This is another “someday” book that sat on the shelf for many years that I decided to make time for. Been going through it, slowly, over the past year or so. Each exercise runs through all keys and usually has at least 20 rhythmic variations to do. Usually I will run through one position on the guitar for each rhythm pattern. Takes quite a while to complete just one of these exercises. Right now, I’m about two-thirds of the way through and happy that I made the effort.
Been working my way through this monster of a book over the past few months. Currently on page 105 of Volume 3 while revisiting/reviewing Volumes 1 & 2 on a daily basis. Don’t see myself as a great jazzer by any means, but it has helped my reading for sure.
I’ve been using an ear training app called EarMaster for a few months now and am starting to notice a difference in my ability to identify intervals, chord qualities, rhythms and chord progressions as well as sight sing some pitches. It’s pretty comprehensive in it’s scope and has a lot of lesson material in it.
Following up on my Feb 12 Blog entry, here’s an example of an audio track before and after applying Compression & EQ on the final version of the track.
Here is a screenshot of the settings I used:
Music Sketch #59 is dedicated to all that we have known and loved.
Picking up from my March 5th entry, here’s a video with MIDI data before and after using Logic’s “Humanize” feature. It might appear subtle to some, but to me it definitely helps loosen up the rigidity that can happen with strict quantization.
Found this really cool chart mapping instruments and their frequency ranges on Audio Issues. The accompanying article is somewhat high level but really useful in explaining the ranges as it pertains to mixing.
One thing that I have been meaning to learn more about was how to tune kick drums/low pitched drum samples to the key of a song, at the very minimum to ensure that they won’t clash with other low frequency instruments. Sometimes this can be done by ear, other times it’s good to get more analytical about it.
First determine the fundamental frequency of the drum as described in this great article on Mode Audio. This can be done by opening up a EQ with a frequency analyzer (e.g. “Channel EQ” in Logic) on the drum track in question to see where most of the energy is being displayed, like so:
Then analyze the fundamentals of any other low frequency instruments that may clash in this range.
Look up the relative note names of the frequencies on a table such as this one from Liutaio Mottola.
Then you can tune the drum using techniques outlined in Attack Magazine’s article. The highlight of this article for me was: “A neat trick for making the job a little easier here is to transpose the kick upwards by one or two octaves, do the fine tuning, then transpose it back down by the same amount. It tends to be easier to determine the pitch of the drum hit and hear how nicely it interacts with bass notes when it’s transposed up an octave or two.”
Had fun trying out the “Transform MIDI > Humanize” functionality in Logic, which I learned about through this really useful video on YouTube (starting at about 8:48).
One of the problems with not being a world class keyboardist is that I tend to rely quite heavily on quantization which is great for making things “perfect” but not so great for emulating real human performances. Essentially this “Humanize” feature randomizes your MIDI data within a defined range (default values being 10 ticks). Parameters that can be modified are “position”, “velocity” and “length”. Worked great!
One of my all time favorite artists is Peter Gabriel and my favorite record from him is his 1989 masterpiece “Passion: Music For The Last Temptation Of Christ”. Musically and sonically it stood out from everything else at the time and still sounds great today.
One of the assignments from the “Hearing & Writing Music” book that I’ve been working through was to “find examples of drums or non-pitched percussion instruments to transcribe”. I could have chosen anything but this album was the first thing I thought of and I picked the beginning section of “A Different Drum”.
At first it was daunting, but I notated a little bit a day over a few days and then played it into Logic using Native Instruments “West Africa” collection. My version is far from being “just like” the original but I like how it turned out.
Photo taken while visiting Kyoto Japan.