The music theory explainer document above is a great reference for your students. It explains clearly and concisely how the two basic intervals of a whole-step and a half-step combine to construct Major scales. You can distribute them to your learners during classroom sessions. You can also email them or upload them to school or college learning portals or IT systems.
You can also laminate them and put them on the walls of your classroom for "quick reference" for your students during lessons or music workshops
We study whole-step and half-step intervals at this early stage because an understanding of those two intervals is all that is required before being able to construct and analyse Major and minor scales. When students develop an understanding of scales then all intervals can be studied in relation to those scales
An understanding of music theory must be built up from solid foundations and before looking at developing an understanding of intervals students must first be confident that they can "correctly" name notes
If they don't understand scales then they won't be able to grasp chord construction?
If they struggle with chord construction then they are not going to understand
established harmonic systems and the relevance of key signatures?
Our resources are designed to allow you to help students to build a "joined up" knowledge of music theory from a solid grounding in the basics
Our materials that cover the early stages of music theory are designed to allow your students to progress logically through the "nuts and bolts" of the subject without getting too hung up on notation. After they have mastered the principles behind correctly naming notes students are ready to go on to study intervals of a whole-step and a half-step
Note Naming How to correctly identify notes
Intervals (particularly whole and half steps)
Intervals into Scales (how intervals of whole and half steps combine to create scales)
Scales into Chords (how scales contain chords within them and the difference between major and minor chords)
Chords into Harmonic Systems (chords which "fit" together that can be created from within a single scale)
If you click the image below you will get a Free PDF containing 20 pages of lesson plans looking at the early stages of teaching music theory in much greater detail than we can go into here
Click this text for a
FREE 20 Page set of Music Theory Lesson Plans Covering Intervals and Beyond
Our "one click" download consists of 300 professionally prepared handouts that can be printed over and over again for less than the price of a single paper textbook! many of which deal with the correct identification of intervals
These resources are especially designed to make life easier for classroom music or instrumental teachers who need to get theoretical ideas over to students.
The handouts have been put together so that the same basic ground can be covered with differing levels of graphic support (some handouts feature keyboards and have space for letter names while others aimed at more advanced students rely on a more conventional musical stave approach).
They are designed so that a single music educator might work with all ability levels within a single session. challenging the more able learners whilst supporting those who are not so familiar with the concepts and material under study
musicteachingresources.com is a new sister site of the already well established guitar and bass teacher's resources website teachwombat.com
Diatonic Harmony provides a framework by which music students can develop an understanding of all of the chords to be found in any particular key.
An understanding of the diatonic system will allow students to examine a chord sequence and to decide which scale it is based upon as well as to give them the knowledge to compose musically "correct" chord sequences of their own.
Once an understanding of the diatonic system has been developed students are ideally placed to work on study of the (relatively few) common alterations to the diatonic chords which provide the chords that make up the bulk of popular music.
A feature of the materials relating to the development of an understanding of the system is a series of "diatonic puzzles" (click the image to download a free sample worksheet) that contain all of the diatonic chords from a particular key (in the case of the free sheet the key is D)
Stdents are invited to firstly identify the chords on the worksheet and then to name the key that all of the triads belong to.
It is likely (and desirable) that as they progress through the sheets they will begin to develop an ability to identify the key before they have named all of the chords on the sheet by using an increasing understanding of the system and the chords within it.
An example of this understanding might be that they come to realise (rather than just be able to recite) that chord no VII is always a diminished chord (in the case of the sample sheet C# diminished) and that the tonic (name) chord of the key is a major chord a semitone above the root of chord no VII (a D chord?)
Another example would be that two major triads a tone apart might be identified (G and A on the free worksheet)?
Armed with this information students would be able to deduce the key containing all of the chords on the sheet by correctly identifying the lower of these major triads (G) as chord IV (the subdominant) and the higher one (an A chord) as Chord no V ( the dominant chord)
As there is only one Major key (in this case D) which features these two chords then identification of the parent key could become fairly simple by addressing the following questions
Which scale has a fourth note of G (the root note of a G major triad)?
Material relating to the diatonic system forms part of our package that music teachers can now download featuring 200 professionally prepared handouts that can be printed over and over again and all for less than the price of a single textbook!
These resources are especially designed to make life easier for classroom music teachers and instrumental instructors. They have been put together so that a single music educator might work with all ability levels within a single session or work back to basic principles with an individual student.
