Simpedia

Gordon H., Australia

Learning the melody as a reading project is great, but I only teach it to students for whom it’s developmentally appropriate. It’s obviously good for duets in shared lessons, but that’s less likely to be a consideration in private lessons such as yours. For other students, I just have them da-da the melody as you see in the TTM. If you can demo the piece with both accompaniment and melody as Neil does in the TTM, that’s helpful. You could also reserve teaching the melody for a later time if you’d like to give the student the project of creating a two-handed arrangement.

Laurie Richards, Nebraska

I think Neil talks in the training about students needing to learn the melody. He has the teachers in the training video hum it with him several times to get an idea of the melody. I believe he also mentions having students write lyrics as a means of learning the melody better. Hearing the melody in class several times, reading it at home, and writing lyrics should do it.

I have not done these songs as solo projects, only with the rhythm tracks. I do solo arranging later on. They are also good as a starting point for processing the inversions.

Kym N., California

The AC2 songs are definitely much easier and shorter to read as solos than those from Jazz 1. I particularly like the first one for reading because of the use of ties and different kinds of “quads” that you don’t see in RR and TFMM. They both have accidentals which are great for reading. The second one is in 3/4 time which is wonderful cause most songs are 1:2 in ratio. I also like their split chords which can be nice for LH arrangements.

My students are already done with TFMM when they have AC2, so I think these songs are quite accessible as solo projects because of their simplicity and short length.