More music

As promised, here is some more practice stuff. If you click on the image you'll get a larger, easier-to-read picture.  Please feel free to print out anything you want but if you share, please give me a credit and link. Thanks.

Remember to try and make the notes flow out of the ukulele. Chopin used to tell his students to make the piano sing and it's good if we try and make the uke sing along with us. This involves a lot of back and forth getting us to hop from one note to another. It will take some real effort on our part to make it feel musical.

Half and quarter notes for counting practice.

Here is something in 3/4. Three=quarter time is, if you'll pardon my putting this in incorrect terms, a very male time. That one in ONE two three keeps coming back at you. I have a bad habit of playing ONE two three pause, ONE two three pause. We want that ONE coming in right on time every time. And we want it to flow.

Finally, here is one in 6/8. At this point the difference between 6/8 and 3/4 is mostly academic but six doesn't seem to get much attention in ukulele instruction books and I want to do my little bit to correct that. To carry on my incorrect metaphor, 6/8 is a womanly time; it's a lilting, swinging time with lots of potential for subtle shifts in the accents. I'm not very good at all at six and I want to fix that.

It's in 6/8 so remember quarter note gets two beats, dotted quarter gets three beats and the eighth note gets one.

Intervals

The spaces between the notes

The notes we have been singing have gaps between them. Those gaps are called intervals. Intervals are really, really familiar and really, really weird at the same time. They're familiar becasue we know them.

Try a little experiment. Find a nice comfortable low note and sing it until you've got it. Now starting from that note sing, "Somewhere, over the rainbow."

Here is the cool part, in going from "some" to "where" you jumped an octave. Check it on your chromatic tuner if you want. If you aren't exactly on the octave, you'll be close. If you missed it completely, keep plugging and you'll get it in a short while. The thing is that gap or interval is hard-wired right into your brain. And it was there right from the beginning. When your mother sang you songs in the crib, you heard those intervals. If our mothers had tried to pull a fast one on us by singing Mary Had a Little Lamb to a different melody, we would have spotted the trick right away and stomped our little feet until she did it the right way. We heard and understood that melody before we knew who Mary was or what a Lamb was.

Learning intervals really is mastering the basics. This is something we already know how to do and we are just going to learn how to do it in a more disciplined way.

2 + 2 = 3

All the gaps between the notes we have been singing and playing have names. From Do to Re is a major second. It is also exactly two frets on our ukulele. Re to Mi is also a major second although it's a little harder to see because we jump down to the first string to play it. We can play it on the second string if we want by going up two frets from Re. (In case you are wondering, the gap between notes one fret apart is a minor second but we'll save that for later.)

Okay, here is where it gets a little weird. What happens if we go all the way from Do to Mi. That is two major seconds so it should get us ... well, it gets us to a major third. Huh?

Sometimes you may hear people say that music theory is like mathematics. Well, actually it's much simpler than that: music theory is mathematics. This is easier to grasp if you done advanced math because you will already know that different kinds of mathematics have different rules. Boolean math uses different rules than the arithmetic we learned in Grade 3. The rules that apply in each kind of mathematics are a reflection of what you do with that mathematics.

In music, the theory is all about counting and measuring. We never multiply, divide, do square roots or solve problems in musical math. All we do is count and use that counting to measure so we can all do the right things at the right time. If you remember back to Grade school, you will remember that your teacher started to teach you arithmetic by saying, follow this rule. She didn't say, here is why we have the rule. We just took it for granted that she knew what she was talking about and we followed the rules. That's what we're going to do to learn music theory too. No matter how weird the rules may seem, we're going to spend the first little while just learning them.

So now we know how to count two kinds of intervals: a major second and a major third. Besides just learning to sing them, we want to learn to hear them. A fun thing to do with the ukulele is to just pick a note anywhere on the uke, play it and sing it and then play and sing the one two frets up.

And try playing one an then singing it but making the jump to the next with your voice alone. And then try playing one note and responding by singing the one two frets up. And then we can turn around and do the whole thing going down.

And we can keep doing this until that interval is ingrained in our heads so well that if someone blindfolded us and played any two notes with that interval we would be able to identify it as a major second. And if they tried to fool us by playing two other notes we would be able to say, 'No, that's not a major second.'

More music to play tomorrow.

When good enough is not good enough

My project is all about going back to master the basics. I'm still playing and singing for fun and even practicing other stuff as I do this and recommend the same for anyone else.

Of course, when I first started, exercises such as the stuff I put up yesterday were hard. I'd sit there and want to curse because I'd will my fingers to do one thing and they did either something else or nothing at all.

Now the problem is that it can sometimes feel too easy. If I just play the notes Mi-Re-Do, Mi-Re-Do over and over again, I think, 'I've got it now I'll move on.' This is, I think, good enough.

The thing I am challenging myself with is to never accept good enough as good enough. I want to do more with the simple things. I want to master the basics.

• I want to play the notes and sing them at the same time. That is I want to get those notes programmed into my brain, my ear, my mouth and my fingers so I can string them out just as easily as I do words in sentences when I speak.
• I want to make it music. Think about two notes Mi-Re. I could produce those mechanically like the way the siren on a police car does. Or I could produce like a cruel kid on a schoolyard "nyeh-nyeh, nyeh-hyeh, nyeh-nyeh". Or I could make them musical. As Eddie Condon said, it can go in like broken glass or it can go in like honey. Even with one note, we should be able to make it go in like honey.

Here is the opening phrase of a very famous song that uses only one note. (click on the image to see it larger.) Can you hear the song? Can you make others hear it with just this one note? Can you treat it with love and joy and make that one note flow like honey?

What I am doing and ongoing series

Going east by traveling west: the wonders of transposing

I said I was going to mess around with scales and make mistakes and get dirty and learn things as advised by Ms. Frizzle. And I did.

So what did I learn?

Well, there is something about G. It's like a security blanket for me. When I can't find any other note with my voice, I can always get G. I fret the second string from the bottom at the first fret and play that G and I can unfailingly sing the G two octaves below in response.

And I can sing that whole scale going up from there without straining. I can go up to A and sing that scale without strain. And I can do likewise with the Bb scale, the C scale and even the D scale. I can do the Eb scale with some strain but no pain. I can go beyond that too but it gets really wobbly.

I can go lower too. I can sing an F scale, E scale and even an Eb scale and sing all, obviously, without pain. The problem, rather, is volume and projection. I can hear me at those tones but no one else could without getting pretty close.

So I'm a baritone. Which is pretty normal. Most men are baritones.

That means I can sing a lot of songs that are written on the Treble Clef. I won't be singing in the same octave but I'll be singing a melody that exactly parallels the one written (except when I make mistakes). Most of the music on the treble clef, however, tends to be between middle C and the F that is an octave and four notes above it. That is a very good range for ukuleles but not so good for me. Most songs written on the Treble Clef tend to be towards the upper end of my range. With a  few exceptions, even the ones I can sing comfortably don't allow me to make use of my lower range.

I can make much better use of my range if I move or transpose most melodies to suit. If you want to sing, you really want to learn how to transpose. Lots of songs you'll want to sing won't be in your range.

Oddly enough, since I'm singing a parallel octave below the Treble Clef, I can get to where I want to be by moving the notes up rather than down. You can see what I mean if we look at the Treble Clef. There is room for two G scales (If you click on the image you can see it larger).:

The ukulele can only play the second scale (this is also true for ukuleles tuned GCEA by the way). Since I will be singing a parallel melody well below the uke that doesn't make any difference for me. So all the music I will be practicing with will be moved up. I may put a few Fs and F#s in the mix but I'm going to transpose all the melodies I play and sing up into the range of the ukulele.

(This, by the way, is another advantage for D tuning for me. The range that parallels the range I can sing all fit pretty comfortably on this tuning.)

Monday Tune

When I first started I bought an ukulele and a book. The ukulele, a Mahalo, had serious intonation problems, and the book was for D tuning. After I had played a while, my ears got good enough that I noticed the problems with the Mahalo. So I started searching out more info on the ukulele and everyone told me that "no one tunes ADF#B anymore." I  thought I'd wasted my money on both.

The first person I ever heard defend D tuning was Joel Eckhaus. Here he is in action (unfortunately this gets cut of rather abruptly at the end but is still worth it):



I have always liked this interview he did a few years ago. This quote in particular:

I play standard and concert uke in ADF#B (which I call East-Coast-Up-Tight tuning), mostly because that’s the way Roy taught me. But after all these years playing that way, I’ve grown fond of that tuning. It fits my vocal range and my playing style, which is often hard and aggressive. GCEA (West-Coast-Slacker tuning) works well for those mellow Hawaiian Hulas. Some ukes sound better in one tuning or the other, depending on the resonant frequency of the box. I like to experiment and see which tuning sounds best on a uke.

East-Coast-Up-Tight Tuning! I think we should call FBbDG Southern-Sitting-On-The-Porch-Sipping-Bourbon tuning.

Anyway, his point about experimenting is a very good one. Your ears will tell you what tuning you like and the ukulele will tell you what suits it.

More basic assumptions

I've already said this but this whole project is based on the assumption that we've already been learning for a while and have a book and maybe even took a couple of lessons. This is about mastering basics and not about starting from scratch.

I'm also assuming that we'll keep playing and practicing whatever else we have been doing up until now.  It would be no fun practicing the basics of volleyball if we weren't allowed to keep playing games. I like to sit around and play and sing a few tunes every day just because it can be fun. (It isn't always fun because I struggle with some tunes I want to play.)

I will be putting some sort of organizing tools up that will enable people who find the site to go back and follow along in order at some point. The basic organizing principle is the "week". Because I started on a Saturday, all my weeks begin on Saturday.

Finally, I should add that this singing and playing at the same time is not some wild idea I came up with myself while chewing on peyote in an ashram in Siberia. It's actually a technique used in all sorts of musical pedagogy including the Suzuki method. It helps build a hard connection between our ear and what our hands and mouth are doing.