Jammer playing basics, part 1: Basic navigation rules, and hand placement, along with a useful commentary.
DRAFT - open for comments - updated Feb 25, 2013
Overall Navigation
The jammer-field and harmonics
The jammer key-field at first looks pretty bland and featureless; it's 'nothing' more than an array of note-making keys that go up in whole-tone step from left-to-right, and up by fifths in a diagonal direction.
You'll soon find however, that the very act of playing something on it reveals a solid musical structure; each note has a musical color or texture, partly on its own, partly relative to other notes. This texturing/coloring is inherent in music, its just well hidden on the piano and most conventional instruments. I contend that because it is hidden, musicians normally learn this structure slowly, in small, unconcious steps.
The closest analogy I know: it's much like switching from working with Roman numbers to Hindu-Arabic numerals; The underlying numbers / notes haven't changed, they are just expressed and placed in a way that greatly supports working with them, which makes all the difference. For more details see: The Basis of Harmony.
Perhaps you can get a hint of this buy looking at the diagram to the right, which shows the harmonics of a note and where they fall on a jammer key-field. chords and arpeggios follow this line of notes.
The rows
The middle three rows, the Root, Dominant, and Octave are where your fingers will be spending most of their time.
I call this the Core. Just four fingers can reach an quite decent octave and a half worth of notes without moving the hand: the FGAB, BbCDE and two notes on either side; the Eb & Ab on the left and the F# & C# or the right (not shown in the diagram). This is an amazing 18 keys . . . and that's not even using the thumb, which can reach easily 6 to 8 more keys.
Quibles: the Ab to the bottom left, E and F# to the top right can some times be a stretch; the little finger is a bit short, but this is a very good range indeed. Compare to the span of reach on the piano, usually 13 keys.
"Core" core rows
Of special significance is just two core rows: either the Root and Dominant, or their inversion; the Dominant and Octave. Any 2 Core rows have all the notes of the scale. Thus all of the basic chords can be made.
Going farther a-field you can talk about sub- dominant, sub-octave. and the teritory above, the double-octave area. These are not important to the beginning player.
Also of note is the line of close harmony: this is an important musical concept. On the jammer it slopes to the right and is about 2 rows high. This region is the band where the notes and the relative volume of the notes' harmonics are close enough in pitch and intensity that they merge into, yes, harmony.
Columns
Key-centre column
- Key core; the zig-zag line of the root and dominant notes.
- The Backbone or Extended Key core; ; the zig-zag line of the root, dominant and sub-dominant notes. (pic needed)
- Major side; The white keys
- Minor side; the black keys
- the minor and major lines:
the zig-zag line paralleling the key core on the other, the minor side, a minor third down from the root and the dominant, In the Key of C, the notes are Eb and Ab
in the Key of Amin (pic) - the zig-zag line paralleling the key core, consisting of the major third to the root and the major third to the Dominant, this last is also thought of as the major 7th.
in the key of C this is the E and B (pic) - Between the major line and the Backbone is a more dissonant region, I whimsically call it the gap.
Hand postitioning.
Fingers 
- natural fall of the fingers lies on the axis of "close harmony" - this is very good ergomonics.
Also able to play most inversions.
Thumb
On the major scale, the thumb is very nicely placed to play the notes of the backbone. Indeed the thumb can play 2 musically useful (Root and (sub)dominant) notes at a go. This appears to be very handy. Note that the thumb has access to a range of 2 octaves of notes - without interfering with the ability of the fingers to play the notes they need to.
However in minor keys, it's not so well placed. I'm not sure how much of a problem this presents.
Chord parts
- Just as the key imposes a “core and wings” structure on the notes of the bland W/H note-field.
- Most chords themselves have a “base” and “point” structure on the notes, with the base being the chord root and its dominant or sub dominant and the point being the third or minor third of the chord.
This holds regardless of the inversion. - Major 7ts and minor 7th chords have a double wing notes
- 7th chords also have a wing.
- Diminished and Augmented chords have a double-wing structure, with augmented being straight-across, and diminished “tilted” to the right.
Once you know the shape of the chords, and the base & point structure, you automatically know what you are playing.
This Fingering
- Keeps the fingers from tripping over each other
- Maintains the hand and fingers on the key center and key axis
- Generally speaking, each finger has an assigned set of keys that it usually hangs around on, the middle fingers for example presses the tonic and dominant 95% percent of the time, while the little fingers press the mediant and the leading-tone.
- Assists both in learning to play, and in ear-training.
- With the help of a few marks on the keys, to never have to look at the keys, a great assistance to learning to play.
Guidelines
Keep the fingering right!
- how to deal with fingers moving between adjacent keys (e.g. C to G)
Exceptions
- Arpeggios
Advantages
- Unique to be able to largely keep ones fingers centered over the key center, instead of moving all over the place.
- Single note
Techniques
Singling vs. Doubling
Fingering chord bases: using one finger to press two keys (doubling) vs. using a finger for each key (singling) of the chord base.
It’s not an either one or the other condition:
- Doubling: generally, there is a significant reduction of the needed finger travel, the reach when doubling, over singling: you can get there faster.
- Singling: On the other hand, singling a chord gives more finger control over the sound of each note, which is significant on slower passages.
- Doubling quirks has the disadvantage, at least in the novice player, of requiring high precision in placing the tip of the finger into the gap between the keys. Even a .5 mm shift can cause one note to be muted. This slow one down.
- In practice it’s not hard to train oneself to switch automatically between the techniques.
I estimate that doubling gives about a 20% boost to the player in playing dexterity / speed trade-of - very good.
Practicing
Scales - Demo required for each one.
- major
- Minor (don’t bother with harmonic and melodic at this point.
- Minor and major pentatonic
- Chord scales: progress
- Chromatic – useful
Musical snippets
- Simple ascending and descending two-note progressions
- major
- Minor (don’t bother with harmonic and melodic at this point.
- Minor and major pentatonic
- Chord scales: progress through the Series I ii ii IV V vi vii(dim) I
- Inversion practices.
Question - which is better?
- Keeping the hand on the same keys and changing the notes underlying the keys?
- Moving the hand to the notes?
Things to avoid
- Any one thing too much!
The reason is that the fingers get skilled in doing, say scales, and it becomes too easy to play them, the movement can be triggered at the wrong time; the overdone technique becomes a bad habit.
Hidden rules
At this point it's time to mention that you have to be cautious about how notes are played: there are some hidden traps. I once demonstrated the worlds most basic three-chord progression to some peofessional musicians and knew that somehow I had blown it; their politeness spoke volumes. How could I have botched something so simple? Easy, when there are a number of hidden rules to making close harmony and progressions.
The progression is technically the sequence I-IV-V-I. In my demo, I played these major chords, in standard root position; C , then F, then G, then back to C? What could be complicated about this?
My wife ever-so-gently disabused me (but still had a tinge of I-can't-believe-that-I-have-to-explain-something-so-obvious - this was something she learned somewhere between the age of 5 and 10). The really annoying thing was I had technically known the rules, but had not applied them to practice!
The rule is just this: subtle motion, changing as little as possible sounds a lot cooler than big crashy jumps.
...more to come
(*) side comment - any time a rule is mentioned, this is an opportunity for you, the composer: break the rule carefully and you may have something new and exciting. The Beatles did this, just to drop a name. One group that very successfully vilolated this rule is Level 42. (link to song needed)
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