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Transcript:

In the Harmony/Melody section of our canvas course we’ve got a whole bunch of tutorials that can take you through an array of skills. Let’s take a moment to do some upskilling by looking at some highlights.

Inversions/Poly-Chords

We know already from our Bass line work that in the chord strips you can tap on different places to get a different inversion or a different chord tone. Here we have the opportunity to not only play a chord with one finger but we can add a bass note with another. This provides you with not only ear candy but some seriously complex options to go polychordle as well. We can have slash bass notes and all sorts of cool stuff available to us. If I edited my chord strip earlier then it just brings that same strip across for the whole project but if not, I can now edit retrospectively using the guided listening template as a reference.

Arpeggiator

So we can use autoplay and the variations of each option just as we could in the bass but for now I think we are just after minims that emulate the bass. Another option though is to run the arpeggiator, where we’ve got a few different options to play with. You can select the direction of the arpeggiator for example: up, down, up then down or random. You can also select the subdivision for example 16th notes. And the other thing you can select is the range of the arpeggiator. This is something that you would encourage your students to record something in and then play around with. My favorite thing about the arpeggiator is to do non-human or very accomplished pianist jobs where you say go really fast and go really wide for example up and down four octaves in 16th notes. This is another great opportunity to talk about which synths work well in this context for example a monophonic lead vs a warm pad.

Suzuki: Sound before symbol

Another cool thing is that it’s a theory lesson but in context. There is so much musical terminology there for the students to experience first and it's your classic Dr. Suzuki sound before symbol, sound before explanation. The students can experiment and then the theory can come afterwards, “what's going on there?” “oh well that's an arpeggio”. In this way they really understand it then as you're putting the sound together with the words in real time.

Splitting, Copy, and Paste

We’ve got a tutorial for pretty much everything today so don’t get overwhelmed that we are hitting you with everything to know in just a few short hours, remember you have access to these resources through our canvas website. So let’s pause this video and take a quick moment to lay down the synth pad.

Dropping in

Something that is worth encouraging your students to do is to put the playhead up in the ruler where they want to start recording and then hit record. After the count they can play the chord and then press stop, move the playhead to the next position, and repeat the process. That could be a way of structuring dropping in some chords by saying something like “hey guys let's not worry about playing from the start to end in one go because that's quite stressful and could be really hard so something you could do is just go from bar 1 and play one chord in - click stop, go to the next bar and get the next chord ready, tap record one two three four play a chord in and so on.” Once you do this then you'll have a whole bunch of individual audio regions. Here in track view you can tap the track header and then select merge to merge these individual audio regions. That just helps to tidy things up so that you see it all as one region rather than a bunch of regions. You could even rename the region as well so dark matter could be called synth pad or you could go into each one and rename a region as intro or verse for example which would be pretty interesting for laying out a template. We've actually used that feature for an arrangement track in the template linked in the description below with pre-filled blank regions called intro, verse, chorus, bridge. This is super helpful to keep track of where the recording is up to and which sections need building out. More on this later!