44 Sight Singing Instructions

Warm-Up: Seventh Chords in Context

This week’s warm-up teaches an easy method to navigate between the tones of five types of seventh chords by presenting them in context with intermediary steps that guide you in finding the pitches.

Begin every line by playing the given tonic triad on the piano. Then, using your voice, find your starting pitch and begin learning the chord and its context. Memorize the solfege and contexts for easy recall in ear training exercises. Sight singing and ear training are, after all, two sides of the same subject.

Increasingly Complicated Rhythms

The next exercise builds on your visual and auditory cognition of increasingly complicated rhythms in simple time and compound time. Spend a lot of time looking at the score without singing so that you can understand what a certain rhythm is supposed to look at. What is the beat note? What note values form the divisions and subdivisions of the beat? What do dotted rhythms look like in this meter?

Take especial care to practice with a subdivided metronome for precision.
To extend yourself, why not write out the rhythms in an analogous time signature? For example, you could write a 6/8 rhythm out in 6/4 to improve your cognition of what the rhythm looks like when the beat note is a dotted half note rather than a dotted quarter note.

Melodic Solos and Duets

This week’s examples will translate your skill at increasingly complicated rhythms into melodic and harmonic contexts. Conduct confidently, subdividing.