Purpose In Music Lessons

One thing you should do in regards to taking music lessons, or any learning activity for that matter is to take a bit of time and decide what your goals in learning are.

I’m not really talking about big long-term plans, necessarily, but something quite a bit simpler.

One consideration is what style or genre of music are you mainly interested in playing?

For example, so-called classical music relies heavily on note reading. Being able to play the classics requires fluency in note reading and a solid foundation in theory.

Now pop music breaks down into a few categories. The songwriting end of it definitely requires much of the same expertise and theory as classical music and, if you’re going to be happy picking up song books off the music store shelves and playing them, then a good basis in note reading will take you to your goal the quickest.

However, often has been the time that someone has learned a song from a piece of sheet music and then said ‘that doesn’t sound like the original song.’ That’s because sheet music is more of a conglomeration of all the parts in a song but it’s not really how the original band or artists did it.

You will come closer to realizing a melody in music if you choose an arrangement of that song for whatever instrument you play. An arrangement is a realization of a song that best suites a particular instrument.

You must realize, however, that many pop bands work around a melody with the other parts being improvised or made-up by the other band members. This is why playing an Elton John song from a piece of sheet music doesn’t sound much like when Elton performs it because he is utilizing a jazz or improvisational style of piano playing to accompany himself.

Improvisation is the core of much pop music and the basics to this are the Blues.

With Blues, Jazz and improvisation in general, there is not a lot of note reading. What there is instead are chords and scales, particularly what is called the Blues Scale.

This type of music works off of a predetermined progression of chords, which might be simple, or it could be a lot more complex. The Twelve Bar Blues, however, is rather simple and usually serves as a starting point for this kind of training. The improvising musician matches a scale to a chord and ‘plays around’ with that scale to achieve his improvisations.

So, if your goal is to play in a band, your focus in music lessons should more on chords and scales, starting with the Twelve Bar Blues.

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