Loop pedals are such a great way to have fun while you practice, no matter what instrument you play. You hone your rhythmic skills, you focus on a short snippet of music at time, you can layer these snippets to your heart’s content, and best of all, you receive immediate feedback. Here’s Elijah Aaron showing us how it’s done right, with a cover of TLC’s No Scrubs
Category: Do This
Score Study 2.0: Stravinsky’s “Petrushka”
This interactive score of Petrushka is a gold mine for anyone interested in the piece. Stravinsky wrote Petrushka when he was 28 years old, in 1910-11. It’s a wonderful piece of music, and even if you’re not a classical musician, this site is a feast for the mind and the ears. Follow along in the highly interactive score, learn about what the different parts represent, learn about the historical context, and listen to commentary from music luminaries on the piece. There is something for everyone here: players, teachers, and even young children.
Small Percussion: Perfect Gift for Musicians
Check out trumpeter Lee Morgan and alto saxist Wayne Shorter play small percussion on this killing performance by Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers. They’re playing Dizzy Gillespie’s tune, Night in Tunisia. Gotta be one of the best versions around.
Jymie Merritt’s burning fast bass solo is accompanied by some precise hits from all the small percussionists (starts @ 4:00).
The next several posts will focus on the small percussion instruments below and will include videos explaining techniques for these small instruments you can easily toss into your gig bag.
12 Rules of Music Practice (Wynton Marsalis)
Here are 12 practice suggestions from Master Marsalis. Each one could be the subject of a book on its own. After the vids, I’ve added suggestions to consider below each of Wynton’s rules. Some will be covered more thoroughly in the book, “The Practice of Practice.”
Chromatik: An Online Music-Learning Resource
Below is the video on playing thirds that Chromatik chose to include on the site, and what’s really cool (you have to click through to see it), is that on Chromatik, the issues I talk about are illustrated with music theory and written notes. Super-cool! Much more useful and informative than my original video, which is great! I love the internet. When information is free, everybody benefits.
The 10,000-hour Red Herring
You’ve all heard it by now: all the talk and focus on the 10,000 hour “rule,” from people like Malcolm Gladwell, and the researcher who originally published the study with the finding, Anders Ericsson, whose theories are not without opposition in the academic world. If you haven’t heard of this finding by researchers Ericsson, Krampe, & Tesch-Romer yet, it goes like this: it takes 10,000 hours of practice to reach expert-level performance, whether it’s in sports, music, chess, or x-ray diagnostics. But the 10,000-hour rule is a red herring for several reasons.
SoundSlice: YouTube Learning Goodness
If you’re like me, you get a lot of learning done on YouTube, but isolating a passage and repeating it, let alone notating it in some way, is difficult if not impossible. Not any more! Check out SoundSlice.
SoundSlice is a fantastically useful tool geared towards guitarists, but it’s useful for anybody who learns by watching video. Adrian’s done many cool things as a programmer (check his site), and has an album out of his most popular fingerstyle tunes here, most of which you can also find on SoundSlice, like the Beatles tune, Yesterday. Check out the link to Yesterday for a good example of how the site works.
Performance as Practice
When I asked Nicholas Barron about how he practices, he said, “I never practice.” I was intrigued, because the dude can play guitar and sing, and has clearly spent a lot of time doing it. Over the course of the next 90 minutes, he shared the details of what “I never practice” means to him. Performance-as-practice is a focus Nicholas shares with a lot of pop musicians.
Nicholas Barron is a soulful Chicago singer-songwriter who looks like Vince Vaughn (but funnier), and he sounds like the love-child of John Lee Hooker, John Hiatt, and Joni Mitchell. James Taylor called Nicholas “undeniable” at New York Times’ Emerging Artists Series in 2007. Nicholas’s songs are playful, thoughtful, and heartfelt. I’ll tell you a little about his performance-as-practice approach.
Check out the vid of one of his more popular tunes, “I’m Not Superman” below.
Johnny Cash on Failure
“You build on failure. You use it as a stepping stone. Close the door on the past. You don’t try to forget the mistakes, but you don’t dwell on it. You don’t let it have any of your energy, or any of your time, or any of your space.”
Here’s another iconic image of Johnny Cash. I love this one, and like to think this is a good representation of my own attitude towards failure. The story of the image is told by Alex Selwyn-Holmes on his interesting website Iconic Photos. After the quote is a 1959 video of Johnny Cash playing Folsom Prison Blues.
On The Value of Mentors: Bootsy Collins, Mark Mothersbaugh, et al.
Some good advice about finding and working with mentors from James Brown’s funky bassist Bootsy Collins, DEVO’s Mark Mothersbaugh, Pro Skater Javier Nunez, rapper Anwar Carrots, young impresario Levi Maestro, and Dale Crover, drummer for the Melvins and, briefly, Nirvana. They’re chillin’ and shillin’ for Scion, but there are some good nuggets of advice in there. The reason I put this up is that every single professional musician I’ve talked to about music practice has had at least one mentor who changed their lives.
12 Rules of Practice, from Wynton Marsalis
Wynton Marsalis is a musician who knows how to practice. As a younger man, he was equally at home in front of a symphony orchestra playing the Haydn concerto, or laying down some serious jazz with Art Blakey. Check out Wynton’s discography for more evidence. For a while now, he’s turned his full attention to traditional jazz…
Mr. Bean’s Imaginary Drum Set, or, Mental Practice
Here’s Rowan Atkinson with a pretty funny skit. It’s like he’s mentally practicing drums, and we get to hear what he’s hearing inside his head to hilarious results. Enjoy, and use this to remind you to inject mental practice into your own practice routine.
The Practice of Practice 