Basic jazz theory jonathan harnum pdf

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Trust me. Here you go:. You probably guessed the count would look something like that, right? The dash shows that the sound is continuous. When you say this rhythm, say it rhythmically, and say the 1 and 3 louder than the 2 and 4. Each half note gets two foot taps. The foot taps go with the beat 1, 2, 3, 4 , not with the note.

The tap remains continuous throughout. When you play whole notes on your instrument, the sound is continuous, so when you count, to make your voice and continuous within the four beats of the whole note.

Because rests are silent, parentheses are used to indicate the silence. Here are three measures with whole, half, and quarter rests. An added help when you count rests out loud is to count them softly, with a whisper.

Knock yourself out. This will be explained in the next Part. Focus on the note and rest lengths. Chapter 7 Study Guide 1. When writing out the counting, what is used to indicate a rest? When counting out loud, how should you say the count for a rest? Say the count out loud.

Tap your foot. It might be easier to say that there are 8 eighth notes in one whole note. Or that there are 4 eighth notes in one half note. Or that there are 2 eighth notes in one quarter note. Or, my preferred explanation: there are 2 eighth notes per beat. Flags can be seen dangling from the single eighth notes on the left below.

As with all other notes except the whole note, the stems go up when eighth notes are on the third line or below, and the stems go down when the eighth notes are on the third line and above.

With eighth notes, the beat is subdivided, which means chopped up but evenly chopped up. Here are a few measures of eighth notes and eighth rests with the counting. Focus on the eighth notes and the counting. Be sure to count it rhythmically, and say the rests more quietly than the notes. Clap it. A lot of solid research shows that professional classical musicians frequently use this kind of mental practice. Okay, time for a little math.

If you divide up 4 beats the whole note sixteen equal ways, how long is each sixteenth note? The answer is So what do they look like? Just like with eighth notes, the beat is subdivided.

Sixteenth notes subdivide the beat in 4 equal parts, and each part has a name. Practice saying them while listening to your favorite music. Keep your ears open for hearing sixteenth notes in the music. Ignore the up and down motion of the notes and concentrate on the count. This one is challenging, so take it slowly, and try to clap out the rhythm.

Take the time you need to make it familiar. Write out the counting under the notes. If there are rests, say them more quietly than the notes. Repeat from step two, and as your brain becomes used to the rhythm, gradually increase speed. Persistence and repetition are the parents of success. Not to worry, this is normal. It takes a while living with these new concepts before they seem familiar and easy. Stick with it.

However, there are ways to change the length of the notes you just learned. One way to change note length is to place a small dot following a note. What is an upbeat? A dot just behind a note to the right makes the note longer. How much longer? Well it depends on what note the dot follows. A dot adds half the amount of the note it follows.

Another way of saying it is that a dotted note is 1. An example might throw more light on this peculiar practice. As you know, a regular whole note gets 4 beats.

A dot represents an additional half of the length of the note it follows. Half of four is two, so the total number of beats for a dotted whole note is six beats. However you do the math, a dotted whole note gets six beats. But wait a minute, you might be saying, there are only 4 beats in a measure. Remember the top number tells us there are six beats per measure; the bottom number tells us that the quarter note gets one beat.

How long is a dotted half note? Use the formula. The half note gets two beats, and half of that is one. Two plus one is three. The dotted half note gets three beats. A quarter note gets one beat. Half of that is half of a beat.

To make the counting easier, think of the dotted quarter note in terms of how many eighth notes are in it. Notice that when counting dotted quarters, you use a count similar to eighth notes.

This is so you can keep track of exactly how long each dotted quarter note is. Say the bold items in a normal voice, and the rest in a softer voice, as always with a steady foot-tap. Tap your foot while you sing it. Find the length with the same process as the other dotted notes.

Dotted eighth- sixteenth. Here is a measure of dotted 8thths. Notice that a sixteenth note count is used so that you can keep track of exactly how long the dotted eighth is. If you know it, sing it, and clap out the rhythm. Below are the dotted rests and their counting. Notice that a sixteenth note has been included in the third measure. Sixteenth notes often follow the dotted eighth rest.

Now that you understand that a dot increases the length of a note by half its original value, you can decipher the length of any dotted note. Coming up next is another treatment of the notes you already know, called triplets, which is a grouping of three notes. Find out what it all means in the next chapter. What does a dot following a note do? Which type of note usually follows a dotted eighth note? On the staves below, experiment with dotted notes.

Check your work with a friend. Music is water. Musicians are the hose. Of course there are also septuplets, octuplets and on and on, but you get the idea, right? Sound confusing? A concrete example will help explain. They look like this:. The eighth note triplet is played in the amount of time it normally takes to play two eighth notes, which is one beat. For example, a quarter note triplet is played over two beats.

An eighth note triplet is one beat long. In the next example you can see how eighth note triplets are counted. That means a sixteenth note triplet happens in the time it takes to play two sixteenth notes, or half of a beat. A sixteenth note triplet is half a beat long. In the example here, notice that in measure two and three the sixteenth note triplet is connected to an eighth note. Sixteenth note triplets are often paired with eighth notes to round out the beat.

Focus on the rhythm only for now. Applying the triplet rule to quarter note triplets means the quarter note triplet takes place over the length of two quarter notes, or two beats. So, quarter note triplets are two beats long.

Quarter note triplets usually have a bracket over them. This bracket line simply groups the notes together so you can tell which three notes are in the triplet. This makes regulating the length of a quarter note triplet with the foot tap challenging, but far from impossible.

It will be worth your time. Partner up with somebody: one person claps eighth note triplets as slow as necessary and the other person claps quarter note triplets. This is normal. Just like with learning a language, learning to read music takes time and a lot of exposure and practice.

After the review for this chapter is the big review for the entire section. How long is a sixteenth note triplet? How long is a quarter note triplet? How long is each note in the quarter note triplet? Have someone demonstrate quarter note triplets for you.

Imitate what you hear. Part Two Review. Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn. As with the chapter reviews, use your keyboard from the back of the book to cover up the answers while you test yourself. What are the three most common time signatures?

What does the top number tell you? What does the bottom number tell you? When counting out loud, how should you count a rest? What does a dot do to a note? How long is a dotted whole note? How long is a dotted quarter note? How long is a dotted eighth note? Another fundamental musical building block is pitch, or how high or low a note is. I always play. All one has to do is hit the right keys at the right time and the instrument plays itself. If playing an instrument well or singing well could happen only by wanting it badly enough, there would be many more great musicians in the world than there are.

Quality practice is absolutely crucial. But what is practice, exactly? It turns out that how you think about practice matters.

It matters a lot. After beginning to read the bewildering array of published research on practice, I saw that organization was important, and for me, applying metaphors to complex information is helpful.

Music practice began to seem like a pinwheel in motion. So, think of music practice as a pinwheel in motion. But stopping the pinwheel is a lot like dissecting a frog.

Taking practice apart for analysis kills something that is a dynamic, variable, and highly complex personal endeavor. It came from Tuba virtuoso Rex Martin, who said he got it from Bud Herseth, the legendary Chicago Symphony principal trumpeter of 55 years.

We need to practice performing. This short section explores what practice is. WHY Without motivation, there would be no reason to practice. WHO Many people will have an impact on your practice, most especially, your own Self. There are others who can help or hinder, too, like parents, teachers, and peers.

WHEN How much should you practice? When during the day is best? How little is too little? Can you practice too much? How does music practice develop from beginner to expert? WHERE A short section covering the practice space itself, including what makes a practice space good or bad. HOW How do you practice? What works best? Because he sings and plays guitar with such superb skill and panache, to my mind, his ability simply had to be a result of many years of practice.

Erin McKeown, starting in her early teens, spent countless hours in her bedroom composing songs using her 4-track recording system to lay down vocal and guitar parts, crafting some excellent songs and working on her skills at the same time. Neither Erin nor Nicholas considered what they were doing to be practice, but doing what they were doing, both became good enough to be successful professional musicians. Practice is simply the way you get better at your instrument.

It can be in a room alone, working through techniques and exercises, it can be writing songs, and it can be playing on the streets for money. There are as many ways to go about getting better at music as there are musicians. Motivation to get better is one crucial aspect of practice. Foster it.

Imagine yourself playing somewhere. There are many excellent players in the world who play only for personal enjoyment. Desire will keep you motivated through exercises and repetitions and slumps in mood. It will increase your desire to play more than any other thing, especially if you dig the musicians and their music.

Somehow, seeing music being done right in front of you makes it more real, more within reach. Recordings are great, but live is better. So listen as much as you can. Listening to music and trying to play along is a lot like how you learned to speak. The best is simply what you like best. Be persistent and the secrets will be revealed to you. There is some very interesting research regarding our notions of talent. Music education researcher Bret P.

There is way more to be covered on this topic than this space allows. Check out this video of Dr. Anyone who plays an instrument has been a beginner at one point.

Beginners make some really funny noises: squeaks, blats, bellows and bleats. Have the patience to wait out your frustrations and the funny sounds you might make.

Things will get better. I promise, but only if you stick with it. The less you play, the longer it will take to get better. There is no getting around this. Once a week will simply not cut it. This will be very frustrating. Avoid frustration by playing more often. You have your whole life to work on this. The very best answer is: play as much as you feel like. That may seem like a cop-out answer, but let me explain. Avoid this if you can. Pick it up again later in the day or tomorrow.

That being said, there is a lot of evidence that 2 to 3 hours a day is the golden number. More than this is usually not helpful. Charlie Parker said in an interview that as a teen he often practiced hours a day! Most professional classical musicians have their longest, most intense practice session earlier in the day, somewhere from 10 AM to 1 PM. The virtuoso trumpeter Maurice Andre would practice from AM! Professional musicians often practice again later in the afternoon, after a nap, and they may do a short session in the evening, too.

The earlier intense sessions tend to be one to two hours, and the later practice sessions much shorter. More on sleep and practice in a couple pages.

Okay then, use it to your advantage. During one hour of prime time television there are over twenty minutes of advertisements. Save your money and buy a nicer instrument instead. Press the mute button and play! This technique works best when nobody else is in the house. It sounds cruel, but it was an excellent thing. When you start to play an instrument as a beginner, your self-image as a musician is very fragile.

So what? For some, practicing what is unfamiliar can feel embarrassing, and for others simply uncomfortable. If you do feel uncomfortable playing with others around, the solution is to play when you have lots of privacy, either when nobody else is home, or in a separate building. Even a closed door is better than nothing. In my experience, people usually mind much less than you think. Still, music practice is a lot like jet skis—plenty of fun for the person doing it but not fun at all for anyone who has to listen to it.

Get a private place to play if you can. I leave all my instruments out and ready to play. Take the time to consider your long-term, mid- term, and short-term goals. Write them out. Time is precious. Also, go into your practice sessions with an attitude of performance.

Lots of great players imagine someone is in the room with them as they practice, and not just anyone, but someone they really look up to and admire.

Ethan Bensdorf, a trumpeter for the New York Philharmonic, said he often imagines legendary orchestral trumpeter Bud Herseth in the room listening to him during his practice. There are as many ways to practice as there are people who play, but all of them share some similar characteristics. In fact, practice sessions look alike across many disciplines, form music to sport and beyond.

Use it to make sure your instrument works properly, is tuned, and you have all you need for the coming session valve oil, music, extra strings, reeds, pencil, etc. Depending on your instrument, there are several things you want to keep in mind. The list is nearly endless, but your time is limited. And when you do, go slowly enough that you play everything with no mistakes. And perfectly! Or said more positively: good in, good out. Listen closely to the sound. Make it as perfectly clear and clean as you are able.

Especially for beginners. Three or four minutes is long enough. You can get some double-duty out of long tones by playing them with a drone. Drones and the instruments that create them appear in many types of music, like the didgeridoo of Australian music, the bagpipe in Scottish music, and the tanpura in Indian classical music. The drone is a tone that plays continuously underneath melodic lines and rhythms in the music.

Attempting to merge your sound with the drone is a valuable exercise. It seems simple: listen to the tones surrounding you and play in tune with them. Unless you play piano or guitar, setting the pitch in this way helps very little. Using a tuner—a device that requires you to use vision to adjust your sound—is not helpful to a person who needs to use their hearing.

Playing with drones will help you with ear- instrument coordination. When playing with a drone, you can fairly easily hear when the pitches do not match and learn how to adjust your instrument to match the pitch. The very best drones to practice with, in my opinion, come from an Indian instrument called the tanpura.

And as you might guess, there is an app that re-creates the sound. Highly recommended. A metronome is a device used to keep perfect, mechanical time. You can use one to help you get a passage up to speed, but not in the way you might think. This is common sense. Henley decided to test this method of using the metronome incrementally with another technique: playing super-duper slowly and perfectly, and then at performance tempo.

No incremental advancing, just big jumps from slow and perfect to performance speed. He found that those who used this method got better, faster than those who just slowly clicked their way to a faster temp. In that case, I still switch back and forth between very slow and perfect, to as fast as I am able. Try it.

It works! Other studies have found that most professional classical musicians incorporate some kind of mental practice in their routines. Mental practice techniques are ideal when you need to give your body a rest from playing during a practice session. Buzzing can be done either with or without a mouthpiece.

It had a tape deck with a microphone attachment. During my enforced practice sessions, I came up with a plan to get away with not practicing. That way everyone in the house would think I was still playing. But I was. Listening to yourself play an instrument on a recording is a lot like listening to your voice on a recording. Again, we learn the most from making mistakes, because those mistakes show us where we need to improve the most. Try recording yourself. Ideally, you should seek feedback from a live person, not only teachers and musicians better than you the best sources of feedback , but also from others who may not know much about music.

Ask for friendly feedback from your friends and family. Ask them to try. There are a bunch of other great books out there on practice that will help you get the most out of your practice time. Here are a few more of the best books on practice. In addition to interviews with world-class musicians in multiple genres Classical, West African, Singer-songwriters, rock, jazz, Indian classical , I combed through many hundreds of studies of practice and this book contains the best of what I found.

Check it out online at ThePracticeOfPractice. Get Better Faster crystallizes and distills all the great practice advice and gives it to you straight and to the point.

Find it at Amazon or from the publisher, Sol Ut Press. A line note is any note split through the middle by a line. If you go over the line, your space note may look more like a line note. Use a pencil with a good eraser. Here are some space notes, low to high. Notes exist both higher and lower than the limited number shown here. When you draw a line note be sure the line goes through the middle of the note, otherwise it might look more like a space note, and that can be confusing, so when you write them, try to skewer the note right through the middle.

Here are some line notes, low to high. Notes can be written higher or lower than these. After a line note comes a space note, and after a space note comes a line note. This message brought, delivered, and conveyed to you by our Department of Redundancy Department. Wait, what? Shorter, faster sound waves produce higher pitched tones. Take a look at the staves at the beginning of the chapter. How about some examples? Each example below shows the range of an instrument from its lowest note to its highest note.

You should now have a good handle on line and space notes and how pitch is shown in written music. Is it all clear?

What is a line note? Any note with a line through it. What is a space note? Any note lying in a space. What does pitch mean in music? The highness or lowness of a note. Vary the highness and lowness. Use leger lines. Go through your example and identify lower and higher from note to note.

Write in the counting. Use any type of note. Go further than that if you are bold and adventurous. This is one of those few rules that has no exceptions! Remember when we talked about line and space notes coming one after the other? The notes are named alphabetically when the notes are written one after the other line-space-line-space, etc. There are 88 keys on a piano, right? What are their names? Good question. After G, the pattern begins again with A. Below is an example showing this. Do notice the letter change from the 3rd note to the 4th note.

Notes on leger lines or spaces are named the same way. Focus on the note names only. For now you can ignore it. Make sure you know the information in the Chapter Review on the next page before you go on. What letters are used to name notes in music? What letter comes after G in the musical alphabet? What kind of note comes right before or after a space note?

A line note. What kind of note comes right before or after a line note? A space note. What letter comes before A in the musical alphabet?

Say the letters A-G in a repeated loop as fast as you can. Do the same thing backwards. Say every other letter, but start with B. Every fourth. However the complete basics are covered as well: both dummies' and complete idiots' guides are included.

There are some great listening excersises for both singers and guitarists and even thought I havent been labelling the books by difficulty, it sohuld be the simplest task to read them progreessively judging merely by the titles. I will however recommend Harnum's 'Basic Music Theory' as a starting point for anyone who is already aquainted with an instrument.

Some of these PDF's contain executable code hotlinking and sound embedding. I only ever read PDFs in foxit reader's safe mode, so I cant vouch for the safety of any of it.