Scales for Lessons
Weekly Teaching Tip – Sep. 27, 2011
This week’s Weekly Teaching tip comes from one of our newer teachers. She feels comfortable working with voices, but sometimes feels that she doesn’t play the scales as well as she wants to and that sometimes this gets in the way of her teaching as she feels like she is concentrating more on playing the scales than listening to the voice. I recommended that perhaps as she is continuing to practice the scales and get better on her own time that she could sequence (record) the different scales on her keyboard and then just push the up and down transpose key to raise and lower the scales. This way she would have control of which scale to choose and what pitches the scales were on, but she wouldn’t need to focus on playing them and could focus more on the student. She responded to me later with another solution she found.
“Hey Dean, I found this really cool app that some of you teachers may like. I love it.
Because I’m not so comfortable playing scales and teaching as of yet, as I told you, I went searching for an app to use and this one is great. I did try that feature on my keyboard, but it’s super complicated to get it to transpose. Bummer.
Anyway, it’s called “singers friend”. It has a bunch of scales to choose from (Even minor, which I think is totally weird) and you can choose the vocal range and scale on each one. It’s 3.99 I believe and you just put in on your ipod touch, iphone, whatever, plug it into your speaker system or computer, press play and go. Anyway, just in case any of your teachers are in my same boat, this might be something that comes in handy.
Thanks again for everything.”
Thanks for her suggestion! And to all of you Keep Singing!!