As a beginner conductor you often want to look down at your score the entire time. You’ll want to make sure you know where you are and can see everything that’s in the music.
But avoid that as best you can.
Glance down at your score when you need to, or when you have to turn the page.
Most of the time you’re conducting you should be looking up at the musicians.
And they’ll play better too.
I used to have a habit of doing this until I noticed that whoever I was directing would play (or sing) so much better when I was looking at them. It tells them that you’re listening and paying attention to them. I also shows them that you know the music well enough to not be stuck to the score.
This requires some focused score study so that you’re able to do it. It also requires that you can take in multiple pieces of the score quickly. When you glance down at the score try to remember a few measures ahead, then glance down again when you need to. Get as much musical information in those small glances as you can so that you can spend most of your time looking at the musicians in front of you.
One of the best ways to give a cue to another musician, whether you’re directing, conducting, or simply communicating an idea during a piece, is to make eye contact.
Look at them when you signal something to them.
Look them in the eyes.
It’ll help you communicate so much more effectively when you do this, though it does require that you know what you’re doing well enough to look away from your hands, fingers, or score.
Make eye contact when communicating with your fellow musicians.
When studying a piece of music to learn it and understand it, it can help to take a step back and look at the music from a farther perspective. Try to view the whole piece of music as a whole.
Can you see the entire form of the music in your head?
This is harder than it sounds to do, especially if the piece of music is longer than 5 minutes and definitely if it’s longer than 15 minutes.
Taking a big enough step back to be able to view the whole piece that way takes a lot of time studying and familiarizing yourself with the piece. Playing through it once isn’t enough. Play it through a bunch of times. Almost as if you’re trying to memorize the entire piece of music and play it from memory.
Knowing it from memory isn’t necessary, but the goal is to know it well enough to be able to create a mental map of the piece. Where are the fast sections? Where are the loud sections? Where are the slow sections and the quiet sections?
Often this can be done by simply flipping through the music like a magazine. Literally just looking at it a lot helps. Look at it enough to be able to “see” the whole thing.
No matter what you’re learning the music for this can help a lot because it’s such a different perspective than remembering single notes and chords and melodies. You’re looking at whole sections of music.
What’s the music being used for? What’s the goal of the music?
Is the goal to be dramatic? Is the goal to be big and loud and grab everyone’s attention? Is the goal to relax people?
Whatever the goal of the music is that will affect how you write and perform that music. Some goals may not require perfect precision. Some goals may not require a ton of fast notes.
Think about the goal of the music before you begin your performance or your composition.
As a guitar player who’s into heavy metal I’ve practiced playing fast quite a lot. I don’t think it’s at all necessary to be able to play incredibly fast to be a good player, but it can definitely be fun to do and it’s a great addition to your playing.
So here are some tips I have for how to practice speed playing.
Practice slowly
Check your speed
Practice consistently
Play at 80% speed
Relax your muscles
The more you do it the better you get
Practice slowly
The first step to playing quickly is to practice slowly. This one might seem obvious, but I mean practice REALLY slowly. Practice so slowly that you get bored while playing. Practice so slowly you almost fall asleep. Practice whatever fast passages you’re trying to play at around 30bpm or so. Play it so slowly that every single tiny note is perfect. The goal is to slow it down a ton so that you can think about each small part of your playing. You want to think about your wrist position, your finger position, your hand position, and any other aspects of your technique.
I’ve got a YouTube video on this specific topic that I recommend you check out to get some more in depth ideas on how to implement this into your practice time.
Adam Neely also has a video where he discusses this same idea. It’s something that professional golfers and Olympic athletes will do.
The reason for doing this is because when you’re playing quickly any extraneous movement becomes more of a hurdle to playing accurately. Your movements need to be more efficient in order to play more quickly. If you can imagine playing jumps on piano, stride piano style, when playing slowly efficiency doesn’t matter as much because you have time to add in extra movement. When you’re playing quickly it’ll become much harder to play with extraneous movements because you don’t have as much time to do it. So minimizing extra movements helps you play faster because you literally are doing less movement.
I list this one first because this practice technique has been the most useful for me. I often take things and play them incredibly slowly repeatedly for only a few minutes and then I’m able to play them. In the moment it’s not the most exciting thing to do, but if you can handle doing it for a few minutes, even ten minutes, you’ll be much better at playing the passage.
Check your speed
The next thing to do, after playing incredibly slowly, is to check your speed.
Test your speed playing. Do it both without and with a metronome. Check just how fast you can play it accurately. Only play it a few times because you want to just check how fast you can play.
I like to check my speed once for every ten times I play it slowly. That way the majority of the times I’m playing it cleanly and accurately.
You can check at the full tempo or check at a faster tempo that is still accurate.
Playing it too fast for too long will ingrain bad habits, poor technique, and sloppy playing. We want to ingrain good habits, proper technique, and clean playing. So check your speed sparingly.
Practice consistently
One of the best things you can do to improve your speed is to practice consistently. Practicing every day would be ideal, but if that isn’t possible then figure out some other regular schedule to practice regularly and consistently.
It will take time, and you may not be able to increase the speed at which you’re playing every single day. Progress might not be perfectly linear. The goal is to have progress that trends towards playing more quickly. Look at your average playing speed over a few days or even a few weeks. That way you’ll be able to better tell whether you’re improving or not.
This can be frustrating because we always want to see immediate progress and immediate results, but as long as you’re seeing progress over the course of a few weeks you’re still seeing progress.
Play at 80% speed
Another way to practice speed playing is to play at 80% speed. This is a technique I learned from the guitar player Joe Stump while I was taking lessons with him at Berklee College of Music.
Play at 80% speed. 100% speed is the maximum speed you could play the passage fairly cleanly. 80% of that speed is significantly slower and should be much easier to play cleanly and accurately while still being a fairly fast speed.
The way Joe Stump taught me this technique was that you set your metronome at 80% speed and play repeatedly and continuously. Think of this almost like an endurance exercise. You’re playing fairly quickly and for a long period time. Longer than the full passage. You’ll have to loop the passage to achieve this goal. You want to be playing continuously for a few minutes.
Eventually after doing this, even for just five minutes, you should notice it becoming a little easier to play at that speed. The goal is to adjust to playing at that slightly higher speed so that it feels effortless. When that happens you check where your max speed would be and adjust where 80% is.
Relax your muscles
This one can be a little difficult if you normally have tension in your shoulders and arms, but relaxing your muscles can greatly improve your playing. It’ll make it easier to move all of your fingers and help with playing accurately.
One way that’s useful to do this while practicing is to tense up every muscle in your body, and then relax those muscles. Doing this a few times can help highlight where you’re holding tension and help you lessen that tension a little bit.
As you try to play faster and faster notice any tension that comes up as you increase the speed. Often people will play faster and with more tension because they’re not comfortable enough at that speed to play with relaxed muscles. So as you increase the speed pay attention to any tension in your body as you increase speed and take steps to lessen that tension.
Another thing that can help with lessening tension is stretching. Sometimes when playing quickly for a long period of time you may notice your hand or arm muscles cramping up. Shake out those limbs and then stretch them lightly. Static stretches can help and so do dynamic stretches like rolling your wrists.
The more you do it the better you get
This may also be obvious, but the faster you are able to play the more easily you’ll be able to learn fast music. If you practice one specific scalar run and get that up to 16th notes at 120bpm, you’ll also be able to more easily learn another scalar passage and play it at 120bpm. It might not be immediately after learning it, but the process of increasing your playing speed for the new passage will be faster than for the original passage.
Basically, the more you do it the easier it gets to do. Once you’ve got the finger mobility and finger speed learning fast passages becomes easier, even if they are slightly different than the one that you originally practiced and learned.
That’s it for my tips on how to increase your playing speed. I hope that was useful. As with all of this stuff, try out different practice techniques and practice methods and see what works for you. Some of these may help you more than others so test them out first and use whichever ones work.
The reason to have a portfolio is to have it when you need it. The goal of creating a portfolio is to have a series of projects that you’ve worked on in one place that you can show people.
When you need it you’ll want it. It doesn’t need to be fancy, but it needs to be in one place.
A Soundcloud playlist works just fine because you can have multiple pieces in one place.
It can be that simple.
But have a portfolio ready because when someone asks for it you’ll want to be prepared.
Following up from my previous post about composing for piano. Go check it out if you haven’t read it.
When writing for any instrument that you don’t play it can help to study music that’s commonly played on that instrument. Look at the popular pieces within the repertoire of that instrument. Look for arrangements and pieces for different levels of players.
It can also help to learn some basics about the instrument. How is it set up and what are the basic playing techniques.
Just learning the basics can help tremendously because you’re writing from an informed perspective, rather than just writing notes on a page.
If you don’t play piano, or if you don’t play piano at a high level, writing for piano can be a difficult task.
If you’re writing for live players, as opposed to writing something that you’ll sequence yourself, learning about the instrument and the techniques that are used to play it can help ensure that the recording session, rehearsal, or performance goes smoothly. It can also save you some potential embarrassment or headache if the piano player tells you that what you wrote is either way too difficult or, worse, unplayable on the instrument.
I’ve seen this happen with student composers that are new to writing for piano especially because unless you’re a piano player some things that might seem easy can be incredibly difficult and some things that might seem difficult are incredibly easy.
Before we get into some specific tips that I have, one of the best things you can do if it’s possible is have the player look over the music. Even if they’re an experienced piano player it can be incredibly useful, especially if you aren’t an experienced composer for piano. Some things on the instrument, just by nature of how the instrument is set up, are unplayable and writing those things should be avoided.
With all of that let’s get into a few tips that I’ve got for writing for piano:
Study piano music
Learn some basic techniques
Make sure it fits within your hands
Be careful with large jumps
Be careful with speed
Be careful with repeated patterns
Be careful with octaves and block chords
Let’s get into these in a little more detail.
Study piano music
My biggest recommendation when writing for piano is to study piano music. Get some books of piano music and take a look at how they write music for the instrument. Classical scores work fine, but any professional sheet music for piano players will also work perfectly well.
As a piano player I would caution against looking at piano vocal scores for operas and musicals as well as piano reductions of orchestral music. Some of these scores can be incredibly difficult to play even for well accomplished piano players because the arrangers are trying to include everything that they can from the original orchestra score. Some scores are easily playable, but there is a wide range of difficulty levels in accompaniment books, especially for music that was original composed for orchestra.
You want to find music that’s written specifically for piano. Look at how they arrange melodies and accompaniments. Look at how they arrange spreads of chords.
Look for common patterns that are used in the music. How are chords often voiced? What are the common accompaniment patterns and methods? How are the melodies arranged and played? What range is written for one hand?
Learn some basic techniques
Learning some simple techniques for piano can be incredibly useful in being able to compose effectively for that instrument. You don’t need to become a classical concert pianist or a professional jazz piano player, but learning about some of the techniques and knowing the names for them can be useful.
Learning about stride piano and playing melodies in octaves or how tremolos are performed can better help you translate your musical ideas into a way that is understandable and playable for the piano player.
Learn how piano players play legato, either with their hands or using the sustain pedal. Learn some basics of position shifting and how piano players shift their thumb underneath their other fingers.
Learning how the instrument itself works can also be useful. Knowing about the different pedals and how the instrument makes sound on the inside can be useful to better translate your musical ideas onto the instrument.
Another thing that can be useful is to learn about how piano players play chords and arpeggios in their left hand. There are a number of different ways to voice chords on piano, and some chord voicings are more common than others.
Looking at these things along with studying scores can help you better understand the specific idioms of that instrument and how piano players play music.
Some techniques of writing are alberti bass, arpeggios, chordal accompaniments, and hymn or chorale style writing. Each of these types of writing is common for piano players to play and can be used comfortably knowing that the music will look and feel like piano music. When composing for a specific instrument there are conventions and common techniques that are often used. These don’t need to be used all of the time, but if you have an idea in your head and aren’t sure how to write that idea, these techniques can come in handy.
Remember that whoever the piano player is for your music they’ll have practiced a ton of other piano music. They’ll have practiced specific techniques and specific styles of playing. They’ll have a lot of knowledge of other types of music on their instrument and how your music fits in with that previous knowledge can determine how familiar the music is to them. Even if something is playable, if it’s strange or something that’s not often written for the instrument, it may throw the piano player off because they likely haven’t seen it before.
Make sure it fits within your hands
If you’re not an experienced piano player this can be difficult, but start with the hands separated. Try playing just one hand of your piano piece. Then try playing the other hand. Playing them separately, but still with the correct hand, can be a good way to check how well it’ll fit when it’s actually performed.
The goal of doing this is to make sure that there aren’t huge errors in the part.
If as you’re doing this it seems absolutely impossible, no matter how much you practice, then think about whether or not you’ve seen that specific technique in a piece of music before. If you haven’t seen it anywhere (or if you’ve seen it in a Franz Liszt piece) then it’s probably something that should be re-written.
The same thing can be said with left hand spreads. We’ll talk about this later in the article, but if you can’t reach the interval you wrote, and it’s more than an octave, then I’d suggest re-writing that interval. I’d stick to an octave or less in one hand unless you know that the specific player that will be performing or recording your piece can reach a larger interval. All piano players will be able to reach an octave in one hand. Not all piano players can reach larger than that, though many can reach a ninth or even a tenth (an octave and a third).
Be careful with large jumps
One common piano technique is called “stride piano” and it’s often used in jazz music to play a bass line, or bass note, and accompanying chords. The left hand jumps back and forth from the bass note to a higher chord voicing. Depending on the speed and size of these jumps it can be a fairly difficult technique to learn.
Be aware of this when writing for piano. The larger the jump and the faster the music, the more difficult it will be for the player to be accurate. Below is an example of something that is quite playable. It’s the song “It Don’t Mean a Thing (If It Ain’t Got that Swing)” by Duke Ellington.
“It Don’t Mean a Thing (If It Ain’t Got that Swing)” with stride piano
Things to notice here are that these jumps are just about an octave the entire time. The largest the jumps get are a 12th, or an octave and a third. That’s not all that large of a jump. If someone is familiar with stride piano then this excerpt should be quite playable. If someone is not familiar and comfortable with stride piano this may require some practice, though most piano players at or above the college level will be familiar with stride piano.
Below is an example of something that is much more difficult.
“It Don’t Mean a Thing (If It Ain’t Got that Swing)” with more difficult stride piano
The main thing that makes these two arrangements different levels of difficulty level is because the whole left hand has to travel a greater distance. In the first arrangement the piano player can play the low bass note with their pinky finger (finger five) and play the above chord with their thumb, index, and middle fingers (fingers one, two, and three). Their hand doesn’t have to travel all that far.
In the second arrangement the piano player has to play the low bass octaves with their thumb and pinky finger (fingers one and five). The chord after it can still be played with the thumb, index, and middle fingers (fingers one, two, and three), but look at how they now have to play two notes with their thumb. Their thumb alone travels from G on the bottom line of the bass clef all the way up to the G on the third ledger line above the bass clef. That’s two octaves that their thumb alone has to travel.
These two arrangements will sound largely the same. The only real difference is the bass octaves and the melody up an octave, but the overall feel and effect of writing both will be largely the same.
If you want to write stride piano music or something that sounds similar you can get the same effect, or a similar effect, by writing alternating broken octaves. This can be seen below.
“It Don’t Mean a Thing (If It Ain’t Got that Swing)” with broken left hand octaves
This won’t sound as full as proper stride piano, but it’s a similar sounding effect, and depending on how necessary it is to have proper stride piano can be a great substitute. It’s also a way of getting a lighter effect than a more full stride piano arrangement. Depending on the specific effect you want it can be a useful thing to add into your music to have a larger range of sounds.
Be careful with speed
Writing fast passages on any instrument is tricky because you need to make sure that the person playing them can actually play that fast. For piano scalar runs are fine because most piano players will be able to play scales quickly. Major and minor scales and chromatic scales should all be perfectly do-able within reason.
The main thing to be careful for is when you write music that’s incredibly fast that’s outside of the normal patterns of fast playing on piano. Writing a fast scalar run in thirds would likely be fine, but writing a fast run up a series of triadic arpeggios that don’t have an order might be a little difficult.
Certain patterns will be easily played quickly, but outside of those patterns, or outside of something related to those patterns, it may be difficult for the player to get their fingers underneath the music.
This leads us to the next point.
Be careful with repeated patterns
I’ve definitely made this mistake when writing for piano before.
I wrote a repeating ostinato in the right hand and a left hand bass part. The right hand part was way too unfamiliar and didn’t fit well under one hand. In addition to that I wrote a crescendo in the music.
During the rehearsal for this piece my friend who was playing the piano let me know quickly that what I’d written wasn’t playable at the speed I’d written it at. He was an amazing piano player so I knew that what I’d written must’ve been strange if he couldn’t play it.
We ended up taking out the left hand part and just using the right hand part, but split between the hands. That made the strange repeating pattern playable at the proper speed.
I bring this up to point out that some repeated patterns, if the pattern doesn’t fit well underneath your hands, likely won’t be playable at a high speed. Some patterns are awkward underneath your hand. It doesn’t mean that these patterns need to be avoided at all costs, but it’s something to consider when composing a piano part. Knowing what will be difficult and what will be easy to play will better help you use the piano to convey your musical ideas.
Be careful with octaves and block chords
Writing octaves and block chords are fine. They’re both something that piano players do all the time. Even for melodies. Often piano music has melodies using both block chords and octaves. It’s very common. So definitely write it into your music, but the reason I include it here is because it can increase the difficulty of a piece of music substantially.
A piece that’s easy to play will become harder in octaves. It’ll become much harder if it’s written in block chords AND octaves.
Let’s take a look at an example. Below is the melody for “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.”
“Twinkle Twinkle Little Star”
If we re-arrange this melody to be written in octaves in both hands it’s still not incredibly difficult.
“Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” in octaves
If we re-arrange it yet again we can add block chords to this so that the right hand is playing both block chords and octaves. This increases the difficulty level of the piece quite significantly from the above arrangement.
“Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” in octaves and block chords
This is significantly more difficult to play than the original one. We can arrange it one more time to make it sound even larger by changing the left hand part and adding some jumps.
“Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” in octaves in both hands, block chords, and stride piano
This new arrangement is definitely playable, but it’s significantly harder to play than the original arrangement with just the melody and the bass line.
It’s still something you can write if the sound that this type of arrangement creates is the desired effect. Just be aware when writing something how difficult it will be to play.
There are alternatives to this that can be used to get a similar effect. The left hand could be alternating octaves, like we discussed earlier when discussing stride piano. The right hand could be only the top three notes, removing the bottom octave doubling. That arrangement will have largely the same feel and largeness but will be a whole lot easier to play than the above arrangement.
This suggested arrangement is pictured below.
“Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” alternative arrangement
Final thoughts
The main thing to keep in mind is who your players are. If you’re writing music to be played by a professional pianist like Yuja Wang, Tigran Hamasyan, Brad Mehldau, or Lang Lang then you can basically write anything that’s playable. Those players are at such a high level that they’ll be able to play basically anything on their instrument.
But if you aren’t writing for someone at that high of a level, then take into account who exactly will be performing your music. If it’s your friend that’s a piano performance major at your university, take that into account. Ask them for some music that they can play easily and something that will take some practice. Ask to look at some music that they’re working on. Use that as a guide for a suggested difficulty level.
If you’re writing something and you don’t know who the player is yet, then take a look at some similar pieces of music. For example if you’re writing a piano sonata, take a look at some piano sonatas to get an idea of how other composers have used the piano and what will likely be familiar to piano players.
One other consideration, in addition to writing for the player that will be playing your piece, is to realize that different piano players will be familiar with different things. A jazz piano player will be good at different things than a classical piano player. Even if they are at roughly the same level within their own genres there will be certain techniques that the jazz piano player will be much more familiar with than the classical piano player and vice versa.
Writing intentionally can help a lot with these things. If you’re using the instrument in a way that will likely be unfamiliar to the musicians, then ask yourself how necessary it is for the instrument to be used that way. It can be useful to consult a piano player and ask how common or uncommon a specific technique is and if there’s an alternative that is more common and will get the same effect.
Knowing specifically the sound you want is the goal here. If there’s a common technique to achieve that effect that’s great. If there isn’t then make sure that the effect adds something to the music because it may cause some trouble for the piano player.
At the end of the day you should write the music that you want to write. And one way to better do that is to learn more about the instrument for which you’re writing. There may be techniques you didn’t know existed that you want to use or techniques that get the effect that you’re trying to write. Whatever music you’re trying to write, knowing more about the instrument can only help you better achieve that goal.
Sight singing is the ability to look at a piece of music and sing it after having been given “do“, the root note of the scale. It can be quite difficult, but there are a number of exercises that you can use to improve your sight singing skills.
Here’s the list:
Practice sight singing
Learn solfege
Pitch match
Drone “do”
Scale exercises
Arpeggios
Hear the melody in your head
Inner hearing
Before we get into the specifics of these tips let’s talk about inner hearing. Inner hearing is what you hear in your head. Another word for this is audiation. It’s the ability to hear things in your head.
Sight singing is very related to inner hearing. If you can’t hear what a melody sounds like in your head then you won’t be able to sing that melody. You need to work on inner hearing if you want to get better at sight singing.
Some of these practice tips will be related to inner hearing and will help you improve your inner hearing abilities.
Practice sight singing
I’ve added this one hear because though it might be obvious I think it’s worth mentioning. If you want to get better at sight singing, then you should practice sight singing. These exercises are all useful and can help, but the main thing is to practice sight singing.
Simple melodies are useful to use at the beginning so try to find songs that don’t use many scale degrees. Folk songs can work well and so can Kodaly songs. The Kodaly method is a method of music education started by the musician and music teacher Zoltan Kodaly and it focuses on learning simple solfege songs, that use progressively more solfege syllables. If you can get your hands on a book that has a list of those songs that are notated they can be great practice for beginner sight singers.
There’s also plenty of sight singing books that can be used.
Hymnals may also work because they have many songs that are fairly simple.
Learn solfege
My number one tip to work on sight singing is to learn solfege. I’ve got a video that goes into some depth on why solfege is useful which I recommend you check out.
Solfege is an Italian naming system for the notes in different scales. Using movable “do” you can learn each scale degree as it relates to the root note of “do.” Having unique syllables like do, re, mi, fa, sol, la, and ti can help you learn them more quickly because you have something specific to hold on to.
Do sounds like do all the time. Re sounds like re all of the time. Each syllable has a specific sound.
You can also use numbers, but I don’t like numbers as much because numbers are already used for roman numeral analysis.
Here are the solfege syllable for the major scale.
Do (pronounced like “doe”) is the first scale degree. Re (pronounced “ray”) is the second scale degree. Mi (pronounced “mee”) is the third scale degree. Fa (pronounced “fah”) is the fourth scale degree. Sol (pronounced like “soul”) is the fifth scale degree. La (pronounced “lah”) is the sixth scale degree. Ti (pronounced “tee”) is the seventh scale degree.
In minor you’d have some alterations, but those are the basics.
Di (pronounced “dee”) is used for a sharp first scale degree. Ri (pronounced “ree”) is used for a sharp second scale degree. Fi (pronounced “fee”) is used for a sharp fourth scale degree. Si (pronounced “see”) is used for a sharp fifth scale degree. Li (pronounced “lee”) is used for a sharp sixth scale degree.
Ra (pronounced “rah”) is used for a flat second scale degree. Me (pronounce “may”) is a flat third scale degree. Se (pronounced “say”) is a flat fifth scale degree. Le (pronounced “lay”) is a flat sixth scale degree. Te (pronounced “tay”) is a flat seventh scale degree.
Using all of those you can create all of the different scales and modes.
Pitch match
Pitch matching is the ability to sing a note that you hear. It can also be the ability to sing a specific scale degree within a scale, after having been given “do”, the root note of the scale.
Practice matching pitches randomly on your instrument. Just doing this can help a lot with intonation. Play pitches at random on your instrument and try to sing or hum them.
You can use pitches all within a specific scale at first. That may be a little easier. Then transition to random pitches that aren’t within one specific scale.
Drone “do”
Another great exercise to work on both sight singing ability and inner hearing ability is to practice singing different degrees of a scale while playing do on an instrument. Piano is the easiest to do this with, but other instruments can work too.
Give yourself do and then choose a scale degree to sing after that. Let’s say you choose to sing mi. Sing mi and then after you’ve sung it check your tuning against your instrument. Then sing do again and sing another scale degree.
Keep doing this within only one major or minor scale at first. Practice singing in different keys. Once all the major and minor scales within your range are comfortable mix them together. Sing both major and minor solfege syllables in this way.
One variation of this exercise is to not give yourself do or sing do after singing each solfege syllable. This way you practice hearing do in your head without giving yourself do from an instrument and continually hearing it over and over again. This helps with inner hearing.
Scale exercises
Another thing to do to work on sight singing practice is to practice singing scale exercises. Singing scales up and down can help, but practice singing scales in different combinations. Sing scales in thirds. Sing scales in fourths or fifths. Try sixths and sevenths, though those will be a wide range.
You could also practice singing scales in arpeggios which brings us to the next tip.
Arpeggios
Singing arpeggios is a common singing exercise, but it can also be used as a way to practice inner hearing and improve your sight singing skills.
Practice singing scales in arpeggios or whole chord progressions. Sing the arpeggio do mi sol then sing re fa la then sing mi sol ti and so on up the entire scale if your vocal range can handle it.
It can take some time to get comfortable with all of this in major and minor scales, but once you are comfortable with it try singing arpeggios in different inversions. Sing the arpeggio of do mi la and then re fa ti and then mi sol do and so on. This can help singing different parts of chords and common interval groups in music.
Try second inversion triads starting with do fa la.
Another way to practice arpeggios is by singing whole chord progressions as arpeggios. I recommend starting with common chord progressions first and then transition to less common chord progressions. Start with something like I V vi IV then sing a twelve bar blues. Sing a ii V I and any other common chord combination you can think of.
All of these will help you better hear chord tones and better sight sing music.
Hear the melody in your head
Before you attempt to sight sing a melody, practice hearing it in your head. Try to hear it in as much detail as possible. Hear as many of the articulations and dynamics as you can. Try to hear it played on whatever instrument it is written for. If there are lyrics hear the lyrics.
The goal is to hear as much detail as possible. Really hear the distance between each interval and how it relates to the tonal center or the root of the chord.
Final notes (pun intended)
That’s it for my list of tips to improve your sight singing. As with all of these tips it’s necessary to test them out yourself and see what works for you. Some of these practice methods might not be the best practice method for you. If that’s the case test out other ways of practicing to find what works best for you.
And remember that your practice should be specific to whatever you’re trying to learn. If the goal is to sing atonal melodies then your practice should reflect that.
One of my students likes to write chord progressions and the other day they asked me, “How do you figure out what key a chord progression is in?”
So I figured I’d type out my response to them here.
There are a few things we can do to figure out what key a chord progression is in. Ideally you’d use all of them together to figure out the key, but sometimes they may not all be useful.
Another reason to use multiple of these is because some chord progressions could be in two different keys. They likely aren’t in two keys at the same time, but a few chord progressions can fit into multiple different keys. So depending on specifically how the chord progression is set up and how the other music is written on top of it can determine which key it is in.
Here are the things we’ll be covering:
Prior knowledge
Write out the total notes
What chord does it start and end on?
What chord sounds like “home?”
What other notes are in the music?
Look for familiar chord progressions
Prior knowledge
In order to use most of these techniques you’ll have to know the notes of all of the major and minor scales. You’ll also have to know how to spell out the notes of major and minor chords. The more scales and modes you know and the more chords you can spell will help you more quickly identify the key of a song.
Some other knowledge you should have is a basic understanding of ear training. Knowing what the root note of a scale or chord sounds like will help. Knowing what the root chord of a scale will help.
Some basic knowledge of rhythms and measures and how to read music will help you better understand this article, though it’s not necessary to understanding the ideas presented here.
Write out the total notes
Take the chord progression and write out the total notes that you have. Include every note within each chord. Don’t repeat notes. Try to find at least one of each note name. You want an “A”, a “B”, a “C”, a “D”, an “E”, an “F”, and a “G.”
Let’s look at an example.
Example #1
Here we’ve got a C major chord, an F major chord, and a G major chord. Now we need to find the total notes that we have.
C major has a C, E, and G. F major has F, A, and C. G major has G, B, and D.
If we list them in order we have C, D, E, F, G, A, B, and C. So now we have a guess. This song is likely in C major.
If we take another example we can guess based on how many sharps and flats we have.
Example #2
Here we have an Eb major chord, an F minor chord, a Bb major chord and finally an Eb major chord at the end.
Eb major has Eb, G, and Bb. F minor has F, Ab, and C. Bb major has Bb, D, and F.
Before we put them all together, notice how many flats we have. We have three flatted notes; Eb, Ab, and Bb. What key has three flats?
If you guessed Eb major you’d be correct. If you guessed C minor you’d also be correct.
We can then guess that this chord progression is in Eb major because it has three flats, and it starts and ends on an Eb chord.
This brings us to our second method.
What chord does it start and end on?
Often chord progressions start and end on the “home” or root chord of the scale. In the above two examples those two chord progressions started and ended on the same chord. Those chords also happened to be the root chord of the scale.
This method won’t always be accurate so don’t use it by itself, but for a lot of tonal music it will be quite accurate.
This can also be used for melodies. If a melody starts and ends on a Bb then it’s a pretty good guess that the song is in Bb. Don’t use this alone because there will definitely be cases that you’ll be wrong, but it’s another way to guess.
What chord sounds like “home?”
This one gets a little harder to describe, but listening to the music intently can be a great way to learn about where the root of a scale might be. The chord built off of the root note of the scale will sound the most resolved. It’ll sound like the “home” chord, where the music wants to end. Other chords won’t sound resolved. Ending on the other chords will sound like the music hasn’t quite finished yet. We’ll call this the “I chord” (roman numeral one).
Listen to the music and try to hear what chord sounds the most resolved.
This can be useful if you’re trying to figure out a modal chord progression because the total notes may be the same group of notes as a major or minor scale, but the root of that scale doesn’t sound like the I chord.
This will likely line up with the beginning or ending chord, but might not always, so use your ears as best you can.
You can also use this with the melody. What notes sound the most resolved in the melody. There is normally one note that will sound the most resolved. Figure out that note as it will likely be the root note of the scale.
What other notes are in the music?
Another thing you can do, if the chords don’t give you all of the notes of a scale, is look for other notes in the music. If a song has all of the notes except one, you can likely guess using another technique, but if you’re missing two notes you might have to find some other notes in the music.
I normally like to look at the melody first. It’s the easiest voice to hear in most cases and will give you some other information.
If the melody has other notes that aren’t included in the chords, add those to your list of total notes and take another guess.
Look for familiar chord progressions
Looking for chord progressions that are familiar to you is a great way to figure out the key of a song. If you’ve learned a song in G major and you remember that chord progression, and you see another song with the exact same chord progression, it very likely will be in G major as well.
It can also be useful to know some common chord progression patterns. Knowing what a 12 bar blues chord progression looks and sounds like would be useful because that chord progression will have some added notes in it that aren’t in the major scale.
The same can be said about common chord progressions. Learning these in all 12 keys will require some music theory knowledge, but being able to recognize them can be useful.
That’s it for my tips on how to figure out what key a song is in. Give them a shot if you aren’t sure what key a song is in. Also realize that some songs may change key during the song. Some songs may have chords that are outside of the key. These are a little more complicated and beyond the scope of this article, but there will be other articles that I’ll write on those specific ideas.
