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Year 10 - Music

Fundamentals of rock

Developing understanding of pop music: rock, blues and rock 'n' roll

Unit Summary

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Lesson Summary

You will learn to describe the key features of rock and can create and develop a riff.

Key Notes

  • 1960s rock built on the foundations of rock 'n' roll and blues.
  • British bands were key to the growth of 1960s rock, including The Beatles and Rolling Stones.
  • Key features include riffs and instrumentation featuring distorted electric guitars, vocals, bass guitar and drum kit.
  • Riffs and melodies are often based around the blues scale and played in a unison texture.
  • We can extend riffs by using transposition.

Vocabulary To Learn

  • rock: Rock is a broad category of music that developed since the 1960s.
  • riff: A riff is a short recurring or repeated musical idea that forms the basis of a pop or rock song.
  • unison: When in unison, instruments play the same rhythm and pitches together (this can be in different octaves).
  • transposition: Transposition is a group of notes up or down in pitch so the intervals between the notes are the same but the pitch is different.

Common Mistakes To Avoid

  • Unison and homophonic textures are the same thing and unison parts have to be played in the same octave.

3 Quick Questions (With Answers)

1. Explain the lesson in two key points.

1960s rock built on the foundations of rock 'n' roll and blues. British bands were key to the growth of 1960s rock, including The Beatles and Rolling Stones.

2. What does this key word mean in this lesson? 'rock'

Rock is a broad category of music that developed since the 1960s.

3. Correct this common mistake.

Mistake: Unison and homophonic textures are the same thing and unison parts have to be played in the same octave. Correction: In a unison texture, both the pitch and rhythm of the part must be the same. In a homophonic texture, only the rhythm needs to be the same - the parts can play different notes or chords. Parts played in octaves are also classed as a unison texture.

More Lessons In This Unit

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