The Most Simple, Yet Most Effective Musical Exercises.

Music is an interplay of three sonic realms: Melody, harmony, and rhythm.

Music is also a language, which is an interplay of phrases, concepts, and expression.

In language, whether it be natural language or music, expression is often dismissed, but it has the power to transform a simple phrase or concept into something completely different. In musical terms,  the use of expression in musical language is often called "phrasing".

Phrases and phrasing are two different things. Phrases are "what" you play, and phrasing is "how" you play it. With the realms of melody, harmony, and rhythm in mind, a simple concept in any category can be expressed in innumerable ways.

Example 1 - Rephrasing of a rhythmic pattern:

This is quite a simple beat. A bass drum being played in crotchets in 4/4 timing. What we want to do from here is dismiss the particular drum being played, yet retain the rhythmic pattern.

Doing so can provide results such as these:

Example 2 - Rephrasing of a melodic pattern:

The melodic equivalent of the previous exercise is to have a selection of pitches or intervals, retain their specific ordering, but change their rhythmic allocation. With a simple ascending C Major scale such as this one.

 

We can make alterations like these:

Example 3 - Rephrasing of patterns in harmony:

And lastly. All one has to do to rephrase harmony is to keep a tonal reference and choose other pitches to accompany it. The most basic harmonic concept would be that of a C major chord, whose tonal centre is C.

By retaining C as a tonal reference, alterations such as these are possible:

What's great about this way of recontextualising your musical ideas is that you're building off a reference point. Therefore, every new idea is interrelated, giving you great command over your musical choices and familiar interpretation of all sorts of musical patterns that could otherwise be foreign and challenging.