Assorted Musical Goodies
First: Making Music Magazine recently asked if I’d be willing to share one of my tutorials on their excellent site, and I told them I’d be delighted to. The lesson is entitled Piano Accompaniment Styles For 50 Great Songs, and, as they describe it:
Get started playing your favorite songs with this jam-packed video. You’ll learn the basic chords (I, IV, and V) at the heart of countless tunes, how to arrange (invert) them for maximum effect, and how to make it all come alive with rhythm and bass line. Virtually a complete course in one crystal-clear tutorial.
Starting Monday July 9th, you’ll find it here.
Secondly, as you may know, I’m forever stressing the importance of developing your ear. (As I do here, for example.) And while there are many ear training resources to be found online, perhaps none is as extensive as Musical U. The site offers a variety of strategies, including the use of solfege, the do-re-mi system familiar to anyone who’s ever seen The Sound of Music.
Solfege (also known as solf-fa) is an approach that has proven immensely useful to me, to my private students, and to countless other budding musicians over the past thousand years. (Yep—really that long.) It focuses on the “gravitational force” exerted by do (the tonic or keynote) over other notes in the scale, and helps you to recognize all the tones you hear by sensing their “need” or “desire” to resolve to do.
In the coming months, I plan to upload my own tutorials combining ear training, improv, and piano technique—a potent combination indeed.
Finally, I’ve recently discovered a free music notation application called Musescore. One of my students mentioned it, and the timing was perfect because I was in need of upgrading my ancient version of Sibelius, the industry-standard software I’ve been using for many years for creating musical scores, but which will now cost me a pretty penny to keep using.
To my surprise, Musescore—which, I repeat, is free—is much more than a toy. I’ve now composed a piano piece on it, and am using the program, at least for now, for a variety of other tasks as well. While not quite up to the standards of Sibelius in every way, there’s no question Musescore can create scores that look just as professional.
Musescore’s easy availability is also encouraging me to incorporate it into my students’ lessons. It’s a great tool for helping people learn to transcribe music—that is, learning to notate recordings by ear. Transcription is an exercise universally recognized as one of the best ways to train your ear.
Naturally, learning to use Musescore also improves one’s music reading, and it can help to make the process of learning to compose easier and more fun (not to mention cheaper).
I’m glad I found it!
