Stage 8 milestone
Milestone: Harmony City
Review, practical challenge and self-assessment to close the stage with everything you learned.
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Stage 8 milestone
Review, practical challenge and self-assessment to close the stage with everything you learned.
Look back from the city’s highest rooftop. You came in playing chords and scales that worked “just because”. You learned to measure the distance between two notes and to recognise it with your eyes closed, you opened up chords to see their stacked thirds, you walked the street of a key’s seven chords, you felt the dominant’s tension pushing you home and, finally, you left box 1 to travel the whole neck. Now every street has a name. Time to show you can find your way around.
| Stop | What you learned | The key idea |
|---|---|---|
| Intervals | Number (letters) and quality (half steps); perfect, major, minor, augmented, diminished; shapes on the neck | Count letters first, then frets |
| Intervals by ear | Consonance and dissonance, inversion (rule of 9), compound intervals, your own references | Sing up the scale from the lower note |
| Triads | Major, minor, diminished and augmented; three-string shapes; inversions | A chord is a tower of thirds |
| Harmonising the major scale | I ii iii IV V vi vii° in any key; the relative minor | The pattern never changes; only the names do |
| Functions and cadences | Tonic, subdominant, dominant; leading tone and tritone; four cadences | Home, road, hill… and back |
| The five boxes | The five pentatonic positions, connections, major pentatonic, CAGED | One scale, five slices |
Streets of Light is an original eight-bar piece in C major. It has two phrases: the first ends with a question and the second answers it. Before you play, analyse it yourself.
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Chords | C | Am | F | G | C | Em | F · G | C |
| Degrees | I | vi | IV | V | I | iii | IV · V | I |
| Function | T | T | S | D | T | T | S · D | T |
Phrase 1 (bars 1–4) makes the full journey home → road → hill and stops on V: a half cadence, the question. Phrase 2 (bars 5–8) starts the same way, but bar 7 speeds up the journey (IV and V in the same bar) and ends V → I: an authentic cadence, the answer. In bar 2, Am stands in for I because it belongs to the same family; in bar 6, Em does the same.
Play the piece with open chords and a simple strum. The challenge is bar 7: two chords in one bar. The pattern below drills the strum with one chord per bar; once it is comfortable, play along with the backing above and change to G halfway through bar 7.
Play it twice in a row. On bar 4 say “half cadence”; on bar 8, “authentic”. In bar 7, play two strums of F and two of G.
Goal: Play the eight bars with open chords over the backing at 80 BPM, saying each phrase’s cadence out loud when you reach bars 4 and 8.
Now play the same piece with triads on strings 3-2-1, all in the same area of the neck. Notice the voice leading: usually only one note moves.
Before playing, identify each shape’s inversion (which degree is on string 3?). Then play it over the backing. Extra challenge: find another version of the piece with triads on strings 4-3-2.
Goal: Play the eight bars with triad shapes, with no gaps between chords, naming each shape’s inversion, at 80 BPM.
The melody at this level uses only pentatonic notes (A minor, which is also C major), crosses from box 1 to box 3 and ends each phrase on a chord tone. It finishes on the tonic with an authentic cadence.
Goal: Play the whole melody over the backing at 80 BPM and then improvise two choruses using at least three boxes, ending phrases on G (bar 4) and C (bar 8).
Over the next two weeks, spend 20 to 25 minutes a day on this routine. Rotate the blocks: you don’t need to do every block every day, but spread them across the week.
| Day | Ear (5 min) | Triads (6 min) | Boxes (8 min) | Analysis (5 min) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Monday | Harmonic intervals | C major, three inversions | Boxes 1 and 2 | A song you like: find its key |
| Tuesday | Melodic intervals | C minor, three inversions | Boxes 2 and 3 | Harmonised G scale |
| Wednesday | Triads: major or minor | I–vi–IV–V progression | Boxes 3 and 4 | Functions in a progression |
| Thursday | Cadences by ear | Harmonised scale on 3-2-1 | Boxes 4 and 5 | Harmonised D scale |
| Friday | Free mix | Streets of Light, level 2 | All five in a row | Cadences in a song |
| Weekend | — | Streets of Light, level 3 | Free improvisation | — |
Use the drone and your own references. Alternate melodic intervals, harmonic intervals and major/minor triads.
Goal: Get 8 out of 10 intervals or triads right by ear, singing up the scale from the lower note.
Goal: Play the harmonised C scale on strings 3-2-1, up and down, saying each chord’s Roman numeral.
Play the day’s two boxes, first separately and then joined. Finish with a minute of improvisation over the backing.
Goal: Connect two neighbouring boxes with a slide, up and down, without stopping, at 90 BPM.
Pick a song you like (or a progression from this stage). Find the key, write the Roman numeral under each chord, mark T, S or D and find where each phrase ends. Question or answer?
Goal: Write the Roman numerals, functions and cadences of a four- to eight-chord progression.
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