Learning Scales and Chords/Intervals by singing solfege?

[bobsguitars09]

I have always been told that if you want to really learn something(musically)
sing the intervals. Should you apply the Solfege(DO RE MI ect ect)?

and sing the tones that way?

[mr. beaumont]

absolutely.

I learned it just singing "doo" ( Oooh sound, like in pay your "dues") after playing the note on my guitar, since it's a syllable I'd use when scatting, anywhay, but solfeggio brings another level of knowledge into it, and eventually will lead to you being able to sing in key better away from the instrument.

but i do like having the instrument in front of me--play the interval, sing it. after a while, you can sing as you play, which is a nice party trick at worst, and a way of creating truly vocal-like melodic lines at best.

[BigDaddyLoveHandles]

My Springtime pollen allergies are really bad now, but that just means I've got my Satchmo vibe goin' on!

[saponsky]

I agree, singing the intervals gives you a nice ear training too. You get to a point when you can even hear the note in your mind before you play it.

[Sailor]

Easier said than done on your own though. While in college our professors made us solfege everything in theory, history, and method classes. It was cool...sometimes in history they'd break out Bach chorales and the class, for the most part, could just sight-sing the chorale in 4 parts in just a few tries. Also came in handy learning new tunes on new instruments, and in chorus, as you had a very close idea as to how the tune would sound before you played it.

Sailor

[fep]

I'm taking an ear training class at a community college and when we sing we sing numbers representing scale degrees. I think this is preferable to Solfege for jazz because we already think scale degrees.

Here's part of a page from our book. We are one on one tested on this stuff and the teacher will pick a page from the book and ask us to sing it or she'll write her own melodies and ask us to sing it. (It's sight singing, no instruments are used, no reference pitches, she doesn't care about the key just that you get the relative pitches correct). Pretty tough tests.

So take example 7 which is in Ab. We'd sing "3 4 5 6 7 1 3 2 5 4" etc. at measure 9 we'd sing "5 5 6 7 1" and knowing in your mind that the second 5 is a sharp 5 so you'd sing two different pitches for the 5, in your mind you're thinking 5 #5, while singing the words "5, 5" i.e. same words but different pitches.





And the next step or level of development is to just think the scale degree numbers in your head while singing a sylable like "la", for some reason this is more difficult for most, including me.

[FatJeff]

I had to do that solfege stuff for the first two years of music school. I got OK at it, but to tell you the truth, I never quite got the allure. It was a PITA, and I've not used it since. I don't see how it adds anything other than more shit to remember when thinking about scale degrees. I like fep's suggestion of actually using the numbers!