by How the System works
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LEARN TO PLAY CLAVISET First, look at the Claviset System Read the Claviset System to get the basic idea. Then we will give you a music lesson right here on line. Now for Lesson 1 We are only going to concentrate on one thing: playing the right notes. We are not going to be concerned about the duration of the notes, just getting the right ones. To help you hear the notes, we will show the durations in a graphical way by spreading them apart. A long note will be shown with no note following it for a distance. You'll get what we mean in a moment if you don't already. Let's take the ending of a popular song: Hey Jude, as performed by the Beatles. Do you remember how it goes? Na na na na na na na na na na na Hey Jude. And then it repeats again and again. Can you hear that playing in your head? OK, let's see what that looks like in Music for Claviset. We did not pick a very easy example. This music extends beyond the range of a single octave. If you can understand this example, you can play it all! Before we look at the notes, let's look to the left of the notes. We see D 5. This means that the Claviset should be set to scale D 5 to play this music. In case you are wondering, D 5 is like the G Major scale but uses D as the root note. You see the 4/4. We will get to that briefly in the next lesson. You see the 0. That means the notes on our set of lines and spaces are played in octave 0, i.e. in the middle of the Claviset.
The numbers shown underneath the song lyrics give you the correct place on the Claviset where you would play the notes. Look at the Claviset keyboard section below. Remember how the notes relate to the keyboard. Let's go slowly from left to right. The first note, 1, is on the first white space in the music, so it is on the first white key on Claviset, also marked 1. The next note is note 3. It appears on the second white space in the music, so it is on the second white key on Claviset, marked 3. The next note is note 5. It appears on the third white space, so it is on the third white Claviset key, marked 5. Now we get some notes that extend above the regular lines. It is easy because the same pattern continues. You see the note on the line above our staff lines. Let's call that 2+. It is on the first black line above our staff, so it is played on the first black Claviset key in the next group, also marked as 2+. The next note drops down by one to the first white space above the staff lines, marked as 1+ and played on the first white Claviset key marked 1+. Step through the notes one by one and you will soon get the idea of how to relate the notes to the Claviset keys.
Now for Lesson 2 Let's use the same example, but now show what it looks like with the proper musical notes. You can see that the notes are all in the same place, that is, if you look at the circular part of the notes. The different note shapes indicate how long each note is held. We are not going to explain the exact meaning in much detail here. Briefly, the 4/4 at the left of the music indicates that each quarter note gets one beat. The second note in the figure below is a quater note. The first 4 indicates that there are four beats per measure. That is all we will cover here. The rest is covered in each Claviset Beginners songbook. To make this example easier for you, we have spaced the notes proportional to their duration to help you get the idea of note duration. So try following along with these notes on the Claviset keys in the above figure. It is played exactly like the previous example.
By now you are getting the idea of how this works. It is actually much easier if you have a real Claviset in front of you because your fingers quickly fall into the right place. It is harder working through the example on paper, so if you did it correctly, congratulations! You are definitely ready for Claviset. There's just one more thing to add: chords. We are going to show them using a short cut. There are three chords used in this example: chord 1, 4 and 7. If you forget how the chord is made, just remember the sequence: 1 chord would use notes 1, 3, 5; 4 chord would use notes 4, 6 and 8 i.e. 4, 6, and 1 in the next octave; 7 chord would use notes 7, 9, 11 i.e. 7 and 2, 4 in the next octave. We are going to use the single-finger chord feature, so you only have to touch one key per chord. The key you press is, you guessed it, the name of the chord. So you hit 1 for the 1 chord, 4 for the 4 chord, and 7 for the 7 chord. Look at the figure below to see how the chords are added into the music. They are shown above the notes in square boxes.
Congratulations! You are ready for Claviset. |
