Lesson video

Hi, everyone.

I'm Miss Friar and I'm going to be a music teacher for unit three.

I am so excited to be taking you through these lessons.

It is a brilliant topic and a really important topic to be looking at, in not just musical history, but all of history.

And I can't wait to get started.

At the start of every lesson, we're going to do a musical activity, whether that be singing, tapping, body percussion, listening skills, something to get you in a musical mood for the rest of the lesson together.

So, today we're going to do a combination of a singing and a listening task.

So, I've got a backing track here on my phone.

We'll listen through once and then I'll tell you what we're going to do.

It's not very long, but have your ears nice and tuned in and see if you recognise the style of music.

Okay, that's it, round about 30 seconds of a clip.

Now, that is a backing truck for a particular style of music.

Now, there is a whole band playing in that track, but we're going to have a go and see if we can sing just one part.

We're going to see if we can sing the bass part.

Do you know what a bass part is? Or maybe even what a double bass or bass guitar is? Well, well done if you do.

Don't worry if you don't, we're going to look at it in bit more detail over the next few lessons, but it's a low pitched string instrument that you find in both bands as well as big orchestras.

So, we're going to have a go at singing a low pitched part.

Now, if you can't sing very low, I'm going to show you a higher note.

So, don't worry about it.

Okay, the first note we need to sing is a C, if that's too low, you can sing a C.

So, whichever you'd rather, and this is how the singing parts go, the baseline that we're going to sing.

I'll do it first and then you're going to have a go.

I missed my cue.

Too busy talking.

Here we go.

♪ C, C ♪ ♪ Or C, C ♪ If you can sing that low.

We're still on C, C.

♪ F, F ♪ ♪ F, F ♪ ♪ C, C ♪ ♪ C, now we change to G, G ♪ ♪ And to F, F ♪ ♪ Back to see C, C ♪ ♪ Change to G, G ♪ Okay, if you're not sure about keeping track of C's and F's, don't worry.

We're going to imitate a bass guitar today and a kind of sound, if you were to pick a bass guitar, would sound like, "dum, dum, dum, dum, dum".

Okay? So, we're going to make a "dum" sound.

♪ Dum ♪ And again, like I said, that's quite low for me.

So, it's low for you, sing dum, dum, dum, dum.

Okay, just have a go with the backing track.

And if you're unsure, stop, listen to what me and the backing track are doing, and then see if you can join in.

We're getting our ears in tuned to the baseline of this backing track.

We're picking three pitches and see if you can start to recognise the order that they're in.

♪ Dum, dum ♪ ♪ Dum, dum ♪ ♪ Dum, dum ♪ ♪ Dum, dum ♪ So, it's four C's, two in each one.

And then we changed to F.

So dum, dum, dum, dum.

Okay, so there's two F's, two notes each of them.

And then we'd go back up to C.

♪ Dum, dum ♪ ♪ Dum, dum ♪ Then there's one G and we're seeing two notes in it.

♪ Dum, dum ♪ F ♪ Dum, dum ♪ Back to: ♪ C, C.

♪ ♪ Then G, G ♪ Okay? Good, let's give it another go with a backing track.

You're doing really well.

Here we go.

On the dum's.

♪ Dum, dum ♪ ♪ Dum, dum ♪ ♪ Dum, dum ♪ ♪ Dum, or dum ♪ Whichever you can do.

♪ Dum ♪ ♪ Dum, dum ♪ ♪ Dum, dum ♪ ♪ Dum, dum ♪ ♪ Dum, dum ♪ ♪ Dum, dum ♪ ♪ Dum, dum ♪ ♪ Dum, dum ♪ ♪ Dum, dum ♪ Well done.

Great work.

I've thrown you right into having a go at recognising baselines and having a go at singing today.

So, thank you for being brave and taking part in doing that warm-up activity with me today.

Okay, let's carry on and see what else you need for today's lesson to go really well.

Okay, so, resources that you need for this lesson are a piece of paper or a book to write in, or if you've got the worksheet, you're going to work from that.

You're going to use a pencil and a different colour pen to help you with your marking or making notes.

Because we're going to be making music today, you've got one of three options.

One: You can just decide that you're going to use your voice.

That's absolutely fine for this lesson.

You could grab an instrument that you like to play.

So, if you already play an instrument or you've got a keyboard or piano at hand, or you can use an app on a phone or a tablet or another electronic device, there are loads of musical apps out there.

And again, we're going to be basing it around bass guitar and keyboard.

\ So, you want to pick an app that has those options.

If you don't have anything from that list already, pause the video now, go and get them, and then come back, press pay, and we'll get on.

It's really important, every single lesson, that it's really clear of the structure of what we're going to do and what you're going to achieve today.

So, the first thing on our list, we're going to have a look at where blues music originated.

So, blues is the style that we're going to be looking at.

And we're going to look at where that originated.

We're going to be looking at some of the key features of early blues music.

Okay, so, blues music spreads over decades, but we're going to look at just the earlier style of blues music.

Then we're going to have a look at something called the 12 bar blues structure.

With that you're going to learn how to play that 12 bar blues structure and transpose it.

And if you're not sure what transposing is, don't worry.

We're going to go through all of that in a moment.

Okay, let's have a look at where blues music is from.

Okay, let's have a look at where people believe blues music originated.

There's some text on the left hand side of the screen that I'm going to read through.

Just follow with me as I go along.

The blues is the name given to a tradition of music, which was created at the end of the 19th century.

It is believed that this style has been evolving since the first West Africans were enslaved in North America, but where in North America, did blues begin? and I've got a map they're up on the screen.

And there is a part of North America that is highlighted red.

And that is where blues music is known to originate.

Where it started.

Take a few seconds now, and think if you know where that part of North America is, if you do, write it down on your piece of paper.

We're going to check the answer in five, four, three, two, one.

That is Mississippi.

In fact, it's called the Mississippi Delta.

And this is the place where blues music originated.

So, where it started.

Right on the border of the Southern part of North America.

Write that down on your piece of paper if you didn't get it, blues music originated in the Mississippi Delta.

If you've got it right, well done.

Great geography skills.

Okay.

So, now I know where it started.

Let's have a look at some of the early features.

So, musical ideas that we would hear in blues music.

Time for a listening part of our lesson, and it's called active listening.

What that means is you're not just listening and enjoying the music like you would do if you were listening to the radio, but you're going to actually analyse and think about what you can hear while listening to it.

And you're going to answer four questions after you've heard this clip.

One: name two instruments you can hear.

Two: describe Robert Johnson's voice.

Three: true or false: there is call and response in this song.

And you should know what call and response means from some previous lessons.

Also, if you can tell me where you can hear the call and response, or what parts are calling and responding, also write that down.

And number four: how and where are the chords played? So quite a lot of detailed questions there.

I'm going to press play on the clip, and then we'll go through those answers.

Here we go.

♪ I went to the crossroad ♪ ♪ Fell down on my knees ♪ I went to the crossroad ♪ Fell down on my knees ♪ Great.

Some really early style blues there from Robert Johnson.

Okay.

Pause the video now and take just two minutes to write your answer to these four questions.

Okay, well done.

Get your different colour pen ready 'cause we're going to go through and mark these answers now, and you want to write any corrections, if you were unsure of the answers.

So, two instruments you can hear in this piece, vocals and guitar.

Okay, remember, in early blues music, it all started out with just being a voice and a guitar, or a banjo.

So, Robert Johnson is singing and there's a guitar with him as well.

Well done, if you got that right.

Number two, describe Robert Johnson's voice.

Okay, so, there could be multiple answers for this, but here are mine.

It's really freely sung.

Okay, so, what that means, is he's changing parts.

Some bits he's singing longer, some bits he's singing shorter, he's singing in the style and in the emotion that he wants to sing around with the guitar.

Okay, so, he's freely singing.

He's accenting certain notes and certain words.

Okay and you can hear that in the higher part of his vocals.

He's also sliding between the notes.

Okay, which you hear a lot in blues music where they slide from one note to another.

If you've got any of those, well done, but please take a note of what you wrote and I'm sure your teacher would love to see that.

Number three, true or false: there is call and response in this song.

The answer is true.

You can hear a call and response between him and the guitar.

So, he sings a line, and then the guitar plays a little tune in between.

The call response.

The he sings another line and the guitar comes back in and plays another little tune.

So, there's the call and response.

Number four.

How are the chords being played? It's very unique to early blues music.

The chords are paying very short.

They're in between the vocals, just like we said with call and response.

And he does lots of sliding.

So, he will be wearing a, maybe a metal tube on one of his fingers, and he is sliding along the, and he's sliding along the strings of his guitar to create that slide sound.

Let's have another lesson.

♪ I went to the crossroad ♪ ♪ Fell down on my knees ♪ You hear that Yeah, I mean, that was not a great guitar impression, but you can hear the slides in the notes.

Well done, if you've got any of those right.

Really great active listening.

Make a note of any of those that you were unsure of, so, you've got the right answers on your piece of paper.

And that's how I look at what we're doing next.

Okay, we are in the middle of our lesson now.

Here is a grid showing the structure of the 12 bar blues.

Now, this is a particular structure, or way of laying out certain sections and chords of blues music.

Now, the reason this is done, and the reason it is so commonly and traditionally used in creating blues music, is because having a set structure like this means that it's really easy for solo performers, either vocalists or instrumentalists, to improvise around these, around this set structure.

It's very similar to jazz.

In fact, they'll write this structure out in something called a lead sheet.

And a lead sheet is a certain way of writing out the score that everyone in the blues band would have, so that they know where they are in the blues music.

Now, these letters are note names for the chords in each of those.

Okay and we're going to look at a bit more into chords and how they're written out and what the main chords are that you use later on in the unit.

But for now, we're going to take these just as notes.

As baseline notes.

Okay, so, we've taken these notes from the cords, C, C, C, C, and we're reading from left to right, each row C, C, C, C, F, F, C, C, G, F, C, C.

Hopefully you recognise that from the introduction where we sang the baseline, along with a blues backing track.

In fact, here's that blues backing track again.

So, just watch and follow, and then you're going to have a go at seeing if you can time the right baseline notes with the backing track.

Here we go.

Okay, what I want you to do, get your hands ready, please.

You're going to clap along with the backing track, when you think the chord, or the baseline note, is going to change in the 12 bar blues structure.

Okay, let's have a go.

Clapping hands ready.

Two, three and.

Great, well done.

Now it's your turn to have a go at playing that 12 bar blues.

We're just going to focus on these as individual notes and as a baseline.

So, I'm going to give you a little demonstration now, and then you're going to have the chance to go off and practise that.

I'm going to demonstrate on an app.

If you've got a keyboard or a piano at home or at school, brilliant, use that.

If you've got a bass guitar and you want to have a go at using that, please go ahead.

So, there are loads of apps that you can get to be able to play music, keyboard parts, and other instruments on phones and tablets and things like that.

Make sure you get permission from a parent and carer to download a new app, I'm going to use GarageBand because that's the free one that comes with my phone.

So, you click on GarageBand and then what you do, is you can see that it comes up with loads of options.

So, there's a keyboard option, a drum option, voice, strings.

I think there's a base one.

We're going to come back to that in a minute.

So, to begin with, let's just do it as a keyboard.

And you want it to look like the keys of a piano.

Okay? Now, if we were to be playing a full piano blues part, the baseline would go into your left hand.

Okay, so, I really want you to try and keep these three notes that we're going to play, into just your left hand.

The notes I need are C, F and G.

Just those three, really easy.

And if we follow the structure, it sounds like this.

I'm going to put two notes into each one of those boxes.

Okay, so, there'll be two in each one before it moves.

Two notes per bar.

Okay, here we go.

C, C.

C, C.

C, C.

Get ready to change to F, F.

F, F.

Back down to C.

Two, three, four.

C, two, three, four.

Here comes G.

Down to F.

And C.

C, C.

C, C.

So, try and keep it in your left hand.

If you've got a piano or a keyboard, then obviously use that.

But again try and keep it to your left hand.

It's just three notes.

I know you can do it.

Now, the image underneath the keyboard on my screen, is showing you where on a bass guitar, you can find these three notes, so that you can play them as if you were in a blues band.

We can also do that on this app.

Okay.

So, I'm going to scroll along until I find base.

And it brings up a bass guitar.

And like it says on the image on our screen, I'm going to go one, two, three frets.

That's these lines, these vertical lines, one, two, three, and here I can find G.

C.

And F.

Okay, that's what I need.

So, we start on C, which is the second string up on the third fret.

Now, be careful to stay within those vertical lines.

Otherwise it sounds a bit funny.

So, same pattern.

C, C.

C, C, C, C, C, C.

F, F, F, F.

C, C, C, C.

G, G, F, F.

C, C, C, C.

But just on a base guitar sound.

Okay, so, just like I demonstrated on the keyboard app, we're going to follow the same structure on this bass guitar app.

So, you use the image that's below, G, F, G, C, F.

I'm going to follow the same structure.

You count yourself in after four.

One, two, three, four.

Go up a string to F.

Back to C.

Going to go down to.

Back up to.

Then.

And that is how you can play a 12 bar blues baseline, using an app on your phone or tablet.

Time to pause.

And for you to have a go, I want you to have a go at playing the 12 bar blues baseline, just like I have demonstrated in C.

Okay, C is our starting note.

C is our ending note.

So, we're playing in C.

Follow the structure, it's there on the screen.

And you can use a keyboard or piano, an actual base if you've got one, or a keyboard or guitar app, like I've just demonstrated.

Challenge for anybody who finds that maybe quite simple, is to see if you could come up with your own bluesy style rhythm.

So, instead of just playing two notes per grid or per bar, you could mix it up.

So, it goes Or Okay, so, if you find just playing two notes per bar, quite simple, challenge yourself, and see if you can come up with an interesting blues rhythm.

Go and spend a good 10 minutes or so, having a go at playing through that 12 bar blues on your chosen instrument or app.

Off you go, well done, I hope you're enjoying playing through the 12 bar blues in C.

I'm sure you've perfected it by now on your app or keyboard or guitar.

And I'm hoping you've gone and shared that with either somebody in your classroom, your teacher, or maybe somebody at home.

Now what we're going to do, is we're going to learn how to transpose that into a different key.

So, like I've just said, we've been playing the 12 bar blues baseline in C.

We know that because our starting note is C and ending note is C.

We're going to have a go at learning how we can play this 12 bar blues on any note.

We just need to follow the same structure.

Really interesting.

So, here's my question.

Let's see if you can work out without me telling you the answer.

If C is number one.

So, if C is number one on my keyboard here, or on the scale, C, D, E, F, G, A, B, C, what numbers would F and G be? So, if C is here and it's number one, what numbers, on my scale, or keyboard, would F and G be? 'Cause they're the notes in our structure when we play in C.

Take a minute now.

Pause the video, if you need to, to try and work it out.

Okay.

Hopefully you've taken some time to think about what it is.

It's not as complicated as maybe some of you are thinking, we just go up the scale or the keys.

C, D, E, so F would be number four, and G would be number five.

If you got that, well done.

So, now we need to remember that the first chord, or note, of the baseline is number one.

The next one we hear is four.

And the next one we hear is five.

Keep that in your mind.

Here is the same 12 bar blues baseline structure written out, but instead of the C's and the F's and the G's, we've got the ones, the fours and fives, which we just figured out, are the degrees or notes of the scale.

Reading the text at the bottom, we often think about degrees of the scale, or chords, in Roman numerals.

Okay, so, that's how we think about them.

They're called chord numbers, and we know that these notes are taken from cords.

How would we write out chords one, four and five? One, four and five, in Roman numerals? Take a couple of minutes, if you know already, well done.

Write it down on your piece of paper.

If you're not sure, we're going to go through it in a moment anyway.

So, take a minute.

How do we write out in Roman numerals, or in music, chord numbers one, four and five? Let's have a look.

So, chord one, we'd write like this.

Chord four and chord five.

Well done.

If you've got that right, great job.

Keep chord numbers in your head.

One, four, five.

One, four, five.

And let's see if we can transpose.

So, my question now is, if G is one, okay, so we're changing it.

The note that's in here, the key we're going to play, is G.

So, all of these number one boxes will now be the chord, or the note, G.

Okay, number one.

What pitches or notes would four or five be? Use the keyboard on the right hand side to see if you can figure it out.

Look where G is.

That's number one.

You want to go up to note four and note five.

Pause the video now, take a minute and work out what note, or what pitch, would chord four or note five, so four and five, be? Okay, let's have a look.

Note four would be C.

And note five would be D.

Well done, the blue boxes we have G.

Or grey boxes we have C and in the white box, we have D.

Okay.

Quick fire questions.

Which from a numeral represents the first note in the scale or the first chord? I want you to write it down or tell the screen in five, four, three, two.

Yeah, we're looking for the one that looks like a number one.

Which Roman numeral represents the fourth note in the scale? Tell the screen, writing down in five, four, three, two, one.

Yeah, well done.

It's the one that's got a number one written to, written next to this V, which we know is five.

Great.

Next question.

Which note is five.

That's how we write the Roman numeral, the chord symbol, which note is five, when you start on C? Maybe take a bit longer with this one.

What was the fifth note when we were playing our 12 bar blues baseline in C? You can always count up: C, D, E, F.

Taking answers in five, four, three, two it's G.

Well done if you got that.

You just go up C, D, E, F, G is the fifth note of the scale or the fifth chord symbol.

Next one.

Which note is four, chord four, when you start on G? So, now you know how to work out the pattern.

Writing your answer down or telling me in five, four, three, two, it's C.

G, A, B, C is the fourth one when we go up the scale.

Great job.

Okay.

So, this is what we're going to do.

Similar performing task to before, you're going to play the 12 bar blues again, in a transposed key of your choice.

Okay, so, first of all, you're going to play the blues baseline notes in G.

Okay, so, you're going to practise, first of all my transmission, transposition that we did together in G.

Okay.

G, G, G, G, G, G, G, G.

C, C, C, C, G, G, G, G.

C, C, G, G, G, G.

Okay, so, practise the G one first.

And then why don't you have a go at seeing if you can work out your own key? So, you pick what you want, your number one to be.

You might pick F or you might pick E or D, and then go up the scale to work out what your fourth chord note is going to be and what your fifth chord note is going to be, and you will have created a baseline.

'Cause remember the notes of the baseline, can come from the bottom of the cord or it's in the chord.

I would take, yeah, at least 10 minutes, maybe even 15, because you're practise playing the 12 bar blues baseline in G and then you're coming up with a key of your choice as well.

So, this will take about 15 minutes, 10, 15 minutes to perfect both of those performances.

Remember, you can challenge yourself and play in an interesting blues rhythm, rather than just playing the notes as they are, if you'd like to.

Okay.

Off you go.

Have fun.

Well done today, everyone.

We've done so much in this lesson.

We've started to explore blues music and what it's all about, and you've had to go up performing and transposing your own 12 bar blues baseline.

Great work.

Don't forget to go and share these performances with teachers or people at home.

And please go and take the quiz to show me everything that you've learned based on today's lesson.

I'll see you next time.

Take care.

Bye.