Since it is going to take me some time to get to this section of the website, and since learning orchestration is a long term commitment, I’m going to start out by recommending some reading. One of the greatest Orchestration books that ever was written is by Rimsky-Korsakov and is available in its entirety online courtesy of Northern Sounds. There are many great books out there on orchestrating and this one is at the top of the list IMO. No matter what you’re level of experience in orchestrating, there is much to learn here.
My favorite thing about this online version, is that the musical and score examples are all playable, so you can hear and see exactly how the principles being discussed sound in the real world. There is so much good information here that you will be able to spend months going through and digesting everything this book has to offer. There isn’t a better, more thourough introduction to Orchestrating, that I’m aware of. So while I’m fleshing out the rest of this site and stalling on adding posts to this section, I’ll let one of the masters take over for a while. He’s going to do a much better job than I would have anyhow.
So now that we have memorized the five boxes, it’s time to see how they fit together to form a “Master Pattern”. This is the step that will take you the longest to really get down, but I promise the effort will be well worth it. The five boxes are really just a shortcut to help you get your head and fingers around the “Master Pattern”. Its this master pattern that we are going to be moving up and down the neck when we talk about building scales. And it’s this master pattern that you should be striving to see when you look at your guitar neck. Here is a graphic that shows you the five boxes interlocked into the master pattern. Remember, your real goal here is to no longer see five individual boxes, but to see this:
Since this can be confusing at first, here’s a video that will really make this all very clear:
I can tell you that when I was first learning these, learning to see the Master Pattern took the longest. I’m seriously talking about months and months of working them into my fingers. While I was trying to get them burned into my brain, I came up with all sorts of little exercises to help. In the next lesson, I’m going to post some of these exercises. Do spend some time working them as I suggest. It will cut down significantly on the time it takes to get this down.
Again, I promise that all this effort will pay off. Once you have this Master Pattern down, your basically done learning patterns and fingerings. Then we can move on to learning how this one pattern contains all your scales and modes in every key and, more importantly, showing you how to use them to fast track your journey into learning Music Theory.
Do (e) – a deer, a female deer
Ra (y) – a drop of golden sun
Me – a name, I call myself
Fa (r) – a long, long way to run
So (l) – a needle pulling thread
La – a note to follow so
Ti – I drink with jam and bread…that will bring us back to:
Do(e)
This little song from a Disney movie, will help get you started in learning music theory by introducing you to a few important areas that we are going to talk about. One is the major scale, which is your first major hurdle to overcome in learning both music theory and guitar playing. The other is something called solfeggio, which is a way of labeling the degree of scales with syllables. The importance of this for all of the things we are going to discuss here can not be over estimated! So, to begin your journey into solving the mystery of music theory, you have to complete one simple task. Learn one simple song. Memorize it. Sing it!!
I realize that this may seem like a joke, but I’m not kidding. If you bear with me and watch this closely, I promise you, you will have learned some very important concepts that you need to know to get started in learning music theory. I know it may hurt, but you have to at least make it through the entire thing and later, when you get what all this nonsense is about, you’ll be amazed at how brilliant a song this really is. The thing I really want you to clue in on here is the “pitch” of the words that make up this song. So watch and sing and learn. This WILL make sense later!
So for now, rememeber:
Do (e) – a deer, a female deer
Ra (y) – a drop of golden sun
Me – a name, I call myself
Fa (r) – a long, long way to run
So (l) – a needle pulling thread
La – a note to follow so
Ti – I drink with jam and bread…that will bring us back to:
Do(e)
This site is a work in progress. I’ve got a lot of ideas about making this an exchange for ideas about learning, writing and recording music and am slowly figuring out how to pull it all off. So this place will be a bit barren for a while as I put all the pieces together and figure out the best way to set this site up. In the meantime, feel free to listen to some of my music.
If you have a blog, or wish to share information that pertains to the discussions I have setup, feel free to register and post. For now, I’m keeping the Guitar Playing and Music Theory (Beginner and Intermediate) sections closed to outside posts as they are closely tied together in a project that I’m trying to figure out how to present. Once I have the basics of that worked out and posted, I will open a new guitar playing section that will be wide open for interesting topics. In the meantime, I will have little to no time to work on the composition and orchestration sections. So if you have a blog or want to post topics, feel free to do so or contact me and I’ll create posts that link back to your blog. I will only accept posts that are genuinely educational and relevant to the topic at hand.
Since this can be confusing at first, here’s a video that will really make this all very clear:
