Exercises - for familarising oneself with music and musical patterns.

[shingo]

Hi,

Sorry for the wordy title. Having never properly learned all my scales and arpeggios before, I have decided to spend some time focusing on this area in order to improve my capacity for recognising music and chunks of notes as a pattern or position, and in turn hopefully boosting my rate of learning new pieces.

I am buckling down to complete major and minor scales, arpeggios, chromatic scale, a couple of scales in 3rds and 6ths and a couple using poly rhythms. It is my intention then to tackle come common chords and play them in each key. I would like to do some stuff with 7th chords as well.


What I am after is any suggestions on exercises that tackle an aspect of music or musical theory, rather than execution of technique. For instance Hannon (although a dirty word here) may be good for gaining finger independence and dexterity, but at the moment I am after something which can be used to understand music better and improve my ability to see a run of notes as a broken chord of some-sort or a descending part of a scale etc and allow for a bar or passage to be rendered into a familiar pattern rather than a string of notes that each has top be learned.

Like with a language I think it will be much easier to learn a piece when each page can be read in sentences/words rather than letters.

If this makes sense I would be very grateful for anyone to suggest a couple which they have found to be useful, although perhaps scales/arps are the most useful out there.

[csharp_minor]

at the moment I am after something which can be used to understand music better and improve my ability to see a run of notes as a broken chord of some-sort or a descending part of a scale etc.

I think you need a book to help you with sight reading, I have been using 'Improve your sight reading!' by Paul Harris and I have to say it has been very usefull to me. I have been sight reading for less then a year and am now on the grade 3 book. I'm not the greatest at reading but I have been getting better.

The ( grade 3 ) book focuses on trying to get you familiar with scale and arpeggio patterns related to the scale they are focusing on in the section. It also introduces you to diffrent kinds of intervals so you can recognise them without reading them note by note. All the new concepts are slowly introduced in each of the exercises.

Before some exercises there a a few questions to help you prepare the piece you will be sight reading. Some of these questions are like: is there any scale patterns in this piece? or ' what chord does the first 3 notes in bar 1 make?' etc. These are questions you will eventually automaticaly ask yourself when you look at any piece of music, and will then know without thinking about it.  

It has, and is definitely working for me, I'm alrealy starting to read music in bits, not note by note as much; but its a slow process. I think playing scales etc too is also a good idea, but don’t overwhelm yourself with learning too many too soon.

hope this helps

[mezzo piano]

Have you thought about studying Jazz? If you really want to learn theory and application it sounds like you might be ready for it.

[soitainly]

 There are studies by Czerny and others, quasi-musical pieces that focus on technique and coordination of the hands. But for the most part you will be better off learning music ie.real pieces, all of the techniques you may came across are found in pieces by famous composers. Technical exercizes are ok if you are stuck on something or for warming up. But it might be better to make a technical exercize out of the section of music that is giving you problems. If it is just for sight reading practice then Czerny might be a good choice too.