Student’s question:
I’m trying to decide how to best manage my time. Should I study the most common harmonic environments first? Or is it better to study all seven harmonic environments in order?
How we think about this in IFR:
Each of the seven harmonic environments of the major scale has important musical lessons to teach you, and each one will introduce you to beautiful sounds that you can use in your improvising. But if you’re eager to get a jump on learning to understand songs by ear, you can start with the two harmonic environments which are the most common in popular music:
The 1st harmonic environment. This is where you’ll find the melodies to almost every song you’ve ever heard which sounds like it’s in a “major key” to your ear. We master the first harmonic environment in Ear Training for Musical Creativity 1.
The 6th harmonic environment. This is where you’ll find the melodies to almost every song you’ve ever heard which sounds like it’s in a “minor key” to your ear. We master the sixth harmonic environment in Ear Training for Musical Creativity 2.
*We also focus exclusively on these two harmonic environments in the first two levels of our “Sing the Numbers” audio course. We study the first harmonic environment in Sing the Numbers 1: The Major Tonality. And we study the sixth harmonic environment in Sing the Numbers 2: The Minor Tonality. So working through these two courses will give you an incredible advantage in recognizing the sounds in the music all around you.
But then I encourage you to take lots of time to explore all of the other harmonic environments as well. Each one contains important musical lessons that will enrich your imagination and your personal improvising vocabulary. And remember that a major reason why we study the seven harmonic environments is to prepare us for improvising over chords and chord progressions. So while the 7th harmonic environment may not be so common, the “seven chord” certainly is! So don’t just practice the harmonic environments that appear most often in the songs you hear. There are many other reasons why we study Seven Worlds, and all of this learning will come together when we start studying chord progressions.
