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.

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!

“Shut up and Listen”

Before you pay your fee at the Green Mill–the famous jazz club in Chicago (and the birthplace of slam poetry) where gangster Al Capone hung out sometimes–a beefy guy with an impressive mustache, leather vest and bear claw necklace from Alaska will tell you that when the music starts there is to be NO talking….

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Live Music is Best: U2’s 360 Show in Chicago

Usually, our experience of music is very abstract. It’s coherent sound coming out of a speaker, with no visuals of those who made the music, and not only that but the actual event of making the music is in the past, sometimes the distant past. This is why live music of any kind is such a powerful and necessary thing for your own music. To see live bodies in a room (or stadium) with you, making music, breathes life into what it means to make music. The art becomes real, palpably so, and takes on a resonance and meaning that goes well beyond a recording…

Improv = Improve

About learning to play an instrument John Stevens says: Improvisation is the basis of learning to play a musical instrument. But what usually happens? You decide you want a certain instrument. You buy the instrument and then think to yourself, “I’ll go and find a teacher, and who knows, in seven or 8 years’ time…

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Book Review: The Music Lesson, by Victor Wooten

Ever heard of Victor Wooten? He’s a bass player best known for his amazing work with banjo master (yes, that’s right, banjo master) Bela Fleck. Wooten has written a book about music called “The Music Lesson,” but before we get to a review of the book, you may be wondering about Mr. Wooten’s credentials if you don’t know of him already. Watch beyond the first 50 seconds of the following vid and you might be amazed (you could well be amazed before that, too):

Question Limitations

Stop thinking in terms of limitations and start thinking in terms of possibilities. – Terry Josephson …… The marvelous richness of human experience would lose something of rewarding joy if there were no limitations to overcome. The hilltop hour would not be half so wonderful if there were no dark valleys to traverse. -Helen Keller…

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Rafael Mendez, master of circular breathing

Rafael Mendez on Practice Had to post this great example of a Master. His thoughts on practice are pithy. And the advice for swimming underwater is great! Makes me think of surfers walking on the sandy bottom, holding rocks to keep them down. His examples of circular breathing and musicianship are phenomenal. Want to learn…

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Slow Time

It seems necessary to riff on aspects of time lately, so here I go again. In an earlier post I mentioned the benefits of taking the Long Now approach to time, seeing yourself playing in the future, simply sticking with it. If four year olds and marshmallows rings a bell, you’ll remember from another post…

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Video Posts

Hi All- I’m trying to make this a more interesting place to visit, and toward that end, I’ll be periodically posting videos of interesting music, interesting musicians, and other related visual/audio clips. If necessary I’ll say a little something about them, but mostly they’ll probably be related to recent topics, for example: The rhythmically chanted…

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Time Is On Your Side

Music is the art that defines one’s relationship to Time. –Stravinsky Time is one of the fundamental underpinnings of music. Without time, music has no space in which to unfold. Within the space of a piece of music, the sounds can be measured and regular and cyclical, like most music, or it can be more…

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Musical Osmosis

The recipe for perpetual ignorance is: Be satisfied with your opinions and content with your knowledge. Elbert Hubbard (American editor, publisher and writer, 1856-1915) I often meet people who say they don’t know anything about music, or have the mistaken believe they aren’t “musical” at all. Such conversations make me think that we should expand…

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Practice Links

Today’s blog will be a simple listing of some other sites where you can find more information on and/or tools for practice: Want to learn more about the best ways to practice? Get an e-mail with a discount code when The Practice of Practice is published (June, 2014). To learn more about the book, check…

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