Playing songs for beginners

In this workshop, we’ll start to play some simple songs.

Let’s start at the very beginning
A very good place to start
When you sing you begin with
Do Re Mi…
On the Magic Flute with
A B C!

Practice the following first, it’s very important

	Centering To keep the Magic Flute well-centered, it’s important that, each time before you start playing, you briefly suck in air. Keep the flute horizontal and suck in lightly until two arrows appear in the display.
	Pitch This dot indicates how close you are to the center of the chosen note.

We use the first scale we encounter on the Magic Flute, “Scale Simple”. This scale consists of only 6 notes. That way you won’t lose track easily.
Scale Simple: G4 A4 B4 C5 D5 E5

During this lesson our motto will be “Learn as you do”, so let’s get started. The very first song will start with G, the lowest note in this scale.

1. Centre the flute and play

boer

4/4 means that | there are | 4 beats | to the bar |

Almost every note in this piece is 1 beat.

Except the last two notes, they take 4 beats.

They are connected to each other, using a tie. This turns them into one very long note of 8 beats. Do you have enough breath for a note of 8 beats? So there are long and short notes.

A note with one flag takes only half a beat.

Two notes of half a beat.

A “rest” means that you’re silent. This is a 1-beat rest.

This is a 2-beat rest.

2. Centre the flute and play “We will rock you”

wewillrockyou

Slow

Faster

3. Centre the flute and play “Mary had a little lamb”

maryhadalittlelamb

Slow

Faster

	This note takes 2 beats.
	And if a note is followed by a dot, it takes 1½ times as long, so this one takes 3 beats!

4. Centre the flute and play “Super trooper”

supertrooper

Slow

Faster

About intervals
Interval is a difficult word for the distance between two notes. In the two previous songs, all notes follow each other nicely on our scale. In the next song this is not true in two instances: one note has to be skipped. This makes it harder.