Read The Dots

The place for anyone to begin – no matter how many times you’ve looked at a page of musical dots! Start by learning to find your way around, what some of the basic symbols mean and look like, and gain a solid starting point ready to begin reading the dots.

There’s even one really useful slightly more advanced term thrown in to keep some more experienced readers on their toes! Everyone should start with this short set of lessons, and make sure that they have a good grasp of the basics. These are your basic reading concepts.

From the beginning of this series of lessons I help you make sure that you have a good understanding of some really important terminology that you will need when trying to read the dots. Always focussing on putting the major concepts into plain English to ensure you have a solid grasp of the basics, I gradually help you to build your knowledge of scales and key signatures one step at a time.

There are a range of ways that people learn or remember how to construct scales and keys, and I show you the benefits and disadvantages of a number of them, all the while explaining what I believe to be the method that will give you by far the biggest long term understanding.

It’s very easy when you’re learning to read music to spend a lot of time focusing on which note is which. As a result it can be easy to not spend enough time learning to improve your rhythm reading and understanding, and I’m a big believer that the “when” is just as important as the “what”!

In this series of lessons, I start from the very beginning, showing you how even knowing a very small number of note types will get you a long way in understanding how rhythms are put together.

There are also lessons that explain not only how different time signatures work, but I also show you some of my best tips to improve your rhythm reading step by step, allowing you to quickly develop your ability to follow the rhythm of music notation, and be confident your “when” is just as good as your “what”!

Whilst being able to construct scales and keys is hugely important, it is when we start to combine individual notes into chords and harmony that music really comes alive!

From forming your very first chord, through to more advanced extended and altered chords, I help you to understand how each chord type is constructed, making sure that you can see how you can apply key signature knowledge to do a lot of the work for you.

Woven throughout this series of lessons I show you not only how to form each chord in isolation, but also how to find them within the context of major and minor keys.

By doing this you will not only learn how all of the chord types are used musically, but you will more quickly develop your understanding of how pieces of music are written, and gain some really practical skills designed to help you in a huge range of musical situations.