Software Tools (and Toys) Part II

It’s time to reappreciate the original software: paper. –Dale Dauten

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Why shouldn’t we give our teachers a license to obtain software, all software, any software, for nothing? Does anyone demand a licensing fee, each time a child is taught the alphabet? –William Gibson (b.1948)

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Here are some more software titles. Some of these can make your musical life easier, some can help make it more fun, and some will even help you with practice. Whenever possible, I try to list the free, open-source stuff because that is the model that makes the most sense to me. Here you go. Enjoy!

Notation:

Noteflight: This is a free notation program that is pretty new, but very useful. For some of the more advanced features you have to pay but you can do a lot before you get to this point. I’m just now beginning to explore this and it looks great so far. And it’s free! Great tools for sharing music, and the web site is superb. This one is going to be around for a while, I bet. You may need to look no further for your music writing software. You have to register to use it, but it’s a small price to pay (and the only price to pay!). Highly recommended.

Sibelius: This is one of the grandaddies of notation software. It’s a fantastic, powerful piece of software, but it’s expensive. It allows you to enter and print music as simple as a 4 measure melody or as complex as a piece for full symphony, turntable, and singing dogs, or whatever you dream up. And with some exceptions (like the singing dogs), the program comes with instruments so you can hear what your composition sounds like. Out of the box these sounds are a little cheesy, but you can buy (of course) upgrades to get a full range of symphonic instruments. You can transpose w/ a click of the button, scan in printed music, and there are 1,700 quizzes built in that come with the program. This is just a brief glimpse of a few of its features, but if you’re interested check it here. There is also a free viewer called Scorch which allows you to view uploaded scores for free.

Finale: Another of the biggies. Finale is said to have better scanning capability than Sibelius, but I haven’t tested this myself, so I’m not sure. No scanning system is perfect (yet), but they’re certainly getting better. Finale is very similar to Sibelius. You can check it out here. Finale has several different versions and this makes for a little less expense, especially if you don’t need all the power necessary for full-on symphonic orchestra reproduction. There is also a free viewer, and their Notepad works great and is only ten bucks.

Composition/Mashup

All of this software won’t necessarily help you practice, but they’re fun to work with and you can actually create something original that you can then play along with. Many of these are cloud-based, meaning they exist entirely online and you don’t need to download or install any software, a fantastic idea that’s gaining a lot of traction. Your files can be saved either in the cloud (usually) or on your own machine (definitely).

Aviary: This company offers a bunch of free tools but the one that interests us here is their audio editor. It’s a track-based program in which you can create loops, record stuff of your own and manipulate it in all kinds of ways. A fantastic and powerful tool/toy that will suck you in and have you spending all kinds of fun time creating music.

Bojam: An open-source ethic drives this very cool tool. This site allows musicians to collaborate no matter where in the world they make music. If you’re stuck in rural Alaska (like I was) and want (need!) to play with others, this is the perfect tool. Also great for the recluse who still wants to be social. There’s a vid demonstrating how this works on their home page.

eJamming Audio: Another online collaboration tool that lets you play with others in real time. Haven’t tried this one, but it clearly harnesses the power of the Internets to connect people in meaningful ways from all over the planet.

Okay, that’s all I have time for now, but there’s a lot more to come, so stay tuned. If you know of any sites you like, shoot me an e-mail and let me know. I’m always psyched to check out new software.

Have fun and good luck!

Your Plastic Brain

I used to think the brain was the greatest organ in the body, then I realized who was telling me this.   –Emo Phillips

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What we know about the brain is changing rapidly as we bend our ever-increasing computer processing power to the task of scanning brain activity at higher and higher resolutions. One thing we’ve learned is that the brain remains plastic as we age. Learning changes its structure.

A recent study titled “Training induces changes in white-matter architecture,” was published October 11 in the neuroscience section of Nature (and “translated” by ABC Science here). The study looked at the growth of white matter in the brains of young adults learning to juggle. Yes, jugglers. They found significant differences in the brains of jugglers who were encouraged to practice 30 minutes a day over the course of a 6 week training period. Of course, we can assume (as long as we’re not hard-core empiricists) this holds true for other disciplines, too, like music.

Other studies confirm this, and extend the brain’s plasticity well into old age. I’ll post more about this fascinating topic soon.

No matter how old you are, you can still learn.

Software Practice Aids

If the automobile had followed the same development cycle as the computer, a Rolls-Royce would today cost $100, get a million miles per gallon, and explode once a year, killing everyone inside. –Robert X. Cringely

The question of whether computers can think is like the question of whether submarines can swim. –Edsgar W. Dijkstra

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There is a lot of software out there that can be of great help when you practice. In fact, there are so many great programs that this will have to be an ongoing post because there are too many to get to in just one post. Today’s post I’ll cover a few that are free or cheap, and one that is a bit more expensive, but very useful. Here we go:

Music Theory:

You can read my first book Basic Music Theory: How to Read, Write, and Understand Written Music for free in its entirety here.

MusicTheory.net is a great and easy-to-use flash-based site for beginning music theory.

Intonation and Recording:

GarageBand: If you own a Mac you already have an excellent piece of software you can use to record. Many tutorials will show you how (it’s pretty darn easy).

Audacity: I’ve talked about this one before and have posted tutorial vids of my own about it. If you want to go get your own free copy to play with, watch this vid below:

Intonia: I just discovered this great piece of software called Intonia. It was developed for strings but works for any instrument. You play and it shows you whether you’re in tune or not. It records what you’ve played so you can go back to look at it, or you can use it in real time to adjust your pitch. It’s free for 30 days and if you want to keep using it, it’s only $25.

Playalong:

Band-in-a-Box has been around for a while (it was invented by a dentist, but don’t let that scare you away) and is a pretty handy tool, especially if you’re trying to learn how to improvise or to play with others. It’s one of the more expensive programs, however, ($99-$349) but I find it quite useful. You enter chord names, choose from hundreds of musical styles, and the machine creates a backup band for you to jam with. Recent additions to the BBX tools use recordings of actual musicians for a more  realistic sound. There are add-ons that can be easily found (often for free) that have a suite of pre-entered chord progressions. I have the entire Real Book series, for example (Real Books are a large collection of jazz standards). I just open up a tune like ‘Round Midnight and away I go. Lots of tutorials out there for this program, too.

Okay, that should keep you busy for a while. Have fun and good luck!

Book Review: “Effortless Mastery” by Kenny Werner

Creating a new theory is not like destroying an old barn and erecting a skyscraper in its place. It is rather like climbing a mountain, gaining new and wider views, discovering unexpected connections between our starting points and its rich environment. But the point from which we started out still exists and can be seen, although it appears smaller and forms a tiny part of our broad view gained by the mastery of the obstacles on our adventurous way up. — Albert Einstein

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Effortless Mastery: Liberating the Master Musician Within
by Kenny Werner

I have to make the disclaimer that reading this book resulted in a sea change that deeply affected my philosophy and approach to teaching, learning, playing, and listening to music. It came along at just the right time to make a big impact on me and because of this, I had to revisit it as I think about The Practice of Practice. In my re-reading of Werner’s book I see again a wisdom and a reverence for Music that still shines through. I still recommend the book highly, but on the re-reading I notice some things that may turn off some readers, and I’d like to address these because even if you have a gem in a pile of dirt, you’ll still want to sift through the dirt so you can put that gem in your pocket to dazzle people with later.

That metaphor is a little strong, though; I wouldn’t necessarily call it “dirt” when KW gets a little preachy. It’s kind of touching if taken in the right spirit. Werner has a very spiritual approach to music that at times borders on what a friend of mine calls, “hippy, trippy-dippy, New-Agey nonsense.” I don’t believe that is true about most of the book, but I can see where he’s coming from. Don’t let that turn you off. Especially useful in this book are Werner’s thoughts on how fear can (and usually does at some point) affect one’s playing, and even the way one listens to music. Fear of any sort doesn’t result in good playing and it may well force you into quitting altogether. This is bad. If you can get a handle on fear early in your pursuit (or at any phase of your journey), you’re better off than most.

Werner’s chapters on fear start around page 51, so if  can’t get into the earlier material, skip ahead to these gems which are worth the price of the book. The chapter titles are: 5–Fear, the Mind, and the Ego, 6–Fear-Based Practicing, 7–Fear-Based Teaching, 8–Fear-Based Listening, and 9–Fear-Based Composing. After writing eloquently and persuasively about how fear can hamstring our playing, Werner then offers a solution to help deal with the fear, which may well never go away. He offers up some meditations and ways of thinking that can help you get over those fears, and though some of it may sound New-Agey, I can tell you it’s worked well for me, though I’ve altered his philosophy slightly to fit my own beliefs more closely.

The book’s focus is on jazz improvisation, but this is just a way to focus the conversation. The wisdom within these 191 pages can be used by any musician of any level. The notion that “there are no wrong notes” is something anybody and everybody should attempt to adopt in their exploration of sound. Despite the sometimes preachy nature of the book, it is one of my more highly recommended books for those who want to play music. Hope you like it.  Hope it’s helpful.

Have fun. Good luck.

Deaf Musicians?

It amazes me what some people have gone through in order to play music, and it makes me realize (once again) that the passion and drive to have music in one’s life is more powerful than more paltry things like knowledge of how to practice. One researcher whose name slips me at the moment, calls it “the rage to master.” It seems as though being deaf might be the greatest challenge–possibly insurmountable–to overcome if one wants to make music because you have to have hearing to make music, right? Wrong.

The first deaf musician who comes to mind is Evelyn Glennie, award-winning percussionist. Here’s a fantastic talk she did on listening at a TED conference:

And then consider Patrick, a guy who lost his hearing and still wanted (needed?) to play, so he rested his teeth (yes, his teeth!) on his guitar so the vibrations would travel through his skull to help him hear better. This one is a long vid, but if you skip to 6:40, the nurse/technician tells him how the hearing implant bolted to his skull works.Then at around 24:30 Patrick plays his guitar and for the first time in over ten years he’s able to hear it without using his teeth. Awesome! I hope these inspire you even half as much as they inspired me.

A Key to Practicing Tunes in All Key Signatures

If you want to really learn a tune, you should learn it in every key. Start by learning it in all the regular keys, like Bb, C, D, etc. Basically, the regular keys are those with the least amount of accidentals.

On a side note, learning tunes in all keys also includes, indirectly, learning scales in all keys, too, but we’ll save that for a future post.

In my opinion, one of the best ways to learn tunes is by ear. They stick better in your memory, and your ears [actually, your brain] will become much better at recognizing sounds and finding them with your instrument. You can use Audacity–the free program I’ve mentioned before–to change the key of a tune you’re learning. Below is one of my Audacity tutorials that shows you how to do this. Hope you find it useful.

Wind = Music

Most of us in the United States have resources beyond the wildest dreams of billions of other people less fortunate in the world. Our technology and relative wealth allow us the time to study music or other arts, to surf the Internet, to speak with friends and loved ones at the touch of a button.

Imagine that musical ability is a kind of resource, a resource that is not somehow either inside of you or not, it’s a resource you can go out and discover, learn how to do, and make for your very own, eventually creating your own music. This isn’t just blowing smoke, it’s true and a lot of recent research supports this notion, the notion that “talent” is merely practice disguised. This is over-simplifying, of course, but talent isn’t the topic of this post.

Consider the following story if you feel you don’t have the music resources of your own, especially if you think “talent” is a resource. The electricity magically appearing from your wall socket that powers your guitar amplifier (or insert favorite gizmo here) is a resource. What would you do if you didn’t have it? The following video might help you rethink what is possible.

My favorite part of the story is that when William began building, people thought he was crazy, but when they realized that what he built meant they would be able to listen to music, they began to support him. We need music in our lives and there are as many paths to getting the “resources” to make music as there are people. What resources and knowledge are around you that you can take advantage of and harness for your own benefit, and the benefit of your friends and family, and for all of us?

The instruments you hear are African. The first instrument you’ll hear is a kalimba, or mbira (which are actually 2 different types of instrument), also known as a thumb piano, very easy to make and fun to play with.

I hope you enjoy the video and it sparks you to make your own opportunities like William did.

The book telling William’s story is called, The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind (click for an excerpt)

Thoughts on Art and Hip Hop

Art is the most intense mode of individualism that the world has known. –Oscar Wilde.

I am for an art that takes its forms from the lines of life itself, that twists and extends and accumulates and spits and drips and is heavy and coarse and blunt and sweet and stupid as life itself. –Claes Oldenburg (1929-)

Do not imagine that Art is something which is designed to give gentle uplift and self-confidence. Art is not a brassiere. At least, not in the English sense. But do not forget that brassiere is the French word for life-jacket. — Julian Barnes (1946-), English writer. Flaubert’s Parrot.

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Every artistic discipline that strives to say something needs practice and some deep thinking if true Art is to be made (as opposed to mere commerce).

Here’s a video clip of a conversation between Matt Lauer and the brilliant and insightful scholar Michael Eric Dyson about the soul of Hip Hop in support of Dyson’s new book, Know What I Mean?: Refletions on Hip-Hop.

Forget Perfection (or, No Fear)

Artists who strive for perfection in everything are those who cannot attain it in anything.  –Eugene Delacroix

[M]aybe the most any of us can expect of ourselves isn’t perfection but progress.   –Michelle Burford

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Baja Sur, 2001, 8 miles south of Todos Santos at the point break called Los Cerritos I am floating on my board for the evening surf session and it’s my turn in the lineup. The sun glows orange close to the horizon and the angle of light throws the sea into a fractured mosaic of bright spangles and dark shadows. Here comes my wave. It’s big, but they always look big when you’re belly down on the surface of the sea. I know this break well enough now that I can place myself exactly where I need to be to catch the wave with minimum effort. A delicious anxiety clamps my gut as I turn and paddle, making slight adjustments to my position to be sure I’m in the right spot where the wave will thrust upward and crest, breaking in a hiss and foam that will shoot me down its face and towards shore as long as I don’t screw it up.

The sun is bright on the water and on the beach in front of me when something huge and moving towards me  from behind blocks out the sun. The wave. Something about this wall of water big enough to blot out the sun gives me a primal reaction of fear. The fight-or-flight jolt of adrenaline surges through my system and this thing–this massive wall of water–is too big to fight, so flight is the only option. I feel myself rise and then fall past the point of no return, so I pop up and race down the face of the wave for the bottom turn and the fear has vanished. There is no time for it. It returns when I pearl at the bottom of the wave and am shoved toward the sea floor, tumbling, the leash yanking at my ankle telling me where the surface is. Time stretches and later I will marvel at how holding your breath for 30 seconds is no problem on dry land.

Until I began to learn how to surf I didn’t understand the “No Fear” stickers I’d see plastered on cars, stop signs, t-shirts. Now I understand them well, and understand what they mean, their intent. As Paul Maud ‘Dib was taught by his mother, “Fear is the mind-killer.” (this is just a snippet of the Bene Gesserit Litany Against Fear).

We usually think of fear as something very obvious and dire, like perhaps drowning under a giant wave, but fear can also be subtle and insidious, too. Let’s take fear-based practicing as an example. Fear-based practicing is a music killer. It may go mostly unrecognized because of its subtlety, but I implore you to take a look at the role fear might play in your practice.

Do you feel that your music has to be perfect or it is worthless, or unworthy? Do you feel that there is so much to learn that you wonder how you’ll ever get to all of it? Do you compare yourself to your peers or other musicians and feel that some of them “have it” and you don’t? Do you worry about upcoming performances and feel rushed to get all your music learned before the gig so you don’t screw up? All of these concerns, and many many more, are aspects of fear and they can (and probably will) hamstring your practice. Fear, at its core, induces the fight-or-flight reaction, which is a useful way to think about fear-based practice. Will you run or will you fight? And by “you” I also mean me–I still grapple with these issues and probably always will.

Flight is our usual response when we come up against these fears in practice. We skim over all we have to do because there is so much. We fly through routines and exercises and try to cram as much as possible in our half hour of practice (or whatever amount) because we’re sprinting to keep up with our desire to get better as fast as possible. This is NOT the way to go about practice because what you do learn will be of a surface nature, will not stick with you, and will probably be riddled with mistakes.

A more proper response to this fear is to recognize it, and not fall back on the flight response, but tap into the fight response. Fight it by standing your ground and taking time to make the careful steps that will actually result in long term and permanent improvement. This is not an easy task because the monkey-mind we all carry around in our heads is always jabbering away at us in many different voices, urging, chastising, comparing, goading, and all the rest. There are ways to fight these voices, to fight the fear. Going slowly and learning something thoroughly is the best way to fight. The moment you begin to feel overwhelmed or overworked, you should pay attention to how this impacts your practice and slow down, maybe take a break, or at least take a few deep breaths and recite the Litany Against Fear.

I’m not convinced that fear can be eradicated or even that it should be. Fear can provide some necessary dynamic tension that gives you the impetus to really pay attention, to step it up, to tackle the monster* and fight it in the best way you know how, by taking your time, by believing in your perseverance, by trusting in the process, and by recharging your batteries in whatever healthy way works for you. Seek out every source of help you can find and devour it all, but chew it SLOWLY and THOROUGHLY and never, ever stop. You’ll be great if you can do this simple thing.

Have fun and good luck!

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*Here’s a link to the 4 DVD  Marsalis on Music series, one of which is entitled Tackling the Monster: Marsalis on Practice. It’s a great video series with tons of information and dozens of great musicians including Marsalis himself, Yo-Yo Ma, Seiji Ozawa, and many others. The DVD is also available as a fantastic book of the same name and is also chock-a-bloc with great information.

And a gratuitous surf vid of a wave that would scare me no matter how long I try to surf. Yikes!

Slow Down, You Move Too Fast (Audacity tutorial)

This post will give you a quick tutorial on how to slow down a fast tune with Audacity so you can learn it by ear more easily. This is an amazing piece of software and makes the process easy. Old-school jazz musicians would put a thumb on the record (that’s vinyl for you youngsters) to slow it down. This is a much better way!

If you’ve listened to any Clifford Brown, the fantastic jazz trumpeter, you’ll know he’s able to play tasty, tasty licks at burning speeds. The first CB solo I tried to learn was from his tune,  Blues Walk (click to hear a snippet of the solo), but it was way too fast. I imported the whole tune to Audacity, edited it so only his solo remained, then slowed it down (sometimes by as much as 50%!). After nailing it at a slow tempo, I’d gradually speed up until I could play it at full speed. This will work for anything you want to learn by ear, a skill that too many students don’t have in their tool belt because our current music education system has tied them to the notes on the page. This is a handicap. Use your ears. Please!

I’ve spoken often of the necessity of practicing slowly, and this includes learning to play something by ear. If you’ve ever tried to learn a song from a recording you’ll know that those notes go by awful quickly and it’s hard to get a handle on them, especially if you’re new to this kind of practice. What you need is a way to slow the recording down so you can actually have a chance of keeping up. Audacity makes this process incredibly easy. I’ll take you through it and include a little video at the end of this blog post that will help show you more clearly the written instructions.

You’ll need the free program Audacity for this tutorial, so if you haven’t already, download and install Audacity. It works on Windows, Apple, Gnu and Linux systems and can be found in at least 14 different languages. If you speak Swahili or Urdu, you may be out of luck for a while.

Next, bookmark the Audacity Wiki, a great source for just about everything you need to know about the program. I’ll post some quick tutorials on this blog now and then for tricks and tips specifically geared toward practice, but to learn more about the program, the Wiki site is your best bet.

Audacity reads many audio formats: mp3, wav, ogg, flac, and several others. Chances are, if it’s in your computer and makes a sound, Audacity will be able to “read” it.

If the tune you have has the cursed DRM (digital rights management) encryption, Audacity won’t read it. Never fear. If you have this problem you can often burn the tune to a disc and re-import it to iTunes or whatever program you use, and this may take care of the issue. In the future, you might consider buying your music from Amazon.com which does not use DRM encrypted music. Yay, Amazon!

A couple things to be aware of. First is that the slower you make the original file, the less the quality of sound will be. In addition, mp3 files which take up the least amount of memory are what’s called a lossy format because some of the sound data is lost to make the file smaller. There are other files, like .wav which are not lossy, but they are much bigger in size, usually many megabytes.

Okay. Fire up Audacity and import an audio file, a song you really want to learn by ear and slow it down. To learn how to do this, watch the short vid below.

And there you have it. Have fun and good luck!

For more Audacity tips, go to: http://www.allabouttrumpet.com/vids/YouTube/audacity.html