CHROMATIC NOTES EXPLORED
Welcome back! If you remember from previous columns, my number one rule with learning music is ‘contextualize everything’. There’s absolutely zero value in being good at playing exercises, after all. An exercise is simply a way of distilling a principle into a memorable, repeatable version so we can train our hands and ears in that basic version and then apply it. Knowing the pattern is solely a means to an end, which is deploying the knowledge and skill in a musically meaningful way.
So, we’re going to take the scale fragment ideas from the last two months and apply them to a two-chord progression, and in order to make the music satisfying, we’ll experiment with some rhythmic possibilities, too.
Our progression for today is going to be A Major to F# minor. In the key of A Major, which has three sharps in its key signature, these are the first and sixth chords. I to VI is a very common progression, and a good one to practise building lines over, because it gives us a vocabulary to draw on when chords in that arrangement appear in songs we’re working].
