Estimated reading time 4 minutes
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Why Color Code Musical Instruments?
Does your student lose track of the notes on the instrument? LD, ADD, ASD, and special needs students often become confused about where the notes sit on the instrument. On many instruments, fingering and notes are two sides of the same coin. In the last post we color coded the fingers. Now we will take the same pictures and talk about how color coding musical instruments leads to special needs and LD success.
This article uses technical musical terms. For definitions, see the Glossary at the end of the post.
How to Color Code Musical Instruments: Guitar
Multidimensional Pitch Height
How high or low a note sounds is called the pitch height. Guitar has multidimensional pitch height.
- In other words, the thickness of the string controls pitch height, but the string length does too.
- The thinner the string, the higher the note sounds.
- The shorter the string, the higher the note sounds as well.
- This means the student goes higher by playing the open strings progressing toward the floor – toward the thinner strings.
- OR the student goes higher by playing frets progressing toward the bridge of the guitar. The student goes lower by reversing the above directions.
A lot of students find having two directions for up and down confusing. The picture below shows our first example of color coding a musical instrument.
Color Coding the Frets
The general-purpose stickers, shown applied to the guitar in the photo, came from an office supply store. I had to add a strip of tape to the back of the neck or the stickers peeled off. I applied color using colored pencils.
- Some teachers use a 12-color system, one for each chromatic note.
- However, I find that students get confused when shades of color appear to be too similar in the score.
- Therefore, I limit myself to seven colors when color coding musical instruments, one color for each diatonic note.
- When teaching new students, color coding the frets immediately clears up confusion with note placement for the first seven notes. At this point, most students are focused on the colors rather than the line/space notes.
- When a student reaches an octave, the repeated note gets the same color. However, students need to start paying attention to the line/space notes to be able to tell the octaves apart.
- Namely, the student must notice that G green on fret three of the first (thinnest) string sits on the top space of the staff.
- Likewise, the G green on the open third string sits on the second line from the bottom.
Start having the student focus on the line/space notes in conjunction with the color once the student learns the open G note. This is an important step toward graduating from the colors.
Mobile users: for best results reading the examples, tilt your screen 90o to the right.
How to Color Code Musical Instruments: Keyboard & Piano
Reversable Keys
Most piano books have students find the white key notes by first looking at the pattern of the black keys. The visual reversibility of the keys creates problems for many students.
Some students reverse the natural notes C and E, or F and B, or G and A. Any place the notes are visually symmetrical can be reversed. Below is the next example of color coding musical instruments.
The Color Coded Keyboard Guide
The color coded keyboard guide helps reduce mix-ups. I made the above guide in a spreadsheet program. I sized the cells by trial and error. That is, I kept printing and resizing guides until I found the cell size that fit the piano keys right.
Write the letter of each key on the appropriately colored cell.
- C = orange
- D = gray
- E = red
- F = pink
- G = green
- A = purple
- B = blue
You can input the color values into the spreadsheet cells to match the colors with the score. The black cells line up with the black keys, this helps the student to line up the guide on the keyboard at home.
When you color code the musical instrument, fingers, and the score, it pulls everything together. The student will be able to read the blue note, using the blue finger to play the blue key.
Conclusion
Color coding musical instruments is not limited to just keyboard and guitar.
- Apply color coding to violin and percussion (drums, idiophones, and mallets instruments).
- Also, any fretted, stringed instrument color codes in the same way as the guitar.
- Brass and woodwinds have only one fingering per note.
- This means that these instruments usually do not need color coding applied to the keys or values.
- However, color code them if necessary.
Color coding the student’s instrument is a multisensory teaching technique that is particularly important for autistic, LD, ADD, and other special needs students. Without it many students become lost, with it they shine.
© 2020 Geoffrey Keith
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