I love it.

Mixed Berries: come blow your horn!

And PhyllisVance is a musical type too, no?

I see this as a thread with real potential.

I wish that I could learn to play my keyboard. I'm at the Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star level. That gives me two songs in one, Twinkle and The Alphabet song. I've got it set to Clarinet and I'm trying to do A Stranger On The Shore. Learning to read music is like learning another language. I don't have the patience. I just want to be able to do it, but anything good, doesn't come easy. Sometimes I wish that I was like Samantha and could just wiggle my nose and things would happen. My house would be so clean right now.

Here's mine.
Quietly
Ba dahhh da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da
Ba dahhh da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da
LOUDER
BAH DAHHH! DA-DA-DA-DA-DA-DA-DA-DA-DA-DA
BAH DAHHH! DA-DA-DA-DA-DA-DA-DA-DA-DA
Quieter
Dahhh
I'm not sure, I think I missed one line. But at least I'm on key.

Now there's some sheet music even I can read. By George, I think I've got it.

I should figure out what it is in solfege. Actually, I'd rather not.

OK, what I first had was wrong. I'll go listen again and repost.

Start at the top of the scale.
Do_ ti do ti la_ sol la sol fa mi_ re mi re do. Fa fa fa fa mi re mi do.

When you know the notes to sing. You can sing most anything.

*Edited because markdown screwed it up.

The first do is a pick up beat; the all caps mean the upper octave.

do DO.....ti DO ti sol la.... fa fa fa fa mi re mi do. do
DO.....ti Do REti la.... fa fa fa fa mi re mi do.

More or less. The accompaniment is basically I, vi, IV, I. I feel like there's a middle part I am missing but I have Miss E., Crab to go feed.

What is the upper octave? Do you mean the black keys on the keyboard? Or are you talking strictly voice?

I'm just talking scales. I don't know the code for indicating that the song uses two octaves and you need a couple notes above the top "do." I think it's in G, which means only one black note on a keyboard (ti: F sharp).

I looked up guitar tablature for it awhile back, and I concur that it is in G.

Yeah, it's in G. I know, cos I just did a remix, took it down five steps, and now it's in C.

Here's that: The Rotfang Conspiracy does "Theme from 'The Office'".

KarenM, I'm doing it! I translated your do, re, mi's into C,D,E's and it actually is starting to sound pretty good! What is an F sharp though? I just played a regular F. How do you know when you need to use the black keys? Isn't ti a B note? I don't want to trouble you if you're busy.

If you start on G, you need the F# for ti. If you start on C, everything you said above is right.

If you start on C, the accompaniment chords should be C (I), A minor (vi), F (IV), and then C. C chord = CEG. A min = ACE. F = FAC.

In G, the chords are G (I), E minor (vi), and C. G = GBD, E min = EGB, C = CEG.

Those "doody-doo" chords at the beginning are the accompaniment. You can play the notes of the chords in any number. Usually you get one doody-doo per chord, except the second time you play the I chord you doody-doo it a couple of times.

And if that makes sense to anyone...

Now I'll show off with my lesson in black notes. You use black notes depending on what key you are in or what chord to play.

A major scale consists of the following intervals:
first note, whole step, whole step, half step, whole step, whole step, whole step, half step.

A whole step is when you start on one key (either white or black), skip a key (either white or black), and play the next key. A half step is when you go directly to the next key. C to D is a whole step. E to F is a half step. E to F sharp is a whole step. F sharp to G is a half step. F sharp to G sharp is a whole step.

An augmented step is when you skip two keys. G sharp to B is an augmented step. (Actually, that would be A flat to B is an augmented step. G sharp to B is a minor third because a note would appear between them in a scale.)

A natural minor scale is composed of the following intervals:
first note, ws, hs, ws, ws, hs, ws, ws.

A harmonic minor (the one you usually hear in popular music): first note, ws, hs, ws, ws, hs, augmented step, hs.

Chords are numbered based on what note of the scale you are on. A chord is a base note with two thirds. They get Roman numerals. Upper case means a major chord, a lower case means a minor chord. The Roman numeral is just the number of the note on the scale.

In C major, CDEFGABC (no black keys), a C chord is CEG. It is the I chord. In C minor, the chord is CEflatG, and it is the i chord. The V chord in a major scale is always major because the notes that would make the stacked thirds are all the notes that would be in a major scale starting on that note. In the key of C, the V chord is GBD (it is major because all the notes appear in a G major scale). In the key of C, the vi chord, (ACE) are minor because the notes C and E appear in the A minor scale.

So if you know something is in G major and you see the chord progression I, vi, IV, I, you know the chords are G (first note of the scale), E minor (because E is the sixth note of the scale and the triad EGB appear in the E minor scale and not the E major scale) and C major (because the notes CEG appear in the G scale).

do, re, mi, fa, sol, la, ti, do are just the stand-ins for any scale. Do is always the first note; sol is always the fifth.

Got it? Everything else is just practice. Really. It helps if you have a keyboard in front of you when you read this.

If somebody figures out the song from the "Dwight Schrute Army" video on NBC.com, I'll really be impressed.

KarenM, I'm going to print my music lesson you gave me and try to learn it. Thanks. I've been playing it and I thought it was sounding real good until my son heard it and thought that I was playing Over The Rainbow.

Nice, KarenM! That's movable do. At my school we sing fixed do, which means C is always do, but we also sing on numbers with 1 being scale degree one and so (ha!) on until sev for seven. They use this system outside the US and our teachers are from Canada and Brazil. I like it, its nice to think about the notes in both their position in the scale and on the staff. It really helps with sight reading. (Sometimes, when we play slow stuff in orchestra I like to think the solfege in my head.)

ToasterOven, Over the Rainbow does start with an octave leap and a minor second down too, so... you've got the beginning down at least! ;-)

Let me think... we would sing~ so SO, fa SO fa re mi, do do do ti la ti so

As a piano player, it seems that I spent the first five minutes of any lesson doing scales. When I was the show choir accompanist the singers were always wanting to transpose the music. Hence the mindset of the moveable do for me. I had a feeling there was code I didn't know, but are you capitalizing the letters above because I did or because that's the notation that I guessed correctly?

If somebody figures out the song from the "Dwight Schrute Army" video on NBC.com, I'll really be impressed.

Where is it? I want to hear it now that I know there's a Dwight Schrute Army. I sort of looked around but it didn't pop out at me.

DftF: I forgot about your musicality. Musicness? Does it define you? I digress. I came here to say bonne chanson. And I really like the music on your site, which I don't believe I told you before.

Merci beaucoups.

I just stole your idea, KarenM. We use solfege when we are reading music, so I didn't have any way to express the leap. :-) We are supposed to just look at the music and sing it on solfege kind of by sight, so we only write it out as an occasional hint for ourselves. If we were singing this song in class without sheet music we'd use the numbers, but solfege sounds cooler. (But most schools use moveable do in the US anyway, KarenM. I think fixed do is kind of like the metric system of music.)

Imagine me as Julie Andrews, Brian:
do, a deer, a deer Micheal hit with a shovel
re, I can't think of an office line
mi, a girl who likes the Office
fa, what you say when you get hit in the stomach (by Dwight)
so, this is really hard (TWSS)
la, because these syllables are to short
ti, a drink with JAM and (very good) bread
and that brings us back to do

Solfege is the system musicians use to sing the scale on syllables. When you mix up the notes then you keep the appropriate words with their notes, so you get patterns like the ones KarenM and I wrote out for the theme song. (If we have any aspiring Oscar and Hammersteins, they could come up with the lines I missed.)

I play guitar

Oh good... we need an acoustic rendition, Brian. I'll be checking in for it.

Sounds like a challenge. It's been a while, so I'll need time to learn to play again first. Of course if I can break down the various parts, record them separately and mix them, I bet I could make a killer ring tone.

Copied and pasted in case you forget. I think this spells a commitment, Brian. We'll be dimming the house lights for you very soon.