Why Johnny Can’t Read Music, Part Two, Rob Bourassa’s Language of Guitar

Now that we understand the Diatonic Major Scale, we can talk about our Cycle of 5ths and Key Signatures. Many music instruction courses try teaching notation before the student has this understanding. This is why Johnny can’t read music. I’m sickened by the lack of attention in teaching Key Signatures and the counting of Sharps or Flats by name to prepare the student to read a given piece. The Diatonic Major Scale should be learned by rote; BEFORE trying to read. Then, the Key Signatures, and finally, notation should be learned. Sight singing should come before the “Paint By Numbers” method of naming a note on the staff and finding it on the fingerboard as well. After the ear has been trained, the student is able to sight sing, the Diatonic Scales are memorized in order of their appearance in the Cycle of 5ths so the Key Signatures are memorized, THEN we apply ourselves to naming every note in the Chromatic Scale as we play; Every note in our Diatonic Scales as we play, as well as minor scales and modes, and finally, isolated quizzing on reading the staff by names. (First in treble, then in bass clef.) Any deviation from this method leaves us with the dismal status we currently see in our world. Musical illiteracy for all but the brightest. It is possible for somebody to learn in a method currently being used in our schools, but the average student isn’t a left brained savant who will excel in the common method. I won’t call that the traditional method, because it simply isn’t. Paganini wouldn’t even accept a student if they had already learned by notation. Solfeggio and ear training always came before notation in a classical method until the 20th century, where school band primers started training students to play a repertoire by notation instead of stressing scales, arpeggios and solfeggio first. Now, the vast majority of students can’t play musically. Play an Eb chord and ask a student to play Happy Birthday and watch the fun. The rare one will find the Bb automatically. A friend of mine was the head of the jazz department at a major university for 40 years. He gave a test to the new students. He handed them a piece of manuscript paper and asked them to transcribe the Star Spangled Banner; no help from anyone including him. At the end of the hour, the vast majority handed back a mess of notes with no key signature and a bunch of accidentals shoved in awkward places, all because they couldn’t hear that the tune started on the 5th interval and fix the note according to the key signature. Imagine going into another field and being so poorly prepared. This is something that any high school graduate should be able to do easily and nobody should be admitted into a music school without this minimal ability. We are in a world where our colleges are teaching remedial English though, so I shouldn’t be surprised or upset.

[Music] the key of c has no sharps or flats we’ll find our next key by a process that we call the cycle of fifths it’s commonly called the circle of fifths but we’re not going to use a circle just so you know what i’m talking about here’s a brief explanation the circle of fifths shows your major keys and the relative minors and it goes clockwise with fifths so the fifth of the c scale is g the fifth of the g scale d d scales fifth is a a’s is the e e is b and b’s fifth is f sharp and remember we talked about n harmonics that’s also g flat and then the fifth of g flat is d flat the fifth of d flat a flat a flat’s fifth is e flat e flat’s fifth is b flat b flat’s fifth is f and we come back to c again f’s fifth is c a lot of people use this to learn chord progressions which is a very bad way of looking at things that’s why we don’t use this c is the first in the key of c if we go counterclockwise we go by fourths so the fourth of the c scale is f and then we’ll go clockwise to find the five and that 1 145 is our basis of western music’s chord progressions somebody can use one of these things and then transpose to whatever key they want to but this is really a deceptive device the way to really do it is to actually memorize your chord progressions you will memorize a c we’ll memorize the f and the g7 we’re going to play them a thousand times and we’re going to use them in exercises so that we can discern the difference between the sounds of them as well so back to our scale here we had our first note whole step whole step half step and then whole step so we’ll stop right there at our fifth we’re not going to use that circle we’re just going to talk about the cycle of fifths and we’re going to change that g instead of being five or the fifth note of the scale we’re going to make it one or the first of the g scale so we’ll call this a key change so now first note whole step whole step half step whole step whole step whole step half step and if we look we see f is a sharp so the key of g has one sharp which comes on the seventh note and but instead of having to write a sharp every time we use it we’re going to write the sharp at the beginning of the piece we’ll call this a key signature once we name a sharp or flat in the key signature we can remove the sharp from the note in our score it’ll still be counted as a sharp because our key signature tells us that every f has to be sharped we have 12 different notes no matter what we call them rather than memorize their key signatures in this order we’ll kill two birds with one stone and memorize them in the order of how many sharps or flats they have this is why we need to know the cycle of fifths not so we can show off at parties like eggheads professor now you’ll see why we’re learning our scales and chords in the order we’ve been using let’s find our next key in the cycle of fifths g a b c d so d will now become one and let’s move it down an octave so we don’t run out of room on our graphs d will be our first note whole step whole step half step whole step whole step whole step half step and if we look we have an fsharp and we have a c#arp now so the key of d has two sharps fsharp and c# but instead of writing sharps every time i use those notes i’ll put them at the very beginning of the piece in the key signature let’s find our next in the cycle of fifths d e f sharp g a so the fifth is a we’ll make that the one now so we’ll do a key change in the key of a we’ll start first note whole step whole step half step whole step whole step whole step half step and if we look we have c# f# and gsharp now so the key of a has three sharps and the first thing a musician looks at when they pick up a score is the key signature and rather than thinking i need to sharp every c f and g a musician looks at the key signature and says three sharps i’m in the key of a or three flats i’m in the key of e flat lots of times a musician will play a job where there are no sheets and everyone is just playing by ear this knowledge is still essential because it’s how musicians communicate with each other can you imagine being on a busy band stand and somebody calls a tune and you ask “what key?” they say “b.” and you ask g no b e no b d no b c g d e and b all sound quite a lot alike so what people learn to do is simply to hold up the number of fingers and say the number of the key three sharps which is a or pointing fingers down and saying the number of flats two flats which is b flat this is a basic fundamental that every musician should know even if they don’t read you might be wondering how the keys with flats work but we’ll cover that later let’s get back to the keys with sharps we’ll find our next key in the cycle of fifths we were in the key of a so a will be our first note then whole step whole step half step whole step will bring us to e that’ll be our fifth we’ll make e our new one so our new key change will be e and we’ll start that an octave lower so we don’t run out of room on our graph so first note whole step whole step half step whole step whole step whole step half step and that gives us an f# a gsharp a c#arp and a d#sharp key of e has four sharps can you imagine having to write the sharp symbol over all four sharp notes every time you used one that would be ridiculous what a waste of time that would be almost as big a waste of time as it would be to say to yourself “okay i have to remember to keep every f g c and d sharp.” if somebody thinks that this wouldn’t happen think again this is how most of my students who have previously learned to read music in their school’s band class approach it we simply need to practice our chords and our scales in the order of the cycle of fifths and the order will be so familiar to us that we’ll be able to instantly look at a piece of music and recognize what key we’re in this won’t do us any good if we can’t play a simple melody by ear using the scale as a template though many musicians learn to read the spots off a leopard but can’t play a radio without having a sheet in front of them everything they play sounds wooden and lifeless and more of an intellectual exercise than a musical performance somehow singers learn to sight sing with no visible fret markers on their vocal cords they look at a key signature hum an arpeggio to center themselves and then look for the notes within the chart noticing which is the first the third or the fifth of the scale and if they’re in the key of f they sing an f arpeggio and look for the low space on the staff the f note and they find how far away by comparison the first note of the song is whole steps and half steps are easy to distinguish and they sing up or down accordingly not worrying about note names but intervals singers learn a method called sopesio doi fola etc we’ll learn how to do something like this with our guitar too but not till we learn to sing the same note that we’re playing at exactly the same time with no names we’ll build this fluidity first and then we’ll learn the names back to our theory though knowing the scales and reading the expected notes within the scales becomes easy with just a little practice especially when we see no sharps or flats written in the score but shown only in the key signature then when a sharp or flat show up in the score it tells us that we’re playing a note that’s outside of the key we’re in we can also use a natural symbol which gets rid of the sharp or the flat that was added in the key signature and makes it a natural note again and usually tells us that we’re playing a dominant 7th or a [Music] minor for those who don’t know what those are it’ll all be covered a note from outside of the keys major scale will be called an accidental once you learn to read by relying upon the key signatures you can transpose a piece to another key and just keep your eye open for accidental notes the reason i’m mentioning all the notes which i said we were going to ignore is so that you can see the usefulness in memorizing our scales in the order of the cycle of fifths rather than approaching things alphabetically this will also help you memorize the key signatures simply by practicing these exercises in their order we saw that the key of c had no sharps or flats the key of g has one sharp the key of d has two sharps the key of a has three sharps the key of e has four sharps the key of b has five sharps but the seventh key is different it’s f and has six sharps we’ll take a good look at the reason why in a minute but it’s largely to do with our key signatures you want to have a little more of an understanding of the patterns for our sharps and flats first in addition to understanding the need for memorizing our scales and progressions through the cycle of fifths it’s also good to understand the order in which the sharps are introduced in this cycle guitar is a very hard instrument to explain this concept with so i’m going to use another one of our c instruments to do so the piano the piano is laid out left to right low to high the white keys are natural notes and the black keys are sharps or flats so we have c c sharp d d sharp e we can also go backwards and call that e flat d d flat let’s just go up by using only naturals and sharps c c sharp d d sharp e and just like we saw with our stair steps the e has no sharp so we see no black key between the e and the f then fsharp g gsharp a a sharp b and because b has no sharp there’s no black key between b and c either so let’s review our c diietonic scale and remember a half step is one key key on the piano not musical key and a whole step is two keys difference so we have our first note a whole step whole step and a half step whole step whole step whole step and a half step did you notice the fact that only white keys were used sharps come in patterns the key of c has an easy pattern no sharps but outside of c the patterns change c is the only major scale to use only white keys it’s relative minor a minor does as well but for now we’ll look at major keys and just as in the case of our continuing stair steps our scale could continue going up and up and up and up and it does on the piano as well but at some point the frequencies are either too fast or too slow to hear every major scale besides c has sharps or flats let’s look at the pattern as we go through the cycle of fifths each key receives another sharp and that sharp comes on the seventh once a notes been sharped it remains sharped in the next key and the new sharp in that key comes on the seventh note of the scale if you don’t know this already everything i just said made no sense you’re going to understand it soon say this out loud once sharped always sharped remember that because you’ll need to some keys use flats instead of sharps and to find that cycle we can descend by fifths or ascend by fourths we’ll explain that later just remember the new sharp comes on the seventh flats will come on the fourth note and once sharped always sharped the key signature shows how many sharps or flats a piece has predetermined which tells us the key we’re in trying to read music without knowing key signatures or the corresponding scales is a ridiculous waste of time our seven note diietonic scale is old many say that it was pythagoras the greek mathematician who discovered it around 500 bc but it was likely much older going back to ancient mesopotamia long before the piano the pipe organ was developed though the modern configuration of white and black keys in this order doesn’t really appear till 1361 ad in hasht germany we aren’t going to go into a lot of music history here you can read about the problems with pythagoran tuning perfect fifths and wolf intervals and the later solution of equal temperament on your own it’s always interesting but we want to focus on patterns that will help us as musicians at about a th000 ad a benedicting monk ero composed a chant that’s where we get but originally it was the first syllable from each line of a latin chant so in this chant ut was one re was two mi was three fa is four su was five la is six and you would expect c and that’s actually taking st john or sanctus which is j here in in this language english but in latin it’s an i because we don’t have j so we put the two together and we get s i or c regardless we should expect this last one si or c we should expect that to be the seventh note of the scale b but it goes back to the g note which is the fifth so it’s like saying 1 2 3 4 5 6 5 and that’s because we have the seventh one in this chant as a sabbath or resting from its usage this pattern is essential within the diietonic scale and is essential to understand when chord progressions are formed this also inspired the guitar’s tuning we’ll cover that later on let’s see how the sabbath affects the scale we now use letters instead of dome so instead of saying do we’ll say c to understand this pattern better let’s use days of the week for notes sunday monday tuesday wednesday thursday friday saturday and sunday sunday to sunday is also called the octave of the church week we sometimes think of sunday as the sabbath originally the 7th is the sabbath day saturday the day of rest sunday was called the lord’s day for the resurrection of christ and sunday is both the first and the eighth day christ died on a friday and rested in the tomb on saturday which is why christians say we are baptized into his death and in his resurrection we’ve entered his rest or the true sabbath this is why the early christians worshiped on the lord’s day sunday this is the basis for our theory think of c as the christ key it’s the only key in the dominant cycle which we are allowed to use the seventh or sabbath note as a natural keys in the reverse order do as well the keys with flats but to understand the concept we’ll look at the keys with sharps once we leave the key of c through the cycle of fifths we’ll need to keep the law and let the sabbath note rest remember the ratio of steps is the same no matter what key we’re in first note whole step whole step half step whole step whole step whole step half step where we start that first note however affects where the sabbath 7th falls in c it fell on a white key it can also fall on a white key if we’re playing in a minor key a is the first letter in the alphabet it’s also the first note in the a minor aolan mode do you remember when i said that every major key has its evil twin this is our relative minor let that be a lesson to you [Music] [Music]