Study Hub

Study Guides

This pupil-friendly study guide includes a unit summary, clear notes, common mistakes, and quick questions with answers.

Back to Study HubBrowse Year 9 Music Guides

Year 9 - Music

Recreating Blinding Lights by ear

Working out pop hooks and riffs by ear

Unit Summary

This unit focuses on developing pupils' ability to work out simple melodic ideas from modern pop and rock songs by ear. It introduces techniques for accurately recreating rhythm and pitch patterns, and also develops their understanding of how to recreate specific timbres accurately.

Lesson Summary

You will learn to recreate a drum part and hook by ear.

Key Notes

  • Drum beats can be recreated by ear by using similar techniques to working out a melodic line.
  • Breaking it into small chunks and trying to pick out individual instruments or lines helps.
  • Blinding Lights has a typical pop drum groove, with a snare backbeat, repeated hi-hats and kick emphasising 1 and 3.
  • The hook uses a synth lead and has syncopated rhythms.

Vocabulary To Learn

  • Hook: a short, memorable musical idea that recurs in a pop song; it is designed to 'catch' the ear of the listener
  • Synth lead: a type of synthesiser that is well suited to playing melodic lines
  • Syncopated: a rhythm that emphasises notes in between the main beats

Common Mistakes To Avoid

  • All drum grooves have exactly the same rhythms in the kick, snare and hi-hat.

3 Quick Questions (With Answers)

1. Explain the lesson in two key points.

Drum beats can be recreated by ear by using similar techniques to working out a melodic line. Breaking it into small chunks and trying to pick out individual instruments or lines helps.

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

a short, memorable musical idea that recurs in a pop song; it is designed to 'catch' the ear of the listener.

3. Correct this common mistake.

Mistake: All drum grooves have exactly the same rhythms in the kick, snare and hi-hat. Correction: Many typical drum grooves do have the same features or features very close to this, however encourage pupils to identify where there are subtle differences and how the kick, snare and hi-hat patterns can be varied within these features.

More Lessons In This Unit

Browse all guides in the Year 9 Music guide library.