Music is cool because we can always come up with new and interesting patterns. For example, we’ve already seen how the major scale can be rearranged into other note patterns … like the minor scale, pentatonic scale, and blues scale. It turns out that music is simple because it’s all just a bunch of notes … in different combinations … spaced at different intervals.
In fact, when musicians write a melody or a song, they’re really just combining notes that sound good together. And they usually base their ideas on common, simple patterns … like the major scale, for example. More than any other pattern, the major scale has inspired most of the songs we hear today. Which is probably why it sounds so nice and familiar.
Using the notes of a C major scale, for example, we can create a very good melody. Try playing the following note pattern on the treble staff and see if it sounds familiar. If you look closely, it’s really just the C major scale … which has been chopped up and rearranged. From left to right, hit each note—one at a time. And notice how the notes rise and fall as you move through the melody.
Do you recognize this tune? It’s the melody of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” by Mozart. (Some people might also know this melody as the “Alphabet Song.”) Try playing through this note pattern again … only this time, follow the lyrics. They can help us get a feel for how this note pattern flows.
There’s not much to it, really. It’s just the notes of a C major scale … which have been rearranged into a pleasant little melody. Sometimes the notes move up and sometimes they move down. And together, they create a nice motion that’s easy to hum or sing.
In fact, let’s try playing through the entire song now. (If you’ve never played a whole melody before, then this might seem like a lot of notes. But if you look closely, it’s just more of the same C major scale pattern.) As you play, check out the connection between the notation and the notes on your instrument. It’s easy to play when you can actually see what you’re doing.
Of course, there’s more to music notation … and we’ll take a look at that coming right up. But now that we’ve already started reading melodies, it kind of makes you wonder. What’s stopping us from playing anything we’d like? And the answer, my friends, is … nothing. Now that we’ve cracked the code to music—and we can see where we’re going—we can quickly learn any song. After all, we just started out by playing Mozart….