Introducing various keys with the Degree Card

[johnk]

To make relative solfa and hand positions for keys concrete, I use a "degree card", showing the degrees of the scale for any major or minor key. Wouldn't mind some feedback on this idea.

https://au.youtube.com/watch?v=oQeIeNt5yx4

[dan101]

I guess the cards do the trick (I've never tried them). Just make sure to keep things lively and entertaining during the lesson, regardless of your method or means of teaching the scale degrees.

Good luck.

[johnk]

I dont think you looked at my video. The degree card is not like flash cards.

[lostinidlewonder]

I don't understand its application for more complicated situations. How do you use Solfege to do chords or simultaneous notes? It seems to me that we are memorizing the notes one at a time in single note melodies. We consider everything in its single units, where I have always approached music as a groups at a time, rather than the individuals. How are groups of notes related to one another with sound(What we hear from within our heads) muscular(what we feel from our hands) and conscious(what we logically can state about the music) memory. Solfege seems to me to give bias to sound memory.

[keypeg]

Lostinwonder, my first relationship to music is via solfa, but it is in terms of sound which is also within the ladder of a generic scale.  It is especially useful in recognizing melody, recognizing that same melody when it is transposed and being able to adjust to that in an instant.  When in "solfa mode" I would play what I hear in that context. That includes seen written music and "hearing" it as melody. That may give it the relational context you are refering to.  I probably relate to music more like a singer or player of instruments that play one note at a time.

If "solfa" becomes a chart of intervals then I don't know if that context is still there.  It would feel almost like a pitch-related mentality trying to enter the type of solfa that I know.  If it leads to feeling yourself oriented within a scale maybe it's the same thing. Does hearing and pre-hearing enter into it here?

[johnk]

Solfege seems to me to give bias to sound memory.

By placing the degree card on the keys and practicing with it, the 'sound memory' can be made visual and tactual, and what you hear is 'verified', or seen to be in agreement with the notes (keys) you played. You hear and see together, and this aids not only in memorisation, but analysis and improvisation. Basically since I hear in relative terms, I wanted to have a way to 'see' what I hear, and the degreecard does this.

Before i thought of the degree card and began using it, I was very reliable playing by ear and by memory in C major, but the further away the key signaure was, the more I felt in the dark. I had a few disasterous memory lapses because i could not 'see' in the key I was in. Using the degree card had the effect of gradually turning the light on in other keys, and I have used it ever since.

[keypeg]

Johnk, I can "see" that.    (It makes sense to me.)