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Music Theory |
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£26 for a one hour lesson, reduced to £23 if paid in advance.
Length and frequency of lessons are flexible.
Students can choose to learn any or all of the instruments I teach. They do not have to own an instrument to spend part of their lesson learning it.
I teach drums and vocals at Beginner level only.
I am able to teach students to play any songs or pieces they like and not make them learn any they don't like. I teach them to play by ear, by memory and by notation. I also teach them how to improvise, and speak their mind musically.
Students do not have to learn to read conventional pitch-stave/rhythm notation, and actually I don't teach it to musical beginners. I do teach it to those who want to learn it, but only after they have learnt my own 'SMR' notation system - Simplified Musical Reference. I don't want to give them an overcomplicated, incorrect view of music that may make them give up. This simplification is not done merely for the benefit of beginners; it is a system for all musicians that simplifies what has been made overcomplicated and it is not simplistic at all. It is based on an empirical theory of music and the practical needs of musicians. Empirical means verifiable or provable by means of observation or experiment. I do also teach grades if requested, such as the Associated Board, Trinity Guildhall and Rock School grades, but I don't teach these to a beginning music student. They present music theory as little more than the rules of a bad system of nomenclature and a bad system of notation stated as if they are good ones. They raise more questions than they answer, whereas my Empirical Theory of Music answers all questions as it proceeds. I teach the real rudiments of music, and my teaching involves diagrams, slide-charts and data-wheels. I am a musician, music teacher and music theorist, my teaching involves inventing and designing music teaching devices and playing aids, and my theorising has involved discovering undiscovered musical laws and phenomena. These are not minor ones either; they concern the very rudiments of pitch, harmony and rhythm. I do teach beginner students the conventional nomenclature but only because it is so widely used and no alternative system is at all widely used. I wish I did not have to.
Presented below is my article about why the theory, nomenclature and notation of music need reform. It is aimed at those already educated in these. My article explaining the rudiments of music to beginners will be available on my forthcoming website.
I've been playing keyboard since age 7 and guitar since age 10. I studied music at Los Angeles Musicians Institute and Cambridge Anglia Ruskin University, I studied graphic design at Lowestoft College School of Art & Design, Newcastle College of Arts and Technology and Cambridge School of Art. I have been designing and inventing music teaching devices since 1988. I have been giving lessons in guitar and music theory since 2000, keyboard since 2001, bass and vocals since 2002 and drums since 2003. I play a variety of musical styles, and the music I make is generally instrumental and in the funk and ambient ripple field.
My name is pronounced 'Dave Montaig'. 'Deive' is from Deiven.
WHY THE THEORY, NOMENCLATURE AND NOTATION OF MUSIC NEED REFORM
by Deive Montaigue
Music is not nearly as complicated as it is made to seem by conventional music theory and the systems of nomenclature and notation it creates. These are badly mistaken.
The twelve tones of fixed pitch in our musical note system are all used equally in music and should all have a place on the stave and an alphabet letter for a name. Furthermore, these twelve consecutive letters and notations should be used not only for the tones of the particular tuning system normally used - Equal Temperament - but for the tones of any tuning system for music based on an octave-division of twelve roughly equal parts. The twelve fixed tones should have been named A-to-L, but because they weren't and the complex system they were named with uses A-to-G, they should be named O-to-Z, with conventional C as O. The idea that fixed tones should not have single, permanent names and notations is a very weird one. Not one of the twelve fixed tones has been given a single, permanent name and notation (although students are initially taught that seven of them have), yet there was no valid reason for any of them not to have. There has been no advantage at all to naming the seven fixed tones of any particular key with consecutive alphabet letters or notating them with consecutive locations on the stave. It serves no purpose other than to complicate, and it contradicts the very meaning of fixed. Also, the original purpose of having a pitch-stave that is not pitch-proportional was to restrict the pitch-intervals musicians could use.
A keyboard stave should indicate where the notes are located on the keyboard. Why on earth would you settle for any less? The tablature stave for the classic keyboard was invented, I believe, in 1819 by L. D. F. Dumouchel, and was actually the first proper pitch-stave ever devised; its basic design of lines in pairs and trios, like the 'black' keyboard keys, serves as the best one for use by all instruments as a standard pitch-stave.
Rhythmic-time duration is actually measured in beat-value, and there is actually no such thing as semibreve-value except in a bizarre system of notation that has a 'time signature' rather than simply having notations for all the durations. Why on earth would you want to change the value of all the duration symbols? When the meter changes from 'simple' to 'compound', the beat does NOT lengthen, it gets divided into different divisions, and the new durations require their own notations, which in the case of this notation system means their own symbols. Semibreve-value - i.e. whole note, half note, quarter note, etc. - only measures the relative values of the duration symbols of a particular system of notation, it measures nothing in music itself. Semibreve-values and time signatures are not things that are found in music itself.
Rhythmic-time duration is not best indicated via different kinds of note and rest symbols. Besides the fact that this method presents a lot of symbols to learn, it is restricted in what kind of pitch notation it can be used with and it also restricts the possibilities of the only pitch notation it CAN be used with. Our rhythm notation needs to indicate the start of a note or rest with one symbol and the duration of that note or rest with other symbols.
Meter is not being labeled precisely enough. Meter is not just a matter of how many beats per bar and whether the beat is divided into halves or thirds. There is often a further division of the beat to make reference to. 'Simple time' music, which divides the beat into halves, often divides it further into either quarters or sixths. This aspect of the meter has not been named. 'Compound time' music, which divides the beat into thirds, often divides it further into either sixths or ninths. This aspect of the meter has not been named.
The conventional pitch-stave doesn't show the TONE of pitch, and no description of the tone of pitch is given as any of the definitions of 'tone' in music dictionaries, even though those same dictionaries use the term to mean just that - in such terms as 'twelve tone equal temperament', 'five-tone scale', 'pentatonic scale', 'leading-tone', 'tonal music', 'tonality' and 'tonic'. Conventional music theory defines a term one way and uses it another! Just the fact that you never see the term 'pitch-tone' is highly strange - especially as there is another kind of 'tone' a musical note possesses: timbre. Pitch-tone is the cyclic, recurring element of rising or falling pitch, and is shown in the conventional naming of the pitches, just not in the conventional notating of them. The notation stave for representing pitch is presenting the stairway of pitches as a straight one when it is actually spiral. The tones are points in the circle of the spiral, and that circle or loop is the octave. The tone is a binary geometric progression of pitch frequency. 110, 220, 440 and 880 Hz are an example of different notes of the same tone. They are otherwise known as A2, A3, A4 and A5 respectively, and their tone is known as A. Tone is one of the two main dimensions of pitch; the other is height, which is measured in octaves from the lowest audible octave, called octave nought. A pitch is a tone at a particular height. In conventional theory, a pitch-tone is usually called a note, a tone, a pitch or a pitch class, with only the latter term not also used to mean a pitch, and furthermore all of these terms are generally used to refer to fixed tone and fixed pitch, not to tone and pitch in general. More on that later.
A tone is NOT a whole-step interval of pitch. If any interval of pitch should be called the tone it should be the half-step, but the half-step is better referred to by its own unique term, and since it is actually the rightful unit of measure for pitch-interval, half-step is not its most important identity. It is more importantly a stair.
Because of its lack of a cyclic line-pattern to represent the tone of pitch, the conventional pitch-stave is restricted in its RANGE of pitch. A stave with a line-pattern that gives each tone its own identity can be extended to any desired pitch-range, just like a keyboard. It does not have to have a set number of lines in order to be understood.
This restriction to a set number of lines causes further trouble; it calls for a clef system that changes the tone-order being represented by the stave to suit different instruments, so that not only is this a stave with no visible tone-cycle, but it is one with no intrinsic meaning placed upon it of representation as a particular order of tones.
The conventional stave notation for classic keyboard has a stave for the left hand's notes identical to the one for the right hand's notes but, for some bizarre reason never explained, the two staves are not being used to represent the same order of tones. We are told there is such a thing as the 'sub-bass' clef, which gives the stave the same tone-order as the treble clef, but we are not told why this is not being used as the bass clef instead of that one that has a different tone-order, the only apparent purpose of which is to make the notation harder to read.
The spiral stairway of pitch is actually a quadruple helix, with four independently mobile spiral strands that turn against one another as music changes from chord to chord, mode to mode and key to key. These four different 'forms' of pitch have not been properly acknowledged and distinguished. They are: fixed pitch, diatonic-relative pitch, tonic-relative pitch and bass-relative pitch. Although musicians can be heard referring to fixed pitch by that term occasionally, it is usually referred to simply as pitch, it is the only pitch-form provided with a stave even though music can be notated equally well in diatonic-relative and tonic-relative pitch, and the extraordinary way it has had its tones named and notated shows that its fixed nature has not been understood and in the musician's mind is still not separated from diatonic-relative pitch. As Equal Temperament tuning is apparently a very recent technological innovation only truly invented in 1917, this is fairly understandable. Pitch is a complex mechanism with various 'kinds', however it is not nearly as complex as it is made to seem by all the sharps, flats, double-sharps, double-flats, bass clefs, etc, which are entirely fictitious overcomplications of reality. The following two points are further examples of these different forms of pitch being misunderstood.
The major and natural minor modes are NOT the only diatonic modes. Diatonic actually means belonging to the particular heptagonal tone-pattern that dominates music and has done so since ancient Greece: the diatonic heptagon. There are seven diatonic modes, not two. The dorian, phrygian, lydian, mixolydian and locrian modes are just as diatonic as the major and natural minor ones.
When a system of relative pitch reference uses a set of names or symbols to represent the degrees of the major scale, they do NOT represent scale degrees. If they represented scale degrees, they would represent the degrees of any seven-tone scale, not just any major scale. What they are are diatonic vertices/points/corners/tones. They are the true meaning of Do Re Mi Fa So La Ti. These are corners of the diatonic heptagon that dominates musical pitch-tone, produces the thing we call harmony, and exists in the timbral harmonics of a vibrating string. This is not tonic-relative pitch and nor is it fixed pitch; this is pitch in relation to a tone-pattern that happens to have an irregularity of such a kind that, while being symmetrical, gives tones their own unique identities - geometrically, aurally and visually. The full set of twelve diatonic-relative tones are: Do Vu Re Po Mi Fa Ne So Ku La Be Ti (pronounced, and alternatively spelt: Doh Voo Ray Poh Mee Fah Nay Soh Koo Lah Bay Tee).
The 'melodic minor scale' is not a scale, it's a weird, very unmusical exercise involving two different scales. That the Associated Board Grades are teaching it to complete beginners instead of the natural minor scale is all by itself a scandal.
Those are just some of the mistakes being made, there are numerous others, and I am quite sure there are still some I have yet to stumble upon.
The radical music theory presented above is all my own work. I am not the first person to say we need a new pitch-stave - although I am, apparently, the first person to call it that; it is referred to by others simply as 'the stave' or 'the staff' even though music notation uses other kinds of stave whose lines and spaces do not represent pitches. In fact there is an endless parade of pitch-stave designs from people who haven't even understood that one of the main problems with the conventional pitch-stave is not merely a notation problem but a theory and reference problem shared equally by the nomenclature system - which is used by far more people than the notation. They also have not realised that there are other problems with conventional music theory, nomenclature and notation. Designing a better pitch-stave than the conventional one is hardly difficult - it's more difficult to design a worse one. The first proper pitch-stave - the pair-trio stave - was apparently first proposed in 1819 by L. D. F. Dumouchel. The first proper rhythm notation system was apparently first invented in 1997 by me, as apparently was the first proper chord-naming system, and these were part of a whole simplified musical reference system I devised that same year which I have been developing ever since and have come to call Simplified Musical Reference, SMR. I invented the first proper vocal notation system in 1998. I adopted Dumouchel's pitch-stave in 2000, also adding an improving feature to it. In 2003, I adopted Benke Lajos's 'fixed Do' solfège syllables of 1967 for the names of the twelve diatonic-relative tones, just making one spelling alteration. Although he proposed these for naming the fixed tones, I adopted them because they were - apparently - the first practical chromatic set of solfège syllables, and historically the names of the diatonic-relative tones have been solfège syllables. Until 2011 I had been proposing A-to-L as the names of the fixed tones, but a 2003 article by John Greschak convinced me that O-to-Z is a better solution, at least for the immediate future. Greschak appears to have been the first person to propose this, and the only one before me. However, his article makes no real criticism of the conventional system, just saying that O-to-Z 'might be easier to read, write and learn', and seems to suggest that it is a system better suited to the equal tempered scale, as if the conventional system has an advantage for other tuning systems. This is simply not the case. Also of note is his referring to the fixed tones only as 'pitch-classes', never as tones or as fixed. In 2012, I have devised a new system of rhythm notation for vocals and a new system of chord-naming.
I began teaching musical instruments in 2000, using my SMR notation. I teach conventional fixed-tone names and conventional chord names - as these are in such wide use, but make students aware of the SMR ones. I teach with what I call 'Semi-SMR' notation, which is SMR notation that incorporates conventional elements such as the fixed-tone names or chord names. For this article I am using a semi-SMR nomenclature that uses a lot of conventional terms mixed with a few SMR ones. There is no problem teaching with an alternative notation system because the majority of today's musicians don't actually use the conventional pitch-stave/rhythm notation much at all. I do give students a lot of conventional notations, as there are many that are freely available online that I don't have much of a problem with, and it often saves a lot of time to just make corrections to these or add details to them than to start from scratch. Their lack of rhythm details is often fine because many people pick up rhythmic information very easily just by listening to the music. There are two established pitch-stave notation systems that use the same basic stave design as me - Klavar and Ambrose, but as of yet I have not been using their sheet music; I have just made my own.
Among the musical masters who allegedly can't or couldn't read or sightread conventional pitch-stave/rhythm notation are: The Beatles, Prince, Freddie Mercury, Irving Berlin, Luciano Pavarotti, Jimi Hendrix, Benny Andersson, Bjorn Ulvaeus, Elvis Presley, Elvis Costello, Michael Jackson, Dave Brubeck, Danny Elfman, Barry Gibb, Lionel Richie, Les Paul, Wes Montgomery, Barbra Streisand, Lionel Bart, Leslie Bricusse, Django Reinhardt, Lindsey Buckingham, Eric Clapton, Chris Martin, Keith Richards, Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin ...and the vast majority of pop musicians. And I have yet to hear any of them mention that they think there is something wrong with the system. It's quite astonishing.
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