hitting usually a membrane or by hitting some sort of surface that then vibrates and creates a sound. So these are the bongos just to give an example. But drum, congas, even shakers, all percussive instruments are the same in the sense that they produce sound by having something hit it. So here is a membrane, and the body of this bongo, it will resonate. I will amplify the vibrations of this membrane. So when I play, this vibrates and the sound gets louder and more warm, you know, it adds tone here and volume, but the sound is being produced by something hitting the membrane. You can hit it in all sorts of ways. You can use a mallet. You have all sorts of mallets, soft, hard mallets, drum mallets, any kind of mallets. It will create a different sound. And you can explore that. You can play in all sorts of different ways. So when you're doing this, are you also hitting the instrument? Yeah, in a way you are. When you're scratching, there is little hits like microscopic little hits around the membrane. And once there's friction between your nails or your fingers and the membrane, that membrane is vibrating, and that's how you're getting the sound. So it's very tiny little small hits, but it's still the same way. Just to give you another example, a shaker. Also percussive instrument because you have little seeds or little grains of sand hitting the inside of this structure. Therefore, when you play, all those little grains hit the hardware, the encasing, and that produces the sound. So it's still percussive instruments. If you have correct posture, your arm has the right angle, the right force, and you produce good sound. If you have bad posture, it's really hard to get a clean tone or to get something good happening. If you have correct possure, you can play it properly. That goes for all instruments. Let me give you another example. This is a tenor saxophone, and it's a wind instrument that has the sound produced by a red. So there is a piece of bamboo here that will vibrate when air goes through it, and the mouthpiece is going to start guiding the air that's vibrating through the body of the saxophone. And depending how big the body of the saxophone is, you get a pitch. So if I close this notes, the body of the saxophone is this big. If I close this note, the body of the saxophone is this big. The body is only as big as the hose you have. So if I close a bunch of holes, the body of the saxophone become this big. So this is how you change the pitch. So the sound is being produced by the red, which is made of bamboo and the pitches are being selected by the fingerings of the instrument. So it will sound something like this. Sound going through, and the rad is vibrating. Correct posture because I need the sound to go through my diaphrame being supported by my core and freely going from me to the instrument. And the fingerings, the neck, everything is going to help so I can be relaxed and I can have a constant flow of air. Posture. Much harder to play. I've been playing for a while, so sound still comes out, but it's not ideal. It doesn't sound great. Have better posture. You can get one clean note. Let's look at all the instruments. This is the flute. It works like blowing air through a glass bottle. Have you tried this? Getting a bottle and blowing air across the hole and getting a sound. This is exactly how it works. I will blow air through the hole of the mouthpiece, and some of their are going to escape, but some of the air is going to start vibrating in spiral motion inside the flute. The air is going to go through the body of the flute, just like the saxophone. Depending on the fingering, I decide which pitch that sound is going to produce. But the vibration is happening through airflow going through the mouthpiece, just like so. H Posture. Same deal. Airflow core is supported, hands are relaxed, shoulders down. To get a clean note. Let me show you some more instruments. This is a allo, a string instrument. So I'm dividing string instruments into two categories. Bold, where you have a bow and you bowl the instrument, so bowed and fret board, like a guitar where you have frets. We'll talk about that in a minute. But the allo you have this bow which has hair here, is a horse hair, and you put a little resin on it. It's like a little wax, a little powder that you get by rubbing a rosin stone on the hair. It looks like this. It's a rock. And that rock, you get your bow. And you go like this and you put some of the powder into the hair on your bow. So the rosin powder on this horse hair on the bow is going to help create friction and it's going to vibrate the string. The string already plays a sound on its own. This string is vibrating between this point and the bridge, and depending on the length of this string, you have a pitch. So this is C and I'm plucking it. But I can also produce sound by holding a bow and driving across the string to create friction. If you have good posture, you have your hands relaxed. Get a clean tone. If you try to play fast, if you have bad posture, a bunch of missed notes, a bunch of imperfections, and we don't want to get used to that. We want to play clean notes. We want to experiment with long notes and get a very pure tone by having the correct posture and patience, getting a clean note out of our instrument. This is a brass instrument, the trumpet. The trumpet, you have a mouthpiece, and you're creating the sound by vibrating your lips. And that vibration, that buzz, it's going to be amplified by this horn. So you buzz your lips like and that buzzing in here is going to be amplified. And you can choose the notes the same way as the saxophone and the flute by changing the length of the tube by choosing which way the air is going to go, a longer way or a short way. Good posture, correct airflow. The ore is engaged. I'm relaxed. We want you to be playing clean notes. And the voice, how does the voice work? You have strings, like the vocal chords, kind of strings, kind of membranes, and the air goes through those membranes, those strings and vibrated. And that's how the sound comes out, and your lips and your mouth are going to shape that sound. So Uh, and the pitch by contracting those strings in the membrane or by relaxing. So I have pitch, and I have form. Oh So that's how you produce all the sounds via your mouth using your voice. These are general categories of instruments. There are more ways to produce instruments, but this gives you the big picture. This is the guitar. The guitar, it's also a string instrument, but it's a fretted string instrument because you have frets and the notes are defined between those frets. And instead of Boeing, we're going to pluck. So you hold this string and pluck, or you hold a cord and strum. This string is going to vibrate, depending on the length of this string. If I don't hold anything, the string is this big. If I press a here, the string is only this big. And depending on the vibration, you're going to get a pitch, and the body of the guitar is going to amplify that sound. If it's an electric guitar, the pickups are going to register the vibration of the string because the pickups are magnets and the strings are made of metal, and the pickups are going to send that information electrically to an amplifier, and the amplifier is going to amplify those movements, those frequencies, and create a sound. Posture here is key. In the beginning, I feel a little awkward because it's like learning how to walk or learning how to ice skate or learning how to snowboard or learning your language. It feels awkward and almost feels wrong, uncomfortable but the idea here is to learn the correct posture, do research on your instrument so you know what's the correct posture, and then practice that. Only allow to play your instrument, only allow yourself to hold your instrument when you have correct posture, and then you feel comfortable with the correct posture. What we don't want to do is find a way that we feel comfortable, but that's not correct and just run with that. It might be comfortable at first, but later, it's going to limit your ability to learn more difficult things. Don't try to reinvent the wheel. There are many generations of musicians that already explored the pros and cons and figure out the optimum way of holding your instrument and producing a tone. So don't try to figure out what's better for you or how you feel comfortable know what is the correct posture and practice that. And later, you're going to progress very fast if your tone production and your posture have very strong fundamentals. I want to give you an example on the keyboard and on the guitar. So starting with the guitar, a good way to practice is to raise your leg or if you're playing electric guitar, having a strap, but having something so your guitar can sit comfortably around this area. Your hands, your wrist shouldn't be curving like this. It should be relaxed and straight. You see how my wrist is straight. I'm not curving like that. I'm not curving like this. See, my thumb is not like this over the strings. My wrist is straight. That's not going to give me pain, and that's going to make it very easy for me to press the strings. So I'm going to put my thumb on the back, so it gives me support, and I'm going to hold a string and plug with the other hand. My spine is straight. That's true for all instruments. You know, the violin and the flute, you might be spinning, but it's always straight. It's never forward. It's never back. You need a strong core for all instruments and posture, so the sound production can come from within, even when you play guitar, your arms and your shoulder, it will sound cleaner if everything is in place in your body and then you're playing. Another thing to keep in mind with the guitar is don't have your fingers collapse. The tip of your fingers collapse like that or like this. Try to have them steady and using this front part, the midi part of your finger right against the board, right near the near the front fret. So the sound is very clear. If you don't press all the way, you get notes, you know, that are not properly being played. If you press them if you press them all the way, the notes come out clean. This takes practice. Don't start with many notes at once. Start just with one note. Try different finger. Different finger. Try two notes, maybe. Play around, move around. Try different strings. Clean notes is the name of the game. The idea here on the keyboard and the piano is to have 90 degrees on your legs, so you got to be sitting in the correct height, and you should have 90 degree angles between your arm and your forearm. So everything is comfortable. You have posture and you have your core engaged. That way, your hands can just fall on the keys. And they can have a beautiful sound, a beautiful tone. Imagine that you're holding a ball or a little, you know, tennis ball inside your hand, and then remove that ball or that box and you see you have that kind of shape. That shape stays and your fingers move like hammers. So here, you can put all your fingers on white keys, for example, and you can just hammer. Put your fingers on the white keys of the piano and hammer the first finger. Hammer the second finger, hammer the third finger. That might be challenge in the beginning, but just by doing this, you will start getting a sense of what sounds good and what doesn't sound good. You don't want to hit multiple keys at the same time. You don't want to hit different keys when you're trying to hit a key that's far away, have your hand fall in the wrong place. One note at a time, make sure it's clean. You can press and hold you can play softly. You can play strong. The idea here is to have your hands, your wrists, your elbows, your legs all relaxed, but your core engaged. Now it's your turn. Try to practice having good posture and playing one single clean note. If you're playing a percussive instrument, piano, guitar, those instruments, you want to have even strokes or even Boeing. Try to have even bow or even pluck or even strike, and try to play those notes clean every single time. If that's easy for you, try to play two notes. Clean. One, stop, another note, stop. See how many notes you can play cling and practice that until you can play all the notes you know how to play, cling. That's a big first step. Don't rush it. Enjoy the moment. Enjoy the sound of your instrument. If you're playing a wind instrument or if you sing, it's really important to play long notes. That is also true if you play a bold instrument like a cell or a violin. Try to play one clean note and make it long, sustain it. So you don't want to note to crack, but you don't want to crack it. Take a big breath, posture. But if the sound is oscillating, probably your core is not engaged. Engage the core. But notice that once the core is engaged, you have support, and the notes come out easily, and you can be relaxed. Try to find a point of relaxation. While you play the clean note while you have good posture, try to play one note, two notes, try to play all the notes you have access. And practice that, enjoy the sound of your instrument, and don't rush to the next step. Here, the idea is to have fun to be enjoying the sound and to feel relaxed. At first, you're not going to feel relaxed, but just keep practicing. Take your time, and this feeling will come. Once you feel relaxed, you're ready for the next lesson. 7. Consider Fingering: Basic Notes: Alright, now you know how to play at least one clean note on your instrument. That's very exciting. You know the correct posture. You know how to play one clean note on your instrument. And then you kind of realize that in order to play many notes in a row, Things change. Think about typing on a keyboard. You can type one letter, A, B, C, and you can always just use your index finger and find the notes, and you type them perfectly. Now, if you try to type a sentence, I went to the store and I bought an apple. If you try to do that with one index finger or two index fingers, you're going to notice that you will be very slow. That's not sustainable. If you want to be typing, you learn how to use all your fingers and each finger covers a certain area of the keyboard, where they always go there and you are able to play sentences seamlessly. Same thing with music. Music, you need to play more than one note. You play many notes in a row. And in order to have enough fingers for those notes, and in order to make them flow, and in order to keep the notes clean, we need to not the correct fingering for each instrument. This is something you should not try to come up with it yourself. In other words, don't reinvent the wheel because this is a science that has been greatly explored by many, many players, and there is a correct way to play your instrument, a correct fingering for your instrument, and there is an incorrect. In order to know what's correct or incorrect, you need lots of experience, and you lack that experience right now. So you should find out what is the correct fingering for your instrument. So you learn properly and once you're intermediate and advanced player, your technique isn't limited by the fingering and the positions you came up with yourself. So how do we figure out what's the correct fingering for our instrument? Well, let's just do some research. I usually just go on YouTube and type keyboard fingering, keyboard positions, guitar positions. And that you find a lot of information. I want to give you an example of a piano, guitar, and a saxophone. So you get a hang of how to research this yourself, whatever your instrument might be. Let's have a look. So the basic notes we want to learn is C to C. What do I mean by that? C, D, E, F, G, A and B, B to C. Those are the notes of the C major scale. How do you know that? The piano is very easy to visualize. We find the C, and how do you find the C? You see you have two black notes, three black notes, two black notes, three black notes. Find a set of black notes that are two, and then slide your finger before that. That's the C. That's also a C. That's also a C. So you find a set of black notes that are paired two black notes. Get the first one slide one before. That's the C. Okay? So we want to play CDEF G A B C. Okay? As I said, we don't want to be using our index finger for everything. We need to learn how to play with all of our fingers. How do we find that information? Well, you can simply Google it. I'm gonna Google piano, see fingering. Okay. This collection of notes, C to C is called C major scale, okay? So if you type Piano C fingering, you should find it, but if you want to be more precise, piano C major scale fingering. So here, it's showing you some of these charts are very helpful because they also tell you what the numbers represent, okay? So in this case, we have here you see the little hand up top, the thumb is one, the index fingers two, the middle fingers three, the ring fingers four, the pink is five. So you see there for the right hand, will start with the thumb on one, that's C, two, that's D, three, that's E. Now notice it doesn't go to four. It goes back to the finger one. Alright, you just slide under. So let's do that again. One, two, three, slide the thumb, which is the finger number one under to be the five. And now it just goes in order, two, three, four, five. Okay. So you see that after one, two, three, there is a switch back to one, and then you finish using your fingers in order. So just learn that. Okay, what about the left hand? I'll spare you for my Googling just not to waste your time. So I collected here a few images that I found that are helpful. This is one that just show you on both hands where the fingers are. This might seem obvious, but you see that the hands are mirrored, right? So the pinky is always five, the ring finger is always four, and so on and so forth, okay? That's going to be a little tricky because you see when you play the same notes with the left hand, now you have to start with five because the notes still go from left to right. But you see how your left hand. The first finger on the left side of your left hand is the pinky now. It's no longer the thumb, right? So let's put that pinky on the C five there, we see right here. Five, four, three, two, one. Now you go over the thumb back to the three, two, one. Okay? So the left hand will be Switch, and the right hand would be. Back to one. Do not play fast. I'm only playing fast because I already know it and I don't want to waste your time. But when you're playing, it's going to look more like 23 because that's in a row. You're kind of going to figure that out. But now you need to do switch. Stop, think about it, switch. Okay, now it's in a row. Okay? You can go back down. Switchover. Notice is low is fine, but I have posture, I have correct fingerings, the notes are clean. If you make a mistake, go back to the beginning. Okay? Just get comfortable with that on both hands. Right, What if you're playing guitar? In the guitar, you don't use the thumb, so you will have no finger for the thumb. So in the guitar, the index finger is one, the middle finger is two, the ring finger is three, the pinky is four. Okay? Index is one, pink is four. How do you read this chart in front of you? This very bottom line over here is the stop string. This very top line here is that bottom string. So it's as if you're looking the guitar from above, right? When you're looking at the guitar from above, that makes sense. You know, if you put the guitar like this and look at the chart, is the same way, right? How do we read that diagram over there? The very bottom line, it's going to be this string over here, this string that's closest to you. The very top line it's going to be that string, which is the string furthest away from you. They are both called E strings, okay. We'll learn the name of the strings later. The columns in the diagram is this frat, this frat, this frat, this frat. You see the Roman numerals under, and they represent which frat you're seeing. So number three, it's going to be one, two, three, the third frat, okay? So now we're going to read the diagram and we know which fingers. The red dot is where you start, and that's finger number two. So that's the middle finger. So you're going to put on the third frat, the second string from you and just go for it. Now, four, one, made a mistake, go back to the beginning. All right. Just eight notes, CTC, back from the beginning again. You can go back. Correct posture, clean notes. If you're going to use a pick, make sure you're alternating down and up strokes. So, same thing. Make a mistake, go back to the beginning and place lower. Made a mistake, wasn't clean. Go back to the beginning, slower. See I made a mistake in the same spot. So pay attention when you got to that spot. The name of the game here is got 100% accuracy. Good posture, clean notes. Don't have to rush. Alright. Now I made it. It's like a video game, right? I passed that phase. Let's go back down. Made a mistake on the last note. Doesn't matter. Start from the beginning. Again. I pass that phase again. Enjoy the sound, enjoy playing the right fingers, enjoy playing the right pick up and down, and just be in the present moment. Your head doesn't have to be where your problems are or other things you're thinking about. You can take this time to be present. Wrong. Wrong. All right. Let's look at a different instrument. Let's say we're looking at a saxophone. I, you know, just type here saxophone, see major fingering. It's nice image over here. I also collected this image over here, and I recommend that you collect these fingering charts and save them so you can refer back to them when you need. For a saxophone player, you already know how to hold it, you know, the posture, so you know where the fingers will be. And this makes more sense once you go through the posture section of this class. For a saxophone, right? So your fingers are laid down where they should, and, you know, three fingers from each hand. This top note here is the thumb on the left hand, and you see the notes. So claim. We move to the second one. You can give little tabs with your tongue to separate the notes, like or you can just have one breath. Just move the fingers and let one breath go. For a wind instrument, getting a clear notes much harder than a guitar or a keyboard. So take your time. Make sure your posture is correct. Make sure the fingerings are correct. Play those notes, be present. Hey. Made a mistake. Doesn't sound good. Goes slower. Run out of breath. That's okay. Stop. Catch your breath. Keep going. We are not playing time yet. Take your time to play each note. You can go up and down, and you can feel how each note feels in your hand, in your breath, in your body. Let's try the allo. You may ask, why are you showing so many instruments? Well, I just want to make sure you understand that's all the same thing. You find the correct fingerings, you play one note after the other with clean posture, correct fingerings, and clean notes. That's all it is, okay? Let's look at the allo. I simply Googled allo C measure fingering. Images. Okay. Boom, I chose that one. I'm trying to run away from notation for now because I know that many of you are not ready for that yet. So notation, it can be a whole different class. So I'm trying to find images that visually show you how to find the notes. Here you have the first notes up top here. They are open strings. When you play this string open, that's the note it is. And it happens to be a C on the allo. So now we see we skip one. The next one is D, E is over here, F is over here, G is over here. How do you figure it out if there is no frats on the hallo? Well, you can put this little tape. You can put tapes on the halo. And if you Google, I like this YouTuber, YouTube, Sarah, Joy Challo tape. She's going to show you how to put first position tapes on the allo, okay? So check it out that video if you're playing violin or allo, is the same concept. But basically, you're finding the notes and you're faking a little frat in you just pretend you are playing an instrument that have frets for you, and it's going to look like that after you do it. Now you know where the notes are going to be. Just to give you an example of my lllo where I put the tape. This is my cello and you see my tapes here in red. And I just follow that video, put the tapes where they should go, and open strings the C. Now, my fingers is the same as the guitar one, two, three, four. Index one, pinky four. Open C, first finger goes on D. Then third finger goes on E. All right. Similar to the guitar in a way. Not the fingers but the concept. We starting with a open string. We're playing first position they call allo. Your first finger on the first fret. Now the next open string is a G. So it's the same pattern. Open string, fingers one, three, four, the next open string, fingers one, three, four. Okay, play slowly. You might be using a bow. In that case, you want to have very clean note. Okay. Bow is a little tilted like that. Harder to get a clean note. I'm also still just learning. But when I play this, I make sure every note is clean. See, my pinky isn't quite strong enough. Let's practice that pinky. Better. All right. Slowly, make a mistake. Go back from the beginning. Remember the basic concept here, no matter which instrument, you know the posture. You know how to get one clean note. Research the fingering. What's the correct fingering? Which fingers do I use and where do I put them? Play one clean note, the second clean note, the third clean note. You're going to be playing C, cho C. That's eight notes. CD EFG. A, B, back to the C uptop. Those eight notes, seven different notes plus the C repeating is going to be the foundations of learning how to play. Once you can play those notes and you're comfortable, we're going to go to the next lesson where we're going to learn how to play these notes in time. And that's the miss ingredient. So we can play music. We need to play the notes clean. We need to play them in a row. But we also need to play them in time. So next lesson, we'll be looking into that. If you're struggling to play clean notes, and if you're struggling to play the seven notes in a row with the correct fingerings, take your time. Take a pause from the lesson. Practice, take a day or two. Come back. If you want to move ahead and check out the next lesson, that's okay. Remember to come back here and only progress once you can play the seven notes clean with the correct fingering and correct posture. All right? Next, we'll look into the metronome and how we can play notes in time. See you there. Mm. 8. Metronome: Mastering Time: I'm glad to introduce you your new best musical friend, the matronome. The matronom is a tool that's going to allow you to divide time. It can be digital. It can be like this one with a pendulum. I'll show you in a second. But let's talk about why do you need the tool to divide time? Music is a temporal art form, meaning music happens necessarily over time. So think about a painter. He can do a painting in 1 minute in one day in 30 years. But once the painting is done, you're looking at the painting and it's not attached to time. But think about a dancer, for instance, a dancer is moving over time necessarily. So music is an art form that has to happen over time. It's a performance that once time stops or once the music ends, it's gone. Even an audio file, the audio file is sitting there on your computer, but it's not playing. Once you play, it's playing over time. So music is necessarily overtime. So maybe you have a good posture. You have clean notes, you're using the correct fingerings, and you can even play the correct notes of a song. But if you're playing them not in time, not in the right division of time, it's not going to sound like music. So we need a tool to help us divide time. And why is that important? Because humans have a very complicated relationship with time. When we are very excited, full of adrenaline, our perception of time goes very fast. We think everything is going by really fast. When we are tired, feeling sluggish, maybe we are sad about something that happened, we think that times is dragging. It is slowing down. Everybody can relate to this, right? Oh, the day today was so much fun. I passed by in a heartbeat. Or, Oh, my God, I'm, you know, doing something I don't like it. And I keep looking at the clock and only 5 minutes passed. It feels like I've been here for, like, a year. So we can't rely on how we feel to divide time because when others are listening or the music you're putting out there in the world, it's going to be perceived by others, and some might be happy, some might be sad, some might be tired, some might be excited. But music needs to have a objective division of time. And even that structure, the structure that makes you understand the melody, understand the song, that structure relies on a particular way to divide time. So when we are learning how to divide time and put our notes over time, we need a tool to help us. So what does it come to mind when you think about a tool that divides time, the clock, right? Yeah. And in a sense, a metronome, it's a clock that can speed up and slow down. So, for example, a clock, it ticks 60 times every minute and 60 equal times over a minute, right? So a matronom can do that, as well. So let's look here. This is a matronom. I'm going to open the lid here. And here we have a pendulum. And in this pendulum, we have a weight, and we have a scale behind that tells you what the time is. So if I put here 60 BPM, meaning beats per minute, so those beats per minute, how many times is going to take in a minute? So if I put 60 beats per minute, that is going to take exactly 1 second in duration. One, Mississippi, two, Mississippi, three, Mississippi, four, Mississippi. So this is exactly the same speed as a clock would be ticking. So why do we need the metronom? Can't we just use a clock? Well, in music, we might want to play faster music, slower music. So we don't want to be stuck on 60 BPM. For example, what if I want to play something that's this fast? Tap, tap, tap, tap, d d, d, d, ta da, da, da, p. Right? Oh, what if I want to play a balled, you know? Ta Ba, So, this is gonna allow us to set the temple for our practice. When we are learning, the metronome is going to allow us to objectively learn the scales, the fingerings, the notes over time. We're going to start very, very, very slow and gradually progress. This is going to give you an objective mark that you are learning, and it's also going to make sure that when you perform, you're dividing music in time correctly. Let me give you an example. Let's say we want to play guitar and play those seven notes we learn. I'm going to use a pick. You don't have to. You can still play. But I'm going to choose choose a pick here. And let's say I'm going to practice that in a certain temple. So I'm going to put my matronom here. And I'm going to go. Okay, all over the place. Try again. Again, I made two mistakes. That's telling me I should slow down. Alright, now I play those seven notes in time correctly. Can I do it again, or was it beginner's luck? Ooh. Alright, I did it twice. Sounded good, feeling pretty comfortable. So now I'm gonna increase four BPM. Can I do it now? Beginner's luck. Let's see. Great. You know what? I'm getting everything right here, so I'm gonna increase the BPM quite a lot. Frustration. See what's happening here. Let's talk about it. When I was playing slowly, I was playing a right. I increased four BPM, I was still playing right. If I kept increasing by four BPM, I would have been successful every time, and slowly I would get to higher speeds. However, I got impatient and I skipped a bunch of BPMs and I just put the metronome really fast. When I played, made a mistake, made another mistake, made another mistake. And I collected a series of failures. That doesn't feel good, and that doesn't motivate me to play more. Aside from that, I'm learning to make mistakes. Our brain is learning every time, everything you do. So if you're playing successfully, correctly, good posture, clean notes, the correct picking, the next day, increase for BPM, everything is correct. You're collecting successes and you're stepping on a ladder step by step. Where you get to play fast with everything correct, posture, clean notes, everything's going to work out for you. Now, if you go too fast, if you try to go faster than what you're ready to, you're going to make a mistake. And then you're going to try again, you're going to make another mistake, and your brain is going to learn to make those mistakes. And then every time you're going to start playing, your brain naturally going to make those mistakes because you're teaching your brain over and over to make those mistakes, so your brain is doing it. So we don't want that to happen. It's very important here to sell a metronome as slow as you need, so you can play something correctly. And when you play twice correctly and you're feeling confident, you only increase the metronome by four BPM and you play it again. Twice. Can you do it? Increase again by four BPM and so on and so forth. I want to give you an example of the allo. I am a very beginner allo player, and I just want you to see how sometimes you're setting the metronome very, very, very slowly. Just before we do that, I just want to mention that you can divide the metronome one note per click or two notes per click, whatever you want. But I recommend one note per click to start. Later, when you intermediate, you can do two notes per click. Just to give an example what I'm talking about. That's a click, so one note per click would be. That's one note per click, right? Two notes per click would be. So if you're playing two notes per click, you should have way lower speeds. If you're playing one note per click, you're going to have higher metronome speeds. But this isn't a competition, not with anybody else. So careful not to be comparing yourself, and just be sure you stick with whatever measurement you choose. If it's one note per click, that's it. Stick with it. Okay? In this class, we're going to use one note per click. Okay? Let me give you an example of the cell. I'm a big time beginner here, but I just want to show you that sometimes you need to set up the metronome very slow. So if I try to do the same speed I did on the guitar, The notes are all dirty. They are not very clean. My posture is incorrect. So let me take a breath. Let's stop the matronom for a second. Let me think about my posture. Hey, I'm a tall person. I need this allow to be higher. Okay, that feels better. Now, my matronom I'm gonna go lower. Let's see if I can get this at that speed. Mistake. Maybe I can do it the second time. Yeah, I can't even finish the scale, and it's feeling really hard. I'm tense. This is not fun. Let's slow it down. Okay. What about that? Let's see if it was beginner's luck. Mmm. See, I made two mistakes. This still feels too fast for me. So let's load that even more. Still too fast. This is as slow as my metronom goes. Not a problem. Let's see if now I can do it. Wow. I'm finally having fun. This was better. Let's see if I can do it again. All right. That was better. See what I mean. Don't shy away from playing very, very slowly, okay? Once you achieve that speed, increase four BPM, see if you can do it. Come back on the next day, do it again. I want to give you a tip here. Always under practice. Meaning, if you practice too much, you're going to feel tired. You're going to start making mistakes. And the next day, when you think about it, Hey, let me go practice, you're going to be like, I don't know. It's pretty hard. I get frustrated, make lots of mistakes. I think I'll watch Netflix instead. Right? You want to do things that bring you joy, that are fun. And if you're over practicing, if you're practicing too much, it's going to get hard and your idea of what practices, it's not going to be a very positive one, a very attractive idea. So always under practice. What I mean by that is I play that allow scale. I could bump that four BPM once, twice, maybe three times, maybe four times. But if I get to my limit, then I will feel tired, and maybe tomorrow, I'm not going to come back. But if I just increase the speed by four BPM and I play it, and my whole practice was 10 minutes, 15 minutes, that's it. I put it down, and now I'm thinking, Wow. I went up eight BPM on the cello and I really had fun, and I learned to use my pinky better and my Boeing's getting better. That's so exciting. I can't wait to go back and play more. So next day you come, you do that again, and you're like, Oh, wow, next day, I want to come back. And you keep doing that. And if you keep doing that for ten, 15, 20 minutes every day, at the end of the year, you're going to be a great musician. You're going to be playing a lot of things. However, if you get Sunday and you play for a couple of hours, and then you don't touch your instrument until next Sunday and you play for a couple of hours, all of those learnings, all of those memories, all of those details that you're not even aware of, they're going to be gone. So you kind of going to start from a place that it's behind you, you know, you're going to be a little worse than what you were last time you played. That's why it's important to under practice and try to practice every day. It's okay to take breaks on the weekend, but if this is fun and if it only takes you ten, 15 minutes, why don't you just play on the weekends as well? Remember, the more you play successfully, the easier it's going to get. The more fun you're going to have. Remember to under practice. Our goal at the moment is to play those seven notes from C to C. Good posture, clean tone, correct fingering, and in time, choose which metronome speed you're going to start very slow. One note per click, I recommend and try to play those notes with a metronome. If you play two times successfully, increase by eight BPM. If you make mistakes and you have to restart, make it slower by four BPM. Don't worry about going backwards. If you can play slowly, eventually you're going to play fast 100%. But if you only play fast, you won't be able to play slow. So think about under practicing. Aside from under practicing, I want you to understand the concept of muscle memory and ear memory. So muscle memory is your body has muscles in your fingers and all the muscles in your body that are being used to play this instrument. The muscles themselves are going to have a memory of how to contract and which movement to make and how to synchronize. And all of those concepts are very easy for your brain. You'll be like, Oh, I have to pick up and down. I have to put my finger in this fret. After you think about it for a little bit, you get it. Your brain is smart, and, yeah, you know that. But your muscles are not that clever. Your muscles, they only learn with repetition. So you need to do over and over and over and over, and you have to not make mistakes. Otherwise, your brain will learn those mistakes as well. So remember that sometimes you get it and your brain get it, but you're making mistakes. Remember that you're training your muscles. You're not training your brain. So in order to train your muscles, lots of repetition. That's why you want to under practice. That's why you want to practice every day, even if it's for 10 minutes. And that's why you want to be very slow and only increase the metronome by four BPM once you have one or two successes. Okay? That's going to allow your muscle to know exactly what you do, and it's the quickest way to being able to master playing an instrument. In fact, that's the quickest way to master anything pretty much. Break it down to the small part that you can do, do it at a speed or a difficulty level that you can do very well and very gradually increase that difficulty level, increase that frequency, that speed, and do it every day. That's how our brains learned best. Now, ear memory. I call ear memory when you start to hear the notes and know what they are. There is a whole field of ear training, which we can talk about in a different class perhaps. But here, remember that when you're playing you might be worried about your body and about the strength you put on the string and the matronum and the posture, but don't forget to be active listening to what you play. SE sing those notes if you can. Make sure you are present and listening to those notes. It's like learning a language. If you just keep present, if you just keep paying attention to the sound, you're going to start to internalize those sounds. You know, when somebody says, Coffee, you're like, boom, image of a coffee comes into your head and you know a coffee is. But if somebody goes and play a note, boom on the piano or on the allo, boom. Nothing comes to mind, right? It's just a note. That's because we didn't have enough exposure to notes. When you're listening to music, there are so many notes and the time is going by so fast. So that's why for listeners, it's hard to teach the ear what the notes are. But if you're practicing an instrument, take the opportunity now to be very present and aware of C as you play those frequencies touching your fingers, resonating on your body, and the sound stack to your mind, you're going to start learning what those sounds are. And if nothing else, that's going to enhance your ability to listen to music. Every time you start listening to music, you'll be like, Oh, wow, I hear the bass line now. I can hear the keyboard line, and it's going to enhance your ability to listen to music. You're going to be oh, I can hear the bass now. Oh, wow, there's two guitars. One is playing this. The other one is playing that. I can hear the keyboard lines, and music is going to stop being a blub of sound, and you're going to start hearing each component of it. And eventually, you might even start hearing each note and knowing what they are. So be present, under practice, and stay listening. Don't get lost into thinking about your body and your posture and the metronome and shut your ears off. When we're playing music, it's all about the sound, so you need to be actively listening to what you're doing. Okay. All right. Now, on your instrument of choice, you're going to be playing those eight notes, C to C, and you're going to have good posture, clean sound, you're going to have the correct fingering, and you're going to choose a very slow speed on the matronom. Play that two times. Once you play two times with no mistakes, you can increase the matronom by four BPM. It's going to feel like nothing changed, but believe me, it did change. Play that again. Maybe call it a day. The next day, four more BPM. Play it. If you get two times correctly, four BPM again. If you make two mistakes and you have to restart, bring the metronom down four BPM. Before you proceed to the next lesson, I would like you to progress eight BPM, meaning, you're going to play twice, increase four BPM, going to play twice again, increase four BPM. Now you're eight BPM from where you started from. Once you can do that, and you have good posture, clean tone, and you have the correct fingering, then I'll see you on the next lesson. Where we're going to talk about how to use all of those elements to play some melody. 9. Making Melodies: Alright, you're making moves. This is Lesson nine. Congrats for getting this far. So you've learned to hold your instrument properly, to play clean notes, to play the correct fingerings, to play those seven notes of the C major scale. You even play those notes in time now and you progressed and you got a taste of how it is to progress in music using the matronom. Now that we have all those elements, we are ready to play melodies. And that's kind of the point. To play melodies is a big part of music. So in order for us to do that, we need to understand what are melodies. Everybody kind of understands if you go. That sounds like a melody, right? Two melodies, two phrases. It doesn't matter the technical terms, but we understand what a melody is intuitively. However, it's important that once you become a player, you fully understand what a melody is. So melody is monophonic, meaning it's only one note at a time. When you sing, you can only sing one note at a time. When you play the saxophone, only one note at a time. When you play the guitar or the keyboard, you might play two notes at the same time. That's not a melody. Okay? So we need to make sure the melody there is only one note at a time, and it's in sequence. It's one note after the other. These notes might have different lengths, and these notes might be separated by a gap, but it's still one note at a time. Now, melody also needs to be considered one thing, because if I just go You see, there is no repetition. There is no design. The thing just keeps going. It's not intelligible. So the malady needs to have inner structure that it tells somebody, Hey, this is one thing. You can put this one thing in a bag. Even birds know that, right? God. You know, you see, Oh, one time, two times. Oh, different melody. So keep that in mind when you're making your own melodies. Melodies also usually have repetition and other forms of composing a melody, where you double the notes or you play the notes backwards. But we don't need to get too technical. Basically, some people say that a melody has to be pleasant. But that's too subjective. I think as long as it has a design and it's understood as there is a logic here, it works as a melody. Also a melody, you should be able to sing it. There's hard melodies and easy melodies, but if there is one note at a time, if they happen in sequence, if there is a logic to it, you should be able to reproduce that. Right? Ta, ra, ra ra, ra, ra. It's cohesive, and you should be able to sing it. If it's something very wild and full of textures and percussive sounds that don't have pitch, we won't call that melody. That can still be music, but that won't be melody. For us to be able to play music and most music out there, we need to learn the major, the minor, and the chromatic scales. What are scales? They're just a group of notes. We're going to talk about that later in this class. But have in mind that that's why we're learning those seven notes and we're going to keep practicing scales throughout our entire education as a musician, because music is made of a group of notes being arranged into a melody. I want to give you an example. Let's say I'm going to choose the seven notes we already know how to play. Let's say here, I'm going to use my right hand. This is my smjor scale. These are the notes available for me. So if I play them out of order. Okay. All right. That's better. But the rhythm is always the same. The length is always the same. Let's change it up. Okay, better. But I don't each use all the notes all the time. Oh, that sounds more like a melody. What if we put some pauses there? Nice. That sounds like something. What if we play the same thing again, but starting from the second note, like, the same intervals. What I mean by intervals is I'm skipping the D, so skipping the D as supposed to be. I'm skipping the D, right? Now, I'm just going to do See, I just use the same notes starting from the second one. I just literally move forward. Now, it starts like the melody is going places. You don't need to get very fancy in this. I just trying to show you that you can play the scale. Now just have fun having those concepts that I told you monophonic. So we're gonna play only one note at a time. You can skip notes. You can go up, you can go down. You can put pauses. You can repeat notes. So try to have fun playing this. But don't make the mistake that I made. In the beginning, I would just play like a robot because I was very concerned about my hand, and I wanted to put my hand to work. And I want to and I want my hand to play the keys. And I wasn't using my ears. Go slow and think about the melody. Nice. What if you go down now? Right. So try to use the notes you know and change the length of the notes, put some pauses in there, and play around, you know, having fun making melodies. And remember, matronom is your friend. So instead of using our analog matronom here, which you can use, by the way, you know, it's the easiest way. I have one in my software here. Um just like that. And I'm going to make this lower. I'm going to make like 100 BPM. And now, you know, I can play with that metronome. It's okay. If it sounds like a lullaby, if it sounds like baby music, that's okay. You're just learning. So like a language that when you start speaking, you do sound like a child, right? So it's okay. Your first couple of melodies, it might sound simple, and that's okay. It's just the level that you are at. In time, you're going to progress, okay? So don't forget the left hand if you're playing piano. Just play around with those concepts. Monophonic notes in sequence, vary the length of the notes, put some pauses in between. Make sure your design has a logic and it has a perception of one thing. Practice with matronom. Now, let's play on the guitar. I know the notes. Mm hm Now, let me put the matronom and play some melodies. That was cool. Maybe what if I put more gaps in my meldy? Cool. What if I don't start from the first note? What if I start from different note? Cool. I'm just going one forward, one back from the note I start. So just have fun. This is probably going to be too fast. So let me give you an example of a slower speed melody. Right? That was cool. If you can't play fast, if you can't play in time, remember, the more you practice scales with the matronom, those seven notes, it's going to unlock you the ability to play melodies. Alright, now, give it a try yourself. Get your instrument, keep practicing the seven notes with the matronom and increasing by four BPM. Take your time under practice. Also, play a few melodies. Just choose some notes out of order, change the length, put some gaps in there. Make sure you have a logic that's perceived like a melody and just have fun. Now your daily practice can look something like you get your instrument, you warm up, you just goof around for a few minutes. Then you start playing clean notes, then play those seven notes with the metronome, one after the other with the correct fingering, correct posture. And then on the last couple of minutes, let it loose, play some melodies, change the length of the notes, add some gaps, go backwards, skip some notes. And that's it. Call it a day. Under practice. Next day, the same thing again. Your metronome speeds are going to go higher, your melodies are going to get better. Your muscle memory is going to kick in, and in no time you'll be surprised of the kind of music you're able to play. Next lesson, we're going to learn about the chromatic scale because now you can play melodies with those seven notes. But what about all the other notes on your instrument? The chromatic scale is going to allow you to learn every note on your instrument. We'll practice that with the metronome, and you'll be able to play so many more melodies because you're going to have access to all the notes that are available on your instrument. I'll see you there. 10. Chromatic Scale: All Notes Available: What's a chromatic scale? In order to understand that, we need to know what a scale is first. Scale in music is just a collection of notes. Think of a group of notes with particular notes in that group. Imagine you have a bag and you can put any notes you want in it and call it a scale. In the case of the chromatic scale or the chromatic grouping of notes, it means every single note available in order, right? So ascending every note and descending every note. When you look at the piano, you have black keys, white keys. The chromatic scale is going to use them all. On the guitar, you have threats, you're going to use them all. So the chromatic scale is every single note in a row, going up and then going down. The chromatic scale is not the most musical kind of scale. You're not going to hear songs and chords based on the chromatic scale entirely. The songs we love, they usually made out of major and minor scales. And by the way, I'm only talking about Western music. I'm not talking about Arabic music or Indian music, music that uses a different system. I'm only talking about music that can be played on a guitar or that can be played on a keyboard on a saxophone, that kind of music where you have 12 notes. Our nodes are C, C sharp, D, D sharp, E, F, F sharp, G, D sharp, A, a sharp, B, and C. There are some sharps missing there, you might ask. We're going to talk about that in a little bit. For now, remember, the chromatic scale might not sound very musical, but it's the best way for us to connect all the notes that exist and make sure we can play them all. Just a quick note here if you're playing percussive instruments, unpitched percussive instruments because if you're playing Marimba, you have the notes. You can play a scale. Because if you're playing Marimba or vibraphone or a Kalimba, those are percussive instruments. Even the piano is a percussive instrument, and those have notes, so you can play scales, and that's fine. But if you're playing unpitched percussive instruments, such as drum kit, bongos, jambe, those instruments, they don't have the notes from a keyboard, for instance. So if you don't have pitch, defined pitch or all the notes available in the keyboard, you can't really play a chromatic scale. You can't really play a major minor scale. However, it's still helpful for you to watch this lesson. And it's still helpful for you to learn keyboard on the side or maybe guitar because you're going to be playing music that has melody, that has chords, and you're going to be playing with musicians that can hear the notes, that can hear the chords, that are manipulating melodies. And if you really don't practice any of that pitch material by playing scales, chromatic measure minus scales, understanding of music will be more limited. So it's better, even if you are playing unpitched percussive instruments to learn an instrument on the side that allows you to play scales. Let me explain you exactly how a chromatic scale looks on the keyboard. And we're going to use the keyboard because it's very visual, so it will be really easy for everybody to understand. Here, we have a keyboard in front of us. As we can see, we have C D E FG ABC. Those are the seven notes we were playing before. If you want to play a chromatic scale, we have to play every note in between and every single note in order, that would be. Okay. So in the image will be this, that, that, that, that, this, this, that, that every single note. On the side here on my software, you can see that I'm playing every single note available. Okay, instead of just the white keys. So that's the chromatic scale. Now, the next thing we want to understand is the relationship between steps and half steps. So on the keyboard, half step is the smallest subdivision of pitch we have. And that means from one note to the next note, it's a half step. So don't get confused between C and D, right, because between C and D, you have this note, this black node. So that means this is not a half step. What is a half step is from one node to the note right next to it, regardless if it's black or white, okay? So in this case, if I'm in C, a half step up would be C sharp, right? If I'm on C sharp, half step down will be a C. You understand what half steps are, right? So chromatic scale is a succession of half steps. Every single key is being played. Okay, none of them are missing. Now, a host step would be if you skip a key, right? So from C to D is a host step because you have that black key in the middle, that C sharp in the middle. So right? So from C to D, there'll be a host step. Okay? So the chromatic scale doesn't have any host steps. It's all half steps. So the formula for chromatic scale is just a bunch of half steps in a row. Pretty easy. On the guitar, a half step would be would be every single frat. So when you have a open string, and then the first frat, second fret, third frat, all of those spacings are half steps. So a chromatic scale would look like it's every half step played in a role. Okay? So how would you practice chromatic scale? Let me show you on the piano first. First, you understand what a chromatic scale is, but now we need to know the fingerings. So type piano, chromatic scale fingering. When you do that, you find a few videos, but I usually like to go to images. So in here, you will see a chart that it's pretty easy to understand right there. Look at that chart. We know remember the numbers of the fingers, right? The T is one, the pink is five. So if I start, let's say, three black keys, I'm going to start one note, one white note before the set of three black keys, that's an F. I'm going to put the second finger there, my index finger. So I'm going to go two, three, one, three, one, three, one, two, three, one, three, one, two. All right, you don't see more in the image, but now you kind of get the idea. Look here on the keyboard. When you have two white keys that don't have any of any black keys on them, so when you're missing a black key, you're going to go like this one and two. And then every time you have a black key, you're going to use the three. One here, I'm going to go one and two because I'm missing a black key and then three again, one and two because I'm missing a black key, using my third finger again, missing a black key. So now, try to understand this. I'm trying to understand that every time I'm going black, white, black, white, I'm just going 3131, three, one, three, 131. Every time I'm missing a black key, I'm going one, two, one, two. So after you understand the logic, take it easy, go slow, sit at the keyboard. You understand that. Practice slowly. Okay. After you get a hang of it and you're kind of understanding why the fingering is the way it is Okay, I understand now the fingering. I'm not looking at the image all the time. I kind of get the logic, right? The logic is when I have missing black key, I'm going to use one, two. When I go black and white, it's usually 31. And that fits in a hand kind of nicely. All right. So after you become familiar with that, what are you going to do? Bring the matronom on. Matronom is our friend. I know what a chromatic scale is. I know the right fingering. I have good posture. My nodes are coming clean. Time for the matronom. I'm going to find the speed here that I can practice. Wrong fingering. Okay, try again. Wrong fingering, and I'm playing I'm playing two notes per click. That's not always set out to do. I need to be consistent. One note per click. Rung fingering again. This tells me my speed is too fast. I'm going to go way slower. Always better to start slow. Great. Can I do it again? Yeah, I can. I'm just going to save you time here, but then I increase the speed by four BPM, and then we go again. All right. In my case, I probably can play this way faster. Let's say if I can do that without mistakes. Okay. So you can start from C to C, but in the chromatic scale, it's not a big deal. You can start from any note you want and in any note you want as long as you're playing at least 12 up and down. All right. So what that would look like on the guitar. One good thing to know here is you can just play chromatic scale by playing every fret. Or there is a cool way to use all these strings. The fifth frat, one, two, three, four, five, if you press the fifth frat and you play this string closest to you, the next string is the same note. See that? So that means you can go. And then the next string. Now, once you understand this, there is one exception. The string that's one, two, three, four, from the top, the fourth string from the top, it's actually the fourth frat is the same note as the next string. And then same thing for all the other strings. So it will be fifth, the next one, fifth, the next one, fifth, the next one. This one will be the fourth, then fifth again. Okay. Why is that important to know? Because now if you want to use all the strings and you just want to use fingers, one, two, three, four, that's the correct fingering, you would play open, one, two, three, four. Next string. One, two, three, four, next string, one, two, three, h Four. Next string. One, two, three. This is all you need on this string. Next string, one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four. So it'll be like open, one, two, three, four, open, one, two, three, four, open, one, two, three, four, open, one, two, three, is the exception. Open, one, two, three, four, open, one, two, three, four. Okay. So that's how you play the chromatic scale. Remember, the fourth string from the top or the third string from the bottom, that string, the switch is on the fourth fret, and every other string you switch before the fifth fret. Okay? So a chromatic scale would look like I'm going to say what I'm doing. Open, one, two, three, four, open, one, two, three, four, open, one, two, three, four, open, one, two, three, open, one, two, three, four, open, one, two, three, four. Okay. And then you can go back down. Now, I know what a chromatic scale is, correct posture, sounding clean. I understand the switches here, what's going on with this particular instrument. Now, let's put the matron. Mistake again. Great. If I did correctly, I felt relaxed. Do it again. Make sure it's not beginner's luck. If that's alright, put four more BPM onto the number you had before. Do it again. Do at least chew increases a day. So maybe you go four BPM, the one more time, another four BPM. That's enough. You don't need to do more than that every day. So that's how you would look on the guitar. Now, every instrument is different. Some instruments are very easy to produce a note, like the piano or the keyboard, but you have to deal with many hands, right? So one thing to have in mind about the piano is that you have to practice both hands. Prat the left hand, practice the right hand, and then prat hands combined. That would look like, let me give you an example. We practice our right hand. Now we practice just our left hand. I would look like Alright, it's the same switch here, but on the left hand. So if it is not clear, Google the fingering for the left hand, practice just like we did the right hand, put it to the matronom. You play the left hand, you're good. So now your hands are even. Now you have to practice them both at the same time, right? So the piano is very easy to produce a note. The clean note comes easily, but you do have to practice right, left, and hands combined, okay? So now to play hands combined, how it would look like here for us, it would be something like can do this properly, put the matronom, play it. Got to write two times, bump at four BPM, go write two times again, bump four BPM. If you're getting a bunch of mistakes, go down four BPM. If you're getting way too many mistakes, go down a few BPM, more than four. All right. That's how you practice the piano in particular. Now, another particular thing about win the instruments, let's say you're playing a trumpet. In the beginning, it might be really hard for you to play the extremes of the instrument. So don't worry, play the notes you can, but just to give you an example, right? The trumpet, let's say, I'm going to play from C to C chromatic. Alright. Let's go down. All right. Practice slowly, find the fingerings, get notes clean, matronom know the deal. But let's say I want to keep going up and I want to experiment, keep going up. Look what's gonna happen. I can't go up there. It didn't warm up enough. I don't play very many high notes in the trumpet. So that's my limit. So, that's okay. Just keep practicing until you do get clean notes. And then in time, your range is gonna develop, okay? Same thing if you go down. It gets really hard. Only go up to the point where the notes are clean. If those are the notes you can play clean, that's how you're gonna play the chromatic scale. That's going to be a limitation, okay? So that goes for all the wind instruments. Yeah, so what I would do last is after you practicing this with the metronome, put that into a practice routine, right, and have some fun with it. Sometimes you playing imagine a curve going up and down, and after you practice going all the way up and all the way down, just practice changing the direction of that curve as you wish, as long as you're playing every half step in a row, right, without skipping notes. Let me give you an example on the guitar. This time, I'm going to use a pick. I recommend using a pick sometimes, not others. It depends on the style you want to play. If you're playing he met, rock and electric guitar, you probably always want to use a pick at least at first, but acoustic guitar, you might like to use different fingers, experiment and research the genre of music you're interested in. But let's say, in this case, I'm going to use a pick and I'm going to play the chromatic scale, but I'm going to have fun with it. I'm going to go up and down, and I'm going to change directions anytime I want. Always with a metronome when you know to play Always with the metronom when you know how to play the scale already, right? So a gem on a chromatic scale might look something like this. Made a mistake. Let's go again. Made a mistake. Too fast for me. Let's lower this BPM. Make a mistake there. Go it again, start to space out. That happens. So keep your focus, only play as long as you can focus and just experiment going up and down. Let's look how that would look on the piano. On the piano, let's say, I'm going to go and play. I think I can play faster on the piano. Let's go. Right. Maybe hands. Wrong fingering on the left hand. I don't know if you guys caught that, but for two hands, this is too fast for me. I'm gonna knoch you down. Wrong fingering there. All right. Have fun. If this is hurting your brain, if it's a lot of information, that means you're doing too fast. Slow down the metronome. Okay? As you can hear, it's not the most musical kind of scale. It's not like there was music pouring out of that scale when we were practicing. But it's very helpful because you can see how you're playing every single note available on your instrument. That's going to be very helpful to get to know your instrument and to it and to transition between different melodies later on. So now incorporate practicing the chromatic scale to your routine. So remember, you need to have posture, a clean tone, correct fingerings, play with the matronom those seven notes of the C major scale going up and down. Did it two times correctly, bump bump four BPM. Do it again, play two times correctly, bump another four BPM. That's enough of that. Now play the chromatic scale. Up and down, correct finger imposture, clean notes, two times right, bump four BPM, got it wrong, many times, two times, three times, go down again. After you're able to bump up eight to BPM from where you start from, then you call it a day for the day, okay? And then you can practice playing some melodies with major scale notes, or you can practice playing some curves up and down with this chromatic scale. Just have fun at the end of your practice. All of this together shouldn't even be 15 minutes. So you can still play that and have a very chill session. Put your instrument away, and next day, you'll be thirsty for some more. After you're a bit more comfortable with the chromatic scale and you had a few days to incorporate the chromatic scale into your daily practice, let's go to the next lesson. The next lesson, we're going to talk about major scales and also minor scales down the line. But basically, we're going to learn the scales that are more musical. The more songs that we know came from major minor scales. So we're going to have a look at that. And if you're still struggling with the chromatic scale, remember, it shouldn't feel like a struggle. And if you're struggling or feeling overwhelmed, it's because you're playing too fast. So slow slow down as much as you can. All right. So I'll see you on the next lesson to talk about major and minor scales. 11. What are Major and Minor Scales?: How's it going with the chromatic scale? You're probably learning more about your instrument and getting better playing each note available to you. But as we said, the chromatic scale is not the most musical kind of scale. As we spoke before in the previous lesson, a scale is a collection of notes, a particular collection of notes that we use to make music or we used to play. But most Western music, music that's played on the piano on the guitar, that music is usually based on major or minor skills. And why major minor skills is so dominant in Western music. After we learn about how audio works, we're going to understand more about major minor scales, and then we're going to move on to learn how to master those major minor scales. So we can play most of the music available out there. Let's have a look at this representation of a wave. We basically have air that's pushed forward and backwards, forward and backwards, and it moves the air like a wave, like a wave in the ocean. And that wave traveling through the air has two properties we need to know about. One of them is pitch. So if those waves are coming really fast, one after the other, one wave, two waves, three waves, four waves, like, they're coming in really quickly, that means you're going to get a higher pitch. A low frequency of waves. So one wave, more time passes, a second wave, more time passes a second wave. Then we have a low frequency wave, and that's a lower pitch. Okay? So the frequency or how often we get waves, that is telling us what the pitch is going to be a higher pitch for higher frequency or a lower pitch for lower frequency. Now, those waves, think about waves in the ocean. They have a volume, and the volume, we can know what the volume of that sound is going to be depending on how tall the wave is. So imagine a wave in the ocean. How tall is that wave? If it's really, really, really tall, that sounds going to be really loud. If the wave is really, really, really short, that sounds going to be very, very faint, very quiet. So we have the frequency of waves and we have the height, right? In this case, it's called amplitude. So knowing that, I want to explain to you why we have the notes we have on the piano that looks something like this, right? And these notes on the piano, they always repeat. So you see here you have two sets of black, three sets of black, two, three, two, three, two, three. Same thing going down, two, three, two, three, two, three. And if you find the C, you have Measure scale, right? Now, look, just repeats. And repeats again. As humans, we can tell it's repeating, right? We can tell the same nodes are being played. But we also notice that some are higher pitch and some are lower pitch. They are being played in different registers. How is this possible? So the waves, they work in a really interesting way. Here in this image, you can see, if you have one wave being played and you divide the wave in the middle, the frequency doubles. So imagine you're in the ocean and you see one wave every minute. Now imagine you see two waves every minute. So the double of the frequency the pitch is going to be twice as much. And that pitch that's twice as much is just a repeated pitch. So we call the same. So if this is a C, this is a C. So if this C here, I have a particular frequency coming in and vibrating the air so we can hear that C. If you double that frequency, it becomes a C also. If you double again, it becomes a C also. If you double again, it becomes a C also. So this is how nature works. This is not an invention of man. This is part of nature. This is just how it is. If I have my arm here and I move my arm up and down, that's a frequency. I'm moving the air. And if I move the air here really fast, let's say, like a bumblebee or like a hummingbird, you're going to start hearing a pitch. If I want to make the pitch higher, I just move my hand faster. If I want to make the pitch lower, I move my hands lower. Alright? So if I'm moving my hand here, let's say 100 times per second. Let's say that's a note, whatever note, note X, right? If I move my hand 200 times, now it's going to be X again, but higher pitch. And when we go up a register like that, we call an octave. So every time we double the frequency, we are arriving on the same note, but one octave higher is a different register. It's important to understand that because in nature, that is true for all cultures, all music. But for Western music, we decided to divide that distance between one C and the other C or note X to note x again. We decided to divide that in 12 equal parts. Some other cultures like Arabic culture or Indian culture, they might divide that distance by a different number. So their music is going to be sounding different. And if they try to go on the piano, they won't be able to play it because the piano won't have those divisions. The piano only have 12 notes between that X and the other X. Let me give you an example on the piano. Here on the piano, I have a C. And I have another C. In between, I have one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, 11, and I repeat again, C, right? So every 12 notes, we're repeating. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, 11, 12, then repeat. So it's 12, 12, 12, 12, right? So within a C to other C, we have 12 notes available. So we can say that in Western music, we are dealing with a group of 12 notes. And the chromatic scale is 12 notes and 12 notes again and 12 notes again. So it's just the same notes. So this is good news because you only have 12 notes to worry about. Now, those 12 notes, we can group them in certain scales. So let's say we're talking about chromatic scale is just all of them. There is a different scale called whole tone scale. That sounds like. Right? That is just you skip every other note. So this one, skip that one, skip that one, skip that one, skip that one, skip this one, skip this one. Right? But you see you not gonna hear many songs being based off that scale either. Yeah, there is some impressionist French music, and it's used here and there, but you're not going to get a whole song made on that. And the reason for that is what we need to understand now, so we understand why major minor scales, it's basically the essence of Western music, and it's where you should be spending your time practicing instrument. Let me show you the frequencies and the octave in the guitar. This is kind of interesting because you have one string here. When you play the string, If you look very closely, that string is going up and down just like arm or the wings of a hummingbird, and it's creating a frequency that's moving the air on a particular frequency. If we divide that frequency in half, so the half of that string is right here. See how here, it's physically the half between where the string starts and where the string ends. So we have the same note, one octave higher, okay? When you see on strings, it's really easy to understand. Think about the wings of a hummingbird. Moving 100 times, it's a note. If it's moving 200 times, it's the same note again. So every time you double, you have an octave. Alright. You understand that frequency defines pitch, and once you double those frequencies, you get the same pitch again. So in that interval, before you repeat, Western music divided those notes in 12 equal parts. So those 12 equal parts are the notes we can work with. And why out of all the possible scales we can get from those 12 notes, why major and minor music are so dominant? The reason for that, you can simply say it's cultural. Is just how it's been. But there is more to it. Music is essentially storytelling. You're always telling a story. And that story it's constructed. Always in books, in paintings, in dance when you tell a story to somebody, it's always a dance and a contrast between tension and resolution, tension and resolution. This is how we talk. This is how stories are transmitted. This is how people become interested in what you have to say. You say, Hey, you know something crazy that happened, tension. I met with my dad and went to the shopping mall, Resolution. And then when we got there, tension, we saw this group of people sitting and having lunch, resolution. And then one of them, tension, said something that everybody was impressed by. More tension. Now I need double resolution. I can keep building the tension, building the tension, and then boom, punch line. And then she said X, Y, and Z, and everybody laughed. Resolution. So you see every storytelling is based on tension resolution and wouldn't be different with music. All those 12 notes, their frequency is vibrating. And those frequencies, when they're played together, they start bouncing on each other. They start affecting each other. They start pushing each other around. So if you play frequencies or notes, they are going to vibrate together. It feels like a resolution. If you play frequencies that are going to rub against each other and push each other around and disturb each other, then you have tension. Let me show that on the piano. On the piano, if you divide these 12 notes in a pretty way or if you divide it by two, if you divide it in half, if you divide by four, if you divide in even ways, it's going to sound pretty. It's going to sound resolution. It's going to sound like a place that you arrived at. So if I have one, and I'm doubling. That sounds like a resolution. If I divide it in half, that's also sounded like a resolution. If I divide it by four, also sounds like a resolution. So you see music is resting. It's comfortable. Now, if you divide this by, you know, 4.5, Ooh. Now we have something fishy. If we make other divisions like 112, divide by 112, like one oh plus a little bit more. So it's very close together. See very tense. So remember that those 12 notes, in theory, you could organize them in any way you want. Oh, I'm going to make up my own scale. My scale is going to have these three notes, these three notes, and this note. If you try to make music with those notes only and call that your, you know, Fernando's scale and just go for it, it's it's gonna be very challenging to tell a story because maybe you're going to have too many tensions, too many resolutions. It's kind of it's gonna be really hard. It might not be very pleasant. And unless your story is only tension, right? It's like a horror story beginning to end. But even horror stories, they have resolutions to keep you going to give you a breeder. So major and minor scales, they are perfect blend of tension and resolution. And once people over and over throughout history, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of thousands and millions of musicians. They arrived naturally at a group of notes or in this case, two groups of notes, major and minor, where the notes sit in a way that's really convenient to tell stories, that's really easy to tell stories. So we have major scale. And we have a minor scale. Which we can have a variation. We're going to talk about it. Okay? So that way, I can be playing music that's resolution, and then I can go tense. Ooh, tension. Ooh, more resolution. Tension again. Resolution, right? Or I can make it minor. So some people say that major is happy and minor is sad. There is truth to that, but that doesn't have to be the case. Just think about it in terms of tension and resolution, whether it's happy or sad. So minor, let's say resolution, right? Now, tension. Tension. More tension. Resolution. More tension. Almost uplifting, more tension. More tension. Resolution. Right? So those collections of notes, major and minor, they suit us very well, and our culture, the Western music culture is based on those scales. The reason I'm telling you all of that, it's because the most efficient way for you to play music is just to focus on major and minor skills. The reason I'm telling you that it's because when you're practicing, you should play the chromatic scale, so you learn all the notes of your instrument. But when it comes down to play music that already exists or composing your own music, you should focus all of your time, at least at first on major and minor skills. The backbone, the very essence of all Western music. So what is a major and a minor scale? A major and minor scale is a particular selection out of those 12 notes available before it repeats again and again. Out of those 12 notes available, we're going to choose just some of them, and we're not going to use the others. A major scale has a particular formula that you can find those notes and a minor scale as well. Let's have a look. A major scale is formed by a particular count of host steps and half steps. Remember, we spoke about in previous lessons, a half step is when you move on the piano, every single note, including black notes, right? So that is half steps. If you play skipping every other note, skip skip skip skip skip, skip. Those are whole steps, right? So a whole steps is two half steps. Alright, so how do we find a measure scale? Memorize this pattern. Ho ho, half, ho ho, ho, half. Ho ho, half, ho, ho, ho, half step. Okay? So what does that mean in practice? We have we start in any note we wish. In this case, we're starting in C. So I have host step, so I need to skip one. I'm here now. Now I have another host step, so I'm going to skip the next one. I'm here now. So now I have a half step, so I'm just going to go here again because there's no black key in there, right? Now I need the host step again, so I'm skipping that one, another host step, I'm skipping this one, another host step, I'm skipping that one. And finally now finally I need the half step, and that will be it. You see that just by going. Ho, ho, half, ho, ho, ho, half. I find a C major scale. Okay? So it's all about counting hole and half steps. But then you might say, What if I start from a different place? That's okay. Let's say you start on F, right? I'm here. So if you count ho, ho, half, ho ho ho, half, right? So from F to F, I have that black key there. Ho ho, half, ho ho ho, half. So you can find major scales everywhere. For now, we only focus from C to C, okay? So this is how we select the major scale. And then we also have the minor scale. The minor scale, we choose The formula here is I'm going to start on A, for minor scales. Why is that? Because that falls on the white keys of the piano, so it's just easier to visualize. And I'm using the piano simply because it falls on the white keys of the piano and because it's the easiest instrument to visualize scales. But this applies for all instruments, right? So starting on A, I go, the minor scale is H, half, Ho, ho, half, ho. So it'll be again, ho, half, ho, ho, half, ho. However, there are three types of commonly used minor scales. There is natural minor, there is harmonic minor, and there is melodic minor. In this class, we're not going to be talking about the natural minor and the harmonic minor. The reason for that is after I learned one instrument, I was doing all the exercises on all major scale and then all natural and then harmonic minor and then melodic minor. So I was doing three times the amount of work. And then I realized that the really essential one is actually the harmonic minor. After you know the harmonic minor, the other ones will just come naturally to you. And later on, when you're intermediate and advanced player, you can go back and practice the natural and melodic ones if you feel the need for it. But basically the fundamentals, the one you should be spending all of your time is the harmonic minor scale. So the formula I'm going to give you has one catch. It's going to be A to A, but on the last note, we're going to increase a half step. Starting from A, it's going to be, half, ho, ho, half. And now, it's going to be 1.5. So who would be here and I'm going to add one more. Okay. So the very last interval, it's going to be a who step plus a half step. You can think of it as 1.5 half steps or three half steps. So let's say that again. Starting on A. I'll be ho, half, ho, ho, half. Now, 1.5, which would be one, two, three, right? Or, you know, three half steps. B that one, and then A. Okay. So you see that visualized. The very last note, we are pushing one forward. So it will sound like this. Okay, so this is the harmonic minor scale, the A harmonic minor scale. Same thing as the major one, you may say, Hey, if this is just a formula or a collection of whole and half steps, how would that look like if I start at a different note? Let's say we starting on D. Okay, that's fine. Let's look at the formula, and let's apply that. So that would be who. That's half and he be whole. Now be half. Okay, now be ho, skip this one. Another ho. I'm gonna skip that one. Now, it's going to be half. Now it's going to be 1.5, right, or three half steps. So be one, two, three, that one and the B again. Okay? At first, it might be hard to keep in your mind all of this and repeat. Oh, okay, so you might have a hard time keeping that information in your head. Just write it down. Get a piece of paper and just go B. O, I'm going to skip this one, this one, it's going to be C sharp, then another half step. Another host step, another host step, another half step, another 1.5, right? So it's three half steps, so one, two, three, and then again to B. So that would be B harmonic minor. Okay. So don't worry about it if this feels overwhelming. Music is all about muscle memory. In time, this will be coming out of your play without you thinking about it. It's just like when you're learning how to talk, right? First you're there, A, B, C, B A B, C A C. And it's very, you know, it takes a lot of your brain to grasp those things. But nowadays, you just look at a word and you're like, cat. Ball right away, you can read it and the information comes to you. So don't worry about it. Don't be discouraged and just have patience. Naturally, without you doing much, it's going to come to you. All you need to do is just keep showing up. I want to explain to you how to call when we raise and lower notes, just so you know a proper way of calling those keys. So in this image here, you see the name of the kiss. That hashtag it's what we call sharp. That means you get the note and you bring it up a half step. That little B looking symbol, it's called a flat. And a flat, just like a flat wheel, you bring it lower. You bring it down a half step. Okay? So sharp, bring off a half step, bring up a half step, flat, you bring down a half step. So as you can see in the image, you have C, and then this black Key will be C sharp. But you also see there that you have D flat. Why is that? Well, because if I can get this note and I put a sharp and it goes up, what if I get the D and I put a flat, it goes down. It's still the same black key, right? So notes can have two different names. It's just like, you know, Matthew and Matt. It's like, it's just a different variation, but it's the same key, okay? So when we're doing the harmonic minor that we're playing, A, B C D, E, F, and we're going so how are we going to call this node here? Well, it used to be a G, right, but we raised that a half step. So we're going to call that G sharp. Right. You could call it A flat, but then when you write it down, you're going to have two As, right, because you're going to have A, B, CD, E, F, A flat, and a natural. So that is just confusing to read. So in order to avoid having two as back to back, let's just use G sharp instead. That's kind of like the rule of time when you choose to call one versus calling the other. But this is more about music theory. And later on, if you're getting into composition, then there are things that we should keep in mind to call the correct name. But when you're learning to play an instrument, what's important here is that you play the right key, is that you get the right sound. So if you call it a C sharp or a D flat, it's still going to make the same sound, okay? So don't worry too much about that right now. So just have in mind. Sharp you go up a half step, and flat, you go down a half step. Alright, let's try again a different major scale and a different minor scale. And this time, think it out loud with me, so we see if you understand. Let's go for B major. So our formula is ho ho, half, ho ho, ho, half. I start with B major. My first interval is hostep so Now another hole. Now a half. Now a hole. Now another hole. Now another hole. Now another half. Okay. Ho, ho, half, ho, ho, ho, half. That's B major. Now let's try a minor scale. Amonic minor scale. Let's say we start with F sharp. Let's start with a sharp key. We're gonna go hole, half, ho, ho, half, 1.5 halves, right? Like 1.5 halves. And then so here we go. We start on this one F sharp, and we have a hole. So skip this one. This one. Now a half. Now a hole, another hole. Half. Now, three half steps will be one, two, three, and I half. Okay, so be. Now it's your time to give it a try. Check out the worksheet of this class. I put it there under Lesson 11. Exercise for you. Write it down three major scales, write down three harmonic minor scales, and then you have the answers there as well, so you can see if you really understand. If you don't understand, if you're getting mistakes, you can do a little research online, or you can comment below, and I'll do my best to address any questions. After you finish the exercises on the worksheet, you're ready to go to the next lesson. Now, at least in theory, you know major and harmonic minor scale. Next, we're going to put that into practice and we're going to learn how to master playing the C major skill. 12. Mastering the Major Scale: You can already play the seven notes of the C major scale, but there is a difference between that and being able to play music in C major. In order to be able to play music in C major, we need to master the C major scale. So we can play any melodies or anything that comes our way regarding that scale. So we need to also learn the scale in a systematic way, which includes all the notes of our instrument, and also rpagios and intervals. We are going to talk about how to master the C major scale in this video, and later on the following two lessons, we're going to talk about how to master the C major rpagio and the C major intervals. For now, let's focus on the C major scale. Let's do a quick review. C major scale. It's C because we're starting from C and ending in C. So that's the root of our scale. What is a scale? Remember, in nature, frequencies when they double, it becomes an octave. It becomes the same frequency again. So what we're going to do is get those octaves and divide the space in between 12 notes. That's how they built the piano. That's how they build the guitar, and all Western music is based on that system. So then we have 12 notes that repeat over and over and over. And out of those 12 notes, we can play the chromatic scale. We've been practicing the chromatic scale. But we notice that the chromatic scale isn't that musical. So then people start thinking, Hey, let me exclude some of those 12 notes and use just seven of them. And then many scales were formed. The most useful scales, the scales that are the basis for most music out there are the major scale and the minor scale. So we are talking about the major scale here, which is a collection of those 12 notes. It's a seven note collection or group that we're going to use to play music. And therefore, we're going to use to practice. But you may ask, how do I know which out of the seven notes should I use? You need to know two things where you're starting in this case, C, and you need to know if it's major or minor and it's major. When you say it's a major scale, a formula should come to your head, and that formula is ho ho, half, ho ho ho, half steps. Okay? Remember, all those 12 nodes, they're called steps. The chromatic scale is formed by steps. So half steps in the case of the 12 nodes. So those 12 nodes, they are formed by half steps. So 12 half steps, we have an octave, and the nodes repeat. Out of all of those 12 half steps, we're going to go whole step, meaning you skip one, so you start on C, skip C sharp, go to D, so that is a whole step, right? Then we're going to another whole step to E, then a half step to F, then a whole step to G, then a whole step to A, then a whole step to B, and then a half step to go back to C. So ho, ho, half, ho, ho, ho, half step. As long as you know where you're starting from and this formula of whole steps and half steps, you'll be able to form any major scale. Now we're focusing on C major scale. You already know how to play the seven notes of the C major scale. But now we need to master the C major scale because music, melody, chords, and other elements of playing music might require more from us than just to know how to play the seven notes from the C major scale. We need to play the C major scale, going from the lowest to the highest note available on our instrument, and we also need to learn our pages and intervals, which we'll talk on the following two lessons. In this lesson, we're going to focus on mastering the C major scale. Let's do a quick review on what is the C major scale. C because it starts on C and ends on C. So that's the root of our scale and measure because it's a particular group of nodes that we are picking from. We're picking from what? Remember, in nature, every time a frequency doubles, it repeats itself. So if A is 440 frequencies of air oscillating back and forth, if you double that to 880, that will be also an right? So in this case, so we want to remember that this interval that exists in nature can be divided in all sorts of ways. Indian people, Arab nations, they divided that in different ways. But we're only talking about music that can be played on the piano and on the guitar. That's Western music. So in Western music, we divided the octave in 12 parts. And those 12 parts, they're called half steps. So 12 half steps, you start again, and you're back on the same note, but an octave higher. So out of those 12 notes, which is the chromatic scale, which we've also been practicing for a little bit, it's not the most musical scale. So composers and musicians across many centuries have been thinking, Hey, let me extract some of those 12 notes and only use seven of them to make music. And many scales were formed. Some have seven notes, some have eight notes, some have all sorts of numbers of half steps. But after many centuries of musical development, the most used scales were the major and minor scales. So how do we figure out what they are? We need a count of half steps. So we know which of those half steps we're going to keep and which of those half steps we're going to discord. So the formula for a major scale is host up, host tap, half step, host step, host step, host step, half step. So just start on C. B hoste meaning I'm going to skip the C sharp, go to D. That's a host step, another host step to E, another half step to F, and then a host step to G, host step to A, host step two B, and then a half step to C. So here we are. We have the seven notes of C major scale, and on the piano, it's pretty easy to visualize. It's C to C, all white notes. And on the piano, that's pretty easy to visualize. I'm going to give you examples on piano, guitar, and a wind instrument. Now you know what a C major scale is. Let's have a look on how to master the C major scale. Let's have a look on the piano first on how to master the C major scale. It's pretty easy to visualize, find the middle C. So you have the two black notes, three black notes, two black notes, three black notes, find two black notes right in the center of the piano and slide one back. That's the C. Now, let's play all the white keys until we get to the other C. So we go. All right, now that you know which notes you're playing, play with the right fingering. We spoke about the right fingering on the previous lesson, but also going to put here on the screen, the right fingering. Go back down. Be comfortable with that. Sometimes I like to do. Just to really be familiar with the notes and just so I can remember what they are, right? Notice, I'm not worried about the time, but I'm worried about the notes are clean, okay? Clean notes with the right fingering. Alright, in the case of the piano, you need to do that with the left hand as well. You can go from here, you can go from the see below. It doesn't matter. But same thing again, make sure you know what the notes and you do because they're exactly the same. So right fingering, not the right hand fingering, but the correct fingering for the left hand. If that switch, you know, when you get here and you go from finger one to finger three, if that's complicated to you, just go over, you know. See, I'm just playing around and trying to go over the problem here. As long as the notes are clean, feel free to experiment with this and get comfortable so your hands know what to do. But notice that I'm not worried about time yet. Once I know the notes and I know the fingering, now I'm going to put this to the matronom. Okay? How I do that? Have a matronom clicking. You can estimate what kind of speed you want, but in this case, I'm just going with whatever was there before. Great. Can I do that again? Great. Twice correct. I can bump this up four BPM, four beats per minute. So I was at 88. So now I'm going to go to 92. Because I did correctly, it's easy for me, right? An example would be, if I did two times incorrectly, I'll go back four BPM. Okay? So some days you go forward, some days you go backward, it doesn't matter. All you need is flight hours. The more you sit here and you play correctly. You will be learning, even that you don't know and might not feel that way, but you will be learning. So you do two times with your left hand increase for BPM and do that again until you reach eight BPM progress, and then you do with your right hand the same thing. If you go back for BPM and then back for BPM again, maybe just take a break. Maybe stop for the day because your brain is getting tired. Now, in the piano, we want to practice at least three octaves. So what that means is I'm going to go and then I'm going to start with the finger one again. Finger one again and end with the finger five. Okay. So that is so we practice switching octaves. So three times, two, three, B down. Okay. No a clean, correct fingering. For you, that might look very slow, like that is fine. Okay. The important thing here is no incorrect fingerings. All the fingerings must be correct, okay? And notice I'm not worrying about time again because I increase the octaves, right? So my matronom is off. I'm just learning what I'm doing here first, okay? Take it this time to go with your problems, to be present. You know how lucky you are, to have time to play a little piano. That's pretty nice thing to be spending your time on. And once you can play songs, it's gonna be really cool and fulfilling. Alright? So you did that. Now put the matronom on and see if you can do that with matronom. Mm. Alright. For you, that might look very slow, okay, don't worry about it. Now, on the piano, we practice the right hand and the left hand. But we need to practice hands together. So, same thing. Notice it's way harder to play hands together. So you might want to slow this a lot and just take your time. Making sure your fingers are switching in the right spot, and all the fingerings are correct on both hands. Let's say I make a mistake here with fingering. Mistake supposed to be finger two, finger one here. Take a breath, start again. Let go of your problems, I will help you focus and will also be more fun. All right. So just do that and listen to the metronom clean notes, correct fingering. Okay, for not to hold your breath, okay? Sometimes when things are hard, we tend to hold our breath, and that makes the tension build, and that makes the exercise much harder. All right. Simple as that. So do that and increase by four BPM if you do correctly twice. So when you're eight BPM away, it's time to stop. If you do incorrectly two times and you go down four BPM, then be careful to be focused and to calm do it again. If you get che three times wrong and you're going back many BPM, then maybe stop for the day or at least take a break. You know, you're probably not focusing for whatever reason. So this is the piano pretty straightforward. Now let's have a look on mastering this on the clarinet, for example. Just want to give a quick clarinet example because you can't really visualize the notes here. So remember to research the fingering and find out what the seven notes of the C major scale are before you start. So I know the fingering now, right? I know the notes out of time. They're clean. So I'm gonna proceed to put that on metronome. Back down. Cool. Now let's go all the way up the instrument and all the way down where the instrument allows me to go. H See how the note cracked. Not a clean note. Let's start again. Another mistake? This is too hard for me. Two mistakes. So I'm gonna go down four BPM. Let's try now. Um m I'm pressing the wrong key every time I go on that passage. Maybe just take your time and cling just that passage. Start just before the problem note. Okay, now that I know which key I should be pressing, let's start again. M So, I also needed to take a breath in a strategic location. So I also learned that. Now I will do that again if I do that correct four BPM up. Do that twice more, correct. Go another four BPM up once I eight BPM away where I started from, time to stop for the day so we don't get over practice and get a bitter feeling, so we get all tired, fatigue so hard. Next day, we won't come back. So as soon as you got those eight BPM or if you went down eight BPM, because, you know, just not a good day, that's also a good time to stop, okay? Now let's also have a look on how to play the C major scale on the guitar because it's a little different. On the guitar, there's a few things to notice. For most instruments, to play a C major scale or a D major scale or E major scale, to play different major scales. It's quite tricky. You have to learn each scale one by one. On the guitar is pretty easy. If you play a major scale, you play one, you play them all because you just shift a fret up like So transposing, moving the major scale around, it's very easy on the guitar. So play C, C sharp, D major scales. That's very easy. However, there are other aspects of playing guitar that makes it hard, but it's not the same aspect. It's a different aspect. What that is is. You have many Cs that sound the same. So, for example, on this string, you have a C here, and you have a C here, and they sound exactly the same. So because of that, you need to practice different positions. So for now, we're just going to practice one position. And when you become an advanced player or intermediate player, you start learning different positions, okay? So you can play going up the guitar neck and down. For now, we're just going to be playing up and down like this, okay? Now, before we get started, you need to know the name of these strings, okay? So even before you know the name of these strings, you should know the number of these strings. I've been calling it the string closer to you, the string further from you. But that's not really how guitar players name these strings. So the numbers start from the highest string, which is the one furthest from you. And that's string number one. The one closest to you string number six. To me, that feels upside down, but that's just how it is. So we're going to be calling the highest string one, two, three, four, five, and six is the one closest to you, the lowest string. Okay? So how are they named? E string one, B is string two. G is string three, D, string four. A is string five and E string six. A just write that down, tape it on the wall next to your bed or where you brush your teeth. Don't worry about memorizing that because you will naturally memorize it, but have that in mind, okay? So, now that we know the number of these strings and the name of these strings, we need to find the node C. So let's find that node C on the string number six, okay? So we're just going to go if this is a E, and this is divided in half steps, we can go E, F, F sharp, G, G sharp. A, A sharp, B, C. Okay? So the C is on the eighth fret, okay? So the shape of the C major scale is going to look like this. And this shape, we also need to know the correct fingering for it. One, two, three, four. That's how the fingers are numbered. So index is one, pink is four. So we're going to go and put our second finger finger number two, which is the middle finger on the eighth fret, six string. And we're going to do that shape. Oh, Notes are not clean. Plays lower. Playing wrong notes. Let's play In's lower. Maybe you become more familiar with this. Let's play a few strums, a few picks on each note. Okay, that feels easier. Now my brain can get used to this instrument. Nice. Notes clean. Fingerings cracked. Go all the way up on the diagram and then back down. Notice that I don't have the metronom and I'm not worried about time. I'm just worrying about the correct notes, clean, correct fingering. All the way up, all the way down. And back to where we started on the root, C. Okay? Now that we know the notes, know the fingerings, notes are clean, just a quick parenthesis. I also like to practice in my picking while I'm doing my scales. So just make sure you're practicing down, up, down, up, down up. Always alternating your picking, no matter what string you're going to, no matter which note you're playing, so you're practicing that motion as well. Alright, let's practice with metronom now. Oops. Alright, one time correct. If I play another time correctly, I bump this four BPM. If I make a mistake, a couple of times, go back down. When you're playing, you might be very slow. Like That's okay. Okay, made a mistake again. Sometimes slow is even harder than faster, but you got to be able to play slow first. Again, two mistakes. I'm gonna go down. So I always like to start my BPM, my metronome around 40 or 36 when I'm first in starting an instrument or when I'm first in when I'm first starting a new exercise. Yeah, and definitely wouldn't be talking about it while I'm doing it, right? But in this case, this should be okay for me. Focus. Don't hold your breath. Hand is relaxed, posture is correct, notes are clean, fingerings clean, happy days. All right. Now you have an idea of how to play C major scale sequentially all over your instrument feels like. That's going to unlock your possibilities. It's going to allow you to play in different octaves. It's going to allow you to play the seven notes from the C major scale much more fluently, okay? So no matter what kind of instrument you're playing, remember posture, correct fingering, clean notes. Find out the notes you need to play first, out of time, dabble with them, make sure you're playing them correctly with the right fingering. And then once you're ready for the matronom, turn your matronom on. If you're starting, maybe start with 40 BPM or 36 BPM. I like to start as low as possible so I make even progression up rather than starting in the middle and then stumbling down and then making my way up again, in my personal experience, you're actually going to get this done quickly if you start at the bottom right away. So put your metronome there. Practice your skies note by note. Remember, you're also learning how to breathe, how to relax, how to hold the instrument, how to have your mind let go of your problems, how to be present, and all of that you're practicing, as well. So when you make a mistake, don't think I'm dumb, I'm stupid. I just have to play my finger in here. How hard can this be? Why can't I do don't go down the rabbit hole because there are so many things. You're not being kind to yourself about it. You're learning how to breath, how to hold your instrument, how to strengthen your core, or the muscles you're using now that maybe you didn't use before. And all of that requires practice. So just be patient and just surrender to the process because this will work. All musicians go through this process of practicing. And a lot of them go play music right away and develop as musicians by playing songs, which you're welcome to do. But my method is to first learn the fundamentals because my experience after playing so many different styles of music and so many different instruments, it's actually much faster if you just practice scales, your intervals, and your pasios and then become fluent on the instrument. And then you go on to play songs. Rather than to struggle to play a song, struggle to play the next, struggle to play the next, and then eventually be fluent on playing these songs. Okay? So this is my recommendation. Remember, you're ready to proceed to the next lesson when you're playing the same major scale up and down your instrument, play twice correctly, bump for BPM. Do that again twice correctly again, bump another four BPM. Once you eight BPM away from where you started from, you're ready to proceed. Remember that on the case of the piano, you should practice all of that with just your right hand and then all of that just with your left hand, and then all of that with both of your hands. Might feel like you're practicing three times as much as other instruments, but actually to produce a note on the piano is pretty easy. So if you're playing clarinet, you're practicing long notes just to get a note out. So on the piano, that comes very easily. And also on the piano, later on, you'll be able to play hands combined very naturally. Instead of having to learn every single time hands combined, it's going to come automatically. So just hang in there. And remember, on the guitar, there are seven positions per scale. And later on, when you're intermediate and advanced player, you will learn these skills again in different positions. But once again, don't be upset. Be like, Oh, I have to practice seven times as much as other instruments. Not really, because once you slide your hand up and down and you find other skills automatically without any studying, that's going to be really nice. But for the piano and for the clarinet, every single skill need to learn differently. So one instrument is easier here, another instrument is easier there. The main thing is bekind yourself, be patient, and just take your time. If you make a mistake, this is not a brain surgery. This is not a life and death situation. Just be kind yourself. Read, let it go, restart again. And remember to not over practice, okay? As soon as you move a few BPM up, a few BPM down, call it a day, make sure you'll be doing your chromatic scales, your long tones. And then once you play this much, it's good for you. Just make sure you can come back on the next day for a little bit more practice. Next, we're going to talk about the second exercise out of the three exercises you should be practicing to master the C major scale. So we're going to talk about rpatios on the next lesson, and the lesson after that, we're going to talk about intervals, and then you have everything you need to know in order to master the C major scale. See you there. 13. Mastering Major Arpeggios: Congrats. You should be really proud of yourself because now you can play the notes of C major scale sequentially up and down pretty much all over your instrument. However, you notice that if you try to skip notes, you will have a hard time. Sometimes you're going to run out of fingers depending on the instrument, or maybe you just won't have the coordination to skip notes, even though your brain can understand that concept pretty simply. So in music, we need more than sequential notes to make songs or to play tunes or to play melodies. And chords are based on a structure of notes together. The have leaps in them. They are hardly sequential. So how do we practice that? We need to practice that with rpagios. What is rpatios? Arpagis is basically when we call playing a scale but skipping every other note. So for our purposes here, we're going to call rpagios when you play a scale, but you skip every other note of that scale. It's important to say that you should only progress to practice this if you already know how to play the scale because otherwise we feel too challenging for you to jump right at this lesson. So you can play the seven notes, and we're going to skip every other note should play the rpagio. Let's have a look. So here we have the C major scale. If we skip every other note, so skip this one, skip this one, skip this one. Right? So we have. That is a C major rpagio. Okay? So now we want to do an rpagio of every note of the scale. So it will sound like All I'm doing is going to the second note, for instance, and then doing the same thing with the nodes of the C major scale. So let's say I'm going to start on D, I'm going to skip that one. Skip this one. I'm going to skip this one. Let's say E, let's skip this one. Let's skip this one. Skip this one. Simple as that. In the piano, the fingering here should be one, two, four, five. If you want to play one, two, three, five, that's also okay. All right? So you notice that the shape is kind of the same. If you just keep the shape, the notes kind of fall into place. Okay. So once you do that, you can go back down. So I'm going to start on B. Why? Because the C arpegio CGB, right? So that's where I finished. So I'm just going to start on that B going down. I'm not worried about time. I'm just worried about correct fingerings, and I'm worried about clean notes. That's all I'm worried about right now. Alright. Same thing with the left hand. In the left hand, the fingers should be five, four, two, one. So the same thing. I am now worried about time. Play as slow as you need this to be and take a breath. Make sure you understand the concept here. When you get here, let's start from this note, which is a B and go down. Alright, it sounds pretty musical, right? All right. And then eventually you do with two hands. Very slow here, okay? No hurry. Take a breath. You know, back, why you may ask why you're not using the metronome? Well, remember, this is just unfamiliar with the notes, but I'm still not making any mistakes, right? So just play as slow as you need and make sure the finger oops. Yeah, talking at the same time isn't easy, but luckily, you won't need to do that. Well, we finish here, right on C. All right. So here, we played all the pagos. We are familiar with the notes. We know what we're doing. The right hand, just the left hand, both hands. Now let's put the matron. My right hand is kind of savvy, so I'm going to go, you know, that speed. Right? You're going to do that with the metronom now. And once you get two times correctly, up four BPM, two times correctly again, four BPM again. Or if you go down, get into many mistakes after, you know, so many mistakes, maybe just call it a day. But that's how we put the right hand to the matronom, left hand to the metronom same thing. Eventually, you'll be like, This is after weeks of practice or more, right? So keep doing that all the way up, all the way down. I want to show you a hands together to show you how you go back down. But remember to do that independently of the hands, okay? So here we are hands together. Correct fingerings, clean notes. Take a breath. This is the last one. Gonna repeat. See that repetition of the B. So I can go back down right away. Okay, keep going down all the way to C and then call it a day. Remember, it might take you many days to just figure out the right hand, the left hand, hands combined. Take your time, okay? So I want to show you the same exercise on a woodwind instrument, maybe on the flute, and I will show you that on the guitar as well. Alright? Let's have a look. First, you need to make sure you know how to play the scale. All right. Now, skip the next one. Skip the next one. Skip the next one. Second out of the scale D. Skip the next one, E, play the F. Skip the G, play the eight, skip the B, put the C. And just so on and so forth. Do Back down. Notes clean. Correct posture, correct fingering. I'm ready for the matronom. Turn on the matronom Ooh, made a mistake. I'm gonna go lower than that. Also, remember that wind instruments, you can either play them together, which is called legato. Like Or you can articulate every note. Just keep the air flowing, okay? Let's try metronome So on and so forth. Backwards. B D and so on and so forth. Make sure you're playing the whole thing two times correctly, up four BPM. If you do that again, two times correctly, up another four BPM, call it a day. All right? Same thing if you go down, if you're making mistakes, bring the BPM down. If you're making too many mistakes, maybe just take a break or call it a day, come back tomorrow, you'll be much better. Okay. So now let's have a look at the guitar. Alright, so the guitar, we go to play first the Cmagor scale like we did before. The reason I'm just running the scale is because I'm going to have to skip every other note, so I want to make sure I know what the notes are. So now that we know the notes in a relaxed way, let's see if we can put that to the matrono, okay? So I'm going to go very slow and starting from the C, and I'm going to call out the notes so I know where I am cause on the guitar, it might all look the same. So here we go. C. Starting on D. Starting on E. Starting on F. Starting on G. Starting on A. Starting on B. Starting on C. No, on the B we have. Or. So these two notes get played one under the other and you kind of run out of a finger 'cause you go. And then you play with the fourth. But then you need to play the note right under. So instead of doing this, we are going to play before the last note with the finger three. So we have the finger four available to play right underneath like that. So we're going to play the B, we're going to go. Three. So that would be the only change. And that's something to keep in mind with the guitar. If you feel like you're gonna run out of fingers because you need to play right underneath, don't just smash it like this and play strings with a finger. Just try to switch the fingers so you have one available. So it would be. Right. And then see. This is one way to practice, and you want to do that very slowly. Now, note that the guitar, this exercise is more challenging than other instruments. So take your time. There are other things later on that will be easier for the guitar, but this one is one you're going to have to spend some time with it. Okay? Remember, once you can do that, You can do in any key. Right? So once you learn the shapes, it's gonna be very easy for you. But the shapes, it's gonna be a little more challenging than other instruments. Okay? So here we go again, going backwards on the guitar. U All right, clean notes, slow on the metronome. If I do that correct twice, I'll bump four BPM on the metronome. Alright. After you practice your arpegios and you get a hang of it, remember, it might take a few days for you to just figure out the notes. It might take a few days to put up the metronome at a very slow setting. It might take a few days to bump that up four or eight BPM where you started from. But once you do that, you'll be ready to proceed to the next lesson. Don't hurry, okay. Be patient. Next, we're going to talk about intervals. We're going to be doing third intervals, and it's the final piece alongside scales and rpagios for you to master the major scale. 14. Mastering 3rds Intervals: At this point, you should be feeling pretty familiar with the C major scale because you can play notes in sequence on the low and high registers of your instrument, and you can go ascending and descending backwards. That is, you can also leap. You can play rpagios by skipping every other note of the scale. You can play rpagio starting on every degree of the scale and going backwards. So if you try to improvise, you should come up with some interesting melodies if you combine those two concepts. And a lot of melodies requires us to combine nodes in sequence with leaps. That's why we're going to practice intervals, which is the final piece alongside scales and rpagis for you to understand the C major scale. Let's have a look. What do I mean by practicing intervals? We are going to practice a third interval, a distance from three to the first note that we start. We're going to start on C and we're going to count three, count the note you start on. One, two, three, back one. One, two, three, B one, one, two, three, B one, one, two, three, B, one, one, two, three, B one, one, two, three, B one, one, two, three, back one. Okay. So this concept can apply for anything, even your fingers, for example, let's say you want to do intervals, third intervals using your fingers. If this is number one, you go one, two, three, middle finger, back to ring finger, one, two, three, index, back to middle finger, 1232 thumb, back to index. You can always skip three of anything and then go back one. Go to number three, go back one, three or more, go back one. You can do that skipping cables stones. You can do that with tiles in the shopping mall. You can count artworks in a museum and go one, two, three, back one, one, two, three, back one. That concept of skipping three of anything and going back one appears everywhere in nature, and now we're going to apply for the notes of the same major scale. You understand how to go up, one, two, three, B one. Not you three, B one, 02, three, B one, 123, B one, 123, back one, o23. 123, B one. Now go down. You go one, two, three, down, up one. Down, three, up one, down three, up one, down three, up one, down, three, up one, down, three, up one, down, three, up one. Okay. So now that you know the sequence, let's play that with the correct fingering. The correct fingering here, it will be 13, two, four, repeat. One, three, two, four, one, three, two, four, one, three, two. If you want to keep going, four, one, three, two, four, one, three, two, four, one, three, two, four, and then back to one. Back to the note one, but I ended with finger three. Okay? If you want to go down from here, let's say, three, one, two, one, four, two, three, one, four, two, three, one, four, two, three. So basically is if you three, right? So one, four, two, three, one, four, two, three, one, four, two, three, one, four, two, three, one, four, two, three, one, four, two, three, one, four, two, you can end on three or you can end on one. Okay. So that fingering, it should feel something like this. One, two, three, four, one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four. One, right? You can end on one. Not that the music should sound like that, accentuated when you use the thumb. But when you're playing, you're gonna feel like it one, one, three, two, one, one, two, three, one, two, three. You're going to feel how the one is going to allow you to leap to the next pattern. The ring finger will be your anchor to pivot down. If you starting here on finger three would be three, one, four, two, three, one, 42, three, one, four, two, three, one, four, two, three, one, four, two, three, one, 42, three, one, 42, three. Every time you play the ring finger, you have a leap, see? Now I can leap back. Play slowly so you can play the notes clean. Okay. So now we do this also slowly with the left hand. In the left hand for the pattern to work, we need to start with our fourth finger, the ring finger. Four, two, three, one, four, two, three, one, four, two, three, four, two, three, one, four, two, three, one, four, two, three, one, four, two, three, one. And you can end on two or you can end in whatever finger you want to end. You go down, it's going to be two, four, one, three, two, four, one, three, two, four, one, three, two, four, one, three, two, four, one, three, two, four, one, three, two, four, one, three, two. Or you can end on one, you can end on two, whatever. It's easier. When you're ending, you have poetic license to use whatever finger it's close by. But as long as you keep moving, you have to use the correct finger because otherwise, you're going to run out of finger. Okay? So after you practice both slowly and you figure out the finger and the notes, play them together. Remember, left hand, start with the fourth finger. I'm going too fast here for my own sake. And now combine both hands still playing slowly so you get used to the fingering. Okay? Remember, left hand starts with the fourth finger. Okay. After you practice that, put on to the matronom. So matronom posture, correct finger, clean notes, right hand first. I'm going to play a little faster just to save you some time. Left hand. I don't want you to think that, oh, I can play so fast and you're playing so slow and you feel bad. So, you know, remember, if you can play slow, later on, you're gonna play quick. So focus on playing very slow. I'm going to give you an example of the left hand, very slow. Start with the fourth finger. Release the tension. You see we're playing multiple octaves, right? That's so we learn how to turn around. Here's a turnaround. All right. Now, hands together. Fourth finger on the left hand, remember? And so on and so forth. Okay? So play twice. No mistakes. Easy, bump four BPM. Do that again. Bump another four BPM. If you do two sets of improvements, right? Two sets of four BPM, you're ready to call it a day. If you're getting stuck over and over again, you're not making any progress, maybe take a break, stop for the day. But incorporate this into daily practice, okay? Now let's look at a wind instrument, how that would sound like. Trumpet. Same deal. Remember, you need to know the scale first. Now, finding the notes slowly. All right. There was some notes that were not very clean, and I was playing pretty fast. So see, even after practicing so many instruments and knowing this, you still want to rush because you're tired, because you're impatient or you're feeling anxiety about getting this done. But that is counterproductive, okay? So at the tension go, relax. Let's get those clean notes, okay? Fish to take a breath, that's fine. Uh huh. At my level of trumpet playing, this is as clean as I can get. So I'm not gonna be, like, super peaky, like, Oh, this is not good enough for an orchestra. Yes, it's not perfectly clean, but the notes are full and I'm not playing wrong notes and the notes are not shifting. The notes are not cracking. So to my level, this is clean. So this is good. We know the notes. We know the patterns, clean notes, posture, everything good. Now, let's add the metronome. Not clean? I need the breath there. It cracked. This is too fast for me, so let's slow down. Slow down 4:00 P.M. Let's do the descending part. Again. So remember, I'm a beginner on the trumpet. I can't get every single note clean, but this is the best I can get right now, and those notes are clean enough to do the exercise. So don't get hung up on extreme perfection. Just be patient because your tone will improve over time. Now, remember that the trumpet, the saxophone, the violin, that's going to take a long time to get super clean notes. But the guitar, the piano, you should be able to get clean notes off the bat, okay? So take that into account when you're practicing. Let me show you how the third intervals look on the guitar. Let's play the scale. Alright. So now I know the notes. Now let's play the third intervals. So Alright. Did you see the problem with the finger in there? When I'm playing here, it's all fine except when we get here. If we play the fourth finger here, when we go you see, we get stuck in that situation that we play the same frets, notes up and down, and we ran out of finger. So remember that when you're going. C DFE G F A G, B, C, B, C, D F G DF, use the three finger. That after use the three finger. So you have the pink available to go. Right? And then you can continue. Now, play use the third finger right there. Same thing as we did before. Okay, so basically The finger three, right? So you play kind of the ring finger get extra action on that passage because you go. Three, Three again, right? All right. So now, are we familiar with the notes? Yeah? And are we familiar with the fingering when I get there? You see how I change? There. Right. Three. Three. I'm familiar, but my pecking is all over the place. Up and down, I'm just kind of doing whatever. That's not good. Let's slow down and make sure the pecking is correct. No, down, up, down, up, down, up. So I'm going to go No worried about the time here. I'm just trying to get accuracy, right? Let's slow down that passage that I need. Three. See, I got the right fingering, but I did the wrong picking. My brain is overloading on that passage, so I need to slow down. Oh ring finger. Alright. I good shape. Let's go down. Let's go down. Three. Alright, so now have clean oats, correct fingering, correct picking. I'm ready to put the matron on. I'm gonna put this pretty slow. Just one oate per click 'cause I want to make this real nice and slow. Oh Finger three in there. So I could do the passage. Let's go down. Finger three. Alright, wrist relaxed in place, posture, clean sound. Yeah, some of the pecking, there was a little buzz in there, but this is just how good I am at the moment. I know that I will get better picking and thinking about this and improving my speed as I go. So this is happy days. Check. Play twice correctly, bump four VPM on the metronome. You should be able to do it again. Go for it. After you 8:00 P.M. Away from where you started, you're ready to call it a day or practice something else and remember not to over practice, okay? Now, take a moment to think how far you've come. You know how to play the chromatic scale. You know how to play the major scale, the C major scale up and down, or pagers leaping between every other note and that leap, you can start on every single note of the scale, and you can do it upwards and backwards. You're playing that in time with the matronom In time, you'll be able to do other exercises, for example, leaping four notes or five notes in back one, five notes and back one. But you should only do that really when you intermediate on an advanced player. For now, you're good to go with those three exercises. So we're going to add to a practice. Aside from getting a clin tone, long notes, posture, you're going to play the chromatic scale. Then you're going to play the C major scale. Then you're going to play arpegios then you're going to play intervals. That sounds like a lot, right? Well, that's a good problem to have because you have so many things to practice. So instead of feeling overwhelmed with all that information, next lesson, we're going to talk about how to organize all those exercises into a practice journal. That practice journal is going to allow you to get those exercises and game by practice. But then you might ask me, Wait a second. You're telling me to practice 15, 20 minutes a day, and you're telling me that I have to practice all of those things every day. How is that possible? That's not going to fit. And in fact, I'm feeling overwhelmed. It's a lot of scales and degrees and fingerings. And the BPM of my C major scale is at this number, but the rpagios I'm playing weights lower. I'm lost. And every time I come to practice, it feels like a burden because I have to remember all of that. Well, this is a good problem to have. That means that you have lots of information on how to get better as a player. However, we need to transform this feeling of feeling overwhelmed by the amount of information. We need to transform that into a game. We need to gamify your practice. And when we do that, you're going to have a lot of motivation from trying to beat the next stage, from trying to go to the next level. So how are we going to do this? We're going to do this, creating a practice journal. Next lesson, we're going to talk about how you can put all of your practice on paper and keep track of your progress. That's going to be fun. And once you see on paper the progress that you already made, you're going to be impressed and hopefully motivated. See you next lesson. 15. Practice Journal: Keeping Track: Let the fun begin. Now, you know how to practice scale pasios third intervals, and you practice long tones and mind your posture. But for all of these exercises, you start in different BPM, and then you increase the BPM, maybe you go backwards some BPMs and it's a lot of things to keep track. You have your chromatic scale, and the next day when you show up, it's hard to remember. Hey, my third intervals in C major, what is the speed that I left off, right? Probably you started intuitively writing them down somewhere. But if you haven't need to do that because this feeling of starting to notice, Hey, there is a lot to learn. There is so many scales, there are so many different speeds. I can't keep track of all of this. So to avoid that becoming overwhelming, we're going to transform your practice into a game. We're going to fy your daily practice. And how do we do that? We're going to create a practice journal where you're going to track your progress, and you're going to see there, what is the next step you need to take? Let's have a look and how to create a practice journal. Here we have our practice journal. I suggest you write it down here. Hey, am I playing one note per click or two notes per metronome click, just so you know what your speed is referring to. And then you have your date, and then you have all the exercises you're playing. So let's say today I go here and I am at which speed here, let's see, 88 BPM, and I'm playing my chromatic scale, let's say. Let's say I play that twice, everything's good. I'm ready to proceed. So here I'm going to put, Hey, today is, you know, whatever month day, and then the year. And then my chromatic scale here, I'm going to put the BPM. So here I have 88 BPM. Okay? Or you can just put 88 because it's obviously that's BPM. So that is great. Now let me practice my major scale. Maybe my major scale, I'm playing faster. Let's see. I'm going. That's all good. I play, I do my whole thing. Let's say, maybe I am on 120 BPM on that, right? My arpegios. Here we go. What is it going to be? My arpegios? Maybe do all of that. So here I have 84 BPM. Right? For you, this might look in the very beginning, maybe your speeds are going to be like 30 BPM, right or 40 BPM. It doesn't matter, but you're keeping track here, where you're at. If during the same session, during the same day, on your chromatic scale, you got to right and you're going to bump this four BPM. So you go up to 92 BPM. Then you do good again, and you're going to progress again and you go to 96 BPM. That's great. So just put here your final BPM at the end of your practice, okay? Now, when you come back on the next day, you know you have to start from 96 BPM. So now it's easy to go here in your metronome and be like, Oh, okay, 96 BPM. So let me just start micromatic scale. And then if all goes well, you do the whole process, and then you'll be able to progress this to 100 at first and then 104. Boom. So you level this up. You know what I mean? So now the idea is that as the days pass, you are leveling up your BPM. Now, I'm not going to lie. Some days you're actually going to go backwards. Maybe here you end your day at 100 BPM. That is okay. Remember that overall, it's like a pilot, right? Like, just flight hours they stack up, and you're learning just by being here doing this, even if your BPMs are going backward, okay? And don't worry. As soon as you're more rested, then you have a good night of sleep, you know, you focus more, the BPMs will go back up again. So don't worry about it, okay? So just keep putting your progress here. And remember, if you go up eight BPM, where you started from, call it a day and wait until the next day to practice some more. Now, one thing that I suggest for you to do, I'm just going to give you here some examples, right? Let's say, I'm going here to 88 and then 92. And then here I went to 40 and then 44. Alright, so that's two days of practice. And then, Remember that, after you're playing many days, I don't really like to scroll, you know, sideways horizontally. So you might want to go here on the tab and just label that maybe, you know, the month, right? Month X. And then you can right click and duplicate that tab. And maybe that tab, you just go here, you know, erase your progress. Copy and paste here where you should start from and label that here, rename and just put month. Why, right? So on and so forth. Maybe you're dividing each tab for a month or each tab for a week. You know, you can make use of tabs. Also, remember, you can add here whatever you're practicing on daily basis, okay? So for example, here, let's say I'm going to add here, I'm going to insert a row below, and I'm going to make this one my long notes. Okay? So I'm just going to format here, like I have formatted before with the colors I like, and I'm going to put here long notes. Maybe if you play piano, that is not useful. But if you play flute or saxophone, maybe that's very useful, right? Or if you're a vocalist, you're putting vocal warmop, right? So my long notes, you know, I start. You can even do things like for example, long notes, you put under here, you can put one note per four clicks, right, meaning that it's very slow, right? So you put let's say you have the speed here, and you're playing just like down, two, three, four, two, three, four, two, three, four, right? If you're playing an instrument where you need to practice your long note. So you could do that, too, and then keep track of your progress, right? I suggest you to start at either 36 or 40 BPM every time you start something. I think that's helpful. And then, you know, other things you might want to put here. Let's say you are a piano player. Maybe what you want to do is I'm going to duplicate this. Another thing you can do. Let's say if you play piano, I'm going to get rid of this role because you don't need long notes on the piano. But maybe a chromatic scale, you can put 96 left hand, you know, maybe you are at 88 right hand. Maybe you're playing at 56 both hands, right? So my short hands for that is left hand for L or R for right hand, maybe B for both hands. So you can keep track of your progress on each hand depending on which exercise you do. If you play guitar, maybe you want to specify, right? You are chromatic scale here, maybe you have a chromatic scale, and you can put here pi because you're playing with a pick, right? Maybe you're practicing this some more and you want to also practice this without a pick. So you might specify that. Whatever makes it easy for you to keep track of what you're trying to develop, okay? So this is the practice journal. Now, remember, this is just how I like to do it on the computer using a Google Spreadsheet. But there are many ways to do that. I like to keep my practice journal on the computer so I can access on my phone. And if I'm practicing elsewhere, I always have it with me. But some people really like something tangible to use a notepad. There is a musical moleskin pad. There are all sorts of nice little diaries and journals you can use. You can be as creative as you want, design something really nice, walk on the cover, get something that's leather thick. You know, do something that makes you inspired. That book or that journal is the representation of all your effort. So if you like something physical and feel more inspired that way, by all means, go for it, okay? So same thing on the computer. You don't need to use Excel spreadsheet. You can use all sorts of software. You can even do on a Google Doc. The important thing is that it's organized, okay? So now it's your turn. Go ahead and do your practice journal. If you like what I did and you want to use that one, I'm leaving that template on the resource section. Now, if you make a new one, if you make something, you know, physical and school, you're proud of it, definitely share with us on the project section of this class, okay? Would be nice to see what you come up with and see a few entries on your journal when you share with us. If you're doing something physical, take a photo with your phone and upload that. It's just that might feel really inspiring to others to see how your journal is coming along. So before you post your journal and before you proceed to the next lesson, just make sure you have a few entries in there. So now you start your practice and keep track of it for one or 23 days, always using the metronome and always using your practice journal to keep track of your progress and to let you know where you should start from on the next day. I can't wait to see what kind of practice journal you're going to come up with. As soon as you have a couple of entries on your journal, me me on the next lesson. 16. The Twelve Tone Catch!: I hope you're feeling good about your progress, especially now that you have proof on your practice journal of how long you've come. Now I have some news for you. I call this the catch. I call it the catch because we've been talking about C major scale and different exercises for you to master C major scale. But what if I told you there are 12 major scales you need to learn. And each of those scales have rpagios intervals and sequential notes for you to learn. That might feel like a catch. Why you didn't tell me that before I started? Well, because it's really all the same thing. Is just that because we have those 12 half steps in the piano, and we can build the relationship between whole steps and half steps to come up with the C major scale. If you apply that formula to any other note, you can also come up with a major sounding scale by starting on any of those 12 notes. Let me give you an example. When you're playing guitar, you have a major shape, C major shape that we've been playing. You have C major, the C major shape we've been playing. Instead of starting on C, what if I start on G? What if I start this anywhere? So if you're playing guitar, you can easily change the key, and it's not gonna change much for your practice, which key you're playing on to a certain extent. But as far as the exercise we're doing, it's going to look pretty straightforward. Once you do the third exercises, you can play in any key, even without practicing. It's good to still practice every key because the frets, they get larger at the beginning of the neck and smaller on the top of the neck. So you still want to practice so your fingers are adjusted. It's not that much harder. So that catch that you have 12 extra keys to play, it's not such a big deal for the guitar at this stage. However, let's look how that looks on the piano. On the piano, you have your C major. So remember, ho, step, H step, half step, ho ho ho, half step. If I maintain this relationship, but let's say I start on F. So it'll be host step from F, hostep from G. Now, a half step, it's actually this black key here. We're going to call that a B flat. Now, from here, I need a host step, so be a C, another hole step, another host step, and a half step, which is naturally back to F. Okay, so I can call this black K here, either A sharp or B flat. It's the same thing. But I'm going to choose to call a B flat because I already had an A before, so I don't want to chew A. It's just confusing. So I'm going to call it a B flat. So again, from here, a host step would be G, a host step would be A, a half step. Now, it's going to be some kind of B, but in this case, a B flat to be a half step. Now, a host step is going to be a C, host step a D, host step, a E, half step back to where I was. Right? If you start from any note and you apply ho ho, half ho, ho, ho, half steps, you find a major scale. Same id of shape, right? For example, Or. You see how the structure is the same. So we can play the same melodies in all sorts of different keys. So we need to learn all of the keys so we can move in between them. A lot of music require us to do this. And also, when you're playing with other people, you have to play all in the same key. And if you're a vocalist or if you're playing with a vocalist, you want to make sure that key suits the range of that particular person. So you have to learn all of the keys, okay? So each of those keys will have scales, rpagios et cetera. So let's say we have our F scale here. By the way, always look the fingering when you're doing the piano or if you play a different instrument, the guitar will be the same as the previous exercises. You just slide the fret. But on pretty much every other instrument, the fingerings are going to change between scales. Look them up. In time, the logic of the fingering is going to get inside your head, and you're going to naturally know which fingers you should be using. But for now, always look at up the fingering, okay? In this case, this is the fingering. And here, I have my Arpacis. See always using that B flat now. You know what I mean? You're never going to use B natural. So always in the scale of F, we are always using that B flat because that's going to hold that scale sound, that major scale sound by starting from F to F. Okay? Same thing if you're going to do third exercises. See that B flat there. Always using the B flat. To make sure it still sounds like a major scale. Okay? And so on and so forth. Let's just do one more time on the piano because it's easy to visualize. Let's find another scale. Let's say I'm starting from D, right? So a whole step would be E, another whole step would be some sort of F, but F sharp. Okay. Now G, a half step, now host step to A, a host step to B, a hole step. So some kind of C, in this case, C sharp, and then half step back to D. So we have ho, ho, half, and then ho ho, ho, half. So from D to D, D major scale, we have F sharp and C sharp. So to keep that, after you practice your scale, you're going to get that under your fingers, under your muscle memory. Then you go on to practice your pasios. Always look up at the fingering, okay? Right. You can go back down to, you should go back down to, and same thing for third exercises. See that F sharp, and that C sharp. Always the F sharp, and this C sharp. Right. So always when we're playing that D scale, we're gonna be playing F sharp and C sharp. How do you find out which sharps and flats you're going to use? Go from your starting note and count. H step, hotp, half step. Count, H step, hold step, half step, ho ho, ho, step, half step. Okay. Simple as that. You may ask, when is it time for me to stop playing one scale and starting the other? Well, you should never stop playing a scale. You just adding to your practice. So as soon as you get around 80 or 90 BPM with a scale, the intervals and the patios and you feel good about that, add another scale. And once you add that other scale, you're going to play the previous scale, and then the new scale, you just going to keep adding to a practice. But then you might say, My practice is going to get enormous. How can I do this in 20, 30 minutes? Well, naturally, your practice is going to get little by little longer, but not really, because in the beginning, it might take you a whole day to play a scale. It might take you 20 minutes to play a scale. But then as you get better and better and better, you sit down on your instrument or you just grab your instrument, and you pop up, pop up, pop up, pop, pop up, pop up, pop up pop up. Check Eight BPM up, do that again. Done. So it might take you 30 seconds or a minute and a half to do one exercise after you are very familiar with it. So that's why it will be easier for you to keep adding to your practice, right? Just make sure to go slowly and not bite more than what you can chew. Now, let's add all those 12 Bangor skills to your practice journal. So your practice journal here see what I did. I got same thing. You have your name and you have how many notes per click you're practicing. In this case, one note per metronom click. And then I'm just going to put here a date date. Remember to keep track of, you know, each day. And then here, you see I'm playing the chromatic scale. Let's say I did a 48 BPM. Now, C major scale. Oh, maybe I'm playing that at 52 BPM. My F major scale that I just add on. Well, maybe I'm playing that very slowly, 36 BPM, right? I'm not playing any of these scales yet. But here, if I'm doing C and F, here, maybe my Carpatios I am at 60 and my F major rpagios I'm still slow at 40, right? And then here you have your intervals, you're playing, let's say, 78, but here you're playing at 44. These are just random examples of BPMs, but I just want to demonstrate how just by looking at this practice journal now, you know that you're practicing these two scales, and you know you're practicing these two rpatios and these two intervals, and you know which BPM you're practicing on each of them. Remember to add right and left hand for all of those if you're playing piano, so you can keep track of hands independently. And remember, if this is getting too busy here horizontally, you can create a new tab and duplicate copy and paste disinformation and have one tab per week, whatever you feel best. So this is what your practice is going to look like as soon as you add another scale. This is going to get exciting pretty quickly. Remember that now, when you play, You can play the same stuff on a second key. That's pretty exciting. You'll be able to soon go all over your instrument and play major sounds. And that's going to unlock so many possibilities for you. That's exciting because after you know, one, two, three, four, 12 major scales, the sound of the major scale really going to get ingrained in your brain, in your ears, and in your muscle. You are going to have muscle memory of that sound. So when you listen to music, your fingers might start moving. You might start realizing which notes are being played. You with time, are going to think of sounds, not of fingerings, and this is going to be your ticket to music freedom. It might take a couple of months, maybe a couple of years, but I guarantee that if you stick with this practice journal, if you stick with your practice, if you stick with playing the scales with the correct fingerings, clean sound, good posture, your music freedom will come, and you'll be able to go and play with anybody. There is a band playing, you don't even need to ask them What's the key? You're going to go in there and the sound is going to tell you which scale you should be using. You might not know that song exactly, but you're going to be able to play on it because you know all of the major scale. So no matter which song they're playing, as long as it's using a major scale, you'll be able to play along. So remember, this should not feel overwhelming. This should feel like you have something to look forward to. There is no hurry here. This can take as long as it takes. Also, don't try to judge this process as in, Oh, that's going to take so much time or so little time because you don't really know that. Let me explain to you what I mean. When you learn the first scale, there is so much that you're learning at the same time, the posture, the clean sound, the structure of the scale, how to practice with the metronom, how to use the practice journal, and the list goes on. Even showing up every day to practice is a skill that you're developing. But as you learn more and more and more and more skills, it gets easier and easier and easier. You're going to have to focus on only the differences, maybe the fingerings, maybe after a couple of times, you memorize those fingerings and you just incorporate that your practice. So fear not in the beginning, you need to gain momentum, but after you have a routine with all of these scales in it, it's going to come very natural to you to learn more scales or pages and intervals. For now, just add one scale to your practice. Maybe keep practicing C major until you reach 80 BPM around there, and then add one more. And then start from 36 40 BPM and then try to level that up again. Once you get two scales at 80 BPM, add another scale. Now, which scales should be adding? It kind of makes sense to have a logic around which scales you learn next. I suggest that you choose your next scale based on the circle of fourth. What that means is you're playing C, and then you count four nodes, C, D, E F. So your next scale is going to be F. Now you're on the scale of F and F has a B flat. Remember, you're going to know that once you start practicing. But then you count from F, F measure, F one, G two, A three, B flat, four. So your next scale after F is going to be B flat. After B flat, it's going to be E flat, then A flat. You keep counting four nodes of that scale to find your next scale. Already typed those up on the template of the practice journal. I'm also putting on the project resources of this class. If you go to the resources section of this lesson, you find the practice journal updated where you have all the 12 keys for scales or pages and intervals. Let me give you a tip when you're practicing. When you start the day, your brain is sharper. You have more focus and you're learning more. So you should start with whatever feels hardest to you. So when you look in your practice journal, you're going to immediately remember which of those exercises and which of those BPMs are giving you the hardest time. You start right there. Maybe it's rpagis, maybe it's third intervals. Maybe it's a new scale that you just added. So you start with that and you spend your best focus, your best mind on that problem. Once you're going through your practice, you start playing things that are easier to you. And by the very end of your practice, when you're the most tired, you'll be playing things that you pretty much already know how to play. You are just playing them to keep them alive in your mind and to make those BPMs go a little bit higher. So remember, start with whatever is hardest and finish your practice with things that you feel comfortable with. Now it's your turn. Update your music journal. So it has the 12 major scales, the 12 pagios, the 12 intervals. And remember to have in there long notes if you're playing a bowed string instrument like a violin or celllo or if you're a singer, if you play a wind instrument, and remember to keep track of right and left hands and hands combined if you're playing piano. Now, once you have this updated music journal, and you get to the point where you can add the different key, do a couple of entries in there, you know, a couple of different scales and rpagios of this new key, as well. And once you have that updated journal, share with us again on the project section of this class. We would love to see your progress and let us know if you have any questions about how to incorporate other keys to your practice. Once you're practicing C, measure and F measure the scales, rpatios and intervals, you'll be ready to meet me on the next lesson. And there we're going to talk about minor scales. See you there. B. 17. Scales: Mastering Minor Tonalities: Welcome back. Now you have a stronghold on the major tonality. You can play C major, maybe you can play F major and maybe some other major scales. And all of that information, the sound of scales, arpegio and third exercises, and also the fingering on your instrument, your posture, the way you breathe, all of that is adding to your brain understand how songs and music in the major tonality works, how those songs feel to us. But that's only half of the story. A lot of music out there is based on the minor tonality, and this is what we're going to talk about today. There are three types of minor scales, the natural minor, the harmonic minor, and the melodic minor. But from my experience, learning a lot of instruments, if you only practice the harmonic minor to begin with, you'll be in good shape. That's the one that's pretty different and requires special attention. Now, I'm going to show you how the natural minor and the melodic minor can be pretty similar to the major scale, and that's why you can postpone studying those until you're intermediate on advanced player. Let's have a look on the A harmonic minor scale. So the A harmonic minor scale, we're going to find it in a similar way that we found the C major scale. We're going to start on A because A is the root, and we're going to go from A to A, all the white keys. Now, did you notice how those are the same notes as the C major scale, but starting on A. So if you play. That's C major, but if you play, that's A minor. But this is the A natural minor. So because they are so similar, let's not bother studying that scale right now because when you're playing the major scales, in a way, you're also learning the natural minors. Now we are left with a melodic minor and harmonic minor. The melodic minor is rarely used unless you're doing pretty sophisticated jazz or in classical Baroque music. There is no many other instances I can think of that the melodic minor is being used heavily, at least as the basis of songs and music. However, that's not the reason we're going to postpone study in this. The reason we're going to postpone study in this is because the melodic minor is the same thing as the major scale, but the third note, it has a flat. If we play A major, if we just change one note here, the third note, instead of a C sharp, we make a C natural. That is A melodic minor. The second half of the scale is It has a major sound, and just the beginning. So it feels like a minor half major scale, and when you're doing counterpoint and composition or if you're altering dominant chords in jazz, if you're advanced player, you know what I'm talking about. In those instances, that scale is used. But for now, we're just learning our instrument. We don't need to overload ourselves with that kind of scale. So that leaves us with A harmonic minor, which we play A natural minor from A to A, all white keys. But the last note that G, I'm going to put a sharp on it. Right? Oh, it would be. That sounds a lot like a minor scale, and a lot of music is based on that. Also, when we're making chords later on, that harmonic minor sound, that alteration here in the last note is going to help us make much more interesting chords. For now, all you need to know is A minor is our first minor scale that we're going to study. It's like our C major, right? C is where we started from. So in the minor tonality, we're going to start from A. So from A to A, and on the last note, you make a sharp. Okay. So what is the formula here? So the formula here is starting from A, we have a host step and then a half step, then a host step, a host step, a half step. And now we have a whole plus a half step. Okay, so you have the kind of sound Right? So that is going to define the sound of this minor scale. Now that you know the notes, we're just going to practice this just like we practice the C major scale. So we're going to first find the notes. Make sure you can play the notes clean, make sure you know what the notes are. Get familiar with it, right? Play two octaves, at least, right, or three so you get the right fingerings. We want to make sure we are looking up the right fingers. Oops, made a mistake there. So go slower. Making sure we have the correct Oops, make a mistake, even slower. Make sure you know what are the fingerings. It's very important at this stage when you're learning the fingerings and you're learning the notes, right? Now do the left hand if you're playing piano, making sure you have the right fingering as well. Posture, correct fingering, clean notes. All right. All right. Now that you did this, you might want to do hands together very slow. At the beginning, this might be challenging, okay? So take your time. And so on and so forth. After you do this, put on the matronom and start practicing your scales. Okay? Practice maybe two or three octaves, so you learn how to switch between octaves, right? So the fingerings, then the left hand, same thing. I'm playing two notes per click, but in this class, we're using one note per click to be a little slower. So just do that B. Then back down, right? If you're going to play three octaves, that's fine, too. The important thing here is get familiar with the scale. You do this two times correctly, bump four BPM. Do two times correctly again, bump four BPM again. If you bump the eight BPM in a day, that's plenty. Relax. If you're getting a lot of mistakes, slow down. If you get mistakes all the time, bring the speed down four BPM. And if you're getting so many mistakes, your head is full, you're not focusing, stop for the day or take a break. All right. So now that we got the scale down, remember the next step on the C major tonality. We did the scale, and then we did what? Arpatios. So, same thing. You play a note, skip the next one of the scale, skip the next one, skip the next one, and then start from the second note. And then we did rpagius. How are the rpagio same thing as the measure in the sense that you start from the first note of the scale, skip the second note, skip skip the next one. Now start from the second note of the scale. Skip, skip the next one, skip the next one, and then so on and so forth. Right. So you're just going to be running this. I'm ending here, but the last one, you can repeat and go back down. Look how musical that sounds already. How do we do the rpagius? Same way we did the C major pagius. We're gonna play the scale. And we're going to skip every other note. Skip, skip skip. Start from the second note. Skip, skip, skip. Next one, the third note of the scale, skip skip skip. And then you keep going. Get familiar with the sound and with the notes, right? Try to understand the pattern here. Remember that every time you're going to press that G, it should be a G sharp, right? When you get up top, go back down. That sounds pretty musical already, right? Oops. Oops. So let's go from this part again. This part here is giving me trouble. So I'm just going to focus on this area. You don't have to restart always from the beginning to count as completed exercises, yes, you have to start from the beginning. But if you're figuring out the notes, there is no sense in always start from the beginning because the beginning is going to get very good and the middle, you're going to keep making the mistake. So this is my problem area here, so I'm just going to go from here again. Okay, I think I figured that out. So I'm gonna go back one. You see how I'm not using timing here. I'm only worrying about getting familiar with the notes, right? Making the mistake in the same place I was making the mistake again. So let's go back down. All right. Oh, I played. Oh, yeah, that was right. Okay. See, I'm getting familiar with how to move my hands, right? Do that with the left hand as well. Make a mistake. Maybe I'm just not focused. Let's go back again. Slower. Alright, much better when I'm focused. Right. Now down making sure we're using the correct fingerings. If you don't know what they are, research them online until you get the hang of how to figure it out what the right fingering is. It's pretty musical, right? All right. So after you do this, same thing, put the metronom on, then practice, let's say, you know, one hand, the other hand, the hands together. So on and so forth, the left hand, let's go descending now just for fun. Sometimes I like to sing. Di I skipped one there. Sometimes I like to sing because it's one more thing for your brain to grab on for you to learn this more effectively, right? So I'm making mistakes. So let's lower this because this is too fast. So I lowered four BPM. Let's try again. D. Make a mistake again. Let's lower another four BPM. Mmm. Right? So maybe do two octaves, make sure the fingering is good, the notes are clean. This is a good speed for me. You know, I'm 76 now, and I started this at 88, and I kept lowering up until 76 76. So just how it goes. Some days you're busy, your mind is heavy. You're trying to teach a class at the same time you're playing, doesn't matter. Just make sure that whatever you're playing, it's comfortable because the idea is to have fun. You're not a good or bad person for being able to do it fast or not, right? A lot of great music is played slow. So don't judge yourself or your playing or your progress based on how fast you're playing, right? Just lower the speed so you can do whatever you set to do comfortably. So then hands together, right? So put the metronom again. And then, in this case, probably you need a lot slower always when hands together because it's harder, so That sounds like it reminds me of Cuban music when you're playing hands together like this. I love the sound. Oops, so I made a mistake. I'm gonna go over here again. Oh, this is much more comfortable. And therefore, make another mistake. I'm gonna lower it even more. So now that I'm talking with y'all, this feels much more comfortable and therefore, much more fun. So I can have enjoyment out of doing what I'm doing, you know, both teaching the class, but also playing this exercise, making sure it's not oops. I guess stalking while playing it's not my thing. So my mistake was that I'm forgetting which note I need to start on next time. So sometimes what you can do is go, A, you know, you start from A, right? And then I'll, you know, B. So you keep track of what's the next note you're starting. C. That's the benefit. D, that's the benefit of playing an instrument that you're not using your mouth like a saxophone. E. Right? A Aggie Sharp. Right. So, you see, I identified what is the problem with why I was making that mistake. I was like, every time the two times I got it wrong, it was because I was playing the F twice. There are pages in F twice. So I was kind of talking and getting lost on what's the next note. So I fixed that and played it again. Boom, correct. Moving on, right? So remember to keep your practice breezy, light, keep a dynamic, right? Don't tunnel vision and put so much pressure and, you know, attention to one thing. Keep it breezy. Change the speed. Come up with a different solution, singing, saying the name of the notes, that's going to make you go faster. Right. So now we did scales. We did arpegios. Next, we're going to be doing third exercises, right? So that would be, let's see. Oh, made a mistake. I'm going to go slower. So you remember how it is, right? So you skip. You go to note number three, so you go starting from 123, back one. Now from here, one, two, three, back one. One, two, three, back, one, one, two, three, back, one, one, 23, back one, always using the nodes of this scale, right? So that G sharp is always there. And then when I get here or when you get to the top, you're going to go three down, so one, two, three, one up. Tree down, one up, three down, one up, three down, one, up, three down, one, up, three down one, up, three down one up. Right? So practice this slowly. So you get the hang of the notes. You find out what the notes are, especially when there is a change here. Do that with the left hand, too. Make sure you know the fingering. This fingering here doesn't feel right. Yeah, this fingering here is not feeling right. So let's see if I start from a different finger, for example. Okay, so my left hand starting from the ring finger is gonna fit better here. I already have enough experience to kind of figure out the fingering, but you should be researching that so you know exactly what's the right finger, okay? So in this case, I'm just getting familiar here with the left hand. Okay, now, put the matronom.Oh, this is pretty fast for me. Okay. So that turnaround, let's see. S. This is too fast for me. I'm gonna go down on a bunch. Mm hm. I know what the notes are, but the fingering I'm struggling with. All right. What if I start with the index finger? That could also be comfortable. Whatever feels comfortable to you, whatever fingering you decide to use that you research, stick with it. Okay? So as you're practicing, you're getting better with a specific thing. Alright, so then hands together, and then this is it. So after you get all these exercises up to AD BPM, you add another key. Instead of A minor, add D minor, how do you find D minor? Same thing. It starts on D, right? And we know that formula. The formula is hosp half step, host step, host step, half step. Now 1.5. So be 1.5, and then half. So we have. Right. So we have here a DEF G, A, B flat, C sharp, and D. You could call this D flat, but then we have two D, D flat and de natural. You could call this A sharp, but then you have two as a natural and A sharp. So I'm choosing to call B flat and C sharp. So we have one ladder of each, right, D, E, F, G, A, B flat, C sharp, D. Okay? So now that you know the nodes, get familiar with the fingering, both hands, making sure you can play making sure you can play two octaves. Same thing with the right hand. Oops. Alright, so I feel comfortable here. So put to the matronom one hand. Or if you're doing one click one note per click. Do this two times, right? The same thing. So fast slow down, two times successfully bump it up, that kind of thing. Then hands together. Remember, Oh, piano, I have to practice three times more than other people. Yeah, but you make the sound pretty easy. There are pros and cons and things that are hard and easy in each instrument. In the end of the day, you're pretty much practicing the same. From my experience, kind of like playing pretty much every family of instruments out there. And yeah, in the end, it catches you in some sort of way that you still need to practice. It's just what it is that require practice is different. So this is how you master the minor tonalities. Same way as you did the major ones. Same process. Now, this is a logic keep track. Now you have more things to practice. Let's update our practice journal. Here is an updated practice journal where you still have your name, you know how many notes per click you like to do. In this case, you're probably doing one note per click. You put the date of your practice here, and then you put how fast? Are you doing your chromatic scale? How fast you did your C major scale? How fast you did your, you know, F major scale? And then your rpagio, your third intervals. And then here in this section, I put it the minor tonality exercises. So let's say you're doing the A minor now, maybe start that at 36 or 40. And you played the scale, right? And then you play the Arpachios let's say, a Foty, and then you played the third intervals at 36, right? And then as you go on, go on, go on, on, maybe by the time you here, and you're like, 80, 80, 80, you know, maybe you add at this point, you add the D minor. So you go and put like, Oh, I'm going to start here from Foty. I'm going to start here from Foty. Right? So, it's the same process as managing your major exercises. Once you get this fast enough to 80, let's say, you can add a new scale. When you get these rpasis fast enough, you can add new rpagio new major pasios. Same thing for the third intervals, and same thing for the minor stuff. So this is a game and it's a long game. So it's going to take you time to do this. But it's going to be a lot of fun. And as you do it, it gets easier and easier and easier and you start seeing patterns in this scale and start being really easy once you practice continuously. Remember to not over practice, practice a little bit. So also reminder that I like to keep, you know, one tab per month or one tab per week. Sometimes you can just, you know, rename this and say, Hey, this is May or, you know, week of and put the date. And then once you have here, Your practice done, you can just duplicate that and make a new tab and go start next month or next week, right? So keeping track of your progress should feel pretty exciting. And if it's feeling overwhelming and if it's feeling hard, it's because you're doing too fast or because you introduce too many skills and exercises too quick. I'm going to leave this template of the updated Practice journal in the resource tab of this lesson. Have a look if you like to use these templates that I'm sharing. But if you're doing in a physical book or if you're using a notepad or whatever way you have your practice journal, just update that so that includes these new scales now. Same thing as the major scales. Your next scale should be four notes away from the scale you're playing now. So you're on A minor, so you count A, B, CD. So D will be your next harmonic minor scale. You're on D, you count four notes, D EFG. So your next scale is going to be G harmonic minor. Reason for that is that you gradually get harder scales which have fingerings that are a little bit more tricky. And if you just choose randomly, you might get a scale that's way too hard, way too soon. So by following this method, counting four notes from the note you are at, you're going to be in a very smooth progression with your scales. I want you give a little caveat about all of this practice for guitar. A lot of people like to play guitar to simply play chords, and they like to They just want strum chords and play campfire songs, and they want to sing as they're playing. All of this practice that we're doing is aimed for you to be able to play melodies. So you can play solo, so you can improvise, so you can play melodies. And if you're not really into doing that, and all you want is to play chords, then you can skip to the chords lessons in this class down below. I suggest that even if you don't want to play melodies and solo, that you still watch these lessons, it's going to give you a better musical idea of how music works. But yeah, all of this practice is meant for people that wants to play melody. Usually, if you're playing piano, saxophone, flute, singing, of course, you're going to be playing melodies, so that's a given. But the guitar is an instrument that a lot of people just use to play chords, right? So if that's what you want, that's fine. This information is on the lessons about chords, a few lessons downstream. Alright, so A harmonic minor on the guitar, same thing. We're going to count those who steps half steps, but also you can look at the tableture so you know which fingers and which strings to use. This is A harmonic minor on the guitar. Becoming familiar with the notes here. Sounds so beautiful. I love the sound of harmonic minor on the guitar. So now that you're familiar with this, put you the matronom and play the scale with the matronom. And then you can do third exercises. All right. And now A harmonic minor diatonic Arcadis with the matronomPlaying that very, very, very slow. And remember, find the notes first so you're comfortable. So first, I'm going to play without matronom oh Now we backwards. Alright, so now you have everything you need to master the minor tonalities. We took time explaining the exercises and the major scale over the course of four lessons, but this one is everything condensed into one lesson, all about minor scales. In this case, harmonic minor scales. And the reason for that is because it's exactly the same. Once you have the scale, once you have the formula, once you have the notes, you become familiar with the scale, you play on the matronom, then you become familiar with the pagios, you put to the matronom, you become familiar with third intervals, you put to the matronom. You level that up over many days, many weeks, maybe. And then after that's leveled up a bit and you feeling more comfortable, you add a new scale. So then you go from A to D to G and so on and so forth. So your daily practice at this point should look like something. Maybe you're doing chromatic scales, and that doesn't take much of your time. You're doing some long tones, that might not take much of your time. Then you're doing some major scales, maybe the C major, F measure. That should be fairly simple for you to do. If not, reduce that speed, make sure it's not taking much of your time. Now maybe introducing a minor scale. So that might take you more of your time. That might be the bulk of your practice. Then write down the BPM. If you just play the scale and you ran out of time, 15, 20, 25 minutes, call it a day. Next day when you go back, you have a quick warm up with your chromatic scale, your major scales, your A major scale, your A minor scale, where you already have a few BPM leveled up, and now maybe you add thepaios. So you can focus with the most mental energy you have on whatever is new. Sometimes I like to start with the hardest thing first. So maybe you do a little warm up, and the warm up might be the chromatic scale might be some long notes and then go right away to whatever is new for your practice. And then after you do that, then you can let loose by playing some major scales they already know and then try to level them up. You will know what feels best to you. The important thing is keep it breezy, keep a light, keep it short, and come back the next day. The more consecutive days you practice, the easier it's going to be to start where you left off, and your hands are going to start jumping into place, and you'll be impressed, you'll be like, Wow, look at what I'm playing. And it's a really good feeling once you get that going. Okay. So make sure to update your practice journal. Then once you have all these minor exercises on your practice journal and you have a couple of entries in there, share them with us on the project section of this class. We would love to see the progress you're making. If you have any questions, let us know. I will try my best to answer. If not, other people can answer you as well. And once you're feeling comfortable with the minor tonality, meet me on the next lesson. In fact, meet me on the next lesson right away. I'm going to give you some tips about how to make your practice more efficient. 18. Learning to Love the Process: As you noticed, there are a lot of things to practice. But think about a baby that's learning how to talk and babbling and making sounds that nobody really can understand. So if you're making sounds on your instrument that requires a little more poetic license to be understood, that's okay. That's just part of your development. You notice that the more you practice, the better you get, so it's just a matter of time for you to be fluent on your instrument and in playing music. Remember that it's part of the process to look weird or to sound odd. Think about when you're trying to grow your hair. You have a mullet face. You have a face that hairs in your face. You look really weird, and then out of a sudden, you have a nice long hair and everybody's like, Oh, look at that cool hair. So there is growing pain for music as well. So don't let other people bring you down. Usually the people that bring you down is your loved ones, people that live with you. They might say you sound like a duck. They might say, I can't hear you practicing anymore. They might give you a hard time, but they just don't understand what it takes to play an instrument fluently. And when you're playing music that they like and later you're playing for your friends and family, everybody's going to love that you're able to play. So just tune those people out right now. Don't let anybody bring you down. And nobody should bring you down, including yourself. So don't judge yourself because you're not a good player or because you're making too many mistakes. Don't let that weigh on you because if you let that mentality take control, you won't feel motivated and inspiring to keep showing up to practice day after day. You might have noticed that people that really love the process will have a big future playing music, and therefore they will get very good because they just been doing for a long time. So think about it. You're probably going to practice more than you're actually going to play music. So if you love to practice, if you love to bump your BPMs up, if you love to learn a new scale, if you love to play those patterns and manipulate sound, and you're just happy that you're spending some time with your instrument. Then when you least expect, you be a good player. However, if you trying to power through the practicing just so you can get to the play, and you just dread learning the scales and you hate the sound of the metronome and it sounds so boring and it's so hard, then you're not going to get to the part of playing music. So learn to love the process. And for some of us, that comes naturally. Some of us have to kind of learn to love the process. Think about it, liking things that are good for you. Maybe when we're younger, we like troublemakers for relationship. Maybe we see another person that is troubled or that needs help and we feel attracted to it. But maybe once we have that relationship, that might be toxic, and that might be not the best thing for us. However, if we are attracted to somebody that likes us back, that is stable, that is fun, that is intelligent, that is responsible, all of that is going to rub on you and it's going to be part of your life. So if you like what's good for you, you will have success both in practicing relationships, in your diet, in physical exercise in anything you can think of. Now, if you want a quick fix or if you just want some quick relief and you're seeking short term pleasures, like, I want to play that song right now. I want to, you know, just do whatever on my instrument, and I don't care about metronomes and practicing. I just want to play this one song right now. You might have a short life in music and in practice because the motivation and that drive might be lacking some days. You won't have anything to fall back to that you can continue to play and continue to improve. So learning how to love the process is key for your success learning an instrument. If you think of it, it's not that complicated. You have two tonalities, major and minor. For each of those tonalities, you have 12 different keys. So we have two times 12. And for each one of those 12, that's times two because major and minor, we have three exercises. We have scales, we have rpagios and we have thirds. Okay? So, three times 12 times two. So three exercises times 12 keys, times two tonalities. That's 72 things you need to learn to be totally fluent in music. So if you think of it, it's not that mysterious. It might take you time, but this might be a more enjoyable ride than you can imagine right now. You're going to find lots of things about yourself. You're going to learn how you learn best. You're going to have moments that you're going to be meditating as you're practicing and your mind is just going to go in a state of being passive while the learning is coming through you. Your body and your muscles are going to have muscle memory, and they're going to be firing and executing what you want. Just when you think about the song, boom, it's going to come out. You think about the scale, boom, it comes out. When you get to that stage, which doesn't take much. You can even get this stage as a beginner playing long notes or playing chromatic scale or playing just three notes. You just play. Tara, er, er, experiment with the sounds and with the techniques. And as you do that, your mind's going to get in a state of flow. And once you get into that flow, you going to want to go back there. It's basically feeling very much alive. And once you do that, you get full of energy and full of motivation and drive to keep practicing, keep learning, keep developing this craft. And later on, you'll be able to give back all of this time that you're taking for yourself. You're going to give back when you play for your friends and family. Now, we mostly talked about scales and rpagio and third intervals and holes and half steps, and we didn't talk much about actual music. We just talked about technique, and secretly, that was done on purpose. At this point, you are only here if you could get past that technique. And if you could get past that techniques, so you can see the music that lies ahead. So now that you have those fundamentals and that you can grasp the tools you need to have in order to play music, you are ready to start experimenting with actual sounds that will feel musical to you. Next lesson, we're going to assume you only know C major and A, A harmonic minor. And just having those two scales available, we're going to learn how to play some melodies, how to experiment. We're going to get into the fun part of playing music. Keep updating your music journal, and meet me on the next lesson when you think you can play C major and A harmonic minor comfortably, and then we'll experiment with some melodies. See you then. A 19. Learning Songs: Melodies: Alright. So remember, melody, one note at a time. We're not playing more than one note at the same time. This gets into Jiffer territory. So we're staying with melodies one note at a time. Now, you can play notes one after the other like a scale, but you can also do leaps like arpegios or any kind of leaps. And you can do third exercises, that kind of leap. And notice that you always either going up or going up with lips or you're going down with lips as well. So if you get all of those elements and you blend them, you usually get a nice melody. So a little bit of scale arpegio now I was going up, I'm going to go down, right? So It's a nice melody or right? I'm repeating a note and back to the same note. So the notes are next to each other. And now to contrast, I do a leap. And because the leap went up, so now I'm going to go down. So you see the melodies usually have a pretty nice balance of those elements up and down, sequential leaps. Try to balance that out. Let's come up with a melody. Let's say I go So now, probably need some leaps. Now, probably need to go down. Right? Right? So I'm balancing that. What if you start going down? That's fine. Right. Or maybe melodies you know, uh Hmm. Right? So what do we have here? A leap and back. Now sequence. So I went back and forth, and then an rpagio going down. See? Leap, scale, rpagio. Third exercise. Right? So leap sequence, going up and then going down, going up, then going down. So give it a try. Get a scale. Are you familiar with it and try to make melodies like that. Let's say we have A minor here, Amonic minor. So maybe I will do sequence. Sorry, rpagio scale. I'm gonna repeat. Now I'm going to go scale up instead. Right. So arpeggio. Scale. Rpagio a little variation went up at this time. So do you see how you can create melodies that way? Also, another fun way to learn about melodies is to get songs that you know. So happy birthday to you, pretty much everybody knows that song. So try to figure out how to play that. It's trial and error, right? So choose a note and see if that's going to feature the scale that you're playing. So let's say if we want to start here, All right. Okay. Good. So now again. What about I had this F. Now let's try the G. All right. So you can kind of see the sequence here, right? You have F E. GF. If you want to keep going with that sequence would be. Right. Let's keep going. We were here, right? Octave. How do you know it's an octave? As you're playing scales, you're gonna be going over the repeat sections, this octave section. So you're gonna have in your head in your ears the more you practice scales. So. Now, that sounds off. That B sounds off. That also B sounds off, so Right, so I had a leap there. I had to have the leap, not a sequential note. How would you know this? Well, if you practice if you're practicing rpagios you would get that sound in your head, right? So right? Now I have that note, you see how it's a B flat. That's not in C major, because the C major, we have all white keys. So which key do I have a B flat? Well, if you've been practicing a major scales, you would know that it's F measure. Remember, you already practiced this, so you would identify that scale as an F. If you haven't practiced, that's fine. I'm just explaining how you would know that after practicing, right? So this is how you get there by practicing scales and chords and different keys. That takes weeks, months, ears. So hanging there, but you would know this, right? And then when it finishes here, it feels like the root. How does it feel like the root? Because you've been practicing these scales, and you would get a sense right now of what the root is. So now, do you see that we started on C. So that means that when the root is F, happy birthday U starts on C. So if we count F, one, two, three, four, five, it starts on the five of the root. So happy birthday to starts on the fifth note of that root of that scale of F major. So if I want to play happy birthday to you in C, I need to start from 50 C, the fifth Os. So we have C, one, two, three, four, five. So if I want to play in C using only white keys, I have to start in G instead. Let's try. Right. Good. Now have that leap and remember the rpagio going down. Scale. So it's an rpagio going to a scale, and then Right? So you see how you have an rpagio here, and then I scale. Learn that, make your own melodies. So let's say my melody is going to be now You see, I go scale rpagio scale, right? Going up, rpagio going down with a scale. So if you balance those elements, you should be able to get melodies. Now, this is one approach to make sure your melodies sound good and to give you inspiration to find melodies. But another way is to just use your intuition, right? As you're practicing third exercises, just Good. I just let my fingers fall in there. Why did this sound musical because I'm changing the rhythm, right? Waiting, right? And then going down. So after a big leap, you can wait a little bit to give more drama, right? Or if you're doing, you know, every time you feel like you arriving at a note, you can hold a little bit, or you can put pauses like Pow, pause. Pause. Pause. Pause. Repeating, right? So try to incorporate these elements into your process of making melodies, and you should have lots of fun because you already know the scales, the arpagios and the third exercises. Remember, as you learn different keys, let's say you learn Gmajor. I have F sharp in there. Now play some melodies on G major. Look how pretty that is. I just did an rpagio starting from F sharp I lid F sharp to G, then did an rpagio the same way you're doing. Right? So I just did. Oops. And then just went down. One note and then a leap. So it's not that hard. Give it a few tries and remember you're always been experimenting and making these melodies after you are comfortable playing scales, arpegios third exercises from a particular scale, from a particular key. Also, another fun thing to do is to play nursery rhymes. Remember that those are very, very simple and you have a chance to learn by ear. So, you know, You can't start with that one. You just play the scale of C up to the third note, and then you go to five. Five, five, six, five, right? Then just try to go from there. You see that here we have a theme of repeating a note, like repeat. Repeat again. Repeating the same notes twice, right? Steal that idea for yourself. Now when you're making a melodies. See how I added a double note there. See? You can steal the concept. No copy the melody, because that's not even fun. You can copy the melody to learn how to play to extract information. But let's say you're composing something to express yourself, you can steal the concept and then adjust to your own notes, to your own rhythms, to your own way of expressing yourself, expressing your music. Sounds good. So this is how you have fun and create some melodies on the piano. Don't worry about the left hand playing bass and playing chords. We're going to talk about that a few lessons downstream. Now let's have a look on the guitar and on a wind instrument, how it would look like to play a melody. Alright, let's try a wind instrument. This is a tenor saxophone. And let's try the minor key. A harmonic minor. Okay? Okay, play the notes. Clean. Now, I have the arpegs. Right? And going down. And I have the third exercises. So once you practice those up and down the instrument with the metronome and all that, now you come here and try to play some melodies. Try happy birthday to you. Happy birthday to you is on a major key, so it's not going to walk on a minor scale, but maybe summertime is a nice one to play on all your minor scales. So summer so summertime starts on the third note of this scale. So starting on that one. Summertime is a nice song to play every time you add a new minor scale to a arsenal. So summertime starts on the fifth note of the minor scale, so So you starting on that note? Right. So, learn from that. I went. Five, three, five, and it's a gap going up and down. And then notes next to each other going up and down and a leap at the bottom. Leap. Right. In the piano, you can literally see the leaps and the notes together. But if you're playing a wind instrument, you will know what's a leap and what's a consecutive note. And at this point, if you've been practicing for a couple of weeks, you start to hear what are notes adjacent to each other, notes that are adjacent to each other, and notes that are apart, like leaping. So we had a leap, a sequence, and then a leap going down. So if I want to copy that idea, but using different notes, Right? Same concept using different notes. Let's try something else. I'm using different leaps. I'm using different notes, but I am starting with a leap. I'm doing a sequence, and then I'm having another leap, right? When I have a big leap, maybe hold there to create some tension and then go in opposite direction with a scale. Y. Right? Just can't repeat the scale going down. He So, melodies are everywhere. You just start stumbling on them as long as you have under your fingers the scale, the patios and the third exercises. So that is the key to unlock your potential playing pretty much any melodies that you could play in this Western system of 12 half steps within an octave. So those three exercises are so important. Remember, you only have 72 exercises to master a lot of music. Two tonalities, 12 keys, each tonality, and then for each tonality, you do three exercises. Scales, rpagio and third exercises. Okay. Next, let's talk about notation. 20. What Are Chords? : Alright. Now you can play some melodies thanks to the fact that you've been practicing scales Apagios and third exercises in both major and minor tonalities. Because of that, you can play with those elements, go up, go down, balance out the design or the feeling of your melody, and you can create beautiful original melodies. You can experiment. You can even start to learn other melodies by ear at this point. However, melody is only one of three elements of music. The other elements are melody, rhythm, and harmony. What is harmony? Harmony is the science of how to organize chords and what is chords. And chords is when you play two or more notes at the same time. So when you're playing those notes at the same time, which notes do you choose to play at the same time? How does that work? You have 12 half steps and stack up those 12 half steps in blocks that you play together, if you're just going to empirically try, if you're just going to play by trial and error, there is so many possibilities and permutations. It would be probably pretty hard to get something that sounds good. That's why I want you to learn about chord theory and about harmony. So everything that you play sounds good, or it fits. And then you can select, Hey, I prefer this, I prefer that. But we're going to learn about how to build chords and what chords are. That way, you'll be able to play songs and play sounds that support the melody. Think of it like a singer. You can sing a song by yourself, which is called A Capella. But if you have a guitar or a keyboard or instrument that's playing chords underneath, it feels like the melody is supported. You're kind of giving the melody a context. So the chords can be very, very helpful if all you want to do is to strum some chords on the guitar and play campfire songs for your friends and family. Let's say you're playing piano, but you don't care about playing melodies and you don't want to be an intermediate player, you just want to take it easy and just be able to play chords so you can sing on top. That is totally valid, and if that's as far as you want to go learning music, that is great. This lesson is exactly for you, how to build chords, then we're going to try together building some chords to make sure you really understand on the following lesson. And two lessons from now, we're going to learn some songs with the knowledge of chords we're going to get throughout this lesson and the following lesson. Another question comes to mind. If all you want to do is to play chords, campfire style, do you really need to learn about scales and rpasio and third exercises? Yes. Maybe you don't want to practice that as much as people that are playing melody will need to practice, but you definitely want to understand because those melodies will be playing on top of the chords that you would be playing. So you need to know about how they're constructed, what do they sound like. And how is your ear going to improve if all you're playing is a bunch of notes at the same time? If all you're playing is chords. You need to have a sense of one note at a time, so you can hear lips and you can hear sequences. And that is going to improve your understanding of music in general. So, yes, you should also practice scales, rpagis and third exercises. But maybe you just don't want to do as much as people that are going to play melodies are going to practice. Now, let's have a closer look on what chords are in practice. Let's look over the piano how to build chords. And once again, we're just using the piano because it's really easy to visualize. Let's have a look on chords. Remember, notes playing one at a time. It doesn't matter if you're leaping, which direction you're going, but one at a time, it goes under the realm of melody. Here, we're talking about harmony. So two or more notes played at the same time. You can play them with rhythm. But they are played at the same time, okay? Now, do you notice something similar about the chords? Cords are your arpegios played simultaneously. So remember when you played C major, and then you played arpegios. Now, if you get those arpegios play at the same time, boom, you have a cord right there. Play the same time. Oh so essentially your pages played at the same time. They are chords. But what kind of chords? If you look up a song and it says C major, F minor, B flat major, how do you know what the chords are? Let's talk about that. In the same way that scales have a formula of half steps and whole steps and how you find a measure scale. Remember, you have ho, ho, half step, ho, ho, ho, half step, and that's the formula of the C major scale. In the same way, we have a formula for the chords, okay? For now we're going to talk about three note chords. When you play three notes at the same time, okay, those are called triads. So for triads, we have four flavors of triads. These are the flavors. Okay, that's it. The end. Seriously, these are the flavors of triads you need to know. Now, what are they? Measure. Measure you already know is the first rpasio from the measure scale. So if you want to know the formula here, just follow along. I would be you start counting for the next, you know, interval. So you have one half step, two half steps, three half steps, four half steps. Okay. So from the root, you have four half steps, and then you have three half steps one, two, three. So four half steps and then three half steps. This is Major. If you build elsewhere, same thing. So if you start here, let's say, right? So we have one, two, three, four, one, two, three. So you see how this has the same sound as this. Not the same sound, but the same quality, the same structure, okay? The same flavor. This is the major triad. Now, minor triad, let's go from I'm going to stay always in C, so you see the difference. So starting on C is the same rpagio as your first rpagio from the harmonic minor scale. So you have If you practice the C minor and the first arpagio is the minor triad. So the formula here is three half steps and then four, one, two, three, four half steps. Alright. So notice that from the major to the minor, you only get the middle note and you go a flat. You go one half step back. Major minor. So minor is three half steps plus four half steps. Alright. If you want to build elsewhere, let's say here. So three half stamps will be one, two, three, now, one, two, three, four. That, same flavor. Same flavor. So this is the minor triad. Now, how do you find the diminished triad? Diminished triad, from the minor here, you get the top note and you make it flat. So that sound, what is the formula here? It's three half steps, one, two, three, then one, two, three. So you have three half steps and three half steps. Diminished. Let's say we start from here, be one, two, three, one, two, three. Kind of spooky. That is the diminished triad and augmented triad from the measure, you put a sharp on the top note on the fifth node. So what is the formula here? It's four half steps, one, two, three, four, and one, two, three, four. So four half steps and four half steps. Okay. So how do these look? On paper, Let's have a look here. Here you have the formula, here you have the notes, C, EG. So it would look like this, a C, or you could have a mash, like C mash for C major, right? I an example, if you start from E flat, this would be the nodes. So it could look like this. This is important to keep track of because this is how it's going to appear on the songs you play. Okay. So here we have the minor and the formula. Here you have the notes if we start on A, here will be the notes if you start on C. And this is how you would look like on paper when you see on a song. It could have M, like C capital for the root and M, that would be a C minor, or it can be CMI or CMI N sometimes like this. So this will mean C minor. Could also be a dash, like a minus sign like C dash, it would mean C minor as well. Okay? So diminished, here is the formula. If you do a diminished chord on C, this will be the notes, C, E flat to G flat. And then if you look up a song, this is how it's going to show up. Either C, dim dim for dimiinish or that little degree symbol, C, and then the little circle, that means diminished. And augmented. Here is the formula. If you do it on C, it will be CE G sharp, and this is how it would look if you look up a song. I would either be Og, like Cog for augmented, or it could be C sharp five. In this case, sorry, it would look like this. C sharp C five sharp, right, because you're telling that the five is going to be sharp. So which is different from what I had here before. If you do this will be C sharp. Augmented, but the sharp needs to go after the number, so it's augmented. C, and then the five can be sharp. So C five, sharp could be augmented. Why is that? Because G here is the fifth from C. How do you know that if you count C, D, EF G, C five, one, two, three, four, five. So five sharp means five sharp. So if you play the Carpatio with the five sharp, it's augmented. That's why of this symbol being like that. Now, it could also be a C plus the same way that the minor could be a minus C minor, the augmented, it's a plus. Like C plus, going to be augmented. Alright? Alright, so this is go to keep it in mind. And remember, you might see other symbols like this, we're going to talk about on the next lesson, but those are if you have tattered chords, meaning chords with four notes. We're not talking about that yet, so don't worry about it for the moment. Just remember how to make this happen, okay? Now, a word about this is when you need to find a chord, so let's say I'm playing a song that is, you know, C F, G, C. Let's say I'm doing that, right? Now, if I need to find out, Hey, what is C? And I go, one, two, three, four, one, two, three. Okay, I find the C. Now the next chord is an F. So I go the same thing, one, two, three, four, one, two, three, right? So I have. And then G, go same thing, one, two, three, four, one, two, three. G, and then back to C. So for me to find out the chords, it's important this theory. I need to know how to figure them out, but nobody is going to be playing, Hey, C. One, two, three. Okay. Nobody is going to be doing that because music is happening over time. You don't have time to count. You don't have time to figure this out every time. So you need to just memorize it. But the way you memorize it, it's not with your brains with your muscles. It's a muscle memory. If every time you're playing C, you're trying to remember how it feels on your hand, look at it, memorize the sound, be really present, understand the patterns here. The more points of reference you can send a memory, the more you're going to remember. After a while, you're just going to instantly recall the C and the F and the G. Same way that when you're learning how to spell, you're like, C A, cat. And then every time you like cat, cat. But then out of a sudden, when you see the graphic of the, you know, when you see on the page, the C the A and the you're not figuring that out anymore. You're not sounding that out. You immediately know the sound. You're like cat. So for chords, it's the same thing. You use this theory, so you can get this under your hand so you can start playing and start finding these chords. But the more you play, the more you're going to memorize, and very soon, you're going to know immediately. So if I say CFG, you're going to go right away. All right. Also, muscle memory for the piano and for the guitar in specific, they can be easier than other instruments in the sense that you see how the fingerings that I'm using here is the same for those chords. So if I had a cast on my hand and I just moved around to the roots, I would find those chords, right? Some chords are different. You need black keys, but still the shape the same, see? These are all major chords. So once your hand gets that shape and you understand, you kind of just have to move it around making sure you know the theory and what the keys are. But after a while, you're just going to be able to hit the cords, without thinking about it. So in the beginning, it might feel that you push an elephant uphill and you're thinking so hard four half steps plus three half steps and your brain is overloading, don't worry. That brain overloading, it's like when you go to the gym. And you walk out and your muscles are hurting, but then your muscles grow and you're strong, right? So that menthol effort is going to pay off later, you're going to be able to be talking with somebody and playing those chords, and there'll be no problem. They just going to come to you naturally, okay? So let me show you on the guitar how that looks like. So on the guitar, to find chords here, it's also about muscle memory. Once you have a chord shape, you can just move it around. And always going to be the same chord, just changing keys. So if this is an F, if you go one frat up, it's gonna be F sharp, and then G, and then G sharp, and then A. So for the guitar is all about knowing which chord shape you need to play that particular chord. So for that, you just look it up guitar diagram, and we'll tell you where you press your fingers, Okay? We'll have a quick look on how to research that. It's piece of cake. But basically, once you have a chord shape, it might sound something like this. Some of the notes might not be ringing. That's either because your posture, maybe your hand is in such way that you're not pressing the strings properly. So make sure you're relaxed and that your wrist is the way it should be. And once you press it, you don't want to let your hands collapse. You want your hands pressing straight into the board. And after you're pressing the neck properly and the strings between the frets, try to clear every single string. Make sure you can play all of them separate, and they sound good, like a harp should sound, right? Now, in the beginning might feel hard and your hand might be stressing out to hold this and you might be doing a lot of effort. It's okay. In the beginning, often, we need to put that kind of strength to get familiar with the position. Also to let your muscles build so you can actually hold the cord. But you shouldn't do it so much that you feel pain, right? If you're feeling tired, and if you're feeling a lot of effort, that's okay. The feeling will go away and later just be able to do it, no problem. But in the beginning, it might feel a little challenging. There is no such thing as my hands that you small, my hands are you big, my guitar is this, my guitar is that. It's probably just because you're starting, right? So just hang with it and keep practicing and try to play the chord, okay? Stick with one chord first. After you learn the chord shape, you can play all of the chords. Right? So every chord shape you do, you get 12 free. So, you know, they are a little bit more tricky than the piano, but you get 12 free every time you crack one shape. So, you know, remember to practice patiently, okay? Let's have a look on how to find some chord diagrams. Just Google something like, let's say, C measure guitar, Cord diagram. Just, boom, you don't even have to click on images. They're right here, many C shapes, right? Let's click on this one. So you see right there, it tells you to the X means is the first frat. So the very beginning, you have frat number three. So frat number one, two, three. Now, you have finger three on the second finger three on the fifth string. On the third frat, right there. It's like playing that game, you know, with the ships that you say, Hey, a seven, and you try to, you know, send bombs on a ship, and you try to figure it out where the enemy ships are, you know, that game. So it's kind of like that. You just look at the diagram and you see, Okay, the finger two is going to be on the fourth string on the second frat. So right there. Finger one is going to be on the second string on the first frat. Boom. So you did that shape Let's see. Simple as that, okay? We'll look more into this once we're learning songs in a few lessons. Now that you know how to build chords in theory, let's say if you can use that theory to build chords yourself. We'll try that together in the next lesson. 21. Building Chords: All right. Surprise quiz. Who doesn't love a surprise quiz? But this one will be fun. Let's go to the worksheet and have a look on some exercises together. Let's try to build cords using the formulas we learned on the previous lesson. Alright. So here on the worksheet, we're going to try to build those cords, okay? So here's what we're going to try to do. Not try. There is no try. There is only doing it. So A, that symbol means major see here when we just have the capital ladder. So that's A measure. And how do we build this? Here is the formula. So let's go from A, and let's count four half steps from the root, from the first note, one, two, three, four, no B C sharp. Now count another three half steps from there, one, two, three. So we have A, C sharp, and E. All right, so that's A major. So you go here and you go, A, C sharp, and E. Boom. Now, next, we have F minor. How to do that. See here the formula. So F minor, the little M, you know it's F minor. So we're going to start from F, and the formula here is three plus four, halfstep. So we're going to go three, one, two, three, one, two, three, four. So we have F, a flat and C. So, boom, just go here. F, A flat and C. Boom. Now, which formula do we use for that one? Well, that one, what is D something? So them, what is them. We see here them is for diminish. So this will be the formula, and the formula is three half steps plus three half steps. So I'm going to start on D. I'm going to go one, two, three, one, two, three. So B. Right. So now we have D F A flat. Boom, DFA flat. Now I'm going to do one more, and then I'll give you some exercises here. Okay? I'll give you four exercises because I'm doing four with you to be fair. So now we have D plus. What does that plus means? See here plus, that'll be augmented. Okay? So the formula here is four half steps, plus four half steps. Also, starting from D. So let's count one, two, three, four. Now, one, two, three, four, So what we have here, we have D F sharp and A sharp. Okay. So D F sharp, A sharp. Boom, you did it, right? So now, you finish the four exercises here, okay? G major, G minor. Let's have this B A diminish and E augmented. Alright. Next, you try the worksheet. Once you finish those four exercises there, you'll be ready to go to the next lesson. On the next lesson, we're going to learn how to get everything we know about chords and put together so we can learn how to play some songs. 22. Playing with Chords: Alright, time to learn some songs. How it would work to use what we know about chords to try to learn some songs off the Internet. Let's have a look together. So I just went to Google and typed three little Birds chords by Bob Marley. And the reason for that is because Bob Marley songs are fairly easy to play. They only have a few chords. Paul Simon is the same thing Bob Dylan, some Beatles songs. So I recommend those artists to get you started playing chords. But also anybody that you want, as long as it's simple, try to find simple chords because you're just starting out. So here, let's say, if you're playing guitar, it's pretty straightforward because you have the chord diagram right there. See the chord diagram. So how would that look like? We have that bold line up top there is the nut. So it's this very top fret over here. And then you have finger one, two, three, and they are all on top of each other on the second fret is starting from the fourth string. So like that. Right. So I'm going to play the A. This is the A. You do the same thing with the D, look it in there, put the fingers where they go on the diagram. Those two axes means you shouldn't play those strings. So when you're strumming, just avoid those fifth and sixth strings. And then you have E. And that's it. So it's AD E. Okay? So first thing you would do is just try to play those chords. So we have three chords. They are ADE. For you, remember, that might sound like where I put my finger, et cetera. And then the notes might be sounding like this. Clear every single note. Grace. If that's all you can do for a whole day, that's fine. Just learn the A. Go back, try to play, try to put your hand down, put it back up, you know, relax, make sure your posture is correct. Okay. Play games down, down, up, up, down, down, up, up. Try to play each string one after the other. Try to become familiar with this. Just take your time. Sometimes I even like to sit in front of the TV and just, you know, get used to the position. But that's controversial. But yeah, as much as you can try to press this shape, the quicker you're going to learn how to hold it. So remember, sometimes it takes a little time, okay? So you do the same thing for D and E. Once you're able to play those three chords, now you have to play in between them. That might feel very slow. For example, you might be playing, like, don't worry about a thing 'cause there you stuck. 'Cause and then you go. Okay, 'cause every little thing is gonna be your Here go, ta ta ta ta ta ta. Alright. Alright. Found it. So go again. Don't worry about a thing. 'Cause take your time, put your fingers straight out. Every little thing is gonna be your back today, okay? Alright. Right? So you might have to play the song excruciatingly slow or play one chord, totally stop the time, find the other chord, and then play it. That's normal. Everybody goes through that, okay? So just play. Mm hmm Mm hmm. Mm hmm hmm hmm. Mm hmm. The, the da, nah. Okay. So one way to do it, too, is until you need to play the next chord, try to get ready while the song's playing, for example. Don't worry. About a thing. 'Cause every little thing is gonna be right. Right. So in between the time I have between one chord and the other, instead of holding it and keep strumming the way a proficient guitar player would do, maybe just stop but take that set amount of time to find your next chord. Even if you can just do Don't worry. About a thing 'cause every little thing is gonna be right. Right? Even if you need all of that time to set up the next cord, that's totally fine. And in the beginning, you're gonna need even more time than that. But remember, there is only a few cords. There are seven cords per key. There are 12 keys in tonalities. That's it. Well, then all of that number plus four because you have majors, minors, diminishes and augmented. So it's a couple of hundred chords. But in the guitar especially, once you know one shape, you gain 12 freebies. So it's a couple of hundred chords, but you're learning 12 by 12 chunks. So don't worry. It's not that hard. A lot of people that, you know, didn't practice that much, they can play guitar chords, and you see a lot of artists drunk and not focused and totally relaxed in weird positions, totally being able to play chords, okay? Probably not going to play a crazy jazz solo or some heav metal solo or something really complicated. But this type of chords, it's fairly easy to do, but in the beginning, it's going to feel very hard. So if you go over the hump, which is going to take a few days, maybe a few weeks of practice. Boom, you gain a skill you'll never forget, okay? So this is how you would figure the chords out on the guitar. Let's look how that would feel like to try to put the song together, looking at the chords on this online page that I found here. So basically, you just follow the lyrics. You kind of know the song, right? So play on YouTube if you don't or find the song that you know, but it's telling you where the chords should go. You see? Don't worry. So on worry you have the A about a thing use every little thing is going to be alright, right? So it's telling you where the chords happen. This is the way of telling you a little bit of the rhythm, right? It's not telling you that you should do this, don't we? About a thing. Or if you should do. Don't worry. About a thing. It doesn't matter, right? So you come up with your own rhythm or you do the rhythm that artist is doing. Especially when you're starting for this purpose, it's important that you play the chord where it falls on the lyrics, right? So, don't worry. About a thing. 'Cause every little thing is gonna be alright. Right? So let's go to the verse. Rise up this morning. Smile with the rising sun. Tree little bird. Brett on doorstep. Singing, sing songs. You can also strum melodies, p and drum. Singing. This is my message to you. Right? So which pattern do you strum? You can do pretty much anything. Look online. I kind of like this one for all purposes. Down, down, up, up, down, up, down, down, up, up, down, up, down, down, up, up, down, down, up, up, down, up, down, down up. That's my go too. But you can look up online a bunch of other strumming patterns. And you can also play note by note. I like this because it teaches you to check if you're really pressing the notes properly. Singing the A. In the beginning, you're gonna have to play very slow, right? 'Cause every little thing is gonna be Take your time, right? And then after you get a hang of playing this, even if you're playing very slowly, like, don't worry about anything and then you need to go and you take your time cause every little thing, take your time back, da da, da, that'll be right. Like, after you get through that phase of getting familiar with the chords and the lyrics, and you can play the chord separately, and you can more or less glide in between them, then it's time to bring our friend the matronome, right? So set up a tempo that you think you can play, right? Then. About a thing. 'Cause every little thing is gonna be alright. Singing then. You can't you make it easier? Just go down or up so this strumming is not one more thing for you should think about it, right? Like, rise up this morning. Every click of the metronome, smiling with a rising sun. Three little birds. Bit door, my door, stop. Or you can strum up, right? Sing and sing songs. A melody pure and true. Singing. This is my message you oh. Alright. So that's how you make your way. Once again, if you're making a lot of mistakes, the metronome is too fast. Same thing as practicing scale. Lower the metronome, find the speed that's comfortable. And then once you're done doing that, put that on your music journal and write down name of the song. This is the link for the song or here, you know, print that, put it in your folder, and then put the BPM that you can play that song and put the date. When you go back, and you play that song again, start from where you stopped from, and try to bring the song up all the way when you can, you know, just pull up the real recording, like three little birds, Bob Marley. And then, you know, when you can play with the artist, you know, you're having the right speed, right? Let's see here. So, have a We're gonna go to D. Right. So now I can play at that speed. Sing it down Baring. 'Cause every little thing is gonna be right. I'm just strumming and then muting with my hand, right? So this is how you progress. It's going to take time for you to get here, but once you get it, you're going to learn a bunch of songs like that because so many songs use the same chords or it's the same skill set over and over and over. That's why it's not that hard for you to rock out some songs on your next campfire Adventure. Alright? Let's look how that would feel like on the piano. Here is another song, just so we do something else different, right? So let's say, another one bites the dust chords by Queen. I just typed that on Google, right? So here, you have the guitar diagram. But here, if you click, you have piano. So you can follow that. You could follow that. That's fine. But I kind of like to make you count the steps and half steps because the more you count yourself, the more you're going to memorize how they should sound, okay? And the more you're gonna remember them so you don't have to keep reading this every time. But feel free to look here if you want. Also, I just want to show you one thing. Once you play a chord, let's say, it starts with F. Dan, no, no, no, no, no, no no Right. So no, no, no, no, no. So now, the F, this is the chord, F minor. So I just count one, two, three half steps, one, two, three, four half steps. That's F minor. A couple of things to make this interesting is you can always flip these notes. So if this F, if you want to play up here like this, you can. Okay? If you want to play the C down here, you can, okay? So try to play things that are close together. You don't have to play everything in root position. This is called root position because the root is at the bottom. You can play what we call inversions. If you want to get the top of the bottom note and change octaves. So instead of playing F E flat, C, you could play a flat CF at the top, right? So it's just switching one octave up, or if you're here, you want to put that C down here, you can. If you want to put that E flat down now, you can. You see how you can move the chord around and it's the same chord. Right? You can do that if you want, not mandatory. Just if it makes easier and it sounds better for now, you could play them all root position. So first, I'm going to find my chords. Let's just say in the beginning, I have F minor, and then I have a sharp minor, which will be here, right? Here, I just counted one, two, three, half steps, one, two, three, four half steps. Right? So just those two chords for the verse. Also, one thing that makes pretty cool is play the root. You can play the root down here somewhere, just to sound more, you know, sound full. So we're going to go to A flat here, right? So first, I get familiar with the chords. I make sure I can play them. Now, make sure I can switch between them. Oops. Okay, I can switch between them. Alright. Now, just try to hum it along, right? You don't need to be a singer, even if you don't want to be singing, if you're gonna play for other people to sing or if you're gonna play the melody later. Still, always hum it, always play it doesn't have to be in tune. It's just it helps you to get your body engaged into playing music, right? So that is to say, excuse my singing, 'cause it's awful. But that doesn't stop me from playing the melodies and helping my body get into the music, right? So it'll be No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Right? This just the English of this song, it's hard for me, but still, just slow down. Steve Fox N with app um. And so the sun is, ready go. And now we have a C sharp, right? So let's do C sharp here. Data. And then G sharp. So we count Tata. So get familiar with C sharp, G sharp, C sharp, G sharp, right? And then after that, we're going to go back to the A sharp minor that we know, and then C major. So make sure you know all the chords, take your time, count, find one by one, practice, right? And then just humming slowly. Let's go from the pre chorus. Tan, tan, tan, tan, tan. Dan, no, no, no, no. Pump, p Back to the beginning. Pam, pum, pum, da ta, ta, ta. Same chords at the beginning. Pom, pom, pom, pom, pom, pom, pom P, a pm another one Now, a G minor, right? So we practicing that beforehand. Eh data Da da da And then boom. Bum. Right. So playing a chord every click of the metronome is a good way to start, okay? Same thing as the guitar. Find the chords in the beginning. At the very top here, even before you start, you have here the index of chords you're going to need. So even before you start looking at the lyrics, you can just go, Hey, I find my F. I find my A sharp minor, find my C sharp, I find my G sharp, I find my C, find my G minor, right? You want to find a song even easier than this, totally chill, right? Just find a song with one or two chords that you like, and learn how to play. But basically, this is how you would apply that chord theory to this, okay? So once you can get through, put the matronom, right? Let's say this one per Let's see. I'm gonna go with that speed. Ten, dt. Pop pop pop pop. And now the sea sharp. Ta da da Ta da, da, da, da, da ta ta ta ta pop pop. Okay, so that is too fast for me to doing those transitions, just go slower, right? Let's go from the pre cars again. And that no, no, no, no, no, D and D data Da da da Da TomTom. Com da da da da da ta. Boom, boom, boom. And so on and so forth, right? Once you get to the proper speed, same thing. Go back here and type. Another one bites the dust queen, find the, you know, find I like albums, not the live version, because when they play live, the rhythm switch. This is easier to play. So be Let's just right? Y All right. As simple as that, this is a little fast for me. I need to practice this a little more if I want to play at that speed. But you just do the same thing as when you're doing scales. You just figure out the notes, play them slowly, get familiar, put the matron on, play, keep increasing the speed. Once the speed you're playing is matching the speed of the recording, then you can play with the recording, and you should be able to play the songs, right? Pretty straightforward. You can definitely do it. Find easy songs, so you have more successes and less frustrations. In time, you'll be able to play anything you want. So if you cannot play chords, if you're playing a wind instrument or your voice, what you should do is pagiate the chords on your instrument. So I just wanted to show you how that would sound. Let's say you're playing the Bob Marley song, right? The first just two chords going back and forth, it's A major and D major. So don't worry about it every little thing, D major, it's going to be right back to A major, right? So find the A major arpegio the triad. Now, just keep playing that arpeggio and change it with the song. So let's keep the song in your mind. Like, no worry about a thing. Cause every little thing gonna be alright. So that same thing will be Uh n unh. You know what I mean? Let me put the song so you hear how it sounds with the song. That is the way of having your instrument play chords, even though it can't play chords. Okay? So let's hear it. Tape. That is the chord. So I'm going to appreciate the chords now. Step out That is going to allow you to know where the chords are, even though you can't play them, but you're gonna know which scale and which arpegios are happening in real time. That's going to allow you to improvise because now I know to use the A major scale and hit the Da rpagio when it switches, and then I can improvise. I'm just going to use scale rpagio and toward exercises, and I'll be able to play with that. So check this out. Scale Bajo Third exercise. Double double Now both. So I'm not even trying to be musical. I'm just trying to nail the scales and arpags and the third exercises and switch the chord when the chord switches. And you see that everything fits. So that is big news. Stuff fits. And then from here, you can start to make static decisions. You can be like, Okay, my technique is down. I'm proficient in what it takes to play the song. Now I'm going to choose with my heart and my feelings and my expression, what I choose to play, what I choose not to play. And then you can start making music. But all the struggle of knowing which notes to play and the technique of your instrument is going to be behind you and then you're going to be free to play. Alright, now it's your turn. Try to learn a song that you like. Pick a very easy song and practice that song. Practice the chords, practice changing the chords, put to the matronom, increase the speed very slowly. Once you increase the speed of this song, and you can play all of it at the correct speed, play with the recording of that song. And then remember you're not done until you can perform that. So that means for your friends and family. And if you're extremely shy and you're not ready for that yet, just remember, did I practice enough? A lot of people that claim to be shy, they are just unprepared. If you're very, very, very prepared, ten times more than what you think you should be, if you're totally mastered that actually, your shyness might change to a sense of showing off. You want to show off this thing that you know how to do very well. So even if you master the song and even though it's totally mastered and you're still very shy because those people do exist, and that's fine, record yourself playing that song and then watch back and you can be your own audience. In time, I hope you're able to play for people because that's what music is all about. But it's fine if you just want to record and have that be a thing, that is totally okay. So learn a song. Put that song on your music journal, keep track of the BPM, keep practicing, perform it. Once you're done performing that song and you have a recording of it, choose a new song and start again and keep learning songs. Try to learn songs that are simple and easy and familiar to you. You can find the chords online, and you have a blast doing this. Once you're able to play a song, why don't you share that with us on the project section of this class? It's going to be very inspiring to see your progress and to see you playing a song in whatever level you have and to see others learning and playing songs as well. Remember, we only want supportive comments in this class. Reason it's not because everybody is going to play perfect and because there is only positive things to say about people playing, you're going to hear mistakes and you're going to hear beginners. But remember that if you give people motivation and incentive, they're going to keep practicing. And if they're not good now, they're going to be good soon and they're going to be good in the future. So right now, making a negative comment or calling them out in a negative way might rub all of the energy and all of the drive they have to keep practicing. And you might have just ended the career of a future musician. You might just have ended the progress of somebody that would be great at playing songs. So when somebody is learning something or when somebody is learning something, you have to be very sensitive and careful only giving positive comments and helping that person have more energy and drive to keep practicing because everybody can play good. And if somebody's not playing good, it's just because they are in the middle of their journey or in the beginning of their journey. So they just need to get to the point where they're playing good. So we only want to give positive feedback, and hopefully everybody here will feel comfortable to share them playing a song or two. I'm going to do that myself. I will record myself playing a song that I like, and I will share on the projects section of this class as well, right? On the next lesson, we're going to talk about major diatonic chords. How is it possible that Bob Marley choose a few chords and put next to each other and a song pops up? How is it possible that Bob Dylan chooses a few chords out of all the hundreds of possible chords, and they work together so he can sing a song? There is a theory that tells you which chords go with each other and which chords are supporting the same scale. And once you understand that, you're going to be able to put chords together and make a sound like music instantaneously. So you'll be able to compose and you'll be able to understand music much better. Those are called diatonic chords. So on the next lesson, we're going to talk about the major diatonic chords. Alright. This is you got a friend in me from Toystory. You got a friend me You got a friend me Wonder looks rougher than your miles and miles from your nice from bad remember Why you got a friend me. You got a friend. You got a friend me. You got a friend me. You got a troubles, and I got too. Is there anything that I would Wizz together, Astros 30 God friend me. Some other folks might be a little smarter and taller than I am, and they be stronger, too but none of them will ever the way I do I just you and me. And as the years go by our friendship never die you're gonna see it's your destiny Dodd. I. See, the English isn't perfect, the play isn't perfect, but it's in time and it's sounding complete. So go forward, share your song. There is no judgment. You're just during the process of learning. You're not finished, then you can always get better. But meanwhile, put your music out there and let that inspire others. Two. 23. Major Tonality: Diatonic Chords: Congrats. Now you can play a song. It might not be perfect, but you're getting there. Now you can put all of that information together. Scales, arpegio, third exercises. And you can combine that to play a melody that you come up with that you jamming on. You can start learning things by ear. And you have a song to learn. You know how to build chords, and you know how to look up those chords online of a song that you know, a song that you like. Remember to keep it simple. And add that to your routine. So now you have a practice journal where you have your scales major, minor, different keys. For each of those, you're doing rpagios third exercises and scales with metronome, leveling that up like a video game, and then you have a different journal, a music journal where you're keeping the songs you know how to play or you're learning how to play. So you can print out those chords. You can put it there. You can write by hand. But it's nice to keep a catalog of everything that you can play or that you're learning to play. But now you see you have these two worlds, a world of melody and scales and rpagis and third exercises, and you have a different world of chords that are played spontaneously. So how do things match? How those things come together for you to know which chords will fit with a particular scale or when you play a particular scale, which chords go to support that is it possible that people make songs by putting a couple of chords together and melodies walk on top of it beautifully. A single scale, it walks all over those chords. How is that possible? Well, we're going to learn about diatonic chords. Diatonic means that it all, all the chords or if you're talking about diatonic notes. So diatonic means from a same tonality, from the same key. Right. So if I'm talking about diatonic cords, it's because those cords are coming from the same parent scale. So you have a single scale, and from that scale, you get specific cords. So they are linked together, like they have the same DNA. They are from the same family. So they're blood related, if you want to say. Say diatonic notes, it's because those notes are belonging to the same system, same group. So we know that because of the scales. So a C major scale, if I say, what are the diatonic notes of C major scale? I'm just asking, what are the pitches that form the C major scale? So you know those CDE FGA B BUC, white keys at the piano. We have a formula. We can transpose that and find other keys. Same thing with dihamonic minor. But what about chords? If I ask you, what are the diatonic chords of C major, of any major scale? Well, that's what we're going to learn today. Let's have a look. So here first, I'm going to show you just by typing in these notes because it's going to be easier to understand. So here, you have C major. You see how you have the two black keys. I'm sliding one behind. So here this will be C, D, E, F, G A, B, back to C. Alright, so now, we want to find the chords of C major, okay? So how do that? Well, basically, you just do the rpagios. So let's say C rpagio. So if I'm skipping every other note like this, that's it. So I'm going to put those notes stacked up together because those are cords. So we find the cords by getting arpegos and stacking them up, you know, at the same time. So that would be a bit loud. It's crunchy. There you go. Okay, that's better. All right. So here we have the first cord. So I just got the rpagio and I stacked up together, okay? But I like to teach this in the following way. After you have the scale and you want to find the chords, you just skip every other note vertically. The rpagio we skipped every other note horizontally. So how would we do that here? I have C. Now I'm going to skip the D, and I'm going to leave it on E. I'm only using the white keys of the piano. I'm putting not on F, I'm going to put on G, not on A, I'm going to put on B. Right. That's the first chord we have. Now, I want one chord per note. The last one, I really don't care because it's just the same thing as this one is just one octave up. Okay? So I'm going to do the same thing here again. I'm not going to put on the E. I'm going to put on the F. Now going to put on the G, go to put on the A. Now going to put on the B, gonna put it on the C. Keep going. Now gonna put on the F, gonna put on the G, go to skip the A, put on the B, skip the C, put on the D. I'm going to skip the G, put on the A, go to skip the B, put on the C. I'm going to skip the D, put on the E. I'm going to skip the A, put on the B. I'm going to skip the C, put on the D. I'm going to skip the E, put on the F. I am now on A. I am going to skip the B, leave it on the C. I'm going to skip the D, put on the E. I'm going to skip the F, put on the G. And finally, I'm on B. I'm going to skip the C, put it on D. I'm going to skip the E, put it on F. I'm going to skip the G, put it on A. Vo la. This is it. These are the diatonic chords of C major. Okay? Why is this cool? Because if you're playing these chords or a combination of these chords, the C major scale is going to fit with all of this. Let me just give you a quick example. Let's say I choose some chords here. I'm just going to choose this first chord, this fourth chord, and the fifth chord like that. And then here, I'll just make a rhythm, like pom pom pom. So maybe I'll just put these rhythms like this. Like, maybe I'll put like that. Let's say this is my chords, right? So if I'm playing C, I can play any nodes in C. It's gonna work. Look. Anything that you play here with the C notes are going to sound nice. So they're going to fit. Now, obviously, this is not very musical, right? It's just I'm just running a scale up and down to prove a point. But let's say I'm going to play here on the piano, some melodies with those chords. Let's see. Can bring the scores an octave lower, so it's out of the melody range, right? So I was playing the chords here. Now I'm going to bring the chords down here. See? Whatever melody you play. Alright. It's going to fit. So this is the key for you to find the relationship between chords and scales. Okay? So now that you know the chords, you can compose. You can pick some of those chords. Out of those seven chords, you can choose some of them, put a rhythm that you want and play that scale, and they're going to fit. So this is how rhythm, melody, and chords come together. Rhythm because I'm using a particular rhythm here, right? Let's say I wanted to change this to be like that. So, you know, let's say like this. Right? It's a little bit more syncopet. It's a little bit more Latin. And the rhythm I'm playing the melody, too. Rpagis and the scale, right? Some more patios here. Right. Repeating the notes. Right, or third exercises. Mm. Third exercises. Obviously, you're going to practice this much slower. I'm just showing you how they relate. Okay? We're going to talk about how to practice this later, but for now, I just want you to understand. I'm going to show you how to label those chords. If they are major, minor, what is the deal with this formula of chords. But remember, I don't want it to be overwhelmed. The focus here is in playing an instrument first. Later, you can master this music theory. But I'm going to show you the music theory so you can know how to build the chords. Once you see a chord, you know how to play it. And when you find the chords online in songs that you like, you're going to know how to be able to find them on your instrument. A lot of the theory I'm going to explain to you right now, you may not retain, but that's okay. Just pay attention, do your best, and this is going to answer more about the relation between chords and scales. And later on, when you're about to play, it's going to be all about practicing those chords. Whether you understand or not how they are formed is secondary, okay? Lots of musicians don't know how the chords form, and they still can play, right? So I'm going to show you a little bit about the music theory, but don't stress about it. Let's go back here to the chords we had and how we built those chords. Um, and if you're curious, this software here is called Ableton ive, okay? Any digital workstation or any midi sequencer can do this, okay? So here I have the cords, and now I want to show you what's up with these cords, okay? The first ord you will notice the way you would figure out how to label the cords is forget the top node for now. So forget the top notes. Remember, we had those four chords, the triads major, minor, diminish, augmented. You just count the half steps. So if we have one, two, three, four, one, two, three, so four and three, what is that? Major. Okay? Simple as that. So, for example, if we have this one here, if we have one, two, three, one, two, three, three half steps, plus three half steps, what is that? Go back to building the chords lesson, look at your notes there, or you look on the resources tab of the class for this information. The half steps plus three half steps is what? It's diminish, right? So B diminish as simple as that, right? How to label this? This is a F, and then we have one, two, three, four, one, two, three. So four plus three is measure. Right? How about this one? We have a E that's E, so we count one, two, three, one, two, three, four. So three plus four half steps. What is that? That's minor. So this is how you figure out what the chords are, okay? Now, here, and a lot of music, there is more than triads. There are seven chords, okay? So songs are just triads, but some songs have seven chords. So I want you to show you that. All it means you're stacking up one more note in that sequence, and how do we label those notes as simple as this. Let's have a closer look here on the C, okay? So here we have the C all over the screen. So how do we label the last note? The following way. If the last node is half step away from the octave, from the root, it's a major seven, Major seven. So this will be C major, major seven. Okay? If the top node is two steps from the octave, meaning, one, two, that's a minor seven. So this will be a C seven, seven minor. The nomenclature is funny because when you say C seven, it means a minor seven. Okay? It means a major chord, C major, right? The bottom is major. And then if I just say seven, you presume it's minor. I'm going to explain that in a little bit showing you the chord symbols, just hanging there. So C seven means this is two half steps away from the root. And if you three half steps from the root, it's going to be a diminished chord, a fully diminished chord, okay, a diminished seven. So once again, if it's half step from the octave, from the root, it's major seven, minus seven, if it's two half steps, diminished seven, if it's three half steps, as simple as that, okay? So, if we have a look here, let's say we have our G here, right? Or let's choose another one to be fun. This one A, we have A with one, two, three, one, two, three, four, so three plus four, this is a minor. Now, what about the seven here? Well, that's two half steps away from the octave, two steps away from the octave of that chord, right? So we're starting on A, it takes me two half steps to get to the A. So if it takes me two half steps, this is a minor seven. So this is A minor with a minus seven. We call this A minus seven. Okay. So let me this seems a little complicated, but it's really not. What I want you to understand is that when it comes down to playing this, it's all about muscle memory. It's kind of like memorizing, but not like memorizing as if you have a history book and you need to remember dates. It's not like that kind of memorizing. It's muscle memory memorizing. So you just know that the first chord, it's going to be like that. And once you're doing the pagios, they're going to start you're already doing that practice, right? So it's not going to be hard for you to just press them at the same time and find the chords, okay? So I just wanted to explain this so you understand, but don't stress about it. Alright, so now I want to show you here on the worksheet, an example, and I want you to do this exercise before you proceed to the next lesson. So here we have a formula for diatonic major chords. What do I mean by that is always the first chord is going to be major with a major seven. Always the second chord, it's gonna be minor with a minor seven. If the seven is major, it's got to say match seven or little triangle and seven. If it's minor seven, it's just going to be a seven. But then you ask me, Well, there is a M here. This is referring to the chord. So two minor. So the second chord is going to have a minor triad, and the seven on the top is going to be minor. Okay? The third chord is going to be the same as the second in terms of quality. It's going to be the third degree of the scale, it's going to be a minor triad with a minor seven on top. And then it's going to be a major seven. And then it's going to be we call this dominant seven when you have a major chord with a minor seven. It's the only one. You see, that's a major chord with a minor seven because this one is a major chord with a major seven. This one is a major chord with a major seven. This is the only one that's a major chord with a minor seven. How do I know this is major? Because there is no M here? It's just the number or in this case, could be a later, right, like a D seven or something. It's not like a D minus seven, right? Just like a D seven. So it's the fifth in Romnomerals. So the fifth degree of the scale with a minus seven. Then we have here the sixth degree is going to be minor with a minor seven, and the seventh degree is going to be half diminished. What does that mean? That means you have a degree of this scale, and then the bottom of it is going to be diminished. Okay? And then the seven, it's going to be minor. If you write it like this, it means that the seven is diminished, okay? Music notation can be kind of weird. So that's why I'm saying, don't worry about it. In time, you're just going to memorize this, okay? The more you use. But basically, the way you write this would be minor flat five with seven, okay? So basically, it's like a minor triad. But the fifth note is not really minor, it's diminished. So you bring that fifth note down, and then you have just a minor seven. This can be kind of complicated, right? So let's look at an example here, so you see it's easy, okay? I have a D example here, but let's do this example in C because it might be easier. So what are the notes of the C major scale? CDF, G A, B, and then we don't need the C again because it just repeats. Now, I'm just going to copy this formula here. Because this applies to any keys. Now, I just substitute the notes here. C, the second note is a D. The third note is a E, here is a F, here is a G, here's A, and here it's a B. Boom. This is the diatonic major chords of this key here of the C. C diatonic chords, it will be like what we just did, okay? If you want to know what are each of those notes, let's take a step back. If you want to know how to play this chord, honestly, for you to be able to play this quickly and really memorize it, just go on Google and type C, match seven chord piano. Boom, right there, it's telling you which notes to press. See? C, match, chord piano is right here. Now, if you want to do that on guitar, just type C major seven chord guitar. It's going to give you many positions where you can play that chord. Remember how to read chord diagrams, right? You just put your fingers in those positions. So the short answer is, how do I know how to play this chord? Just Google the fingering and play that like a practice to the metronome. When you're playing a song or when you're practicing chords, we're going to talk about that later, okay, in a lesson downstream. So this is the short answer. How do you know how to play it? Google the fingering, keep playing. You memorize that, see, it's like the end of story for now. If you ask me, how do I know which notes are in here? Then you have to do what we did here on the sequencer, okay? So you have to play this scale and you have to stack them up. So it will be the rpagio notes. So how would I look on the piano, right? So here on the piano, I have if you ask me, Hey, C Major seven, you Google this right there. It's also the first rpagio pressed at the same time. Now, if I want to know which notes are there on the piano it's pretty easy because it's just see the notes, right? But if you want to know on the guitar, just know that you're basically playing the first note, skipping the second, skipping the next, skipping the next. This is it. These are the notes, okay? On the guitar, let's have a quick look. On the guitar can be a little tricky because when you play a chord, let's say C major seven those notes are not necessarily one after the other. They are shuffled in octaves, okay? There are inversions happening there. So let me show you what that means on the piano, okay? Basically, let's say I get this note and I bump an octave down, and I get these two notes and I bump an octive down. And I get this two notes, I bump an octa down. And these two notes octave down, this one note an octave down, I'm just doing this randomly. These three notes and octive down, this top two notes and octive down. This is still the same chords. I just switched the notes octaves, and I created inversions, okay? They still sound the same. They have different flavors, but they function the same. Okay. If you want to make it more musical, just have them move as little as possible. Right. And then if you play this slowly, you see that the C major scale still fits. But, you know, making a song with seven chords like this repeating sounds pretty wacky. So let's say you have one, six, 25, right? Like, that's what I'm calling 16 to five, I'm the one chord, the six chord, the two chord, the five chord, right? I'm just going to organize them like that. You remember we did all those inversions, right? So now, you see how the melody still works. Apaga. Third exercises. So basically, in the guitar, because the way the strings are laid out, you can't just play always root position where you go, CEG, B, you're perfectly stacking up the notes, right? In the guitar, they're always usually reversed. Like the notes is skipping octaves. So in this case, it is a CG, B. So we skip the E, right? So if the nodes of the C major seven are C E, G, B, here it's going to be CG, B, In this case, if the notes of C major seven are CGB, in the guitar, it would be C G. B E. So we got the E from the second place and we put up top, still the same thing. It's just because the way it fits on the hand, okay? So once again, for you to play these chords, just Google the fingering and learn how to play them, practice how to play them. I will talk about how exactly to practice them, so don't worry about that right now, but you don't need to know every single note to be able to play later after you know how to play, it's nice for you to learn the theory behind and know what you're pressing, but that comes much later in my experience. That's my suggestion. Now, if why now, why did I tell you all of that? Because once you want to get a couple of course together to make a song, which course do you choose? You have, you know, Uh huh. A bunch of chords, you're just going to choose random chords. It's probably going to sound random. It's probably not going to sound great. So how do you narrow down which chords you should be using? Well, if you know the diatonic chords of routinality. So let's say we play in C. So we look at our formula and we have C major seven, D minus seven, E minus seven, F major seven, G dominant, G seven, A minor seven. And then we have B half diminished. And then we have C again. Okay? So if you know those chords, you can pick from those chords to make your song, and your melody always going to work. Okay? So in this case, let's say, I pick one, the C, one, the C, and then I'm going to pick the two minus seven, and then I'm going to pick the five dominant G seven and back to where I was the C. So I can just play. All right. Now, notes that the note of the C major scale. They're all gonna fit here. Let me write your whistle and play at the same time. You can hum it. Da da da da da If you don't want to just be playing scales, you can skip around. Toward the exercises. Da da da da da pagos da da da. So this is how artists choose a couple of chords that are basically fail proof. All the melody that you're humming on top, if you're humming a scale. And at this point, when you're playing an instrument, a scale just gonna come out of it. When you're singing, a scale just gonna come out of it, because you've been practicing major scales in many different keys and harmonic minor scales in many different keys. So naturally, you're going to be singing those scales. And when you choose the right chords, anything you do is going to work. Now, doesn't mean that anything that you do is a keeper or that's tasteful, or that's a great composition. But at that point, it becomes about curation, right? You'd be like, Oh, I don't like this melody, I don't like the score, let me switch it around. But everything that you're trying all of it works, it just becomes a matter of taste and a matter of what you choose and what you don't choose. That's very different than having everything available, and 90% of it is going to sound awful. And having your composition process involving all of those chords that a lot of them are not going to even fit, is just going to be so overwhelming and it's going to drag your creativity down. So this is why we learn the diatonic chords of a particular tonality. This is diatonic chords of a major tonality. Once we know how to do this, we know which chords we can choose from and we know which scale is going to fit on top. Okay. Now it's your turn. Let's have a look and how you can do that yourself. Now, check this out. I put here for you on the worksheet the formula. I gave two examples. These are the notes of the C major. And then here, you just get the formula and you substitute the Roman numerals for the notes of the scale. Boom, this is your answer right here. This is going to be the C major diatonic chords. Okay? Same thing I did here, D major. I spelled that out the notes. Then I substitute in the formula the notes of the Dmajor scale. Boom, this is your answer right here. So if you want to make a song in D major, pick some of those chords and then play D major on top. Okay, give it a try here yourself, okay? Write down the diatonic chords for the following major keys. So C major, spell it out to the scale, then get those notes and substitute on the formula. Do that for F, E and G. All right? Once you finish this, you're ready to go to the next lesson. After you finish the worksheet, you'll be ready to go to the next lesson. Now, as I said, you understand which chords are the diatonic chords of a parent scale. So now you can pair a scale and arpegis and third exercises, a tonality, a particular key. You can pair that with a set of chords, and you can choose from those set of chords from those seven chords, which ones you want to keep, and you can put them together to create music to play, okay? But now that doesn't mean that you can do that just because you understand what I said. So in order to be able to do it in time to play that relationship, we need to practice. So next lesson, we're going to talk about how to put this knowledge in practice. 24. Playing with Major Diatonic Chords: Now is where the fun begins because you know enough about scales and melodies and you know enough about chords to put them together to play music. You can experiment with music. You can come up with your own melodies and songs. So the possibilities are endless. You can use your instrument, you can use your voice, and you can even use the computer. Let me show you. The idea here is still to be practicing, but we're going to be practicing music now instead of practicing technical exercises. Of course, you continue practicing the technical exercises, but here is how you bring chords and melody together. Let's say on the piano, with my left hand, I can play chords, so I'm going to play. These are the diatonic chords of C major. You can play seven chords as well. Okay. Now, with my right hand, I can play melodies. Arpegis? Third exercises. Okay. So at first, just go very slowly without the metronome. Play a chord, play something. Maybe change the chord, play same thing again. Oh, that could be a song already, right? I'm going to play the same melody again. And then scale down. Let's put third exercise. I'm going to do four. Okay. So now you can experiment with tension and resolution. Cords one, three, and six, they are pretty resolution. They are arrival places. And the cords four, five, seven, two, they are propelling you forward. So if you go between those, let's say I'm going to go 1-5. Right. Or choose a sequence of chords here. It doesn't have to be many. Let's say, just three chords. This time, I'm going to start on the six chord. And then six, three, four. I'm just going to play that Tata, six, three, four. And then with the melody, let's see. I'm just going to go down like this. Let's say you like this. Let's say you want to keep going with this. The next step would be you guessed it. Your best friend is the matronome. Just put that on a speed you can play. Start very slow. Do whatever you think you can play, right? So now you get to compose. I'm going to say, Hey, four clicks on the six chord, two, three, four clicks on the three chord, and then I'm going to do eight clicks on the four chord. I'm just choosing that out of my head, right? You can make your own choices. Four, three, four, and eight here. Th. Now practice your melody just by itself. My melody is gonna be one, two, pump, boom, two, pump, p, one, two, three, four. I can play that pretty easy, so I'm not gonna keep practicing, so I'm gonna go put it together. Boom, boom. Boom, boom. Right? Keep playing this. Now you can get in the zone just by repeating this. You can add variations, but this is how you practicing chords and melodies together, and you're practicing music, right? You can do that with songs that exist. Okay, I practice that with my right hand with the left hand. You can look up the cords online. But, that, five. But one, da, da, da, da, da, two, five, O. Okay. So now, if I want to put it together, slowly. Okay. It's too fast, so let's go slower. The idea here is to have fun. Speed will come naturally. Never plays faster than what it feels comfortable. So I'm Okay. Just practicing that part that I'm getting wrong. Okay, let's go again. Now, I want to show you on the guitar and on the computer. But just before that, on the piano, remember this. When you play the chords like this, they're called root position because the bottom note is the note that's giving the name to the chord. So you're just playing you're playing the scale here, right, with your pinky, and then you're stacking up your pacius. At the same time and you're finding the chords, right? But hardly no piano player will play this way. What they would do is they would invert, like the guitar forces you do. Piano players will do that naturally. So this is don't stress about it now, but just to keep it in mind, let's say I'm playing a chord here, right? If I'm going to a G which is here, instead of moving my hand from here to here, from my C, I ask myself, Hey, what are the notes of the G without me moving my hands too much? The G is D F, G B. So the G is right there. It's just that these two notes are supposed to be here, and I'm just getting these two notes and I'm putting down here. So I'm playing like this now, so I can go. And when I'm going to switch, I just gonna go, right? So instead of doing the hard movement here, you can just move two fingers and back, okay? Have this in mind. It's not only easier to play, but it makes It's called voice leading. It makes your chords sound much better. Okay? Now, the guitar will kind of do that automatically for you because you have no choice but you're play inverted chords. So let's have a look on the guitar how that would look like. On the guitar, let's say we're playing C right and we find out that on the chords of C going to play them to make sure I know what they are. Okay. So now that I know what the chords are, I'm just going to pick some of those chords. We can even pick the same ones that we did before. I think it was six, three, four, right? So six, it's gonna be A minor. And then E minor. And then F major seven, right? That's what we played on the piano. Remember that you have other places where you can play these chords. You can choose Google A minor. You might find this. And then the three, you might find this. And then the four, you might find this. That's fine. That's the same chords still. Instead of being up here is down here, right? So let's stay with the bottom ones. Now, you can kind of tell how they sound nice together and they fit. Now, how do you practice your melody and your chords at the same time? On the guitar, that's pretty challenging. That's an advanced technique. And personally, I never went there. I either want to play melodies on top of other chords or with other people or the computer, or I want to play chords for me to sing or to play sax on top or something like that. But I really I'm not ambitious enough to want to play chords and melodies at the same time. So I never practiced that. That's pretty advanced. So I definitely wouldn't go there right now if you're learning guitar. But there are ways you can do that. One way is to sing, right? So you know the C major scale. Mm hmm. And, you know, a lot of teachers say, and I agree. You don't really know a scale until you're able to sing it, right? Doesn't need to be pretty, doesn't need to be super in tune, but you need to know the relationship, right? So, Now that you have that in mind, you can just play with that. First, you can just run the scale to get familiar. That sounds like a song already. Just a scale. Now you can just play with it. Right? Let's say we want to do our pages. Right. So what about third exercises? How can Fernando do all of those things singing and whistling? Because I've played those scales over and over and over. So the more you practice, the more those sounds are going to get ingrained in you. So it's going to be really easy for you to just output that material. That's why this class is no substitute for a music teacher. Let's say you want to learn a guitar. It's great. Get a guitar teacher. It's going to help you a lot. But in the essence of it, music is music, and your instrument is just an instrument for you to get to the music. So I hope this class is helping you to understand what music is unrelated to your instrument of choice. Music is just what it is, and you can use the guitar, the piano, the saxophone. That's a whole other thing. And practicing the technique, it's something you have to do so your fingers are able to execute the music. But once you understand music, not attached to your instrument. It's gonna be much easier for you to be able to express the music from your heart, as opposed to, let's say you practice a lot of guitar, and now you're going to express your music with your fingers. You're not going to express your music with your heart because all you're gonna want to do is to play while you practice, right? Play those mechanical things. And which is fine. You can express yourself playing mechanically, but if you choose so, not because you can't do anything else. So ideally, you can have the framework. Oh, let's pick different chords. Let's pick two, which is the minor. So let's pick two, three, and five. No, I didn't like that. Let's pick two, three, one, no. Two, three, seven, two, three, seven. Three, seven, two, three, seven, one, two, three, seven, one, two, three, seven, one. That's very tense progression, very unusual, right? Vote weird. But still fit the malady. But good. Right. So you can discern and you can express yourself when you're happy when you're gloomy and just play with the elements of music that way. Okay? Now, let me show you how you can use the computer to do that because, you know, some of you might not be at that level of practicing instrument yet, or maybe you're playing saxophone and you can't play chords at all, right? You're a singer or you're playing trumpet and you can't play chords period. I can show you how to have the computer play chords for you. However, I'm just going to put a note here that if you can't play chords on your instrument, you should be patiating the chords on your instrument. But also, I suggest that you learn either piano or guitar. You don't need to be an excellent player, but just memorizing the chords, looking them up, and being able to play them is going to give you so much more feeling of how music works, that you should definitely do that if you don't have access to chords on your instruments. Okay? It doesn't take much to Google a couple of keys, a couple of diatonic chords, learn them on the piano and the guitar. In no time, you'll be able to do that, and it's going to enhance your playing a lot. Alright, let's have a look on the computer, how to have chords played for you so you can play melodies on top. All right. I like to show this website here. It's called muted dotOSlash Sequencer. It doesn't need to be this website. You can just Google Cord sequencer cord generator, music generator. You find a lot of websites like this. You don't need to buy anything. It's free. So here you have the notes. I'm choosing here, Hey, which instrument I want, a guitar, piano, I'm going to choose piano, and then you can put the chords you want here. So let's say which chords we want. Let's say we're doing the same chords we were doing on the piano on the guitar, right? It was the six, three, four. So what is the six chord of C major? The six chord, if I go CDEF G, A, it's A. So I'm going to stack up the notes on A, A, I'm going to skip the B, C, I'm going to skip the D, E. This is only allowing me to do inversions, right, because I don't have more chords to go, which is fine. So I have C and the end of my progression, I'm going to put here, right. And then I'm going to put A, and then I'm going to put three, starts on E, right CDE. So E, I'm going to skip the F. I'm going to put the G. I'm going to skip the A, I'm going to put the B. Okay. And remember, there is, if I skip the C, I can put the D too. And here, if I skip the E. Oh, sorry, I'm on the E, I skip the F, I can put the G. So you can make seven chords, right using four nodes or you can use triads, whatever you prefer. I'm using four node chords here, Tatra chords, just so you can see that. And then I'm going to go to one. So one and skip the D, E, I skip the F. I play the G, I skip the A, I play the B. You might be thinking, Hey, you're skipping way more than one because look, here, it's all the half steps, right? And when I say you play a note and skip one, I'm saying you skip one note off the scale. So I'm only considering here the white keys of the piano, which in this case, it's not white and black but you know, right, CDE no sharps, no flats. Be I'm in C major, right? We could do this in different tonality, but just to keep it easy, C major. So now you can play this All right. Now, can I make these notes long, by any chance? Let's see. No, you can't make them long, but that's fine. You know what you could do? You could just repeat them, like so you don't have so much space in between. And I wonder if this has a matron built in. No, it doesn't, but this will be enough. So I'm just putting twice each one of them just so we don't have a lot of time without something plain because, you know, we might lose the rhythm of it. I made a mistake here, but I want to see if that's gonna sound good. I put it on the wrong timing. Let's see. Boom, boom, boom, boom, B, B, B, I'm gonna keep it there. Okay. So now you can get your instrument. Let's say, I'm gonna spare you from my singing, but let's get clarinet, for example. So now I just find the C major scale. Weight scale. Arpachis. Third exercises. Right? Mixing it up. So you're able to play around and experiment, and everything that you play is not going to be a keeper. Everything that you play isn't going to be amazing, but everything is fits. And now from this point where everything fits, you can make decisions, and you can be more picky about your decisions, right? So you can do different chords. You can find software where the piano sounds better. Let's say if we change the sound of the piano and get a little bit more picky with the clarinet notes, let's try. So here, I'm going to choose dreamy keys, whatever that is, let's see. Boom boom boom no, did not like dreamy keys. Let's say FM Synth. Let's see that. Nope. That's pretty aggressive. Let's try guitar. Okay, it's maybe not the best sounds we have here? Organ synth. Let's write that. Okay, that's cool. Okay, I like that. Now, let's pick the notes of the clarinet. This note here, I'm not liking the way this is sounding. I'm just gonna use a triad on the E instead. Let's C? Ho Ho I like that part that goes. Like it's an rpagio starting on the fifth on the G note. So I'm just gonna walk on that. H. Bam. You could walk with that. You could start exploring that, right? Maybe record yourself, put your phone on, keep a record of what you're doing, call friends and family, have them, you know, hear your performance or hear your improvisation. It's important to perform and to have feedback, either from others, and others don't need to give you feedback as in they don't need to point out things about your performance. Just them being in a room isn't a feedback. Or record a video of yourself playing and you just by watching, you're going to have the feedback you need, okay? So this is how you put cords and scales together into practice. So add a little bit of this experimentation, your practice routine, okay? This should be fun and let loose from the tension of playing with a matronom and techniques, okay? All right. I'll see you on the next lesson where we're going to learn about minor diatonic chords, harmonic minor diatonic chords. The same way that we did major diatonic chords, we're going to look on the other side of the coin for the harmonic minor diatonic chords. All right, see you there. 25. Minor Tonality: Diatonic Chords: And Alright, now you have a strong hold on what diatonic major chords are. So if you have a major scale, any key of any major scale, you know how to find the diatonic chords of it. So you know which chords are going to support that scale? That's great. So that covers about half of the music that you probably going to hear and want to play. And the other half we're going to cover now with the diatonic minor chords. Remember that the minor scale, it has natural minor, melodic minor, and harmonic minor. And for the purposes of this class, we only dealing with the harmonic minor. So right now I'm only going to talk about the diatonic chords of the harmonic minor scale. In the future, there are other chords that you can use that come from those two variations of the minor scale. But for now, let's not complicate this. Let's stay simple. We're going to use the same scales we've been practicing the harmonic minor scale, and we're going to find which chords we find from those scales, okay? Let's have a look. Now we're going to do the same thing we did with the C major scale using the A harmonic minor scale. So just going to spell out the scale, A, B, C, D, E, F, G sharp. I don't care about the A because it's the same thing as the first one. Now I'm going to stack up the notes, skip the B, put a C, skip the D, put a E, skip the F, put a G sharp. On B, skip the C, put a D, skip the E put F, skip a G sharp, put a A. I'm on C, skip the D. You have a E, skip the F. You have a G sharp, skip the A, you have a B. Now, the D, you skip the E, you have an F. You skip the G sharp, you have a A, you skip the B, you have a C. From the E, I skip the F. I have a G sharp, I skip the A, I have a B, skip the C, you have a D. You have a F, you skip the G sharp, you have a A, you skip the B, you have a C, skip the D, you have a E. The G sharp, you skip the A, you have a B, you skip the C, you have a D, you skip the E, you have an F. All right. Boom, those are the chords. So now, the same thing. These cords, you have to label them, and we label them just the same, right? So remember, if you ignore the top notes, how do we label those? Go back to building the cords lesson, look at that formula on the resources section of this class, and just look at the triad first. So if I have here and I have the A and then have one, two, three, half steps, and then have one, two, three, four half steps, this is a minor triad, right? If you get here and you have E and you have one, two, three, four, half steps, one, two, three, four plus three, that's a major trier. That's how you label them. Now, if you add the seven, same thing as with the major diatonic chords. If the seven, the note on the top, if it's half step away from the root, from the octave, it's going to be major seven. So this is A minor major seven. Now, here, if the top note is two half steps to the octave, so we have a A, and then the octave would be a B. So if it's two half steps from the octave, that's a minor seven. So that means this is a B, something, minus seven. What kind of B? I have B, 123, 123. So three plus three half steps is diminished. So we have diminished with a minor seven. So this is what we call half diminished. Okay? This is the same chord as the chord number seven of the major diatonic scale. So the number seven of major diatonic and the number two of harmonic minor is the same. Alright, and so on and so forth, right? That's how you label them. So I suggest that you write this down on paper or whatever you feel comfortable and kind of figure this out and you can play with them. I'm going to show you the formula in a second, but I just want to show you really quick how, you know, this works the same way as the major diatonic chords. If you just pick a couple of chords, so let's pick one, and then three, and then five. Let's see, right? Cords like that. And I'm just gonna make them last here, okay? So, let's bring these chords down. So if I play A minor, I'll have A pages. Okay, it fits. Now, you can play to make this nicer sounding, remember, you can invert some of the notes, throw them an octave below, right? Instead of using the B on top, bring the B at the bottom. You know, just try to make them travel as little as possible. Might sound better. You can mute some notes if you want to just use triads here and there, right? So let's see, you know, our patios. No. Or you can play third exercises. Now, to make this sound even better, if you are landing on notes on the meldy the chord has those same notes, it will sound even better, right? So my last chord has a G sharp, E, a B, and a D. So if I land on those, it sounds even better. Let's try. See? Right? So whatever chords you pick, whatever tempo you pick, you know, even if it's the simplest thing, it can be just be one chord. Obviously, it's going to work. But let's say, let's bring some notes up. Now, every time notes are vary together like this, like touching each other, this may or may not work. So in this case, I think it's a bit crunchy, so I'm just going to mute one of them. Pick whichever one you want to mute experiment. That sounds cleaner, right? Third exercises, right? All right. So that works. Now, let's have a quick look on how to practice those, you know, putting together those chords with melodies. Same way we did with the major one. Find the chords here because you did the pages, right? So I'm just remembering just remembering what the chords are. Now that I remember the chords are I can pick. So this is one and then I'm going to choose seven. And then I'm going to go choose now from seven, I'm going to go choose four. Now, let's say, one, seven. And then three. And then back to seven. So we're gonna go one, seven, three, seven. So let's say my malady is gonna be 17. Back to one. Seven. Bring your matronom friend to the party. B B Let's see. Too fast for me. Let's go slower. Alright, now here's fun now. Go. Just inverted the C right there. Now, what kind of melody want? Like, let's walk on the melody. Let's be. I like that. So all I'm doing is scale three notes and back and then doing the same gesture, starting on the seven, and then back again, and then ending on the fifth because I have the C here, right, which is the third chord of the scale. And I have that C there. So I have the C the D, so I'm playing that. So I'm just gonna play Bopp, bop Bopp, pop, pop bop, bop boop. Well, bup bup bup, bup, bup bup, bup, bup, B. Right. So, you know, if you have some maybe a hip hop it would sound good like Right? So just playing with which chords happen at the bottom versus which melody I'm playing on the top, you can start exploring and you start hearing the sound of the scale. They've been practicing, but now the chords are supporting that. Okay? So now let's have a look on the guitar. Before we have a look on how this sounds on the guitar, let's figure out the formula for the harmonic minor diatonic chords. For that, we want to go to the worksheet. And the worksheet, I'm going to give you here, the formula. So we have first chord is minor but with a major seven. Second chord is half diminished. It means it's dish triad with a minor seven. The third chord is a major chord with a major seven. And the five of that major triad, it's actually sharp. So that means it's an augmented ord, ok? You could also write this this way, you know, three augmented major seven like that. It's just not usual, but that's fine. Now the fourth chord is minor with Major seven. And then the fifth chord has minus seven, major with a minor seven. Then the sixth chord is major with a major seven, and then the seventh chord is diminished with a diminished seven. Alright? So this being the formula, I gave you an example here. We have A harmonic minor, and then I just spelled out the notes, the same thing we did on that software, A, B, CDE F, G sharp A. I'm just substituting on the formula up top. The notes of the scale. So the first chord will be A minor major seven. The second one would be the second one would be B half diminished. The third chord would be C major seven with a sharp five, which means C augmented with a measure seven. Now, the fourth chord would be a minor seven. The fifth chord would be minus seven. So I gave you an example here, Ahamonic minor, and I spelled out the notes. ABCDEF, G sharp A. And then I just got those scale notes and I put it on the formula. So A minor major seven, B half diminished, C, augmented with a major seven, or you can call a C major seven with a sharp five. And then the fourth chord would be a D minor seven. The fifth chord would be E seven, and then the six chord would be with a major seven, and then the seventh chord, G sharp diminished seven. All right? This is the formula here. So if we want to check out the chords on the guitar, let's see how they so now let's check out the chords on the guitar. Let's see how they sound. So I'm just going to play the minor scale. So I'm just going to play the minor scale. Alright, so I remember, to get into a brand that sound on the scale. And now let's play those chords. So if I have, you know, I'm going to play the first chord, A minor. So let's see. Tata. Let's play the five. L, L. So a lot of songs would be 1-5 or one and four back to five, back to one, right? So our fourth chord here, it will be D minor seven. So a lot of the sounds in minor will be 151, four, one, five, one or a combination of that. You also have the six chord available. F Major seven here. So let's, you know, do the same thing as we did for the measure. You can sing, you can hum it. In this case, let's I'm going to whistle. Let's get my whistle in tune. So Scale. Right. You can choose a variety of cords and do that. But all of those cords that you choose, let's say you have G diminished, right? G sharp diminished. So if you want to add that also walk So you see how all the cords are fitting and I don't have to do much effort for them to fit. If I just choose the cords that come from that scale, they all going to fit. Doesn't mean that you can only use those chords. When you're more intermediate and advanced, you can borrow chords from other scales. You can change scales and chords in the middle of a song. Before now, you understand how you can have one scale that you've practiced and you can have a specific set of chords, only seven chords to choose from. From those seven chords, you choose whatever ones appealed to you. It can be a scale, it can be an rpasia, it can be third exercises, and that way, you're able to manipulate music and manipulate this harmonic minor tonality. Remember to practice with the matronom, right? So turn your matronom on and make sure. Let's say I'm gonna go one, one, one, one, five. Then I'm going to go four, four, four, four, seven, right? And let's say my melody is gonna be All right. So experiment, experiment, get lost in the music, get into the flow. And if you want to make a composition out of this, if you want to make a song out of this, then you stop and start being really picky. Hey, do I like this? No? Do I like that? No? Do I like this chord? Okay, I'm going to do four clicks of this chord, then I'm going to change. Then you can start arranging if you feel like it. But if you don't, you can just improvise and use the scales or pages and third exercises you've been learning. Paired with chords. Okay? In the piano, as we seeing, you can use left and right hand to do chords and melody. In the guitar, it's very hard to play chords and melody at the same time. So I would wait for that until you're an advanced player or intermediate player. For now, I would just play the chords and either sing or whistle or record maybe yourself playing the melody and then play the guitars with the recording, something like this. If you are playing a woodwind instrument or a monophonic instrument, instrument that can only play one note at a time, it cannot play chords. The voice, the saxophone, the flute, if you're playing those instruments, you can use the computer to play the chords for you. But once again, I recommend that you learn a little bit of guitar or piano, so you can feel the chords and you can feel how it is to play them. You can understand them better in your ears as you learn how to play them. But that is just a suggestion. I'll leave it out there. But let's say you don't want to do that, you can use the computer to play chords for you. So let's go back to that website, muted dot IO slash Sequencer. And here I have the notes. I'm going to choose the organ synth sound. And let's say the chords we were playing before to, to, tone, tone, tone. Just to keep it simple here, I'm just going to pick two chords, let's say, or should we pick three? Let's pick three just to show how to spell them out one more time. So I'm going to start on A, and then I am going to skip the B. I'm going to put the C. I'm going to skip the D. I'm going to put the E. Okay, I'm going to use a triad for now. And then I'm going to use five. So I'm going to go here, E, skip the F, put the G sharp, you skip the A, put the B, and then skip the C, put the D. Now, let's see how that sounding so far. And then I'm going to go back to the A. And then I'm going to go here to the seven. So the seven, I'll start on G sharp. And then G sharp, I'll skip the A, I'll put the B, I skip the C, I'll put the D, skip the E, and I'll put an F. Let's say how we have. I'm going to make this faster here this BPM faster. Note that because the cords are happening just, you know, very short and there's a lot of space. I'm just going to make it faster so they keep happening. So it's easier to keep track. Mmm. Yeah, it's pretty hard to keep track of them when they're playing so short. So I'm just gonna keep adding, you know, chords, every measure. You know, I'm just repeating the same thing twice every measure, just so it's more, you know, it's more fitting. All right. So let's say, you know, should instrument should we use? Let's use a trumpet. So we have here I'm just going to find the scale. So I just running this scale up and down, playing some arpeggios, and it fits, right? Now, if you want to get picky, you know, get better sounds, choose the chords better, make the chords have some sort of rhythm, right? And then be more picky on the notes. Well, maybe let's be a little more picky on the notes. So it sounds like a melody, not like I'm just rambling, right? B Right. So just goes to show how even if you can't play chords, knowing which chords are available to you, it's going to allow you to pair your chords with a particular scale that you've been practicing that you can play. All right. So here on the worksheet, now it's your turn. Put the chords for the D harmonic minor diatonic chords, for the E and G harmonic minor diatonic chords. How to do that, first spell out the notes of that scale. And then substitute those notes on this formula here on top. Once you do that, and assuming you get to practice these scales before, if you already practice these scales, great. If not, you don't have to do it. But maybe the harmonic minor you already did practice. So get those diatonic chords of whatever scale you know how to play and manipulate the chords and the melodies in the scales, the pages, the third exercises, so you can play with now go back to the worksheet, and there's three exercises there for you to do about spelling out the harmonic minor diatonic chords. Simple way to do it is to just spell out the notes of each harmonic minor scale and then substitute those notes into the formula that I provided to you of what any harmonic diatonic chords should be. So once you do that, you have the chords available to you on that specific key tnality. Okay? So once you do that, you are ready to go to the next lesson. In the next lesson, we're going to talk about how to practice chords. Then you may say, Hey, Fernando, you already showed us. You play the notes, you find them, you choose some chords, you play the melodies, you get picky or not, put the matronom, we get it. That's right. But this is how to practice the relationship between chords and meldy. But how do you actually practice playing the chords? How are you able to out of a sudden and be like, C major, A minor, G sharp diminish? How can you have fluency and achieve the mastery you need to just recall those chords anytime you want. Spoiler alert, it's going to involve muscle memory and the matronome. I'll see you there. 26. Adding Chords to Your Practice: Let's now add chords to your daily practice. Remember, now you have 72 exercises to master all of major and minor tonalities. You have major and minor tonalities, and then for each of those, you have 12 different keys, C, C sharp, D, E, et cetera. So you have two times 12, right two tonalities times 12 keys, that's 24. And then for each of those 24, you have to do three exercises, scales, rpagios and third intervals. So it's 72 items that you can play, master, advance the speed, you know, like play a game of trying to make the play higher and higher speed using the metronome as a reference, and then you're done. You're done master tonality. You'll be able to fluently play any melodies that come to mind with ease. So yeah, 72 is a lot, yes, but it's not totally out of reality, right? Probably some people played video games that had more phases than that. So within that, you'll be able to play melodies and you'll be able to improvise. You're going to have a fluency in the playing of your instrument. So how do we add chords to our daily practice? Let's add chord practice into our practice journal. Alright, so here is your practice journal. You have your name, how many notes you're paying per click of the matronom. And then here you can put the date or whatever way you're formatting this. And you can put here, you know, whatever date is today, and then you can put Oh, my chromatic scale, 70 2:00 P.M. Et cetera, and you try to level this up. So you're familiar with this. So let's think about it what we have so far, chromatic scale, the major scales. The major rpagios and the major intervals. Then we have the harmonic minor scales. Then we have the harmonic minor rpagios and then we have the harmonic minor third intervals. And then I'm adding here the chord practice. So we have major chords, just triads. You have to practice that in 12 keys. So minor chords, triads in 12 keys, diminished, augmented. So let's stay just with these three chords here for now. Let's understand that on the piano, just using the piano because it's easy to visualize. So let's say a major chord. You can look up the formula on previous lessons. So we have a major chord here. And then if I want to play a major chord is starting from a C sharp, remember the formula, one, two, three, four, one, two, three, half steps. So C, C sharp, D, E flat, E, and so on and so forth. So you're just practicing playing the chords. So how do you practice this? So let's say here major chord triads. First, become familiar with them, right? Make sure you're playing each of them, you know, and you kind of getting familiar with which notes you have to play. If you're still counting one, two, three, four, one, two, three, probably you need to get more familiar, you know, so you kind of know which notes you have to practice for each of those, right? And then once you're familiar enough, boom, our friend the metronome. I'm just going to choose, let's say, four clicks per chord. So I go one, two, three, four, C major, two, three, four, ChR, two, three, four, D, two, three, four, E flat, two, three, four, E, two, three, four F, two, three, four, you can speed that up. I would make a note here if I was you. If that's the case, you put here four clicks per chord, right? If that's what you want to do, and then you put the BPM. You might choose to do later on if you're more advanced, remember, you can use the staabs here, you just duplicate and you start a new week or new month. But at some point, you might choose to do one click per cord. So let's say I'm here and I'm doing Uh the Oops. See you got that wrong too fast. Slow it down a little bit. Let's go again. The the the pump pop. Alright. So did that twice, right, bump it up to the metronome. Same process. You can go down too, right? Like You can go like that. It's kind of a little bit of darpagio exercise, right. The important thing is that you are able to play the chords in, you know, not diatonically, but play the chords one after the other. You can also play rhythms, right? You can play. One, two, three, four, four, two, three, four, one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four, right? And remember, in the case of the piano, left hand as well. Did the major chords now here, minor chords, triads, 12 keys first become familiar, count to the half steps. Remember minor if I'm going to start from C, going to be one, two, three, one, two, three, four, three plus four have steps will be like that. So if I want to play that it'll be one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four, one, two. Oh, you're getting good. Let's do two notes. One, two, ten, ten. I'm not suggesting that you change in between, but, you know, after several weeks playing, you might want to challenge yourself. But see, no mistakes. That's why I'm leveling up because this is easy for me. In the beginning, you'll be playing this very slow, right? Next is diminished chords. Try it. Same thing. Get familiar with count. We have starting on C, we have one, two, three, one, two, three. So three plus three, have steps. Now we go and so on, right? Go down as well. And augmented chords, same deal, correct? So augmented, you just count, you have steps. The formula we have, one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four, four plus four, augmented chord. Now, same deal, augmentment augmented augmented. Right, and so on and so forth. So you learn how to practice this and remember, if you have to go very slow, that's how you should do it. At first, you can just stop practicing major chords. That's it. Stay there for a couple of weeks, maybe for a couple of months, whatever it floats your boat, right? And then you can add the minor chords. If you're already doing the 12 keys, you know, and you can play, and it takes you, you know, a few minutes, maybe you can add a the minor ones. Then they diminish, then they augmented. Once you do those, I'm even going to color this a little different so you see this kind of like a milestone. After that, you can practice seven chords, meaning tetrachords, meaning there's four notes per chord, right? So here, if we have a major seven chord, right. So for those, I put it on the worksheet, a formula here for you, where you have the half steps count for each of those tetrachords. So it's here for you. But also, you're able to find that because you've been playing the rpagis, right? That's all it is. However, now, these are the diatonic arpegios, right? So now, when we're trying to master this, the technique of mastering this, we're just going to go, for example, the first one, C major Major seven. Now we just want to play that type of chord going half step up. So it's not going to be diatonic. It's going to be chromatic. So, for example, C Major seven. Char Major seven, D Major seven. E flat major seven, E Major seven. So this was even too fast for me, right? So let's give an example where something really slow. So I'm going to do four clicks per chord. I'm going to go two, three, four, C sharp, two, three, four, D, measure, measure seven, three, four, E flat, Major seven, two, three, four, E, measure, seven, three, four, F major seven, F sharp, Major, measure seven, three, four, G, and so on and so forth, right? So this speed is good for me. So play that level up on the metronom, go back down, play with the left hand, write it down, forget about it until the next day, right? So you can add then this to your practice, the Major seven chords. If you're mastering those and Oh, you get the piano and you're like, Oh, yeah, I can play, you know, fluently. This takes a couple of weeks, right? So you might be Okay. Alright. I know exactly what I'm pressing here. I can even talk, like, Ooh, I'm feeling this. Maybe I put some rhythms. Alright, having fun, right? So when you're fluent like this, then you see it's pretty quick. So you're like, Okay, I'll add the next one. So this is going to be major seven chords, not the major seven, but minus seven. So major chord, minus seven. So that's going to be the formula. So if we look there on the worksheet or it's the fifth chord, so we go one, two, three, four, five. So that's the formula, right? So you see here in the worksheet, measure minus seven chords right there. So it's four half stabs, three, three. We have four half steps, one, two, three, four, one, two, three, one, two, three. All right. I know which notes major minus seven is, right? So I'm play all of those now. Go and put the metronome very slowly. One, two, three, four, C sharp, Major, minus seven, D major, minus seven. It's called dominant. E flat, measure, minus seven, E major, minus seven, F measure, minus seven. And so on and so forth. Okay? So you get the hang of it, right? You have the formula for each of those chords, and you have the practice sheet here, and now it's just up to you to practice. This is the road map. I know it might feel like a lot, but if you think about it, this is it. This is a finite study. You're going to be forever perfecting your taste and the way you play and how fluent you are or how fast you can play. But in order to play music and be able to be fluent, it doesn't take a whole lifetime. You know, for example, if I want to play in the key of C minor, See, I'm fluent. I can't play melodies. Right. Arpagos I'm just playing around. And if I want to make a song, I start being picky, right? I'll be like, Oh, I want this, I don't want that. And I can start exploring. Or when I'm learning other people's songs, you know, I just learn what you press. Why not you press. Right? So once you know this, it becomes a lot of fun and so easy. And mastering this is fun, okay? Mastering this is like a video game. So if you're able to have fun playing this, you will get to be a fluent player very, very soon. See, it's not really rocket science to learn this stuff. It's more a lot of very easy things that you need to combine. So each piece of information is relatively easy to understand. But because there are so many little steps and scales and formulas, if you are organized with your resources, with your worksheet, with your practice journal, with your music journal, keeping track of the days you practice, keeping track of your metronome speeds. You make a lot of progress. Trying to do this learning process just by winging it, it's going to get you plateaued. You're going to plateau up to a place that you could figure it out and you're just going to stay there. So you see how applying daily routine practice and the practice journal and the matronom to chords is essentially the same as applying that same method to learning scales, pasio and third intervals. So put that muscle, that muscle of learning, that muscle of starting very slow and always playing correctly and gradually increasing that speed day by day by day by day. If you apply that to chords, you'll be able to play chords fluently. One, you'll be able to play chords fluently. Then you might choose to play diatonic chords. So it sounds more like a song, so they sound like they fit over the same scale. But for practicing the chords, technically, in your daily practice routine, you might want to practice all the major, all the diminished chords, all the minor seven chords, and just tackling them by category. So your muscle learns through repetition. Once you know the chords, you can play just the diatonic chords of a particular scale, that kind of thing. So in order to explain how to get these chords that you're going to learn on your practice routine and incorporate with your daily practice, which is already full of scales, rpagio, third exercises, how you're going to bring that all together and still play songs, let's have a look on the next lesson, how to put that all together in a way that is sustainable to play and practice every day. I'll see you there. 27. A Daily Practice Routine: I want to mention that I practice multiple instruments every day because I am very advanced in a lot of these instruments. But in the beginning, I suggest that you stick with one instrument because it's already a lot to learn all about music and all about the technique of that instrument at once. Once you learn your second instrument, you're only going to be learning the instrument because the music you're already going to know. Oh, how is C sharp harmonic minor scale formed? You're already going to know that. How what is the third diatonic chord of major tonality? You're going to know that. Oh, yeah, it's in C, it's E minor, and the formula is three half steps, four half. You know, you're going to know everything regarding music theory and how it's supposed to sound. So you only have to figure out the mechanics of the instrument. But for now, if this is your first instrument, I would say, stick with practicing just one instrument until you get fluent. So let's have a look on what a daily practice might look like. Think about it like nutrition, right, or like eating. You don't necessarily eat every vitamin every day in every meal. You might eat some greens during lunch, but maybe you don't have greens for breakfast. You have some protein for dinner, but maybe you're not having protein when you're snacking. And so with the practice is the same style. You have major tonality and minor tonality. Each of those have 12 keys, and then you have three exercises per key. That's technical stuff, plus the chromatic scale. So with time, practicing those going to get quicker and quicker. But also, you want to attach to that technical practice. Also music practice because technique isn't musical necessarily. So for music, you are practicing, learning a song, you are practicing, playing the arpegio over the chords of the song you chose. You're practicing improvising with the chords and scales, diatonic chords and diatonic scales over a progression that you either play on the computer or you play yourself, and then you play on top of it. So you want to have half B technique and half B music. Or it can be two thirds of technique, one third of music in the beginning, whatever you feel like it. But let's go and let me give you an example of how I would balance this daily practice. Alright, let's say I'm practicing guitar. I'm going to decide, do I want to play with a pick up and down, up and down? Do I want to play with my fingers like this? This goes back to the music appreciation lesson where it depends what kind of player you want to be primarily, right? If you want to play, you know, shredding, have metal, there is no sense in practicing much like this. You could later on, but primarily, you need to get your pick game, you know, in shape. But maybe if you want to play Bosonova, you might want to play, you know, with your fingers if you want to play classical guitar. So it depends on where you're going for. But in this case, here, I'm just going to play without a pick, okay? So let's say, the first thing you start is the scale. So which key are we in? Let's say I'm practicing C major. So I'm gonna play C major scale. Right? Back down. So put the metronome on, you know, find out what is a good speed for you. You know the deal. Look in your practice journal if this isn't your first time, right? Oh, Okay, this is a good speed for me. Go for it. Go wrong. Do it again. If you get wrong twice or more, I'm going to lower the speed. All right. So now that I played the scale of this tonality, now let's play the rpagio of that tonality. So we go. So on and so forth. Play all the rpagis going up and down, you know, adjust the metronome as you go. You know the deal. And then third exercises. Here we go. Oops. Make a mistake. You stop right away. You don't want to learn a mistake, right? So on and so forth. Alright. So I play the scale and arpegio of the same key. And then next third intervals of the same key. So today was my C major day. I'm gonna stick with C major until I'm pretty fast. When I'm, you know, at, like, higher speeds here, Oh, two notes per click. Oh, yeah, I'm playing. I'm fluent. I feel comfortable. Everything's fine. I can talk. Alright, this is great. When you're pretty fluent, it should take you, like, a minute to do those three exercises, right? Like a minute and a half to do those three exercises. As you go. Okay. Now thirds De You're making very little mistakes and you just playing, right? You almost get in the flow as you do it. When this becomes too easy, then you can go to your next key. In the guitar, it's different because to go to the next key, I just slide my finger over or right? You can just play by sliding, and it's the same thing you already learned. So in every other instrument, the piano, saxophone, violin, cello, whatever, each key is going to give you a different challenge. So it's going to take you time for you to switch to the next key. On the guitar, because it's pretty relatively easy to go to the next key, you're going to learn different positions. So look up guitar positions, and after you learned the first position here. Now, learn what is the C major second position. Just do research, find out the fingering. I'll be here. As opposed to here. Right? I just start with a different finger and I go up on the arm of the guitar and you keep going up. That's how later you can play back and forth on the neck of the guitar as opposed to up and down. So in the guitar, once you mastered one key, like C major, you can play in other keys for fun, but try to add the second position and the third position and so on and so forth, okay? So once you going back to your daily practice, let's say today. Oh, I played first position on the guitar or I played C major scale on the piano, let's say. Then you do the three exercises, scale, arpegio third exercises. Once you did that, it's almost like you go warmed up. You got your technique down, now you're playing with the metronome. Now you on it. You can practice a little chromatic scale just for fun, Or exercises to just improvise a little bit, maybe a major scale. Where you can just just play up and down in whatever way you want, just to kind of improvise a little bit. But it's still technical, right? And then you're ready to play a song. You're warmed up to play a song. So if I'm in C major, maybe now I'm gonna play the C major chords, right? Not the diatonic chords, but let's say, C major chord. Now D major chord. Now E major chord, F major chord, G major chord. So now that you played all those exercises, you warmed up. Next, you can play some chord practice. Practice, you know, the major chords, try it, you know, all the major chords. C, C sar. D, In the guitar, once again, that might be easy. So remember to practice different positions. Oh, I have a C here. I have a C here. I have a C here. Every time I say practice a new key, in the guitar, it means practice different position, whether that's chords or scales or apasis and all of that. So once you played your technical exercises and your chords, now let's play a song. So You're trying to learn a song that you like and try to have that song be in the key that you're practicing. So, oh, a song in C. Most of the chords and the melody is going to be in the key scale that I'm practicing. So, in this case, toy story, you got a friend in me, right? So, like, you got a friend. Got a friend. Right? Oh, okay, I'm learning to switch the chords. How do I practice that? In the beginning, you're gonna be like, Y got take your time. Switch, i friend. Take your time, find the chord. Make sure the nodes are always clean, and you always have good posture. Once you know more or less what you're doing, then you can put the matronom in a very comfortable speed, maybe slow. Y got a friend You got a friend me. Gonna learn the introduction. Right? Oh, okay. I'm going to speed this up. Oh, that chord that goes like this really hard. Let me just practice that. You got a friend me. Right? So, same process you apply to your technical exercises, now you apply to learn a song, and that song is in the key that you're practicing your technical exercises. Remember, you can go on these websites and type you got a friend in me Cords, and you can find a button that says Transpose. In a lot of websites, you can find that button, and you can just transpose whatever song you want to learn, chew the key you want to learn, right? Oh, I want to learn under the bridge ha chili peppers. But I want in the key of E major. So you can either Google that or find a website that has the cords and click Traspose until it's on E Major or E minor or whatever tonalgy that song is in. So that way, your song learning practice is matching the technical exercises and the chords and the scale that you've been practicing. So after you did that, you might want to improvise a little bit. Okay, so now I have C. So I have diatonic chords here on the C, I have this scale, and I have the chords, C, D minor, E minor, half major, G major, A minor, B, half diminished, C. So these are the chords available, and this is the scale available. As we spoke, in the guitar, to play melody and chords at the same time, it's pretty challenging. If you're doing the piano, I suggest you to do that. Left hand chords, right hand melody, really slow. If you play wind instruments where you cannot play chords or, you know, if you're a singer or if your instrument just can't play chords, you can type the chords on the computer on those websites I showed on previous lessons, and you can play with the chords that the computer is playing back to you. Or if you learn how to play piano, you can record yourself playing piano, and then you play your instrument on top. Or you can Google playbacks, you know, Blues playback or, you know, a race playback, summertime playback, and you find just the chords that you can play the melody on top. So just improv after you have those chords available to you, you can improvise. If you can play chords, great. Just improvise like that. In the guitar, I'm not going to play the melody at the same time, but I'm going to sing and whistle. Remember, I particularly never practice singing. My singing is totally, like, off key and not very there's no technique to it. I don't even know what's the technique. And my whistling, whatever I just come up with. But I'm not worried about that. I'm worried about exploring the scale within the chords. So as long as I'm, like, roughly on the right note, it allows me to know this scale and to practice the chords, right? So I could go. So Oh, I like that, so I'm gonna go. Ooh, I like the first two chords, but I don't like the last one. Nope, don't like the third one. Alright, I like that chord. So I'm playing the first chord, the sixth chord, and the third chord of the diatonic Cas, right? So go. I already came up with a little something. It might be close to another song that exists. I'm not even sure if it is or what that song would be, but it doesn't matter. I'm just exploring and I'm navigating the meld, I'm navigating the chords, and I'm just exercising the exercises I practice. Does that make sense? I'm putting to use the technical exercises I just learned, but now in a musical context, okay? And that you can also do with metronome. Everything with metronome is better for your learning, right? So I'm gonna go a little faster with that. I'm gonna And so on. Oh, maybe I'll do a new session. Whatever. But, you know, you can make these little songs, and be like, Okay, I like this loop. I'm just going to record and see how I did or Oh, I'm going to write this down, and Tremor, I'm gonna pick up where I left from. I'm gonna finish the song. You know, do that for a little bit. So your practice is not heavy and it's not all technical and it's not also all, like, creative, it's balanced. So once you finish that, this is a good amount of practice for a day. Then you can call it a day. The next day you come, you still going to be doing the same scale, the same tonality, the same third exercises, probably learning the same song. It might take you a week, two, three weeks for you to get out of this. And meanwhile, you are in this key learning this song, improvising, but you're increasing the speed, right? So you're not really stuck on the same place. You're stuck in the same key, but you are progressing your technique, you're improving your ears. Your muscles are getting muscle memory. So it's going to get you a point after two, three weeks, maybe four weeks, however long it takes you, then you just gonna be like, Oh, yeah. Se major? Oh, yeah, I can play all the chords, piece of cake. Oh, yeah. Here we go. Scale. Oh, yeah, no problem. And one day, you're gonna sit to practice, and you're gonna do everything, and it's gonna be really quick. Like, not that you're going to be really fast. You're also going to be really fast. But after you finish practicing, you're gonna be like, Wow, it's only been like 4 minutes, so like 5 minutes. I'm done. Oh, maybe I should move on to Jiffernt key. Okay? Oh, okay, let's go to iffernt key. Now I'm going to go to F Major. Alright. So how is that major scale? And then you start again. Now, note that the first round of exercise and practice that you do in a particular key, it might take you weeks, maybe months for you to be really fluent and comfortable with that because you're learning the music, you're learning the technique, you learning posture, you're learning everything at once. So it's going to take a long time. But the second key you do, it's going to be way faster. The third, way faster, the fourth, way faster. And remember, there is 12 just in the major tonality. So by the time you al readited six, seven, eight, you're like, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, you're progressing very quickly. Maybe you stay a couple of days in each key, and that's it. You might walk off of it with a new song with a new composition with another key you can play or in the guitar, another position you can play on the neck. And that's just going to add up and add up. So it's an exponential curve. It's like Pushing a car, when you have to you know, the car doesn't start and you have to push it. In the beginning, you're like, and you put in all your focus and all your strength and the cars barely moving. But once the car starts to move and has momentum, you don't have to do much effort and the cars just going and you just pushing it. So remember that in the beginning because I hope you remember me saying that, and you put your frustration away. You are going to get frustrated and you are going to lose your patience. And once those things happen, pull your instrument down. Music is supposed to be fun. If it's not fun, it's really not worth it. So it has to be enjoyable. It has to be fulfilling. And once those negative feelings come, just put them away and try to be rational about it. This is the point of this class. It's not to substitute a teacher for a particular instrument, but it's to give you the overarching view of what it takes to learn music, to learn, how to play an instrument. And you can apply this pretty much to learning everything. And once you know what the path is, that anxiety and that feeling that you're not progressing and that frustration should diminish or entirely go away, right? So keep that in mind as you practice. Remember to keep up with your practice journal and with your music journal, once you add a new BPM or add a new scale or learn a new song, and remember that once you're learning songs and improvising, that kind of practice is not over until you perform that, right? So if you're learning a song for a couple of days, couple of weeks, and you finally can play that song, just don't go to the next song. You need to perform it because it's not over until you perform it. Remember, if you're practicing a song, you have to perform it and ideally share with people. Go on the project tab of this class and share with us some of your progress, some of your songs. So keeping up with your practice journal, with a music journal and doing videos of your practices and stashing those away or sharing them with us, okay? So this is what your daily practice should look like. And remember, it's more important to practice just the right amount and never over practice, rather than try to play everything more exercises, and then get tired, be making a lot of mistakes, getting frustrated. It's not worth it. If all you can do is just play one scale a day, and that's it. You don't even have time for arpegios, that is totally fine. Just play your scale and relax. Next day, come back. Because that positive vibe and that sense of accomplishment is going to propel you forward and forward. And then in no time, you'll be able to do a lot with your short practice and gradually increasing the time that you practice without feeling that you're tired or burdened or sore or distracted or frustrated, is just going to be a natural progression. And that's when you're going to grow into the shoes of a musician, where you're going to be the best musician that you can be once you naturally and in a positive way, make your progression get next, we're going to talk about what's ahead of you, and spoiler alert, it's more practice. I'll see you on the next lesson. 28. What's Next? Keep Practicing: And you know what's next? Keep practicing. Yes, this is pretty much everything you have to practice, to have a technical degree on your instrument, to technically be able to play pretty much anything in regard to chords and melodies. You obviously, you know, improve the technique, the sound, the gear you have, your taste, your ears, et cetera. But this is the roadmap. This is 100% of what you have to master. If you want to walk on stage and play with somebody that maybe you've never seen before. If you want to go jam with somebody and they play some chords in a major or minor tonality, and you know which scale to play. You know which chords to play. You know how the rhythm is working. Your sense of timing is developed because you've been practicing in the metronome. You know a few songs to play because you've been learning songs. So this is all that you have to do it, but you still have to do it. Remember, in the beginning, everything you do is going to take way more time. But you saw how there is a lot of math into this program, right? So you have two tonalities, and then 12 scales, 12 keys in each tonality, and then you have rpagios and third exercises in each one of those keys, and then you have chords and major chords, and you have 12 more of those and minor chords and 12 more of those, and then etcetera, et cetera. So basically, you see that there is a lot of repetition. Once you learn one, it takes a long time. The second one is quicker. The third one is faster, five, six, when you're in the seven, one, you're blazing through these learnings, and then you have 12 more. You know, you have like six or seven more, so you get to 12. So, boom, you master the major chords, you go to the minor. So remember that this process is constantly at the same time, you'll be playing something that's easy for you, but at the same time, that same day, you'll be playing something that's hard for you. That's why music is very, very humbling because music can turn any player upside down and put him in a pickle because there is always something that you're fluent on and something that you're not. And it's a lifetime to try to learn as much as you can not only about your instrument, but about music. And remember, you don't have to fully learn an instrument until you're a professional or an expert. I want you to talk about talent for a little bit. Talent doesn't play a role here at all. And let me explain to you why. Because we are talking about the basics, we're talking about technical exercises. We're talking about everything you have to do to be fluent in music. So think about talking. Do you have to be talented to talk? No, everybody can talk. Well, if you want to be like JZ and rap and have everything in your memory, if you want to be like M&M or TPAC, sure, you need to be talented. But to talk, do you need to be talented? No. Everything we spoke about in this class is just the basics. It's just to be fluent. Is just to be able to play it. So all of this is just about putting the time and having hours of flight is keeping track of your progress, covering all it's covering all of these exercises, learning songs, getting familiar with your instrument, understanding how music works. After that, sure. If you have ten players and they are fully technically resolved, they did all of this, then they and then they became advanced players, and then they played for ten, 20 years, and then they're super experts, and all of them practice like 8 hours a day for liv Okay, at that level, if you do all of that and you still have talent, obviously, you go to stick out. You're going to, you know, be above the mark, and your talent is going to take you even further, and maybe some people cannot get there. But this only counts in a very, very high level. For most of us, included, we don't have to be virtuosos to work with music, to just love music, to play music on a campfire, to produce music with the computer, to play with bands, it doesn't take much. It doesn't take virtuosity to do those things. And talent only is going to make a difference when you get to a very high level. So the size of your hand is fine, the shape of your body is fine. The instrument you have is fine. The talent you have is fine. The time that you have to practice every day is fine. What it's going to have you play, it's gonna be just like talking. Do you talk every day? Yeah. Look at a baby that's learning how to talk. Every day it's trying. Every day is making weird sounds. Every day you don't understand what the baby's saying. Every day, weeks, months, ears, boom, the baby's talking. Learning a second language. Same thing. You go to a different country. Maybe you studied for years. You studied grammar books, you watched movies, you played video games, you think you have a grasp. You move to a new country, boom, you cannot understand anything people are saying. You cannot speak at all. One week, two weeks, nothing. A month, nothing, two, three months. Ah, I already understand a little bit. I understand more, more, still can't speak. Months, months, months, six months, boom, now I can speak. Now I can communicate better and better, and so on and so forth. So a lot of this is just showing up to practice and putting your time in. But unlike talking, you're only really practicing this when you are with your instrument and when you're playing, which is not 247, right? You will take time from your day, stop what you're doing, and then pick up your instrument. So it takes way longer to learn an instrument than to talk because you're only doing for ten, 15, half an hour a day, if you're doing every day. So it seems like it's harder. It seems like it takes longer, but it really doesn't a very natural process. So don't worry about how long it's going to take you. You're definitely going to get there if you keep showing up. Two more things to keep in mind. One is that your practice is not over until you perform what you've been practicing. Learning an instrument is about performing and performing is in real time. So that goes through music, but that even goes through a scale. You can't just play half a scale and stop and then finish the next half. That's not a performance. You can't play a song, stop, and then play the rest of the song. You have to say, Hey, I'm going to play scale now. Boom, boom, boom, boom Mm, M, M, M, M, um. Okay, a performance in time, right? So this is why music is interesting to me, think about like, things that you know, let's say, the timetable, let's say, two times one, two, two times two, four, two times three, six. One thing to know the time table, but it's a different thing to know on a matronom. You put the matronom and can you say two times two, two. Two times one, two, two times two, four, two times three, six, two times four. 16, right? Oh, two times two times four, eight. You see how your brain out of a sudden glitches and you're like, Oh, my God, I just say that two times four, 16, like what am talking about? Obviously eight. But when it's in time, it requires you to have total mastery of that material. So this is something that's gonna help you for the rest of your life. You're going to understand the difference between knowing something, understanding something, and mastering something. So once you master music in time, you have to perform it to be sure you did master it. Whatever you're practicing, remember to post those videos on the project section of this class, so people can give you feedback, positive feedback. People can watch you develop. People can learn from what you're doing. People can ask questions about your gear or your posture. Remember, always positive because whatever it's not good about what the person is doing is just not good at that moment. That person is going to get better, but it just takes time. So giving negative feedback to somebody that's learning music is the same thing as bullying a kid because, hey, you can't walk, your baby. You're crawling like a snake and you can't even stand up. Like, that would be insane to say that. It's just a baby. Doesn't know how to walk yet. The baby's crawling and you're like, Yay, good job. And you're like, ya, good job. You know, go on, and soon you'll be walking, right? Or go to a baby and say, You're blabbling. You can't even talk. You're saying everything wrong, and you can only say, mama and dada, Nobody would say that. That's ludicrous, right? You say, Wow. You can say, Mama, that's great. You can say Dada. That's great. Good job. Keep trying. And then soon the baby's talking. Here is the same thing. We are not babies, but in a sense, if you starting now, you've been playing music for a very short amount of time, and you will sound raw, and you will sound not professional. And that is okay. And for us to be able to share that and give each other incentive and cheer each other on, it's going to make the whole community better, and it's going to keep everybody motivated. You can even challenge your friends and say, I'm playing C major at 80 BPM. But tomorrow, I'm going to post, you know, 88 BPM. And then your friend says, 88 BPM. Great. By next week, I'm also going to be doing 88 BPM with you. Let's post together this time. Like, you can keep each other motivated and keep checking everyone's program. This leads me to my next point, which is community. You need to form a community, a community of people that practice music, and a community of people that play music. Also, community of people that like gear or music gear or a community of people that listen to music, but it's essential that you surround yourself with this environment that you want for yourself. If you have metal, get into forums about that. Look which guitar they are playing. Look up tutorial videos, get into forums about, you know, if you're playing guitar or bass or whatever it is. Who is doing that? Who is teaching online? Let me check them out. Who in your neighborhood is playing that? Can you start a band? Can you join a band? Can you go online and talk to people about bands that exist in your favorite albums and music and ask questions? Remember that having a community is key to develop everything else that you practice won't develop. Creating a community gives you a bigger understanding of the musical context that you'll be using your techniques to play on. Next, I'll meet you in our final lesson, just for some considerations and key takeaways. I'll see you there. 29. Conclusion: Congratulations. You got here at the end of this massive class that pretty much spells out how to learn any instrument. If you had the resilience to follow along up to this point, you definitely have the resilience that it takes for you to learn an instrument. So congratulations and just keep at it. Remember that to learn your first instrument is harder because you're learning the instrument, but you're also learning everything about music. Once you learn your first instrument, the second is much easier. The third is much easier and so on and so forth. So for now, definitely focus on one instrument until you're very fluent on it, and then later on, you'll be able to learn more instruments pretty easily. Here are some considerations. If you play an instrument of undefined pitch, an instrument that cannot play a scale, for instance, like percussion or drum kit, I suggest you to learn the piano. Because you will be playing music, and the other musicians are going to be playing chords and scales and melodies, and all you're going to have is rhythm. So for you to understand them, but more important for you to have your ears of a musician, for you to understand where the chords are being played, what the melody is you need to be able to play that and to practice that. And I recommend the piano because the piano you can play chords. You can play chords and melodies fairly easily. The sound is produced easily by pressing the keys. You can visualize it. So there are many reasons why I would recommend the piano for you. Also, if you play an instrument that doesn't play chords, if you're a singer, play violin, if you play saxophone, you need to be able to practice chords for the same reasons because chords are going to be present in music, and you want to be able to hear those chords, to practice those chords, to understand how those chords feel and function. So for you, I also recommend you practice the piano on the side because same reasons as the percussion players. Piano is visual. It has all the keys there laid up for you in a very easy way to understand that the tone is easy to produce. So for percussion players and for instruments that don't play chords, those are the exceptions where I do recommend that you practice piano at the same time as you're practicing your instrument. Another consideration is what we call transposing instruments. If you're playing piano and guitar, you don't need to worry about this. But if you're playing clarinet, trumpet, saxophone, have in mind that those instruments are called transposing instruments. Meaning, when you play a C on a saxophone, it's not a C on the piano. The scales and notes are shifted. So if a instrument is in B flat, in the case of a trumpet of a tenor saxophone, you are one note below the piano. So if you play a B flat on the saxophone, it's actually a C on the piano. I'm not going to get I'm not going to get much into it, but there are instruments in F, let's say, a French horn. Just check if the instrument that you chose is a transposing instrument or not. And if it is, you need to keep that in mind when you're playing with other people. You need to transpose the key so you're playing the same sound, not necessarily the same notes, okay? So the main instruments there are not a transposing instrument. You know, the flute is not a transposing instrument, the piano guitar, violin, celllo, all of those are not transposing instruments, okay? The voice. So just keep that in mind in case you play mostly wind instruments, in case you play, all the saxophones, clarinets, french horns, some tubas, some euphoniums, trumpets. Keep that in mind if you're playing those instruments, okay? And do a little research on transposing instruments before you play with other people. Remember that this class is not intended to be a substitute for a private teacher. There are many things that only a human next to you can teach you. Even online classes are going to be challenging for some fine adjustment techniques. But this class is aimed to give you an overall view of what it takes and how to execute all of your technical basic learnings so you can get to fluency on your instrument. Here are some key takeaways. Always under practice. Stop practicing before you too tired before you're making too many mistakes. You need to come back the next day feeling good and craving playing an instrument. So don't overdo it in any particular day. Once you're familiar with whatever you're going to practice, always use the matronom. Music is a temporal art. Therefore, you need the matronom to understand how time works. Always stop after you make a mistake. You never want to be playing and making the same mistake over and over because your brain is going to learn that mistake. Remember the importance of small steps every day. If you have a small step every day, you're going to climb that ladder step by step, and you're going to get very high. If you try to do a big leap, you're not going to reach the next step and you're going to get stuck. You're going to feel frustrated. And even if you go through that step, you're going to be very tired and it's not going to be a good setup for you to go further and further. You're going to run out of energy of drive and you're likely going to drop your practice. So remember to always take small steps. Also, please review this class. We put a lot of time and effort to make this class good so you can understand and accomplish your goals regarding playing an instrument. I will read every review and consider those points in your feedback for the other class I'll be making. Also, please let me know on the discussion section of this class, what other classes you want to complement this class. One that comes to mind is that you might want a class on music notation to learn how to read staff notation or maybe chord diagrams. You might want a class on how to improvise in a particular style. You might want a class specifically on what to do with inverted chords or the different positions on the guitar. You name it. So let me know below what other classes you would like to have to complement this one. Don't forget to also follow me here on skill share to get notified next time I publish a class. Check out my work at www dot Fernando ARRUDA my name RudaAdt Info, and also check what I'm up to on Facebook. URL is facebook.com slash FJzMSC. I'm thrilled for you and your new music practice. I can't wait to see what kind of music you're going to be making, what kind of songs you're going to be playing, to witness your progress as you start to learn things with a metronome to share your practice journal. It's going to be very exciting to create this community around this very positive and rewarding activity of learning an instrument and playing music. Remember, your music can change other people's lives. You can inspire others. You can give them comfort. You can excite them. You can entertain them. It's a very, very powerful tool that you can use to shed light around you and to transform the moods of people around. So this is a wonderful way to spend your time, and I'm very glad you chose this class to guide you throughout that process of learning an instrument. Alright, it was a pleasure, but it's getting dark, and I got to go because I still need to practice some allo before the day is over.