Music Teacher's Helper Blog

Sight Singing can be very frustrating. Generally it involves a lot of practice with exercises from books specifically designed for learning to sight sing. The MLR Verbal Associations Skills Program takes a different approach. This approach is geared at teaching sight singing by repeating patterns. The idea is that you will internalize the patterns by repeating them after someone and putting patterns to piano without first hearing the patterns. The program has two different types of exercises on each CD. One with a leader singing the syllables followed by  blank space for the singer to repeat it back. There is a corosponding exercise right after it, that just has piano playing the same patterns. The singer is asked to put their own syllables with the notes that are played. This is not difficult to do, because the patterns are in the same order as the first exercise. There are two CDs with this series. One is dedicated to Major and Minor tonality and the other is dedicated to duple and triple rhythms. There is also a third CD in the series. It is called the MLR Harmonic Ear to Hand Program. It helps students to develop your ability to perform harmonic progressions by ear on a harmonic instrument. Sequential exercises use harmonic progressions composed of primary chords (C, F, and G7 in major tonality and Am, Dm, and E7 in minor tonality). I am in the process of ordering this CD to write a future review of the product.

I used this series in college and have since pulled the CDs back out to dust up on my sight reading. I found it increadibly helpful in the past. It definately helped me to improve my sighreading. I was able to look at music and hear the intervals a lot easier than I could before.

Pros

This set makes learning patterns that you see regularly in music fun and is quite contagious. After a few times practicing with this series, you will find yourself humming the patterns back to yourself. The added accompaniment makes it fun for younger children as well. As I practiced with this CD, I was able to sing patterns much more readily and with fewer headaches. (I actually used to get headaches in sight-singing and dictation classes in college.) My sense of rhythm was greatly improved by using this series. I learned to recognize sixteenth note patterns by site which has helped me out considerably.

Cons

There are a few minor things that I didn’t like about this series. Most of them are because I wish that they would have added more advanced patterns to the CD. The series stops with Major and Minor tonality and doesn’t go into other tonalities which would be helpful for more advanced musicians and college bound music majors. Along the same lines, the rhythmic CD stops at regular douple and triple meter and doesn’t delve into compound meter. It would be helpful if it had a book and exercises that helped students to visualize what the patterns looked like once they had learned what they sounded like.One small drawback is that the singer on the CD reminds me of Kermit the Frog. The first time I heard the CD I thought someone had played a joke on me. Along the same lines the accompaniment reminded me a bit of music for children. If this CD series was designed for children only then they met their mark. If not, then this is an area that could be improved upon.  The syllables used are moveable do and la based minor which is fairly common in public education and beat-function syllables doo day and doo dah dee. These don’t seem to be as common in public education (at least not in the area where I teach.)

Overall, I think this is a great tool for helping students to imrpove their sight reading without the monotony of practicing endless sight reading drills from a book. The few small short commings of the series can be overcome by help from their private lesson teachers or school music teachers. Teachers could help students to visualize the patterns once they have learned to sing them very well on their own. Along the same lines, students can be shown other methods of counting once they are already familiar with the sounds of the pitch and rhythmic patterns.