I have a male adult beginner whose aim is to be able to make up his own stuff. I want to teach him by ear for the moment and am wondering where to find material to do this. If it was a child I'd use nursery rhymes etc. , but that's not really suitable for an adult. I am thinking of finding an adult beginner singing book and using that as my basis. Does anyone have any ideas?

I usually dive straight into a tutor book but want to try getting away from that for the timebeing.

That is an interesting challenge, barcarolle. It might be worth posting this on the jazz forum as well.

My immediate reaction would be to start with a song familiar to this individual. I would try helping him pick out the melody, then show him how to work out the underlying harmony and add that with the left hand. I am not talking from experience here so I do not know whether this will work.

Good luck

Steve

As well as playing by ear and knowing the underlying harmony as Steven mentioned, a methodical analysis of the music structure will help too. Look for patterns, sequences and intervals etc. All of this helps to build up musical intelligence too. I was just using this process with a beginner pupil too. We divided a simple eight bar piece of music into four pairs of bars. The rhythm was identical between three pairs of bars and the last rhythm was totally different. The second pair was an imitation of the first pair but one step up. The third pair was a re-statement of the first pair except for one note difference. The whole piece moved in 2nds apart from one part where there was a 3rd. A combination of playing by ear and recognising harmonic and melodic patterns is a good approach and develops musical intelligence away from pure note reading skills.

Gae

thank you both for your suggestions. he mentioned that he's been trying to work out clocks (coldplay) so i have found some sheet music (for myself since I don't know it!) and written him the chords / fingerings (not using notation) - so roll on tomorrow and we'll see if it works!

Gae - well done on your grade 8 distinction! I'm waiting to see if I've passed DipARSM.

I'm not really sure whether this will help or not but I'll go for it anyway!

With adults I usually use the Carol Barratt classic course, or the Bastien adult piano course. I had a student who whatever we started doing, he could always hear other things within it, so for example in the Barratt there is a gavotte, I think by Handel, so we learnt that one in full, then improvised it into Eric Claptons Wonderful tonight!

The great thing about the Bastien though, is it does work with chord structures and intervals so you could take familiar pieces in addition to the book (and I have no issues with making adults work out Twinkle, twinkle little star and the like) work out the melody then use the Bastien in conjunction with improvisation to add the harmony.

Option 3, links into your song book idea, try looking through some of the easy keyboard, guitar song books that have the chords written at the top and the simple melody line in, I've used these with adults and kids before to build confidence, they do tend to be very mainstream artists though, Beatles, Abba, Disney etc. The easy keyboard ones do have chords marked out, in them.

Sounds like a great challenge though, so have fun.

Morning - I am pleased to report that last night's lesson went down extremely well - he was delighted he was going to learn Coldplay's Clocks and from the moment he started having a go it sounded like the song. He left the lesson on a real high and I think will do lots of practice. How different from putting a beginner tutor book in front of someone, overloading them with information about time signature, note values, notes, bars, counting, reading the music, co-ordinating the fingers and then sending them home to play five consecutive notes all week that really don't sound like music at all.

I've asked him to work out twinkle twinkle little star (Digby!) for next week and am planning over the next couple of weeks to do some work on simple note values and eventually get him to write out the music for it. Can't wait till term starts to try out these new ideas on my other students! (all down to the professional development course I'm doing)

I was hoping upi would post a 'how-it-went'.

I am so glad you had a good time.

Steve

So pleased it went well - you sound really fired up! That's great.

A couple of tunes I find sometimes go down well at this stage are:
The Ode to Joy theme (Beethoven's 9th finale)
Au Clair de la Lune and Sur le Pont d'Avignon ( both French folk songs).

The Ode to Joy lends itself to some simple chord harmonisation,
and the Au Clair to harmonisation by various intervals once the tune is established in the RH. I've also used them for easy transposition.

Hi Maggiemay. Thanks for those suggestions. I teach some adult education classes and have been trying to think of some simple pieces that everyone knows to teach them by ear.