Teaching notes vs solfeg

The Little Lounge For Guests - No Membership Required
1

Hi there!

Not a member but I would like to teach my children the notes rather than the solfege. Is there
a customizing feature for that? And what is the benefit of teaching the solfege rather than the actual
Notes?

2

I am teaching my children notes and solfege. LMs teaches fixed “do”, and I am teaching movable “Do”. The big advantage to fixed “Do” is that in many countries, that is what they use- ie- there are no letter names, “Do” IS the notes. BrillKids is an international company, so when they were making the program they had to take that into consideration. With fixed Do, “C” is always “Do”. With movable Do, the key note is “do”. So in C major, C is “do”. In F major, F is “do”, and so forth. Everything in Semester 1 of LMs is in C major, so it doesn’t matter which kind of solfege you are teaching. I originally was going to adapt semester 2 for movable “do”, but ultimately I got lazy and just redid semester 1 again as I have other music resources we are working on. But I did make a sound file to share that may be helpful:

http://forum.brillkids.com/little-musician-general-discussion/letter-names-file/

That was the short answer. Here’s my more in-depth explanation of what the difference between movable “do” and fixed “do” is, which may also help answer your question: http://www.professional-mothering.com/2012/10/movable-vs-fixed.html

This video might help. The print-out, which you could use for movable or fixed “Do”, is available here: http://www.professional-mothering.com/2012/10/movable-piano-insert.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZjsHXzbyEGU

Also don’t forget BrillKid’s music e-book- it does a great job addressing this topic as well. http://www.brillkids.com/free-download/teaching-ebooks.php

3

The benefit is that solfege is MUCH more singable! The nursery rhymes in LMs are set up to be used in solfege and they are so much fun to sing with your little one. Having said that, you CAN customize the program to set it to use note letter names instead, but I don’t recommend it. :slight_smile: I have taught my children both and they are “bilingual” in that they understand it (many kids music DVDs that are educational use CDE rather then do re mi), but we always use solfege in our house for playing and teaching.