This is the third in my series of Thursday posts with tools for practicing. You can find the first two here and here. This week is a great tip that I can’t remember a teacher formally showing or explaining to me, but it makes perfect sense with how the brain works. That tip is quite simple. Look for repeated patterns.
Now you may be asking, “what kind of patterns?” Well, it could be identical patterns, like in a 4 line piece of music, line 1 and line 3 are exactly alike. This simplifies the music by helping the student realize that there is one less “new” thing to learn.
You also could look at how patterns are identical, but moving up or down. In music, this happens quite often where an idea is moved up or down a step, or any interval and while the intervals and rhythms are the same, obviously the notes change.
Another type of pattern would be rhythmic patterns. Looking for repeated rhythmic ideas, especially in more complex rhythm patterns can help greatly. I’ve noticed students can have issues with a dotted quarter note followed by an eighth note. One activity I’ll do with students is to have them look for and mark all of that same rhythm pattern in the piece. We’ll work on counting, clapping and chanting the rhythm and then it helps them to identify that the rhythm is identical and hopefully clears up issues that may come up with consistency.
A very common pattern with rock and pop music specifically, is chord progressions. A progression is a series of chords repeated over and over. Encouraging students to find those patterns is another beneficial tool to help simplify music.
As you drill down into this idea of patterns, you can go as little or as deep as you want. The object here is to help simplify things for the student to help them be as accurate and successful as they possibly can, minimizing frustrations and maximizing confidence!
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