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This blog records my transition from the Churches of Christ to Eastern Orthodoxy.

Wednesday, September 29, 2010

Shape Notes Going Out Of Vogue?


i still to this day am very dependent on shape notes to know whether or not i'm hitting the pitches i mean to be hitting.  Anyone else grow up learning to sing based on shape notes?

2 comments:

Aaron said...

I am not sure I understand the shaped notes, but I grew up in band playing trumpet, baritone, and tuba, so I can read sheet music, but I have been part of the body for 11 years and so far, am still as much a baby as the first day in terms of understanding the shapes.

guy said...

Aaron,

Shape notes are a simple system for identifying pitches. For any major scale, you can assign each scale degree a particular shape. So all the tonics will have the same shape regardless of octave, all the 2nd's have their own shape, all the 3rd's have their own shape, and so on. So on sight, you can associate a shape with a pitch given a restricted context (that is, the do-re-mi-fa-so-la-te have already been set for you).

--guy

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