Pachelbel Canon

THE MUSICARTA CANON PROJECT
- MODULE ONE -

Thirds in the Treble

Module One of the Musicarta Canon Project starts building your Canon performance with a string of ‘thirds in the treble’. You learn to play them and then to play variations ON them to produce a performance like this:

All the steps are broken down for you, so can’t fail to learn.

Here is a Musicarta YouTube video of this module.

See more Musicarta videos on the Mister Musicarta YouTube channel.

The Musicarta Canon Project is now available as an e-book digital download and on CD-ROM. These skeleton Canon Project web pages are being left on the internet as an expanded Table of Contents, so you can see how much you’ll benefit from purchasing the Canon Project.

To give you the best chance of evaluating the Musicarta Canon Project, you can download the MIDI files for these free-to-view Canon Project web pages. File reference numbers are shown, where applicable, in the right hand audio player table cells.

To play your MIDI files, download MidiPiano here. Learn more about MidiPiano on the Musicarta MidiPiano page. You can also play the MIDI files as basic audio in most media players.

Pachelbel’s Canon is in the key of D major scale. Click through here for a thorough D major refresher course.

Click back to the Canon Project home page here.
Click back to the Canon Project TOC page here.

Using just the index fingers (pointing fingers) of both hands, pick out the following string of double notes (thirds) on your keyboard.

CPM_M1_02

The right hand plays the top (higher) note, the left hand plays the bottom (lower) note. Use the music, the illustration and the audio and the MIDI performance files to help you

Learn to play the thirds over your backing track. You will sound like this:

Teaching you to ‘see the music in the keyboard’ is a major Musicarta goal. Memorising material quickly and ‘getting away from the dots’ is a good start. Here’s how Musicarta helps you memorise the string of thirds.

Use all the clues you’ve got to memorise these pairs of notes. One clue is the way the pairs ‘slant’. Because the black keys are further away from you, black key/white key pairs slant away. Here is the music again, with lines above showing the slant of the pair of notes.

CPM_M1_02

Imagine or draw four dots on your desktop and rehearse the pairs of notes, seeing the black and white keys of the D major scale in your mind’s eye as you tap through the string of thirds.

Working away from the keyboard like this will help you learn the notes. Then play along with your recording again and watch the slant of the thirds change.

CPM_M1_02

Module One goes on to teach you various ways of improvising on the string of thirds, so that you too could make up something like the module performance. Here it is again:

The module finishes off with an ‘Audio Challenge’ – four more thirds variations for you to try to ‘play by ear’. The written out music and MIDI file reference numbers (to watch the music on MidiPiano) are given in the ‘Answers’ section at the back of the Canon Project PDF file for you to check your work.

Can you work out from the module performance how the thirds are being ‘mined’ for music? If you already can, you have a talent which deserves to be developed. If you nearly can – and think you will be able to learn to – the Musicarta Canon Project is for you!