Mystery Melodies
Posted in Feature, Sightreading on April 10th, 2008
We all know the secret to learning to read music: there is no secret. It’s a hard truth when you’re just starting out - the idea that there’s just no way around it, you won’t learn your notes unless you practice! And when it comes to reading notes on the staff, many students don’t get the workout that they need on a regular basis.
Learning a tune
A student typically does a lot of note-reading at the beginning of a “tune cycle,” or the process of learning a song from beginning to end. When first presented with the material, he or she will have to buckle down and figure out all of the notes and their respective rhythms. This can be overwhelming and a bit frustrating, especially if the student already more or less knows how the song should go. They can’t quite figure out the song by ear yet, so they are pretty much forced to painstakingly “decode” the notes one by one until they start to recognize the song.
Now, don’t get me wrong: there are a lot of good things happening at this part of the process. Although it may be a slow process at first, the student is still learning valuable things about the way that written music relates to actual sound, and how to find there way around a chart. The problem is just that this process doesn’t happen often enough.
Memorizing a tune
Once the student starts to get to know a piece, even if the music is still up on the stand, the amount of actual note-reading goes way down. And this is totally normal - after all, written music is just a means to an end. And in the normal process of learning a song, we spend much more time on perfecting the performance aspects of a song that we’ve more or less learned by heart than reading it straight from the page. Not only is this also very important for a student’s musicianship, but it’s also the fun part, the whole reason we get into music in the first place!
My goal is not to change all of this, but to supplement it with some extra note-reading on the side, without turning to classical excercises or scale patterns. I also wanted to find a way to show students that note-reading is really reading a language and not just a painstaking excercise - that there is actual information hidden in all those notes.
Keep them guessing
The idea is simple: every other lesson or so, I give my students a simple melody to figure out at home, without telling them what it is. I keep a short list of hooks from recent pop songs, classic rock riffs, etc., that I can jot down fairly easily on a line or two of music paper. At the next lesson the student’s got to be able to show me that he can play the melody, and take a guess at what it is.
The key is to pick examples that the students will get right away - that way the note-reading becomes extremely satisfying; they have no idea what the song could be until they start to play the notes, and then little by little something recognizable emerges and: “Aha! It’s that Green Day song…” or whatever.
The great thing about this is that it can be custom tailored to any student at any level. A young beginner who’s just learned his first piece? How about the opening strains of “Happy Birthday”? A shred-head? See how soon he figures out “Sweet Child o’ Mine.” A Bollywood fan..? Well, you get the general idea.
A tip for the beginning teacher: bite the bullet and put on a pop or Top 40 radio in your car. The suffering and the time away from your usual public radio jazz will be worth it when you know all the new hits that all your students will recognize in a heartbeat. They’ll be asking you for a Mystery Melody every week!