Acronyms and music.

[Fergie Fulton]

I personally was never taught them and try to avoid them if i can, but do such things as Good Boys Deserve Fun Always and All Cows Eat Grass actually help or hinder in learning music.

I worked with a new student to me and when ever we worked on the staff i could see him mouthing or thinking such things to get the answer.
I was never taught this method, but have always been aware of it, because my first teacher thought it a distraction. He would often say "music flows across the whole stave so why split it into lines and spaces." he would again often say " Learning lines or spaces help define note stacking, not fluency of reading".

I could always see his point so it was never an issue for me as it is just the the first 7 letters of alphabet in a row then every other one to find lines and spaces.....how hard can that be to remember?
I also have seen them for order of sharps and flats, circle of 5ths etc, so i would assume that they have worth and are tried and tested.

So with that history has anyone ever tried to teach without using them...after we use 12 notes with 7 letters so what is there to remember that really needs a Acronym, or would i be doing him a dis-service by working with him to lose it and not use them?

[FretlessMainly]

Like many learning tools, they may have more worth to some and less to others. I found them to be helpful when I was first learning to read music in about 1975 - just as a point of reference as to where you were in terms of the staff and the note(s) in question. From there, I eventually learned to recognize notes in, or above and/or below the staff by recognition, not by their relationship to FACE or EGBDF.

But all one really needs for a particular clef is for a single note to be identified and all the rest can be figured out from there. This way the student is forced to mentally associate letters with staff positions (which is eventually what I did after being taught EGDBF and FACE).

[Russell L]

I was aware of the acronyms, but didn't really use them when learning. None of them ever helped me switch over in my mind from reading treble clef to bass clef either. But, I agree that they might be of use.

[Fergie Fulton]

Two good points made. Personally i see it as an intrusion in the thought process, after all we can all spell our names and addresses and never needed help remembering how the letters were numbered, even learning the alphabet never needed them.

Add to the task the fact it has to be recognised, read, identifed, played and heard correct, is more than enough of a task without adding extra information. If there is a problem i may introduce them later rather than at the start of any student that has no basic theory knowledge to help with reinforcement.

He was back again this morning, so explained to him that lines and spaces denote a pitch to a given cleff. Rather than remembering rhymns for the notes, just see the notes of the alphabet in relation to the clef. After all the acronyms are going to have to change to reflect the change of a cleff, so lets look at how it all works from a practical point of view and learn that.

We done some reinforcment exercises that consisted of this.

I asked him to go through the first 7 letters alphabet repeating them continually, then i stop him anywhere. He then recites the alphabet backwards to that point again. If he had gone though it 4 times forwards he has to go through it 4 times backwards to the starting note.
This one was hard to start with but he got up to a got consistancy quite quick, and what it taught him was the art of seeing and reciting letters forwards and backwards, it helped his mind to work as far as music was concered to read ascending and descending lines at will.

Then i got him to go though the first 7 letters again, this time he would go forward every other letter till i stopped him, or back everyother letter till i stopped him. Again this gave his mind the chance to work out that each one of these letters could be a line or a space, but their pattern of every other one is always a constant factor.

By the end of the lesson he was now identifying notes faster and with more confidence because he could see them for what they were rather than trying to work out though a rhymn or remember a position they held. Funny enough his hit rate was quite low, he said as many wrong as he got right, but that changed. I would much rather he be reacting than thinking at this stage. When his hit rate got good i changed clefs on him with little or no loss in his hit rate.
He also understands that an note on a line will be in a space an octave up or down and this pattern alternates due to math not music.
His transposition skills are now going to develop ( i would expect) because he sees the notes in relation to the clef and he knows it is alphabet related based in a bit of math.
The math side reinforces recognision of the number of lines or spaces between notes, which will help him identify chords, triads arpeggios etc, as well as where he is above or below the stave.

Now the task is for him to relate it to the instrument, now he has an understanding of what they represent in notation hopefully he will now find it easier to find them on the instrument.
For me lessons will now be quicker as i do not have to wait for answers or try and explain things...i can write it out and he can see it for himself, and of course take it home to work on it for next time....so no 10 minute re-cap on what we done last time when he comes back.

[Russell L]

Sounds good. I take it he is a good, serious student. The next one might not be, though. Most folks don't have the patience to go through all that, in my teaching experience, unless they come in knowing that they want to learn it all.

[Fergie Fulton]

Originally Posted by Russell L

Sounds good. I take it he is a good, serious student. The next one might not be, though. Most folks don't have the patience to go through all that, in my teaching experience, unless they come in knowing that they want to learn it all.

Well i see it as a two way street, from his point of view he wants to learn from my point of view i want to teach him, not watch him practice learning songs. So for me i want to get to teach him how i intend to communicate with him so he can communicate with me.
In all the lesson was fun and informative and he seems keen to learn, how do i know this? He sent me a message saying he searched and found an app for his phone called Music Sheet Workout that does what we worked on. He can set himself in any cleff and time himself on who many notes he can identify in a given time. When he come back next week he wants show me what he can do.

He is a breath of fresh air in those respects, but he is young, so see if his enthusiasm lasts the holidays.