New exercise: One for the ears

One thing that I like to do is scale work with drones and a metronome. This past year I started working on scales that fall outside regular scales. For this post let us call Major, minor, chromatic, pentatonic, and whole tone our regular scales. They are mine, so for the next few moments that is how it shall be.

Now I started working more regularly on other scales to keep working out my ears and working new patterns into my practice routine, So I want to share them with everyone, I have found they are great for the ears, a nice change of pace, and is a great mental workout. Do things from many different starting pitches, transpose them around, and put them in different octaves. The goal for me was to get these into my bones so they are as comfortable to me as my regular scales. In addition to really working on my ears

So here is a rundown of the drill:

The scales are based around a few things, Symmetry, pitch sets, variations of pentatonic patterns from other musical styles, and finally my favorite, the enigmatic scale. Enigmatic scales are the powerhouse of building up the ears as you lose your perfect intervals and sense of tonic are not near by.

While doing this try them with drones, without drones, with a tuner, and without. An example of a way I use the tuner when working on these would be establishing my first pitch, then without using the tuner slowly playing the scale making sure to pay close attention to the integrity of the intervals. Then, when reaching the octave, establish the pitch then check into my tuner to see how the octave fared.

So here is a link.

Click me for scale fun!

Exercise

If you take a look at the top of the page you will see two new link, a project tab, and a downloads tab. I have put an exercise I like to do in there.

The idea behind it is practicing the division of a beat into rhythms we tend to not be as good at. Mainly, five, seven, and nine. I had a conductor once ask how often we all worked on those subdivisions... needless to say not a lot of people did, or do. The end result of that is we are great at dividing a beat into 2, 3, and 4 but our ability to play even 5/7/9/11/13 etc... is poor in comparison. So, just some food for thought. Use a metronome, take time to make sure you are accurate in  your subdivisions and not guessing. It is my opinion that this kind of work will make you a better musician, and when you encounter polyrhythms they become "not a big deal" which frees you up to be more expressive.

Exercise link

Some cool stuff in the pipeline so stay tuned. Leave a comment, hit the +1 button, you know the drill.