Lesson video

Hello, my name is Miss Charatan.

Good to see you.

Welcome to the lesson on how can we arrange melodies into Baroque structure.

Let's have a really quick warm-up because we've got a lot to get through today.

Repeat after me.

Your turn.

Your turn.

Your turn.

Great.

And I'd like us to add a bit of a challenge.

We are going to count a pulse in our heads and you're going to clap when you get to 12 beats.

So you're going to count one, two, three, four.

I'm going to stop counting.

And we're going to see whether we can keep the same pulse across the computer sphere and end at the same time.

Are we ready? I'm going to count you in.

One, two, three, four.

From the beginning.

One.

Did we get 12 together? Hope we did.

Let's get started.

Okay, in this lesson, you will need the following things.

Piece of paper, something to write with, a pencil or a pen, instrument or app, I really like virtual piano, as well as a digital audio workstation.

Cause we're going to be using this to put our ideas into a structure.

A digital audio workstation is something like Garage Band or BandLab for Education.

You can get this on many devices, such as IPads, phones, or a laptop or computer if you have one.

If you need to go and get these things, pause the video, get them now and come back when you are ready.

Lovely, let's get started.

So, we have got a busy lesson ahead of us.

We're going to start by recapping our knowledge of Baroque structures.

Then we're going to be doing a lot of recording in our ideas, using a digital audio workstation.

We're going to explore how to put these melodies into a structure.

We'll add finishing touches to make our work sound stylistic and finished.

And then we will perform and share our work to whoever you can.

So let's start by recapping our knowledge of Baroque structures.

So, what is structure? What am I talking about? Look at the three options and choose the correct one.

Musical structure is the way the music is laid out and the plan.

Let's now have a look.

And remember, what were the four musical structures commonly used in the Baroque period? I have put the first letter of each one to give you a hint.

Pause the video if you need time to choose the correct answers.

Okay, let's go with the answers now.

I'm going to give you a clue as well.

So that will help you even more.

So, first one.

That is my clue.

It is not piece.

It is binary.

Second one.

This is my clue.

That is ternary.

Third one is rondo.

And the fourth one is the super complicated fugue.

Let's see whether we can remember what structures are actually looking like.

So, a structure with A B and A.

What is it? Binary, ternary, rondo or fugue? Choose your answer now.

And let's check your answer.

It is ternary.

Well done if you got that one correct.

That is because the A section returns at the end.

What about this structure in front of you? Choose your correct answer now.

If you put rondo, you are correct.

Rondo is also called a written roundelay form.

And this is when the A section keeps coming back and we have multiple different sections in the middle.

So rondos can actually go on for a very long time.

We can even have A B A C A D A E, etc.

This was a short one.

What would happen if I took away all these sections, then? Just have A and B left.

What would that be? Choose your answer now.

This is my clue.

It is binary.

Well done if you got that one correct.

And lastly, it begins with a melody that is played by a solo instrument.

This melody is then played by all the other instruments or voices in turn, but not necessarily at the same pitch.

This is not a canon because it's at a different pitch.

It is a fugue.

Well done if you got that one correct.

Let now just have a quick look at this fugue again.

Cause this one's very complicated.

So a fugue has a first subject and a second subject and then it develops along.

And a little bit like a canon, we have these entries coming in one after another.

But I've got stars next to them cause they're different.

It might be a different pitch, for example.

This is why it's a fugue and not a canon.

Fugues are very very complicated.

They are sort of a type of texture, so we also refer to a fugal texture.

It was a very very popular Baroque form.

And J.

S.

Bach wrote loads and loads of fugues.

So he wrote 48 very famous ones and even more than that.

So, one more thing from the Baroque era is the da capo aria.

If you were in the last lesson, you might have heard music for an example of a da capo aria.

How is the last section varied of a da capo aria? And what form is it in? Pause the video now if you need more time.

Let's check your answer.

It is ternary form and the last section is varied often by ornamentation.

So the performer improvises ornaments over the top of the melody.

That was a really quick recap.

Well done.

We are now going to record our ideas into a digital audio workstation.

So I have got my melody box here.

It's looking pretty empty.

You might have your own melody and your own bass.

What are the melodies have you been learning from Pachelbel's canon? So, melody two.

They're all in different jumbled up order.

Melody three, melody four.

Look at these all jumbled.

Melody five, melody six.

We need to get these organised into a structure.

So if you have been doing all of these, this series of lessons, then you will have learnt many melodies from Pachelbel's canon.

If you have not and you joined me later, that's okay you have time to catch up.

And you can do more of your own ideas on a digital audio workstation.

So you are now going to create a structure using audio mixing software.

The demonstration you are about to see uses a free software programme called BandLab for Education.

You can use BandLab for Education if you are under 13 years old, but only after seeking permission from your parent or carer.

If you need help in setting up your programme, please speak to your parent or carer.

Or somebody from school will be able to help you.

Let's go on to BandLab for Education.

If you're using a different digital audio workstation, keep with me because it'll be a very similar thing to BandLab for Education.

And you will still be able to get some really important instructions.

Let's go to BandLab.

Okay, so we're now at BandLab for Education.

You should be clicking on the library, which is this folder with the musical notes.

If you have been with me before and you've done some Pachelbel already in BandLab, you are going to find your previous project.

Mine is named Lesson 13 cause I got it ready for today.

And you will do open the mix editor.

If you are with me for the very first time and haven't used BandLab yet, you will go on mix editor, start a personal project.

So I'm going to click on here, open it up.

Takes a little while to load.

Great, so you might not have such complete melodies as me, but you also might have more, you know.

So I'm going to just go through with you now what you need to have for the very basics and how to get some things in quickly.

So you could have your simple melody that you may have done a couple of weeks ago, or whenever you did it.

Simple melody, a more complex melody.

Pachelbel melody one and two and three.

And you also might have Pachelbel's ground bass or some other melodies as well.

To record in, you can do one of two ways.

You can either play in yourself.

So I've got a new instrument here.

I'm going to add a new track.

So an instrument here.

And I would label the track first.

So I'm going to label it Pachelbel ground bass.

So I can either play it in or click it in.

I'm going to show you both ways and you will decide which way is best for you.

So to play in, I will need to click on instrument.

And I might just stick on piano for now cause I can always change it later.

I will then need to find the notes for the ground bass.

So I know the ground bass starts on D.

And I'm just going to practise that quickly now.

I need to make sure the metronome is on.

If you have started your project for the first time, make sure your tempo is down to 80.

Otherwise, you'll find it a bit too fast.

I can also mute some other tracks.

It's going to get a bit busy, so I'm just going to mute everything apart from melody one and two cause it will be nice to play with them, won't it? So, I'm going to get ready.

Going to have my instrument up.

From my first note.

And press record.

Let's go.

wow, I was happy with that because I managed to record it perfectly.

So, I don't need to do very much to change it, but if you did need to change something, you can double-click on it and move the notes around to a different note if you made a mistake or delete any notes.

I'm going to quantize it.

So I'm going to click in here, do CTRL + Alt, click quantize.

And that will make sure it's in time.

So I've got my ground bass recorded in.

I might want to change the instrument to something else, maybe not piano.

Maybe I'll put it on bass.

That probably sounds quite good.

Lovely.

So I've now changed this onto a bass guitar sound.

Imagine that I haven't done this and I wanted to click it in myself because I wasn't very comfortable playing on the computer keyboard.

That's fine.

So I've got my track here already.

I've labelled it in advance.

And I would then right click and do create region.

And I've got a nice empty region here to work in.

So I double-click on it.

And then I need to change to a pencil tool.

I know that each of the notes in the ground bass lasts for two beats, so I will need to do every beat one, beat two I don't do this, beat three.

So I'm going to find my D.

So I'm going to look on the keyboard, C and D.

and then I wait a bit cause it lasts for one, two beats.

My next note is an A.

And I'm just going to go down and find this now.

It's here.

and I made a mistake cause I hit the wrong thing.

That's okay.

You can just drag it using your ears to find the right note.

Or just use your eyes.

I might want to make them longer as well like this.

I'm not going to take you through how to do the rest of that melody.

I'm now just going to show you and make sure you know exactly what to record in.

So you need to have your own melodies.

Simple and complex one.

If you're not quite sure how to create one, don't worry, you can always go back on one of the previous lessons to find out.

Or using musical ear and have a go at creating something of your own.

Then Pachelbel melody one, two and three.

Let's just have a quick look at melody three.

You can see there's actually every one beat for this one.

Just watch out for that one there.

And then the ground bass.

Once you've got the melodies in, you're better to resume with.

You're now going to read these instructions to check that you know exactly what to do to complete this task.

You should be taking around ten minutes for this task.

If you haven't got anything in yet, then you may need to stretch that to 15 minutes and spend less time on our next bit.

Pause the video for ten to 15 minutes and resume it when you're ready to move on.

Great.

So there's a short checklist for you to go through.

Pause the video, spend about a minute looking through these questions and then get ready to resume the video.

Lovely.

I hope you have reflected on what you have done so far.

So we've recorded our ideas into a digital audio workstation and we're now going to explore how to place our melodies into a structure.

So there are two structures which I recommend to you using.

So you can use binary form.

And you've got a nice mix of your own ideas as well as Johann Pachelbel's.

You could also think about using ternary form by adding an A section at the end.

So for the first section, you could have Pachelbel's melodies for your A section.

Then for your final section, you could have Pachelbel's melodies with some ornaments, potentially.

Or even in canon.

What should you do for your B section then? Well for your B section, you could put in your own melodies to make a contrast.

And throughout, you could have that ground bass going on all the way just like Pachelbel's canon.

If you are doing rondo form, what could you do? Have a think about it now.

So if it was a rondo, you might actually want to put your own melodies for the A section.

So that could be returning again and again and again.

Cause you really want to give your own melodies lots of air time.

And for the B section, you could put melody one in from Pachelbel.

And for the C section, you could put melody three, for example.

I'm now going to show you on a digital audio workstation, BandLab for Education how to create these structures.

Great.

You're now going to pause the video to complete this task.

Choosing a structure out of binary, ternary or rondo and putting it into that structure.

Make sure you're using that Alt key as copying.

If this is too easy, make you have varied your texture.

This should take you around ten minutes.

Resume the video when you are ready.

Great.

Let's now go through this checklist and this reflection.

I can't answer these questions for you.

You need to pause the video and genuinely reflect on what you have done so far.

Lovely.

So to make the sections contrasting, hopefully you have maybe varied the texture, used some different ideas and maybe you've actually put your own ideas in one of the sections and kept them quite separate from Pachelbel's ideas.

So we are now going to be adding finishing touches to our work to make it sound stylistic.

Let's now think about how we can vary a repeated section.

We might have covered this before.

I have put the starts of the words on the screen for you.

Pause the video.

Work out what these words are.

And resume when you're ready to check your answers.

Great, so first one.

Ornament is a really important one.

So ornaments, such as trills, mordents and grace notes.

Passing notes are also really really important.

So notes that go in-between other notes.

To get to the other note.

Rhythm is a really important way to vary something.

So you could change with dotted rhythms, for example.

Like in melody four.

And lastly, articulations, so you could experiment with staccato and legato.

So you have got so many options to vary your repeated section if you're in ternary or rondo form.

So let's look at this repeated section.

So if you're in ternary form, you'll have your A section maybe in Pachelbel's melodies.

And your A ending section maybe with some ornaments.

And your melodies in the middle.

Let's now think about how we're going to end our works.

So firstly, what key are we writing in? It's the same as Pachelbel's canon.

If you said D major, you are correct.

So therefore, what number chord do we need to end on to make it sound finished? If you said chord one, you are correct.

Chord one in D major is D major.

This is so important for finishing off our arrangement.

I'm going to show you how to vary your A section and finish off your work properly now on.

So by now, you should have a complete structure on BandLab or whatever device and workstation you're using.

So we're now going to put some finishing touches in.

Let's have a first look at varying the A section.

So its got my first A section here.

And my last A section.

I varied it by having all the parts come in together and my extra melody here.

However, I'm going to vary it further.

I'm going to introduce a canon, first of all.

So I'm going to click on melody one.

And I'm going to duplicate this track.

So I'm using a right click, duplicate track.

And I got Pachelbel melody one, copy.

I'm just going to put canon here instead.

And I'm just going to move that over by two beats, so it starts like this.

So I got that in canon.

I'm going to shorten it, though so it finishes at the same time as everyone else.

Because even though yes, it can finish later, for my piece, I want it to finish all at the same time.

The next thing I could do is now start to vary the A section by including some ornaments.

The easiest way to do this is to either record them in yourself or you could potentially vary them by clicking into the editor.

Let's now have a look at melody one.

So I'm actually going to unloop this and I'm going to copy it and paste it across.

This means that it's going to be easier for me to put in some ornaments.

So I'm going to click on this second one here.

So one ornament I could do.

Here we go.

Should be here.

So let's now have a look at that first note.

I've actually erased it.

So if you make a mistake, you can CTRL + Z and you can get it back.

so I'm actually going to introduce a mordent.

So I'm going to copy and paste this note by using Alt and click.

and I might actually do that for all of them.

Et cetera.

If we just listen to this on its own, I'm going to solo it so we can hear what it sounds like.

Yeah, so I like that.

So if I was doing the whole thing with you, I would continue that for the rest of it.

So these ornaments work quite well on these long notes.

But actually, probably for our shorter notes, so for example here we've got our melody three.

We want to have some really really short notes.

So what we need to do for this one to make the notes really short is to go in settings, sorry to view.

Snap to grid.

We want this off.

So it will automatically be on.

So you will need to click it so it's off.

That means we can make sure we can have some really short notes like this.

We can do the same thing by copying and pasting.

Like so.

Oh, it keeps deleting.

So that's an idea of what you can be doing.

You might want to do that at the end with a long trill.

So those are two ideas on how to vary the ornaments.

Another thing we can do is vary rhythm.

So let's look at melody two.

I might want to make this note shorter, potentially.

I'll add another note towards the end of the bar.

Again, using my Alt copy.

Like this.

So re listen to that one.

I will just make sure I un-solo the other thing.

This one here.

Just hear that again.

So I've made that into a dotted rhythm.

So that's another thing that you can do.

So those are all ways that we can vary our final section.

Ornamentation, by clicking them in, making sure you are having snap the grid off.

Ornamentation, rhythm, having something in canon.

And the last thing we need to do to make it sound properly finished is to record in a D chord.

So you can either click it in or record it in.

I'm going to record it in on here.

And then I'm going to actually just copy my notes across.

So I'll need to make sure my instrument's up.

Here's my note.

I'm going to record this thing on this track here for now.

Make sure our metronome's on.

So maybe I'll want that quite nice and long.

So then I'll need to do the same with others, but I might, if I wanted, copy and paste it for us.

So I'll need to maybe have my D chord, so for this one here, I might do an F sharp.

I might do an A here, for example.

Some final touches you can do are automation, which means changing the dynamics.

So if click on this one here, I could make, actually make it fade out at the end.

So I'm going to put two dots here.

Drag that down.

So you click on this button and then you click on the lines to create two dots.

You drag them down.

So that would mean it goes to nothing.

So you could do a faded ending.

We'll just listen to this now.

This is how it would sound like.

So I didn't do this for all of them, so that's why there were still some parts going.

So it's really really important that you do.

Make sure that if you're going to fade at the end, do it for every single track.

You could also think about having a middle section which is louder, for example.

The last thing you could think about doing is panning.

And that means having it from different headphones.

So if you're wearing headphones, you can have it from different sides there.

So there's a lot to be thinking about now.

Please, if you're overwhelmed, use the technology as your friend and if you don't like something that you've done, you just can press undo up here.

So to summarise, you can use ornaments and change the rhythm, you can put something in canon, add a D chord at the end and then think about the dynamics.

In a moment, you will need to now go back and read the instructions and then complete this task.

You will now need to put the finishing touches to your work.

Read these instructions really carefully.

You should be spending about ten minutes to this task.

If you spent longer on the other sections, that's fine.

Spend five minutes on the task.

Pause the video and come back when you are ready.

Fantastic.

So now it's time to brief your effects of what you've done so far and how you've varied the A section.

How did you ensure that your piece sounded finished? Okay, let's move on.

So now, you're going to perform your piece.

So obviously, that's not going to be live because you've been doing it on a digital audio workstation.

So you can show it to someone at home, send it to a friend or family for feedback, or you can share it with your school.

I'm going to show you how to do that now on BandLab for Education.

So to share your work, you're firstly to save it by clicking on this button here.

You can also rename it to something that you like up here.

So hopefully, it's just saving now.

And the next thing you need to do is do file, download, mix down as.

This'll just take a moment to create that mix down.

So mine is taking ages and it's gotten a bit stuck.

So the next window will come up and you'll just need to click mp3 because that will help you share it with the most people.

Pause the video to share your work with somebody and then resume it once you are finished.

Wonderful.

So now it's time for your final reflection.

If you have time, pause the video now and think about the questions below.

So what were the ingredients to your piece? In terms of structure, melodies, ornaments and texture.

Clue with a P for polyphonic.

Think about why does it sound like a piece of Baroque music.

And if you had more time on this, and you could spend much more time on this if you'd like, what would you change about your work and why? Pause the video, note down the answers to these questions and resume when you're finished.

A huge well done for your hard work today.

And if you've been with me throughout this unit, well done for getting this far.

It would be wonderful if you'd like to share your work with Oak National now you have got a complete piece.

So please ask your parent or carer to share it on Instagram, Facebook or Twitter, tagging Oak National and using the #LearnwithOak.

I hope you have enjoyed learning all about Baroque music and arranging your work on BandLab for Education today.

All is left to say is take care.

Enjoy the rest of your musical journey.

Keep listening to Baroque music and see you soon.