Found this cool drumset notation key on DrummerTalk.org. Super useful!
Category Archives: Music Education
Everything is Everything
Watched a great lecture on the relationships between rhythm, pitch and color given by Adam Neely at Abelton’s Loop 2017 conference. It gets “out there” at times, but he pulls it all together as he demonstrates how everything is essentially rhythm.
Particularly liked this “The Color of Sound” chart from Nicolas Melendez and Clint Goss that Adam referenced. It shows the direct correlations of pitch and light frequencies. It would be cool to use this when putting together a concert’s light show!
Out in the Shed
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.
Berklee
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.
EarMaster
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.
A Different Drum
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.
The Bends
A few months ago I stumbled onto this series of videos put out by Guitarist magazine featuring Guthrie Govan giving a master class on string bending. It’s really well done and he gives a bunch of exercises to improve your bends.
I’ve incorporated the idea of bending the notes of any given scale into my daily practice. Each day the scale is different but I’ll bend my way through it. While playing up the scale (ascending), I’ll bend up to the next note. On the way down I’ll pre-bend to match the preceding note.
For those of you that aren’t familiar with Guthrie you can thank me later.
Notation
I’ve always wanted to write my musical ideas down in standard notation but each time I tried it took way too long and never seemed quite right. I bought this book back in 2004 hoping to fix that.
After trying to go through the material with my old approach (wanting to dedicate hours of study and only moving forward when I thought I had mastered each and every subject) inertia kicked in. This became yet another book that sat on a shelf for a long time with the “some day” label assigned to it in my mind.
“Some day” came and I started going through this book as part of the “little bit every day” experiment that I’ve been doing the past few months and I’m about half way through it. I have to say that it is one of the denser music books that I’ve gone through but I’m glad that I’ve stuck with it. Between this book and ear training I’ve started being able to write simple melodies from memory.
Things like nursery rhymes, holiday melodies and early Beatles songs, etc. I know it’s not the level of Quincy Jones taking a complete symphonic score and distilling it down to it’s core elements and then re-orchestrating it in all twelve keys without an instrument, just using his mind, pen & paper. But I’m happy to be moving in that direction.
Study
I have been really fortunate to have had some truly fantastic guitarists/musicians as teachers/mentors. Each had their own area of expertise (James Robinson: Flamenco and improvisation, Hristo Vitchev: Jazz and Music Theory, Doug Doppler: Metal/Rock and Modes). A common thread they all share (aside from them all being great guitarists) is their commitment to excellence as musicians. Each of them are truly masterful and I’m very grateful to have been able to have the opportunity to study with them.
Perhaps the one lesson that has become the most useful and profound is one that James Robinson shared with me. I was having difficultly making time to practice and he said “just do a little bit every day, even 5 minutes a day and you will get better over time”.
After repeatedly trying (and failing) to make myself stick to difficult and extensive regimens, I decided to try his suggestion and do a little bit every day. The past few months I’ve been doing just that and I’m starting to see a difference. I created a daily routine that covers a wide variety of subjects that I’m interested in and limit the amount of time that I spend on each of them to 5-10 minutes a day. I do some ear training, guitar studies (fretboard knowledge, chords, sight reading, bends, scales, improvisation), theory, notation, bass, keyboards (scales and chords), songwriting/chord progressions and vocal exercises. Again, each area only getting 5-10 minutes a day, period.
Is it perfect? No, but I can see that I’m making progress and am happy to have something that is manageable and easy to stick to. Also, I have plenty of time left over to do other things like writing and recording songs, which is why I want to be a better musician in the first place.
Thanks for the excellent advice, James!
The Bottom
I love great bass lines and have been fortunate to have played with some truly fantastic bassists over the years (Akil Wemusa, Doug Pohorski and Edo Castro). I bought this book years ago in the hopes of becoming somewhat competent and conversant on the subject, but never got that far with it.
Recently I decided to take another go at it and finished the book this week. Am I at the same level as one of the amazing bass players I mentioned above? Not even… but I’m feeling more comfortable in reading and writing bass lines and that’s more than I had before.