Introduction “Those dry, boring scales! My teacher makes me practice them, but they don’t do anything for me.” People who feel this way haven’t discovered how scales are related to everything else in music. They haven’t learned how to hear the notes in a scale and relate them to songs, melodies, and improvised lines. Aside from pitch, every scale tone has a distinct sound and musical purpose. In this workshop, you’ll discover this through ear training and structured practice with the goal of improving your ability to play by ear. We focus on the Major Scale because it’s the starting point for all other scales. We use solfege as a way to indentify notes by how they sound relative to a given key. We really don’t care about the letter names of notes (i.e. C, D, E), because they’re just labels. They don’t tell us anything about how a note sounds. Learning solfege will help you bridge the gap between what you hear in your head and what you play on the ukulele. Be prepared to work hard. It may take you days, weeks, or month for the light bulb to go on, but when it does, your musical senses will be awakened. Ted Fong Ukulele Instructor April 2012
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