Berklee Keyboard Method

Another class that I took during the Fall Quarter of 2019 was the “Berklee Keyboard Method”. While I have “played keyboards” for years, what I was able to do was all self taught and rather limited. I knew just enough to bring my ideas for songs to fruition. This was my first formal training for the keyboard and I’m really happy that I took the class. 

A lot of ground was covered in just twelve weeks. We went over: reading parts in the treble clef/bass clef/grand staff, different hand positions, walking bass lines, melodies that moved between clefs, accidentals, hand independence, major and minor triads and their inversions, harmonizing melodies, voice leading, various chord progressions, left and right hand chords as the other hand played melodies or bass parts, left hand chord shells (Root + 3rd or 7th), seventh chords using just 3rds & 7ths, as well as some extended chords (9ths & 13ths).

Each week typically had two performance assignments to be submitted where you performed a keyboard part live via video recording. No editing, no quantizing, just the real thing. At times this was really challenging for me as I didn’t have much experience reading from the grand staff and was still developing my hand independence. 

The approach that ended up working for me was to start early in the week learning the pieces at _super_ slow tempos, like 40 bpm. This gave me enough time to interpret the grand staff, get my hands in the right place and play the parts correctly. Once some muscle memory was established I could start moving the tempo up. Towards the latter part of the course I was able to increase the tempo to performance speed within the same day. Wasn’t perfect but once I had accomplished this I knew that I could refine it over the next couple of days. 

Now I still don’t consider myself a keyboard player but I have a better understanding of and facility with the instrument which is something that I wanted for a long time.

Ear Training

As mentioned in my previous blog entry, one of the classes I took during my first term with Berklee Online was “Basic Ear Training 1”. While I had done some ear training previously this was my first “full dose” and I’m glad I took it.

We did a bunch of exercises conducting while singing in various time signatures, as well as learning to read and sing notation via Solfege, with a lot of work focused on hearing & identifying interval relationships/chord types/chord progressions/song forms and towards the latter part of the course we did a fair amount of transcription.

For me the most exciting area of development was transcribing via solfege. Not too long ago this seemed like a fantasy to me. Being able to write music free of an instrument for reference seemed like something that only someone like Quincy Jones could do. It truly was a really great moment for me in my musical life when I realized that I was doing it without trying. Granted, I wasn’t super fast with it and the melodies were rather simple, just the same I was doing it.

I still have a ways to go for all of this to be second nature but I’m happy to know that I can do it. Looking forward to the next ear training class that I’ll be taking in the upcoming term: “Harmonic Ear Training”.

Here is the daily exercise that I came up with as part of my final assignments.

Berklee Online

Last July I was accepted to the Music Composition for Film, TV and Games Degree Program at Berklee Online and December 22nd marked the end of my first term of classes. I have one word to describe my experience so far: wow. This was perhaps the most intense three months of my adult life. Pretty much all I did was study, take care of family stuff and sleep. 7 days and nights a week for 3 months. Often I would work through the night not going to sleep until 10:30am or later just to get through the coursework and assignments. 

For this term I went full time and took four classes: “Basic Ear Training 1”, “Berklee Keyboard Method”, “Music Notation and Score Preparation Using Finale” and “Music Theory & Composition 1”.  Each was challenging, interesting and covered a lot of ground in just twelve weeks. I also received prior learning credits for two additional classes (“Music Production 101” and “Producing Music with Logic”) for what I had learned on my own over the years. One key thing that I discovered through all of this is that I won’t be taking four classes in a term ever again. It was just too much. Glad I did it, but once was enough.

All that being said, the teachers were subject matter experts, the learning environment was professionally designed & implemented and the content was extensive and very well thought out. I’m super impressed and happy to be associated with the program.  

I’ll go over the specifics of each class in separate blog entries. 

The one recurring thought I had throughout this term was how I wished that I had been able to do this a whole lot sooner. A number of things that were a bit of a mystery to me for years are much clearer now (e.g. songwriting with modal interchange, transcription via solfege, do’s and don’ts of notation, voice leading keyboard parts, etc.) and I think my musical life would have taken a much different trajectory. I’m really looking forward to the next term and seeing who I become through all this.

Tone Master

The other day I went to a local guitar store with a friend of mine and came across “the one that got away”. I was beside myself when I saw this thing. I didn’t bother playing it right then as I had a strong feeling that it would be mine if I did.

You see, I have been thinking about this amp since the one and only time I heard it way back in the late 90’s. I assumed that this was a new model that would be made for years and years. Little did I know that this was a Custom Shop amp with a _very_ limited run. I never saw it again, until last week.

There isn’t much information about it online other than this from the owner’s manual:

The Fender Amp Custom Shop is dedicated to creating high quality amplification to serve top artists and discriminating players. The Tone-Master is a unique amplifier with many possibilities. On the surface it is a 100 watt, 2 channel switching “Head” amplifier. Upon further inspection one will notice many features which set it apart from anything offered before.

The Tone-Master is a hand-made, point-to-point wired, tube instrument amplifier. There are no solid- state (transistor) devices in the signal path of any kind. This amplifier was created from the efforts of a handful of top craftsmen, players and designers who saw a need and envisioned a new amplifier. Like the other Fender custom amps, the Tone-Master is painstakingly built, one at a time, by a select group of craftsmen at the Fender electronics factory in Lake Oswego, Oregon.

The Tone-Master was created for the discriminating player who requires a high powered, high volume amplifier capable of clean tones, overdriven vintage amp tones as well as heavily overdriven distortion. It has 2 independent channels, switchable via the front panel A/B switch or the footswitch (provided).

Needless to say, I did play it and now it’s mine.

Fly on the Wall (Film)

My wife, Rachel, found this fantastic video of a live orchestral film scoring session on YouTube. It’s a 2.5 hour film done @ Air Studios in London, England. Very inspiring to see how things are done at this level of professionalism, expertise and excellence.

Thanks to Christian Henson and Spitfire audio for making this available for all of us to see. Very cool, indeed!

Time

Found this really useful formula for determining a song’s total time in the Songwriting Sourcebook by Rikky Rooksby (page 170):

  1. Determine the number of beats per minute (e.g. 96BPM).
  2. Determine the number of measures per minute by dividing the BPM by the number of beats per measure (e.g. 96/4 = 24 measures per minute).
  3. Then take the total number of bars in the song and divide it by the number of measures per minute. E.g. 104 measures/24 measures per minute = 4.5m for the total time of the song.

Thanks Rikky!

Mastering

Audio mastering is a distinct discipline that I’m still getting acquainted with. While trying to wrap things up for the Equinox album I decided to see what I could do on my own and found this really helpful course on lynda.com: https://www.linkedin.com/learning/audio-mastering-techniques

Here are some of the key points that helped me with this project:

  • Mix and bounce to -10 dB, with plenty of dynamic range available. If this means removing compression/limiting on the master bus then do it.
  • Bring all mixes into a unique mastering session. Place all songs on their own tracks, each with it’s own EQ/Compression/Limiting.
  • Find the right compressor for each song tonally, using a low ratio, somewhere between 1.5:1 to 3:1. Set the threshold high enough so that the compressor kicks in, but not too hard.
  • Adjust the compressor’s attack and release settings so that drum transients are cutting through nicely.
  • Bring up the song’s level by boosting the compressor’s output gain until peaks get close to somewhere around -2 dB.
  • Apply the limiter (L2) so that the peaks are set to -2 dB with the threshold being just lightly triggered.
  • Try to shape the songs in terms of EQ and volume so that they sound “sonically related”. (Ended up cutting quite a bit ~60 Hz and below, due to bass build up.)

Note to future self: don’t use the master EQ to shape each track individually. Seemed like a time saver until I had to do revisions and had no idea what was done with songs mixed before the last bounce. Always use an inline EQ!

Enchantment

“Enchantment” is the first song from the upcoming “Equinox” album. It is also the first symphonic piece that I’ve done in a long time.

Video footage taken while visiting Mt Tamalpais (Marin County, CA), Municipal Rose Garden (San Jose, CA) and the Pulgas Water Temple (Redwood City, CA).

Here’s the backstory…

I had been wanting to do an orchestral/symphonic piece for many years now. Fortunately some of the tools available nowadays makes it possible to create something that sounds pretty compelling in terms of authenticity. 

This song started as a simple chord progression with me humming the melody. Here’s the original sketch:

Once I had decided that I was going to work on this song idea for the concert, I made a full chart with lead melody and chord progressions:

While working on pre-production of the song I watched two very helpful video courses on Groove3:

Creating Realistic MIDI Strings

Creating Epic Cinematic Compositions

The latter being particularly useful as I ended up mirroring a lot of the approach outlined in the course. 

Here are some of my notes that I referenced while bringing the track up:

  • Follow the “Rules of Harmony” (this video by Rick Beato was particularly informative: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HuSKULck394)
  • Determine parts per section (e.g. Strings, Horns, Woodwinds, Percussion, misc.)
  • Create new alternate version in Logic per section (to free up CPU resources when using the virtual instruments)
  • Stack multiple virtual instruments per section w/ different articulations to create a fuller sound
  • Quantize, humanize then scale % of quantization applied
  • Use mod wheel to write expression automation
  • Bounce to align (if necessary) 


Is This Thing Live?

I had been wanting to get more familiar with Ableton Live for quite a while and the 2019 Spring Concert was the perfect opportunity to do just that. While I love Logic Pro X for writing and production, I was intrigued by the idea of the scene based approach Live has for performance and wanted to see what I could do with it. 

Fortunately I found this excellent tutorial on Groove3: https://www.groove3.com/tutorials/Ableton-Live-10-Explained. It got me up to speed really quickly and before I knew it I was putting together the entire concert in Live.

I found Live to be a pretty straight forward (but deep) and well thought out application. It’s feels “fluid” in it’s workflow and very robust. I am looking forward to using it more in the future, particularly for coordinating music with visuals. Thanks Ableton!