Opening the door to the language of music | Duncan Lorien | TEDxCaFoscariU 

All guitarists know this, you don’t need to learn all minor major sharp or flat, learn the shape of eac one and you know them all, if you don’t need to read music, as guitarists don’t, you don’t need to memorise all the sharps and flats in each scale just the patterns, nothing magical, the skill comes in learning timing, the space in between notes in a scale is music.

100% right comment.. great for ANY recreational player..

Being a total beginner and just learning my second scale (A minor) this video has helped connect something my brain was working on but couldn’t consciously put to words. I know there is a lot more to learn but thinking of these scales as patterns works

This is awful, and not because it's simplistic. First off, it's not simplistic. It's just bad, and especially bad for beginners.

I am afraid this is that kind of shortcut that brings you to abbys of being total beginner forever because you "know music in 3 minutes, why study, why practice"

The problem is, he IS swamping the beginner with a couple of unnecessary terms, befor and during the "play".

me too...life changing!

@dnewjazz1 Duncan VERY CLEARLY said that traditional names for this "step of one" are not important for now." So, my question to you is: Are you a deaf professional musician?

@dnewjazz1 Duncan's approach IS FOR "the common person understanding" (YOUR words). It OBVIOUSLY doesn't get into technical musical terms, as he is not teaching any in-depth understanding of musical architecture.

Damn straight.

She surely was - far too young for me (and I'm married), but she really lit up the stage for sure.

Also concerning the "step" and "two steps", every musician Have heard calls that a "half step" and "whole step". This presentation just multiplies confusion!

When you go from a B to a C note, or an E to an F. Is that a half step or a full step? Always wanted to know officially what these 2 are

@@jasonbull3987 B to C and E to F are half steps.

On returning to learning music to learn late in my life, it was this whole tone and semi-tone thing which initially confused me. If I were to rule the world (Ha-ha) I would either teach whole tone first, or the full chromatic scale before other scales, because I'm sure one of the difficulties of learning to sing - as a special case - is pitch recognition. Beginning learning with a single scale with tones and semi-tones (ie C for an amateur singer) without knowing where the semitones are, and expecting them to transpose the semi-tone sequence to another key is a real stretch. It is why, I suspect, why some people lose pitch, are pitch deaf, or why some beginners give up. It's learning uphill. We're stuck with history's ramshackle evolution of the scales, sad to say. In any case, many RU-vid videos have helped a great deal in filling gaps that music teachers often leave out.

Når hun kom på scenen jeg glemte hva jeg skal konsentrere meg på :).

If i have a kid, that'd be a nice name. i'd make sure he never drives 88mph though

"Tutta la scala del tono"? Ne vogliamo parlare?

"BLUES" hahahahahah they put it on Google Translator "Blues Scale" OMFG

Bellissimo, geniale

How do you know what I really think? Are you clairvoyant? BTW - I play keyboard, guitar, violin, harmonica (blues harp) and pennywhistle/tinwhistle - "by ear" - although I tend to use my fingers a lot. ; )

I completely disagree. You can't really expect certain notes without knowing exactly what the string is tuned to, and you never have a sense of scales or triads or chords in general, You cannot transpose anything by just moving upwards like it is with piano for example, you have to change strings completely at some point. Guitar is one of the most unintuitive instruments I have learned, I still love it to death :P

Can you pls share me the numbers patterns for melodic minor

Musik für alle! Your English is so bad that what you wrote makes no sense at all

Musik für alle! 😊

It IS a joke

I disagree. I am an accomplished guitarist but struggled for years to learn by "rote memorization". Yes, I learned all the scales, but it was difficult and I never once was presented the concept of the relationship between scales and notes(the building blocks). If I had, it would have made life so much simpler and easier.

I come from Hungary, I went to Kodaly Zoltan Music Elementary School, which was 8 years. I've been to Duncan's seminar, and in his 4 days seminar I've learnt a lot more than in those 8 years. So no, Koday method is not simpler or more useful than Duncan's method.

Debra Dass Unfortunately, you have missed the key idea - intervals instead of sequences and names. Lorien never said that intervals were not known. But in your phrase there are TWO different things instead of Lorien's one. On Lorien's seminar people get UNDERSTANDING (this is a key thing) of music - (including even reading of notes) in only 3 days. May be it sounds impossible for someone, but it is true. And yes, it is done in 3 days only instead of years that people spend to find key data under mountains of wrong, confused and contradicted information - in a lot of books and articles. I know personally professional musicians, also with a degree, who then graduated Lorian's seminar (I know personally music group leader, a singer, songs writer and some other professional musicians). They found a lot of new in this seminar. Come there and you will see it personally. Wish you all the best.

You have no Idea what Duncan is teaching in His Seminars.. of course Not, You are a Music teacher 🤗

I was thinking the same thing. Some musicians, such as Thelonious Monk, write in number systems. Those numbers are written over standard notation. Try reading Beethoven's handwritten notations; people will run to standard notes. This system is important, the number system s only a convenience that does nothing for expressing an understanding of music. - Can't even tell what key their in. How do you denote ninths and elevenths with his number system? Move to your right 16 steps?

Debra Dass a ridiculous presentation. I agree whole-heartedly! Nothing to do with “the language” of music ( in terms of communication of emotion or feeling of any kind). If he’s going to mention Debussy...,at least demonstrate! God knows how he landed this gig!

@@AllIn1Studio I'm with you. As I read the comments though, about half say he's opened up the door for them. I'm baffled and aware only that we're all different and somehow they're getting what they wanted in music. I'm self taught and without thinking about it, I simply "coped" the stuff I loved. Then the stuff I loved got more complex but like a baby learning to walk, I didn't give up one bit. Many of the truly gifted popular musicians in my time never held a pencil once to create music, it was done on instruments, some of all of it done without benefit of paper.

The point was to make us completely amateur, non-musicians understand it.

Sharavana, it's also very interesting to learn how the notes themselves arise from simple divisions of a single vibrating string. It really all comes from the fraction 3/2. Pick a starting frequency (440 Hz is common) and take successive multiplications by 3/2. So, 440*1, 440*3/2, 440*9/4, 440*27/8, 440*81/16, etc. Divide each result by 2 until the result lies between 440 and 880. Get 12 members of that sequence, and allow the 13th to be slightly greater than 880 by dividing by 2 one time less. What you have here is basically the chromatic scale (plus the first note of the second octave). Each note forms a "perfect fifth" with the note before it. In modern music we adjust these frequencies slightly to make each successive note have the same ratio to the next lower frequency (that ratio is the 12th root of 2); this also makes the highest frequency be exactly double the first frequency. That last one that you allowed to be slightly above 880 moves down to exactly 880. This is called the "equal temperament" system. None of the adjustments exceed 1.5% in frequency; the notes are close enough to the ones calculated above to be "accepted" by our minds, but are much easier to work with when it comes to things like transposing keys and so on. Since this process actually produces notes that are perfect fifths to their predecessors, perfect fifths are "neighbors," so to speak. This is why the "circle of fifths" is important in music theory. I think it's just fascinating how it all comes from a simple single string. Our minds accept the adjusted notes, but the fundamental thing that our minds really embrace is that ideal perfect fifth, frequencies with ratio 3/2. Whenever two frequencies are related by a fraction made with small integers, our minds "like the result." As the ratio moves further from such a fraction, we like it less - it starts to sound dissonant to us.