Originally published at: Lesson 4 – More Scales + Scale Concepts. Replies here will cross-post on the lesson page.
What is your favorite key to play these in?
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I’m up to lesson 4 in the 6th Sense series. At this point, what would be a good goal for learning the slack key Hawaiian music I like? Should I just pick a key, like C, and memorize it, learn it out of order, play it out of order, etc? Or should I practice a variety of scales? I guess in a perfect world you would eventually memorize all of them.
To get something to stick, my experience is that you have to use it in real life music. Starting with memorizing the C double stop scale is great. Trying to do too much at once is counter productive. Get some musically satisfying moments under your belt in the key of C before working on a different key.
I think once you get into the “Playing Over Chords” section, you’ll start to see how everything fits together. But in the meantime, if you want to try fiddling with playing the shapes over a song in the key of C, you can just follow your ears. (The George Kuo version of “Ka Moaʻe” is in C: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8UDkH1-bL6s)
Thanks that’s perfect. I did learn Kealoha before starting this lesson which uses the concept so it’s good to learn what’s behind it. In Mark’s book he just calls them double stops.
They are indeed double stops. But “double stop” refers to any two notes played together in this way - any interval. “6th” tells us specifically which interval the notes make up.
3rds are another common double stop interval in Hawaiian music. Same concept, different shapes.
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