12 Weeks with Bach
Each week takes one piece of Bach and spends seven days on it. You meet the man who wrote it and the job he wrote it for. You learn the one idea the piece runs on, you go and listen to something that will surprise you, and you put a short passage under your fingers. Nothing is graded. It is a plan you follow with the page open beside you.
It is for a player who can already get around the instrument and wants the music to start making sense: why that note, and why there. Reading standard notation is not required, since every piece with a page on this site has the tab written under the notes. A mandolin and about half an hour are.
A week is seven cards. Each says how long it takes, usually twenty to thirty five minutes, and gives you a few things to do and one question to answer in writing. Two of the seven days are listening and reading rather than playing. Skip those and the playing days teach less than they should.
This is a workbook, and a workbook is paper. Nothing on it listens. The lessons, and the checks on your playing, are in the app.
How to use this workbook
- One day a day. A card is one sitting. When the sitting is done, close the page.
- Do not read ahead. Friday assumes you spent Wednesday and Thursday with the notes, and the surprise it is built around only works once.
- Do not skip the listening and the story to get to the tab. They are half of what the week teaches.
- A week ends on Sunday and not before. If you miss a day, do that day next. Do not double up.
The weeks
- Week 1Hearing the Invisible HarmonySeven days of listening, playing, and theory, built around one short piece that holds more than it lets on.
- Week 2The Question and the AnswerSeven days of listening, playing, and theory, for hearing a cadence as punctuation.
- Week 3Building Music From Little IdeasSeven days of listening and playing, for hearing the machinery inside the music.
- Week 4The Beautiful Wrong NoteSeven days of listening and playing, for hearing tension, putting a wrong note where it belongs, and feeling the pull home.
- Week 5Where the Beat LivesSeven days of listening and playing, for feeling the pulse under the motion, dividing the beat, and phrasing across it.
- Week 6Stop Hearing Notes. Hear Shapes.Seven days of listening and playing, for turning contour, interval, and layered melody into a practical fretboard map.
- Week 7Make the Melody SpeakSeven days of listening and playing, for separating the melody itself from what a musician does to make it speak.
- Week 8The Ancient SoundSeven days of listening and playing, for hearing tonal center, minor color, pedal tones, chromatic tension, and the layered drama behind the famous opening.
- Week 9Chords Have FamiliesSeven days of listening and playing, for going beneath the famous melody to hear diatonic harmony, a singing bass, inversions, suspensions, and the voices moving inside every chord.
- Week 10Put It All TogetherSeven days of listening and playing, for hearing the design, choosing the gesture, and playing the theme like a musician.
- Week 11You're in the BandA seven-day listening and playing plan for hearing music as conversation.
- Week 12You Can Hear It NowThe foundations finale: a seven-day listening plan that turns eleven weeks of vocabulary into independent musical understanding.
Twelve weeks, and the workbook is whole. It opens on the Chaconne and closes on the fifth Brandenburg Concerto, with the Chaconne heard once more at the end.
Each week is written up after it has been played through a day at a time, so the plan on the page is one that was followed, with the rough edges sanded off afterward.