Estimated reading time 5 minutes
Table of Contents
Introduction
Has your student been playing color coded music notes and is ready to graduate? Have you wondered how to get to your student to play a color free score? The How to Graduate from Color Coded Music Notes series will show you how. Read more to understand contour lines and how to use them as the first step toward moving on from the colors.
- It takes three to four years for a student reading text to go from sounding out words to fluid reading. Likewise, it takes three to four years for music students to progress from haltingly reading notes (using clef mnemonics) to fluid note reading. Color coding can help smooth the transition.
- In education there’s a concept called scaffolding. With scaffolding you set up a learning support structure. Then, you gradually take it away over time as the students reach the point where they can handle harder tasks. This means that moving on from the color coding happens gradually over a number of months.
- Color coding is a powerful multisensory teaching tool. However, when you color code notes, you have to commit to using them. Once you’ve started students will depend on them for a time to help them interpret the score. I normally use the color coding on guitar and piano for the entire beginning level music (more on this in section 3).
This article uses technical musical terms. For definitions, see the Glossary at the end of the post.
Color Coding Review
Before you can graduate from the color coded music notes, you need to understand how color coding works. If you have never color coded music before, I suggest you read these posts:
How Long does it Take to Graduate from the Color Coded Music Notes?
So… how long does it really take to graduate from the color coded music notes? That depends on the student and the instrument. Generally, I’ll color the student’s music for all the beginning level method books in a lesson series.
Here are some guidelines on how long each instrument family will need the color coding:
- It takes guitar students about six months to two years to start the process of moving on from the colors. Violin students will take about the same amount of time.
- Woodwinds and brass will most likely graduate earlier than strings, because middle school wind method books only use one fingering per note. For that reason, Violet Brand, a British music educator, felt that students with LD should be encouraged to study wind instruments.
- Piano students take two to six years to start graduating, because the two clefs make the piano much harder to read. In fact, Katie Overy has stated, “… the discovery of the numerous regions of the brain involved in sight-reading at the piano has led to the suggestion that this may be one of the most complex multisensory activities conducted by humans (Sergent et al., 1992)” (Music and Dyslexia: A Positive Approach 158).
- Mallet percussion will likely take longer than guitar, but shorter than piano.
- Note: some special needs students might not graduate at all. However, color creates an important access point to music for special needs students. In other words, it’s better they play with color than not be able to play at all.
Flash cards work for some students, but not others. Once an LD student has graduated from the colors, flash cards become productive. If you try to go to flash cards too soon, it can actually make things worse for some LD students.
Contour Lines: The First Step in Graduating from the Color Coded Music Notes
- Not all notes will need to be colored. Rena Upitis found that children, when making up their own notation, focused on contour and intervals before discrete pitches.
- Thus, contour lines help students to read music by teaching them in a way they naturally learn. I’ll often begin contour lines about six to nine months before going color free on the skips.
- Notice that I have color coded only the first note in example 1 below. If the student currently has every note colored, the contour lines create an important step toward graduating from the colors. For skips see part II.
- Students will follow the contour lines up and down as they play. The truck illustrates going up and down the “musical hills” on the score. You can use a toy truck to demonstrate up and down on the instrument as well.
- The second example shows steps and skips on the staff. The steps get the contours lines, and the skips (for the time being) remain colored. The stick figures help with the concept of stepping.
- The third example shows contour lines applied to the grand staff. The steps have contour lines, while I’ve applied color where the hands play together.
- On piano, students will often need color for hands-combined work, even after they can read the separate staves color free. It takes an extra six to nine months (after each staff has gone colorless) to do color free hands-together playing.
- Notice that middle C has not been colored orange. Middle C has a different look compared to the other notes. Therefore, many students will quickly be able to read it without the aid of color.
Mobile users: for best results reading the music, tilt your screen 90o to the right.
Graduating from the Color Coded Music Notes: Staff as a Graph
- Describing the staff as a graph helps LD and special needs students as they work on the process of graduating from the color coded music notes. Just like with a graph, the staff tracks two types of information. It has a pitch axis and a time axis.
- This explains why the staff looks like it has slanted lines. Also, the orientation of the aural “up” and “down” direction for the pitch is different on each instrument.
Concluding Thoughts on Graduating from the Color Coded Music Notes
- Graduating from the color coded music notes leads students from beginner level work to the first phase of true music literacy. In time, most students will graduate from the colors, even most ADD, ASD, LD, and special needs students.
- This post represents part 1 of the 5-part series. The second post talks about using clef mnemonics as the second step to playing music without color.
- Part 3 will discuss (what I call) edge notes, and part 4 will go into ledger lines. Then, part 5 will deal with how flash cards work for autistic, LD, ADD, and other special needs students.
Related Content
- How to Graduate from the Color Coded Sheet Music: Part II
- How to Graduate from the Color Coded Music Score: Part III
© 2021 Geoffrey Keith
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Glossary
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Once Sheet Music is All Digital, Why Not Always Colour-Code Notes?
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