The Tone and Groove Course

(You will be able to sign up for the course soon!)

Rhythm – solid grounding

Discover how attack and flow, when used with care and intention, generate powerful energy

Feel the unfolding energy of groove – the rhythmic matrix – as it carries you along, like riding a wave, as you experience its inward flow to awaken your awareness of your lifeforce and chakras

Use natural accentuation and flexibility within the nested, nonlinear structure of the rhythmic matrix to express hypnotic rhythms and grooves, varying tempo and dynamics to unlock a multitude of diverse energetic waves that you feel inwardly flowing

    1. Explore how attack and flow from the body and soul generate a musical beat. Using mantras to form underlying rhythmic patterns for developing awareness of the nonlinear structure of unfolding groove, to connect deeply with the magic of the groove to experience flow and trance states

    2. Use simple duple and triple cells to generate and express powerful, hypnotic rhythms – improvising and also using basic notation

    3. Using the 4 complete triple rhythm cells to generate more complex rhythmic patterns

    4. Using the 8 duple/quadruple rhythm cells to generate more intricate rhythmic patterns to take you even deeper

    Tone – solid grounding

    Discover how resonant tone enhances and amplifies the energy of musical flow, so that we feel it more intensely and how the different timbres correspond to specific feelings experienced in the chakras support and sustain tones that carry extraordinary energies

    Explore the magical symmetric map of tonality for the voice and the piano keyboard. Creating simple melodies with clear awareness of tonal shifts within small blocks of 3 and 4 tones, using simple staff notation or improvising

    Experience tonal centres, auxiliary tones and harmony work together within the unfolding of the rhythmic matrix or groove to create energetic lift, the magical rise and fall of music created with powerful intention.

    Expand your tonal range, working with complete harmonic, pentatonic and diatonic blocks

    Explore tonal relationships and the extraordinary way that specific harmonic tonal “places” correspond with certain chakras, and combining this with the ability to maintain unbroken focus on the matrix structure of the groove as it unfolds, learn how to generate longer, deeply healing musical meditations 

    PART 1

    1. Sonority – intention: use rhythm to make the sound feel “supported” and feel aerodynamically floating, blooming, expanding etc. Explore bi-tonal patterns with the sense of ‘home and away’, developing powerful intention built on the poetic sense of rhythmic unfolding

    2. Express simple, sublime melodies on tonal blocks of 3 & 4 tones,  to explore harmonic and auxiliary tones within the block

    PART 2

    1. Introduction to 5 sets of harmonic blocks: improvise simple patterns on single blocks within the vocal and keyboard map, exploring major and minor tonality

    2. Experience the powerful symmetry of the 5 sets to develop a deep and embodied sense of them

    3. Unlock creativity or musical storytelling through theexploration of notating patterns on single triads to create hypnotic repetitions. Discover how conscious awareness of musical (rhythmic and tonal) structure empowers and enhances the magical power of intention in music and supercharges its message

    PART 3

    1. Use relative major minor pairs of harmonic blocks nested within pentatonic (5-tone) and diatonic (7-tone) blocks to generate melodies (improvising and also using helpful notation) that explore the magic of auxiliary notes to generate a deep awareness of tonal tension and resolution

    2. Play harmonic blocks working together within diatonic families of 6 blocks, three relative major-minor pairs, a middle pair, a sharp pair and a flat pair exploring how these “places” interact within the diatonic block to express specific powerful energies that correspond to the 6 chakras – root, crown, heart, solar plexus, throat and sacrum (the third-eye chakra is constant in this practice in the form of single-pointed mental focus)