Key Degrees is a tool designed to help musicians practice and memorize key signatures.
Getting a hold on those key signatures is a great way to improve your musical knowledge and skills in all areas including the reading of number charts, and the ability to perform key changes immediately.
Many professional musicians use number charts (Nashville Numbers, Roman Numerals) to notate the songs they are to perform. One of the benefits to writing them out as numbers as opposed to using chord names is that a chart will only need to be written once. No more time wasting rewrites when your singer decides to change key on you at the last minute!
How it works:
Key Degrees will display a random and playable 4 bar chord progression. It’s your job to play through this progression on your instrument using the key signature provided.
Each number corresponds to a chord in that key signature. So for example in the key of C Major, 1 = C, 2 = Dm, 3 = Em, 4 = F, 5 = G, and so on. If you are told to play the progression 1 4 5 1 in C Major, you would play C F G C.
Levels of difficulty:
‘Beginner’ starts you off with just 3 keys and progressions containing only the degrees 1, 4, and 5.
As you work your way through the levels more degrees are added along with even more keys to test yourself on.
You dont even need your instrument in front of you to practice. Although it is ideal to play along in order to familiarize yourself with how the chords relate to each other on your instrument, you can still practice your knowledge while sitting on the bus, or waiting for your train. Any time you have a spare minute.
You Will:
-Learn to read Number Charts
-Learn your Keys and scale degrees
-Improve your sight reading
-Learn new chord progressions
-learn to transcribe songs real-time into any key