Chords for Sor Study No. 22, Op. 35 - Balance - Strings By Mail Lessonette | Gohar Vardanyan

_ _ _ _ Hi, I'm Gohar Bahadanyan and this is a screen by my laptop.
In this lesson I'll be talking about balance.
And to help me, I'm going to use one of your studies from the Complete Studies, Lessons and Exercises program. _ _
_ _ _ _ _ [Bm] _ _ _
_ _ _ _ _ [F#] _ _ [Bm] _
_ [Em] _ _ [F#] _ _ _ [Bm] _ _
_ _ _ [F#m] _ _ [G] _ _ [C#] _
_ [Bm] _ _ [F#] _ _ [Bm] _ _ [B] _
_ [Bm] _ _ _ _ [F#m] _ _ [Bm] _
_ [F#] _ _ _ _ [F#] _ _ [Bm] _
_ [F#] _ _ _ _ [B] _ _ [Em] _
_ [A] _ _ [D] _ _ [C] _ _ _
_ _ [F] _ _ _ [F#] _ _ _
_ [Bm] _ _ _ _ _ _ [F#m] _
_ _ _ [F#] _ _ [Bm] _ _ _
_ [F#] _ _ [D] _ [Bm] _ _ [C#] _ _
[F#] _ _ _ _ _ [C#] _ _ [Bm] _
_ [F#] _ _ _ _ [Bm] _ _ _
_ _ _ _ _ [Bm] _ _ [F#] _
_ [Bm] _ _ [F#] _ _ [Bm] _ _ [F#] _
_ _ _ [B] _ _ [Em] _ _ [A] _
_ [D] _ _ [C] _ _ _ _ _
_ [G#] _ _ [F#] _ _ _ _ [Bm] _
_ _ _ _ _ [F#m] _ _ [Bm] _
_ [F#] _ _ _ _ [Em] _ _ _
_ [D] _ _ [C#] _ _ [F#] _ _ [G] _
_ _ [C#] _ _ _ [Bm] _ _ [F#] _
_ _ _ [Bm] _ _ _ _ _
_ _ [E] _ I'm sure most of you are familiar with this etude, and some of you might even already play it.
This is a great etude to learn if you want to practice keeping [D#m] the balance between the melody and the accompaniment.
But in order to do that, you need to know which notes belong to the melody and which notes don't.
For the most part, the notes that have the stems pointing up belong to the melody,
and the notes that have stems pointing down belong to the accompaniment.
But I wouldn't take it 100% literally, and I'll tell you why [G] in a second.
So I'm going to play the first few measures and just the melody alone.
You would want to do that just to make sure that your ear knows which notes are in the melody and what it sounds like,
so when you put it together you're not confused [F] as to which notes are more important than others.
So this is just the [Bm] melody. _ _ _ _ _ _
_ [Em] _ _ [D] _ _ [F#] _ _ _
_ [G] _ _ _ [Bm] _ _ [N] And so on.
You would play the whole entire thing, just the melody alone.
But for this video's sake, I'm going to stop there.
Now if you were following the music, you would have realized that I didn't play every single note that had a stem up as part of that melody.
That's because not every single note with a stem up is part of the melody.
You'll notice that some notes have two stems.
One is going up and one is going down.
That's because those notes actually belong to both lines.
So if you imagine for a second that there are two people, a singer or a violinist or a flutist, playing the melody,
and a guitarist or a pianist or whoever playing the accompaniment,
the notes that have two stems mean that they actually belong to both lines.
So the violinist would have a separate line with those notes,
and the guitarist will have those same notes [C#] in their part, but they're part of the accompaniment.
The notes that have just one stem going up, they still just belong to the guitar part.
They're not going to [Bm] be in the singer's part.
So a singer is not going to sing, _
_ _ [C#] _ _ [G] _ _ [G#] etc.
A singer or a violinist is not going to [G] play these notes.
They're just going to play the D, [C#] _ E, _ [Em] _ [D] and so [N] on.
So you have to use your musical knowledge and musical intuition to make sure that it's not really a literal interpretation of,
if a stem is going up, I'm going to play it loud because it's part of the melody.
It's not always.
So once you know what are the notes in the melody, play them through enough times where your ear can follow
and you actually remember and you can even just sing on their own.
Then you put it together with the accompaniment.
In the beginning stages, I would exaggerate the difference in volume between the melody and the accompaniment.
So you're going to play everything together, but first, just to train your fingers,
you're going to [Bm] play the melody notes, let's say at a certain volume,
[B] and the accompaniment notes, in comparison, are going to be very, [Bm] very soft. _
_ _ _ _ _ [F#m] _ _ _
_ _ [F#] _ _ _ [Bm] _ _ _
_ [B] _ [F#] _ _ _ [G] So as you can hear, I was barely playing the accompaniment.
I was plucking the notes, but very, very lightly.
You would have to do that for the entire piece so that you kind of train your fingers to do that,
to feel the notes that belong to the melody and the [N] notes that belong to the accompaniment.
Because it is ultimately your fingers that are going to be doing the physical task of plucking one note more than the other.
After that, after you get used to it, the movement, and you really can control it,
and you don't accidentally play an accompanimental note louder than it should be,
then you're going to balance it out and bring up the accompaniment a little bit more
so we can easily hear [Bm] the harmonic changes as well. _ _ _
_ _ [F#m] _ _ _ [Bm] _ _ [F#] _
_ [Bm] _ _ [Em] _ _ [F#] _ _ _
You can still hear the accompaniment.
It was a little louder, but it wasn't overpowering the melody.
And you definitely don't want to sound [Bm] like this.
_ _ _ _ [F#m] _
_ [Bm] _ _ [F#] _ _ [Bm] _ _ [Em] _
_ _ [F#] _ This, [G#] I tried to play every [N] single note at an equal volume.
Then it really does sound like an exercise.
And even though it is an exercise, it's an exercise in playing the melody and the accompaniment with balance
rather than just plucking notes at a certain rhythm.
So make sure that you treat this piece as music and not just an exercise for arpeggios.
If you want to order the music for this piece and the other pieces that I'm going to play,
I will put a direct link to the Strings by Mail catalog in the description of this video.
Thank you