Need advice. I feel stuck.

Chords, scales, harmony, melody, etc.
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Keyboard is baffling, all the keys are the same size. Try guitar, much easier - different size frets with the little dots, and if you get the chord wrong you can bend the notes and pretend you meant it.

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Remember, there are no 'wrong notes' in Jazz. People might say .... That dude Funkaroma does some bad ass playin'.
Anyone who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.

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Did you buy the only the midi keyboard that doesn't come with melodics or what?
https://melodics.com/

That program is quite an amazing tools for learning how to play. Also another thing I hear people say is just to learn one key/scale like say learn the Cminor scale then just transpote the midi.

But honestly I don't understand the problem with using the midi utilities that force the notes you press into the correct key. There's nothing wrong with that and that's how I started and what happened was I started to learn the scales easier and found myself taking it off so I could go out of it because every note doesn't need to be in the same scale.

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just so you know, when i said learn c, then move up i meant learn to play the scales, not transpose to them.
just clearing that up :)

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donkey tugger wrote: Mon Feb 11, 2019 9:00 am Keyboard is baffling, all the keys are the same size. Try guitar, much easier - different size frets with the little dots, and if you get the chord wrong you can bend the notes and pretend you meant it.
Guitar is not the instrument which is usefull for my type of music that I create. Don’t get me wrong I really enjoy some music with guitar especially blues, but I try to create techno/electro, so yeah it is not very handy.

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Aloysius wrote: Mon Feb 11, 2019 10:05 am Remember, there are no 'wrong notes' in Jazz. People might say .... That dude Funkaroma does some bad ass playin'.
Haha Ive heard that before, but for me personally it is necessary to get the feel of scales before I go thinking out of the box

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SoundPorn wrote: Mon Feb 11, 2019 12:15 pm Did you buy the only the midi keyboard that doesn't come with melodics or what?
https://melodics.com/

That program is quite an amazing tools for learning how to play. Also another thing I hear people say is just to learn one key/scale like say learn the Cminor scale then just transpote the midi.

But honestly I don't understand the problem with using the midi utilities that force the notes you press into the correct key. There's nothing wrong with that and that's how I started and what happened was I started to learn the scales easier and found myself taking it off so I could go out of it because every note doesn't need to be in the same scale.
Never heard of that program, but it seems like a good tool! I see it comes with 60 free lessons so I going to try it out tonight for sure! Thanks for the recommendation

Sure transposing notes seems like a option, but I want to be able to just play the minors and major scales + some exotic scales. I think you can always transpose the notes to experiment no matther if you know all the scales or not.

Yeah midi utilities does work to create something that doesn’t sound off, but I catch myself that I don’t pay attention anymore what key I’m pressing. If I make a mistake I can’t hear which wrong key I pressed. I think for some people this can work perfectly but just not for me I guess.

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vurt wrote: Mon Feb 11, 2019 1:09 pm just so you know, when i said learn c, then move up i meant learn to play the scales, not transpose to them.
just clearing that up :)
Yeah I already realized that. I’m now trying to learn C natural minor. I downloaded a virtual piano app on my phone with just one octave. I’m pretty good with my phone and I already got the hang of it I believe. Its a good way to create a pattern in my mind to know how it is build up. Now the next step is to translate it to my keyboard. My keyboard only got 25 keys, do you think this would be good enough to actually learn on? The next 2 weeks I’ll focus just on learning C minor natural and then next D minor natural till I’m back at C minor again. Then I’ll go to the melodic and harmonic minor scales. I don’t want to force myself to get everything in my mind in a short time, because I know that ain’t going to work. So yeah thats my plan for now. I am going to be busy with learning 1 hour a day and try to split that in 2 seperate 30 minutes of learning. Total of 14 hours to learn the C natural minor scale with all the chords.

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vurt wrote: Mon Feb 11, 2019 1:09 pm just so you know, when i said learn c, then move up i meant learn to play the scales
feck, i completely misunderstood and bought a book on C++
my other modular synth is a bugbrand

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:hihi:

@funkorama, 25 keys will be enough to learn the shapes of the scales with the hands.
but if in future you wish to play piano, rather than just using keys in a daw, you'll want a bigger range of course, as you're usually going to be playing across two octaves maybe in the left hand and 2 or more with the right.

it really depends on the final goal.
no point owning a grand piano if you just want to do monophonic lead :shrug:
however, the more you do know, the more you can do :)

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vurt wrote: Mon Feb 11, 2019 1:40 pm :hihi:

@funkorama, 25 keys will be enough to learn the shapes of the scales with the hands.
but if in future you wish to play piano, rather than just using keys in a daw, you'll want a bigger range of course, as you're usually going to be playing across two octaves maybe in the left hand and 2 or more with the right.


it really depends on the final goal.
no point owning a grand piano if you just want to do monophonic lead :shrug:
however, the more you do know, the more you can do :)
My main goal is to create melodies to my tracks. Not necessary monophonic. I want to be able to play chords as well.

Do you think the method that I want to use to learn scales is a good one? And is it a good start to actually start right now to learn scales? In the meantime I’m going to learn finger technique as well.

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if you feel it's working then yes it's a good way to start :)
scales and the keys they belong to, is the basis of what you are looking to achieve, so a good starting point yes.
all your chords are built from these scales, so that should come later.
practicing playing to a metronome, slowly and building up, will help with basic rhythm.

once you have the very fundamental basics, then it's easier to navigate, as you begin to have the right terminology and understanding to ask the right questions :)

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Oh, so learning chords should come after ive gone through all the scales? I already know the basic of how to build a major/minor triad and 7th.

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well knowing which notes you have available in a given key will help building the chords.
just makes it easier (imo) to move forward in small steps.
try to do too much at once, you'll start getting mixed up and even frustrated to a point you give in.
especially with no onsite teacher to guide you.

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Funkaroma wrote: Mon Feb 11, 2019 3:22 pm Oh, so learning chords should come after ive gone through all the scales? I already know the basic of how to build a major/minor triad and 7th.
I think ideally you want to learn chords as you're learning the scales. Now I might be entirely off here, but that seems to be the pedagogically accepted way.

With that being said, I think there's also two ways of going about: if you learn how to construct different chords on their own right and you also have learned the scales, well, you can just take any note and get the chord like that. But I really don't know if that's effective vs. learning chords per scale.

There's one piano course which I am trying to learn that basically has a module for each scale and in every case it goes through the chords, arpeggios etc which is not really "new information" but it wants you to practice them anyway.

But learning like that will take you a loooooong ass while. My working memory is shite, hence it takes ages for me to progress with building up the muscle memory for each scale.

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