Block, Broken, Marching: Love those Chords!

Quick Reminder: What's a Chord?

Photo courtesy of Facebook user Sara Young

By now you're very familiar with the Red, Blue, and Yellow triangles your Let's Play Music teacher uses in class.  Triangles have 3 corners to emphasize that a chord has at least 3 notes heard together. (Yeah, when you graduate from LPM you will learn chords with more than 3 notes.)  
 

Block Chords

So, if a chord must have at least 3 notes, one straightforward way to play it is to strike all 3 notes simultaneously.  Your ear hears all 3 sounds merged together into one sweet creation: the block chord. Block chords can sound very strong, loud, and powerful in songs. Or they can sound rich and deep.

One of my favorite things about Let's Play Music is when my 5-year-olds sing and play "Old Paint" at the very begging of 2nd year. It's their first time on the piano and they already sound loud, rich, and complex because they are playing chords AND overlaying with the melody of their voice. It sounds SO GOOD from day one.  This is very motivating and the students want to sit down and play for hours!

When reading chord maps in year one, we touched each triangle as the entire chord was played on the beat.   We generally consider all chords played on the harp as block chords (students strum all notes in one swift movement, or at least they try to!)

Block Chord Ear training: Listen to this sample of block chords playing.  The first activity is just like ones we do in class to help students distinguish when we change from one chord to a different one.  The second activity is for to practice identifying which chords are heard in a pattern.  Ear training practice helps our students recognize cadences in music they hear every day, all around them!



Reading Blocks: Since music is read from left to right, notes that are stacked on top of one another are played at the same time.  Learning to recognize the familiar shapes of block chord structures, and teaching the hand muscles to quickly play them is a great skill that all Let's Play Music students graduate with.  As we mentioned in our post on note reading, musicians look at notes and chords in chunks.  You may scrutinize one note of the chord for accuracy, then let the shape of it guide your hand to magically perform the rest of the chord!

By graduation, students will have no trouble playing block chords all over the keyboard, like these.  If you ARE a third year student, what color are these chords!? (The answer is at the end of the post!)

Broken Chords
So, a chord has three or more notes.  A delightful variation is to play the notes one at a time instead of all at once.  Broken chords can change the feeling of a song into something delicate and lilting when played piano and legato or give a sharp and spicy impression when played forte and staccato!

A fabulous word that means 'broken chord' or 'notes of a chord played in sequence' is arpeggio.  Nothing beats having your five-year-old approach a guest over at your house, and announce, "I'd like to play you some arpeggios on the piano, for your listening pleasure."

In the first year of Let's Play Music, we played songs like "On Top of Spaghetti" to practice with broken chords.  Although we did use a chord map, we tapped each corner of the triangles while listening to the accompaniment to emphasize that we are hearing each note of the chord separately (broken chords.)  

Arpeggio Ear Training: Broken chords (arpeggios) are used in Let's Play Music ear-training just as often as block chords.  It is often easier for the students to figure out which chord I am playing if they can hear the notes one at a time, hearing the individual notes and intervals between them.  If I play a block chord and the student can't identify it, I usually play broken style and they can recognize it.  In each of these tracks, can you tell which chord I play? 


Reading Broken Chords: Just like you read a book left-to-right, you play the notes from left-to-right one at a time. You'll get excellent practice with songs like "Lullaby." Because arpeggios are so common, composers often write a block chord and put the arpeggiate symbol next to it.  It just means 'spread this out' and is a handy way to save paper if you write a lot of broken chords. If you want the chord to be played top-to-bottom, add a downward arrow to the symbol.

Some delightful variations that will be very useful in composing music are fun to experiment with now (why wait!?).  After playing the 3 notes of a chord, why not repeat the first note again an octave higher (shown above)? Play the arpeggio going up and then back down! Fancy!  (You'll have to use fingers 1-2-3-5; that's tricky!)

Looking for another way to add a fourth beat? Play the broken chord and then replay the middle note. This can really spice up an accompaniment.  Red, Blue, Yellow, and Red chords in broken style:

There's no need to play a boring bug-bug-bug-bug rhythm.  Take these notes and add a calypso rhythm to make your composition even fancier! That's what what you'll see when you play "Tinga Layo".

Marching Chords
In Let's Play Music we highlight one more fun way to play chords: Marching style.  Like a mixture of block and broken, the chord is played in two beats.  First play just the lowest note of the block, then play all the others. Voila! You've got some marching chords.

You can play around with marching in your own compositions.  Mix up the rhythms or repeat the low or high to create some cool sounds.  In third year we'll also play marching by having the right hand and left hand alternate for a marching sound.  Can you play this cool composition I just made completely of red chords?

 

Have Fun with Chords

Photo courtesy of Facebook user Juliane Wolf

Now that you know the secrets of block, broken, and marching chords, you can change the way you play songs!  In Let's Play Music classes, we train complete musicians. That means students understand how songs are put together, have the power to improvise the way they play what is written on the page, and can compose their own music. 

So give it a try! Go play with chords and create something new! 



Block Chord Reading Quiz Answer:These chords shown are shown in different inversions.  They are: Red, Red, Red, Blue, Blue, Yellow, Yellow, Red. Or you could say I, I, I, IV, IV, V, V, I.  You must look at the key signature to be sure that the first block chord is a I (Red)! Our 3rd year students are so smart!

-Gina Weibel, M.S.
Let's Play Music teacher
  

You can Play "Let it Go" from Frozen

Now that the school year is winding down, could you use something inspirational to draw your second- or third-year student to the piano?  Then make your child's day with a simple and fun version of "Let It Go," arranged by Let's Play Music teacher, Nicci Lovell in Mesa, AZ.

CLICK ON IMAGE TO DOWNLOAD PDF

Second-Year Students:
Play the chords with your right hand.  Then try your left hand.  Then try hands together!  You sound great when you sing along (I am guessing there's a good chance you already knew the words to this one.)  Now you're having a great time and giving yourself more practice with our favorite chords and one interval (see the third?).

Here's a video of a student playing. He chose to use his left hand and was too shy to sing on camera, so I did the singing:

Third-Year Students and Graduates:
Play through those chords: pretty easy, right?  Now you have the freedom to improvise!  Instead of playing long whole notes, play two quarter-notes and a half note, or two half-notes, or some other combination you like.  Here's a video of some improvisation: after you play the chords with different rhythms with the left hand, you can learn to play the melody with your right hand and put it all together.

The Power of Chords

Delightfully,  many songs can be harmonized using the I, IV and V chords (or as you know them, Red, Blue and Yellow.)  With careful listening, you and your child will learn to pick out chord progressions as you hear them in songs, and be able to play your favorite songs!  Stay tuned for more popular songs for your LPM student.

You can click here for a piano video demonstrating how just a few chords can be used to harmonize over 40 popular songs.  To our 3rd-year students: A common chord pattern you'll hear over and over in that video is I-V-vi-IV.  Hey! it's the same pattern that we saw in "Let it Go".  That 3rd in "Let it Go" (C-E) was not a full triad, was it?  Do you see we could complete it to make an A triad?  Or we could call it the vi chord, since A is the 6th step of the C scale.

Have fun exploring with chords!

-Gina Weibel, M.S.

Let's Play Music Teacher

Educating the Complete Musician

Now that you've begun Let's Play Music class, you might be wondering, why aren't we on the keyboards yet!?  Why isn't my child doing drills and building up a big repertoire of performance pieces already!?  What's the holdup!?  Is my child falling behind in the music world!?

I often tell people, "we're not just a piano class, and we're not just a voice class, and we're not just a theory class...we're a complete musicianship program."  Our program is intentionally broad, and covers so much more than technique and repertoire. 

Why Musicianship? 

Can read music...but not improvise?

Imagine if your child could play a fancy piece of piano music beautifully, but he struggled to learn new songs or pick out a melody by ear.  

Or perhaps he doesn't seem to notice discordant mistakes until the teacher points them out.  

Or perhaps he plays his lesson repertoire just fine, but is baffled at the thought of improvising or creating music, wondering when his lessons are going to teach him how to do that.

On the flip side, what if he could sit down and easily play 'The Itsy-Bitsy Spider' by ear, but really felt overwhelmed trying to read any new songs from sheet music?

In each scenario, the student is learning from lessons that lack different elements of musicianship needed to create a complete musician.

At Let's Play Music, we nurture all aspects of musicianship before your child graduates into specialized programs like private lessons. We are building a foundation for broad musicianship that pays off in the long run.  It seems that there are so many elements to be taught, but luckily activities of each type are complimentary to each other: skill in one task helps a child have success in the others. 

The Big 5 Skills of Musicianship

I tried to put into words what defined lessons that would output a musician instead of a one-song-wonder. Luckily the concept is summed up in this interview at www.easyeartraining.com with Dr. Chad West. 

Dr. West is a leading expert and author of a recent article defining FIVE core skills that define musicianship. They are:

• Executive
• Notation
• Rhythmic
• Tonal
• Creativity 

Executive skills are the obvious ones: how to make your fingers actually technically play the instrument. 

Notation is also pretty straightforward: how to understand written notes and music theory in order to play what was intended. 

These two skills are the external skills of musicianship; progress in these skills is easy to evaluate because the results are external (the student's output is measured.)

Executive and Notation skills are the main focus of many school and private music lessons, often at the expense of other skills.   Students may take lessons for years, but still feel unmusical.  

After lots of practice with executive and notation skills, they are probably amazing at reading and playing music, but may still not feel like they can create music.

Our programs don't neglect tonal/ear training that often get left behind. Singing is necessary for feedback on how students are audiating, so we include singing as an important element of musicianship.

We believe a student is never too young to take what they know and create new music.  Teaching chord theory early empowers students to make new music and better understand the music they hear in daily life.

What Do We Cover?

Note reading AND ear training !

-Music theory: playing in 5 keys, transposing, understanding chord inversions, chord progressions, triads, creating scales and more!

-Ear training: interval recognition and singing, chord recognition, chord progressions, and melodic patterns

-Playing by ear: taking ear-training to the keyboard

-Sight singing: solfege, note-reading

-Vocal training 

-Dictation: melodic and chords/harmony

-Sight reading/ piano playing: two-handed repertoire in 5 keys, piano technique 

-Improvisation: melodic improv, chord style improv

-Ensemble playing and singing: harmonizing parts, following a conductor, listening to multiple parts at once

-Analysis of simple and classical music: puppet shows!

-Listening to music from various styles: class musical CDs

 
-Arranging and composing: students complete a piano composition to perform 

You're probably saying "Hey! when I was a kid, my piano lesson didn't cover all of that!" Life is better now! Our programs are carefully crafted and designed to help you raise a well-rounded musician.  

You CAN Teach Talent

With all of these skills in place, folks will be saying "he's a talented musician!" and not just, "he can really play piano!"

To answer the questions, "Why aren't we on the piano yet?" and "Are we falling behind!?" the answer is: We are taking the first year of class to train the ear and brain for success on the piano. We're training the large and small muscle groups, too, through harp and bell performance. We're fundamentally internalizing how music works, through a variety of types of training, so that when we play piano, we'll be truly successful as whole musicians.

Now remember, when your child asks, "What will be doing in class today?" simply and honestly answer, "fun songs and silly games!"  It's the perfect venue for all that hard work we're not telling him about.

-Gina Weibel, M.S.
Let's Play Music Teacher