Space Unicorn in two easy lessons for guitar and piano plus one really hard lesson.

So here is the music for Space Unicorn, look at coloured notes.

Here is a guitar, look at the coloured stickers.

Here is an old keyboard, look at the coloured stickers.

Here is an expensive piano, look at the piece of paper with the coloured dots on it is not stuck to the piano and hasn’t marked it in any way, adults use this piano and could get a bit difficult about it getting marks on it. Grownups know where all the notes are and so the don't need any coloured stickers, the long strip of paper works on church organs too.

Ok the colours on the notes, frets and keys are the same colour for each note so you should be able to play it, don’t worry about the timing too much as if you sing along it will sort of sort itself out.

I have put up another big picture in the children’s book section of my bookshop it's from another photo I took with my mobile phone in The Beaney in Canterbury. Oh and the really hard lesson will be when we take off the coloured stickers. 

Click on this link http://thanetonline.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/music for more easy music lessons that you can do without help from grownups.

The lessons have been tested by my children, so we know they work properly and you won’t waste lots of time on something that doesn’t work.

One last thing, you will find that the copying out and colouring in of the music and the stickers will help you to remember where the notes are, which will make it easier to play the music.

In the unlikely event that there are any children who don’t know how Space Unicorn goes, it is on youtube.    

The Lady Door in the children’s section in the bookshop.

One of my problems as a bookshop assistant is working out how to decorate the newly expanded children’s book section. So this is the start when I was in Canterbury last Thursday I visited The Beaney art gallery and thought a print of the painting The “Little Girl at the Door” by Harriet Halhed would look right on the door in the corner.

Something like; a painting of a door to make a door more like a picture, but not quite.

Anyway it took a photo of it with my mobile phone and have just printed it out and stuck it on the door.

Fortunately I have a fairly big printer and some blue-tack.

When I was a child I was often fairly disappointed with pictures, particularly after having read “The Voyage of the Dawn Treader” I would look at them in the hope there would be at least some hint of another world that I could step into.

I am working on and off, on a painting where there is a boat heading for. What? Well I suppose if I could say what the I wouldn’t be painting the picture. 

Music here is progressing and my younger children can now get through the whole of Clementine on both the piano and the guitar sing it and playing it all at the same time.

We have had a few problems with the coloured stickers on guitars, but these seem to ironed out now.

Sorry the coloured notes don't show up too well here this may be better 

Children’s books in the bookshop and easy piano and guitar for the school holidays.

The children’s book section in my bookshop is now expanded as far as it will go at the moment, about 70 shelves when you include collectable children’s books, which are not shown in the pictures.

The next stage is to sort out the children’s non-fiction and put up some new pictures in this part of the bookshop.

It should be pointed out here that children also buy books that were intended for adults, if say you develop a serious interest in shipping or aeroplanes at the age of nine or ten you don’t really have many other options.

Most of the information in children’s books or on the internet only gets you so far which isn’t far enough.

Some adults and children collect books in the way that people collect stamps and coins and this is another part of the book game that can be played with very little money, as most serious book collectors deal in books to finance their book collecting.

In the simplest terms, if you collect Beano Annuals then you know the system for other annals so you may finance an expensive Beano by finding a cheap Rupert ant the boot fair or in the charity shop.

On the music front we were inspired by Star Trek to transcribing Row Row Row Your Boat, and this meant we had to put coloured stickers on our guitars along a whole octave of fretboard.  

How to learn piano or keyboard for children, the easy way.

I have tried this with my children today so I know it works.

You will need to colour in some stickers and put them on the keys like this, best to use an old keyboard like we did.

Use the black keys to work out where you are.

You will also need to listen to the song on youtube to work out how it goes.

Here is the music with colours to match the keyboard, the top line is for your right hand and the next line down for your left hand. The words are underneath the music. Watch out for the F note the third one from the end it should be played F# instead which means the black key to the right of the F key.

In a cavern, In a canyon,

Excavating for a mine,

Dwelt a miner forty-niner,

And his daughter Clementine.

Chorus:

Oh my darling, Oh my darling,

Oh my darling Clementine,

You are lost and gone forever,

Dreadful sorry Clementine.

Repeat chorus

Light she was and like a fairy,

And her shoes were number nine;

Herring boxes, without topses,

Sandals were for Clementine.

Repeat chorus

Drove she ducklings to the water,

Every morning just at nine;

Hit her foot against a splinter,

Fell into the foaming brine.

Repeat chorus

Ruby lips above the water,

Blowing bubbles, soft and fine;

But Alas! I was no swimmer,

So I lost my Clementine.

Repeat chorus

When the miner forty-niner,

Soon began to peak and pine,

Thought he oughter "jine" his daughter,

Now he's with his clementine.

Repeat chorus

In a corner of the churchyard,

Where the myrtle boughs entwine,

Grow the roses in their poses,

Fertilized by Clementine.

Repeat chorus

In my dreams she still doth haunt me,

Robed in garments soaked in brine.

Though in life I used to hug her,

Now she's dead, I'll draw the line.

Repeat chorus

How I missed her, how I missed her

How I missed my Clementine.

So I kissed her little sister,

And forgot my Clementine.

Repeat chorus

The better way really is to colour it in yourself, here is a blank one to colour in.

Even better would be to write it all out yourself like I did.

The colours will also work on a stickered guitar, click on the link for it http://thanetonline.blogspot.co.uk/2014/08/where-notes-are-on-guitars-and.html

You could even do what I did and start with a blank sheet of paper 

Where the notes are on guitars and keyboards for children, music explained if you don’t know about it and the strange things adults do in the children’s sections of bookshops.

With written music the line,

usually the top line (which is five lines) is the bit you play on guitar and with your right hand on the piano or any other keyboard and the notes you sing.

The

 line usually the bottom line is for the left hand on the keyboard 

A is pink

B is brown

C is red

D is blue

E is yellow

F is orange

G is green

Music lines _________________ F  football  orange

Music spaces                                 E                 yellow

Music lines _________________Deserves      blue

Music spaces                                 C                  red

Music lines _________________Boy               brown

Music spaces                                 A                  pink

Music lines _________________Good             green

Music spaces                                 F                   orange

Music lines _________________Every            yellow

The spaces between the lines spell; face.

 click on the picture to make it bigger

    Sharps flats and key signatures: at the beginning of a bit of sheet music, on the line where a note goes you sometimes get # which means sharp or b, which means flat. This means that you play all of those notes all the way through the music that way. So if you get b on the middle line – which is a B “boy” note – then you play all of the B notes flat (even the ones that are not on the boy line) and if you get # on the top line – which is the F football note – then you play all of the F notes sharp (even the ones that are not on the football line.

 click on the picture to make it bigger

Playing a note sharp means playing it a bit higher, this means the black key to the right of the note on a keyboard or the fret next to the fret for the note and closer to the big hole in the middle of the guitar. Sharp notes often make music sound happy.

Playing a note flat is the other way round and often makes the music sound sad.

Now grownups know where all the notes are and some of them my not like it if you colour in their guitars, pianos and sheet music so you know which note is which, so be very careful.

With music that has too many notes that are all supposed to be played at the same time, you can usually get away with just playing the top line.

Getting the timing right is a bit complicated and listening to the music you want to play while tapping your foot and singing along to it followed by tapping your foot and singing along to it while you are playing it will sort out most of the timing problems.   

Tuning the guitar is easier if you download a tuning app for your phone, be careful not to go past the note and make the string too tight as the string may break.   

Here in the bookshop we now have a different table in the children’s book section because a very large grownup sat on the last one and broke it.

A bit of a further note here, still on the arts front, but not really worth a separate post.

I am trying to print copies of paintings which have the same colours as the original painting and am slowly getting there. the one on the left is a pen and watercolour which I drew the other day and the one on the right is a print of it.

It’s a strange and difficult thing to do with watercolours where the texture of the paper puts a shade of it’s own in and when you make one colour right another goes wrong.

Teaching children music and the monkey business

 My day off today, and the first day off for ages that I don’t have to get up for some reason, so I got up earlier than usual. During term time I have to get up to make sure the children get off to school, on Saturday’s the shop is open and on Sundays the children should be on time for church.

Now I can’t sing, I didn't have a very musical childhood and this came to a head for me when I was an “Anglican contemplative” this is another way of saying monk and doesn’t immediately sound as though you may have had a dirty habit.

I would say that if you think Friar Tuck here, it won’t help much, I won’t name and shame the religious order as they are still just about in the monkey business and for one reason or another, may not want to be associated with this blog post.

There is a lot of singing involved in the monkey business, mostly psalms, you have Prime at 6am mostly singing psalms, followed by Matins mostly singing psalms, followed by half an hours meditation when the natural early risers try not to laugh if others go to sleep and fall of their perches.

After that the normal milking the goats, washing and cleaning your teeth and having your breakfast.

 After that you have Terce mostly singing psalms, followed some strange monkey business which involves standing on your head (because this order all did their yoga together) this is followed by a lot of talking because of the “great silence” which means no one is allowed to talk from after Compline mostly singing psalms, the previous evening until after the standing on your head stuff.

You then go off and do physical labour, I did carpentry which involved teaching it to a lot of god bothering types, who went there on retreat,  retreats are basically religious holidays where people who aren’t monks go off and do the monkey business, so I spent quite a lot of time trying to stop bishops cutting off their fingers and so on.

Then you had Sext, not what you think, because we had made a vow of chastity, but mostly singing psalms.

Well one day the Abbot summoned me, he wasn’t much of a summoner, but he was a natural early riser, and I’m not, so as you can imagine I was a bit worried he was going to be a bit terce about missing Mattins.

I didn’t know if you could be unfrocked, well I suppose it would have been uninhabited, in the monkey business. Mine was was certainly a bit dirty after all the carpentry, although fortunately didn’t have much holey blood on it.

A fly drowns in your cup of tea, what do you do? Fish it out and drink the tea? Pour your tea away and make a new cup? Do you wash the cup up? Try to drink around the fly? does this depend on how big the fly is?

Well as soon as I got to the Abbot’s cell I realised he was trying to drink his tea around a rather large fly. “It’s about your chanting Brother Michael.” He managed eventually. Chanting obviously wasn’t to do with oversleeping and once I realised this wasn’t to do with inhabiting me, I guessed the fly in ointment was my singing.

 This is PSALM 149. Cantate Domino, which is latin for o sing

“O SING unto the Lord a new song : let the congregation of saints praise him. Let Israel rejoice in him that made him : and let the children of Sion be joyful in their King. Let them praise his Name in the dance : let them sing praises unto him with tabret and harp. For the Lord hath pleasure in his people : and helpeth the meek-hearted. Let the saints be joyful with glory : let them rejoice in their beds. Let the praises of God be in their mouth : and a two-edged sword in their hands; To be avenged of the heathen : and to rebuke the people; To bind their kings in chains : and their nobles with links of iron. That they may be avenged of them, as it is written : Such honour have all his saints.”

It’s a very old translation in The Book of Common Prayer, it predates The King James Bible of 1611 and even in the monkey business, where they stopped saying ghost, then stopped saying spirit, and were left saying just “you” the still use it because it fits the music.  

Anyway the upshot was I could carry on rejoicing in my bed, but no more cantate, I think all psalms have basically two tunes when you chant them, if you are in the monkey business. That is one tune between the full stop and the colon and one tune between the colon and the full stop, over and over again.

Well it seemed I had been singing the notes out of tune, over and over again for about a year. Colons weren’t mentioned but we negotiated around the fly to my full stop.

So on the face of it, I may not the best person to teach children music, but I have a special method.

Any of my children saying “I want a pony” is likely to get the answer “With or without ketchup” but one has had some expensive piano lessons and the other some expensive guitar lessons.   

Having a child play the beginning of  “Ode to Joy” at you over and over again on the piano, while the other child who has learn the chords A E and D on the guitar plays something unrecognisable but definitely completely different at you on the guitar, isn’t that joyous.  

So the answer was Shaky, not what you think but a bloke my youngest sister had the hots for when she was a teenager, my children have now seen the video on youtube about fifty times and have concluded that this was something to with the way he moves his legs.  

So we transposed “This Ole House” into C for one one finger on the piano so it can be played with the chords A E and D on the guitar, and I explained to my children that they had to sing it, tap one foot to it, while one of them played it on the piano and the other played on the guitar.

When a child is, tapping its foot, playing a musical instrument and singing, all at the same time, they don't have anything much left to do anything at you.

I don’t think I have ever seen children’s musical ability improve so rapidly, so very successful music lessons indeed.

I haven’t played with my organ for years and I thought I had better get my keyboard skills up to their standard, so spent an educative hour fighting Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D minor, while mumbling, “face” “all cows eat grass” “every good boy deserves football” and other expletives. so they are beginning to master that too. A note here, which I left until later, for the youf of today, which is about learning about learning and teachers are not aloud to tell you, the ruder the mnemonic (thing to remember things with) is the more likely you are to remember the thing you are trying to remember, the bottom line here, at least with piano music is GBDFA so you can decide exactly what type of bitch it is that does FA.   

Obviously I can’t put a video of this up on youtube but I do have older children and I already have one of the type of thing that happen last time around.

The pictures in the post relate to pen sketch I did the other morning as I went back there this morning and added some watercolour to it.