by How the System works |
HOW
THE
CLAVISET The System The Claviset System is made up of two components: the Claviset musical instrument and Claviset Tablature, which most people call Claviset Music. Scales Music is made up of scales. You probably already know at least one scale. Do you remember this: doe, ray, me, fa, so, la, tea, doe? If you sing this to yourself, you will hear a scale musicians call the MAJOR scale. There are seven notes in that scale, the last one is actually the same as the first one but one octave higher. Claviset makes each and every possible 7-note scale available at the touch of a button. Actually, it is at the tap of your foot! Even without sheet music, the Claviset allows you to have a lot of fun playing. You see, there are no bad notes! You can improvise to your heart's content using any particular musical scale. You will feel amazed when you hear how good you sound just by fooling around. But that is only half of the solution. The music adds a whole other dimension. Claviset music is tablature for the Claviset. Have a look at the figure below. There are no sharps, flats or naturals. We take care of all that when the scale is selected. The circled numbers in the figure show you how the notes in the music correlate to the keys on the Claviset. The music has only seven notes per octave, just like the instrument. The colors are not part of the actual Claviset music but are shown here to make the octaves more obvious. The yellow octave is a lower pitch than the white, which is lower than the blue-green colored octave. The C1 at the beginning indicates the scale. For the musically inclined, this is the C Major scale. But all you need to know is to set the Claviset to scale C1. The 4/4 indicates musical timing, but we won't worry about that here. It is all explained in every Claviset beginners song book. The large 0 indicates that the notes belong in octave 0, i.e. the middle of the Claviset keyboard. On a piano, the first note, C (shown as 1) corresponds to middle C.
Take a close look at the music. If you rotate it clockwise by 90 degrees it maps right on to the keyboard. Notice that the three middle dark lines correspond to the three middle black keys, and the four white spaces inside octave 0 correspond to the four white keys in octave 0. It doesn't take long to get the hang of this. If the note is on a black line, you had better be playing it on a black key. Get it? Now that you know how to play the notes we are going to combine them into chords. A chord is simply a group of notes that sound good together. There are 14 primary chords in a scale. Look at the figure below. Chords are easy. Let's think of them as numbers. We have chord number 1, 2, 3,..., 7. The chord is named after its starting note. Chord 1 is simply notes 1, 3 and 5. Chord 2 is notes 2, 4 and 6. Chord 3 is notes 3, 5 and 7 and so on. Do you see the pattern? Start with the chord number and skip every other key. That's it. Just remember that pattern. Now look at the figure again. You see, start with the note number, skip the next key, hit the next key, skip the next key, and hit the next key. You have just learned how to play seven chords in any scale! There is just that one pattern. Isn't that incredible? For the music academic, let's say that we are in scale C Major. Those 7 chords mean: 1=C major, 2=D minor, 3=E minor, 4=F major, 5=G major, 6=A minor, 7=B diminished. You see, this is not only easy but perfectly consistent with music theory. Let's learn another 7 chords.
The bottom row of chords have the same pattern except that we add the next note in the sequence. These are called the seventh chords. So now the pattern is simply: hit the starting key, skip the next, hit the next, skip the next, hit the next, skip the next, hit the next. That's it. Now you just learned to play another 7 chords, so you know 14 chords. These 14 patterns allow you to play just about every chord that you would ever want to play. This pattern works for literally hundreds of chords. Of course you can use the Claviset Prime's Single Finger mode. In Claviset Music, chords are shown as numbers. The 1 chord is played by pressing the 1 key in the above figure. The 2 chord is played by pressing the 2 key, and so on. You might do it this way as you are learning but fingering the chords is easy too. Sometimes the music shows a chord number like this: 17. This means that the chord is a seventh chord. That means you need to add another finger in single finger accompaniment. Whatever the chord is, also play the note to its left. In this example, press the 1 key and also the 7' key (see the first figure). Claviset Music begins by listing all the scales needed in the song and the order they are needed. Just before you play the song, you enter the scale sequence into the Claviset using two simple buttons plus the scale keys and number buttons. It takes only seconds even for a complicated song, then the rest is easy. You just press the scale change foot pedal anytime the music shows you that the scale must change. This is what saves you from having to learn a vast number of scales and the complex sharps and flats. Try it, it is totally fun! |
