Monday, March 29, 2010

Join a Community Band

 It's important to play with other people, as that's more or less what music is. If you're not playing with other people it can be of great determent to your sense of time and your tuning if you go long periods of time without playing with others. Your ability to tune relatively with the other parts will blur and your sense of group time will get fuzzy.
There's a lot of reasons for not having people to play with, Maybe you've just moved and you hardly know anyone. Maybe you've just started playing and have yet to join your first ensemble. It could be that you're just coming back to your love of music after years away due to your (misguided?) pursuit of fame, fortune, or financial stability. What ever the case may be, my advise to you is to join a community group. Why? Because community groups are typically filled with three types of people (and these types aren't intended to be exhaustive) from whom you can learn and with whom you can enjoy music.

The first type are old timers, these guys have been playing music in your community for the better part of their lives. They don't want to make any money off their music, they just do it for fun and they want you to have as much fun as they do. These people (depending on where you live) will know your father, and all of the kids in your community too, and as such can tell you a lot about who is playing music and where a lot of good opportunities exist. Treat these people well, because they are the reason that there is a music community where you live in the first place.

The second type are school kids. These people come from junior high school all the way up to masters students. They're either there because their mom makes them, or because they are considering, in one way or another, playing music more seriously than the average Joe. You should get to know these people well because they're walking in the same shoes that you are, and they are the forth coming musicians, the heavy players and high school band teachers of tomorrow. If you plan on living where you're living now for some time, you're bound to get to know these people quite well, so now's the time to start working on the lifelong friendship.

The last group of people are the pros. A good musician is someone who likes music, and is dedicated to making to with other people who feel the same way. Chances are the pros got their start in a community band, just like you are now. What's more is that they stuck with that band, or at the very least sit in from time to time. It's a great chance to meet these people, play with them, and see how the operate within the community. Maybe they're very gracious and grateful for what some of the old timers did for them back in the day, that's not such a bad trait to pick up. Maybe since they've hit it big they've become self important, and they just stop in to wow everyone. It's a good chance to learn how not to behave.

There's more to community bands that you can learn from though, like how instructive playing with strangers is, or learning a new sort of repertoire that you wouldn't have otherwise, or testing your own dedication to music by playing with a group that, at times, will test your patience. In the end music is music... you can't fail by becoming more involved.

Thursday, March 18, 2010

Archive Lessons

Some of you may have noticed the the first few lessons have disappeared from the feed, more over if you subscribe to the ear trainer through iTunes. Do not be afraid, those initial lessons are still available! All you need to do is check out the archive link on the left an find the lesson you’re looking for.

Thursday, March 11, 2010

Ear Training Tools

Hello Ear Trainers,
Today I would like to write a little about various aids you could use to improve your ear training routine. There are a few books and tools I use that you might find of benefit too.

The first thing you need to get your hands on is something that will give you an in tune pitch. There are a lot of contraptions out there, but my favorite has always been the A 440 tuning fork. They're small, they're very affordable, and they don't go out of tune unless they have been seriously abused. Other people use pitch pipes, which are like circular harmonicas. There are a few types, some give you a pentatonic scale, and some give you a major scale in a particular key, while others offer you the chromatic scale. Some people sing the phrases of applications you can buy for various smart phones, but don't waste your money waste your money on an application when you can just use the dial tone? That's right, the dial tone has to be a pitch, so just figure out what it is and go from there. In the city I used to live the dial tone was A 440, and the boys at the local guitar shop refused to tune to anything else. Most metronomes these days with produce pitches for you too though a lot of people find these sounds quite harsh. The last place you might go is to you computer. Many musicians make use of a laptop as part of their regular practice, I know I do. There's an endless umber of java and flash programs on the web that are free to use that will produce pitches for you.

Second step is to take you chromatic tuner and throw it right in the garbage. This is mostly addressed to electric guitarists and bassists, but you banjo, mandolin and 5 string graphite cello players are to blame too. How are you going to ever learn how to identify pitch if you can't match pitch? Learning to tune your instrument is a life long process that improves your pitch. Each day as you affix your attention towards that incremental distance between those two pitches, you're improving your ability to accurately judge distance. Stop cheating your self.

The third thing to do is pick up some books with notes to read and sing. I recommend the Bach book, 371 Harmonized Chorales and 69 Chorale Melodies with figured bass. It's published by G. Schirmer, Inc. and distributed by a few different companies. I got mine through Hal Leonard, but the pieces have long entered the public domain so you should be able to find a copy without much trouble. Any reputable choral director or sheet music store attendant will know exactly which publication you're looking for. Mine cost me $15.95 back in May of 2007, so you wont expect to pay much for it. What makes this book so good is that you're getting 371 four-part chorales, (that's more than 1,490 parts) in every key, many time signatures, a wide melodic range, and in multiple clefs. Additionally, as you learn to sign by ear better you will better know one of the more important collected works of music in history, and the development of harmony and melody in western music. Also they sound good.

Grab a sight-singing book. Most of the time there's no need to pay for these because they are a favorite item for public and university libraries to throw away. Depending upon the way things are done in your part of the world, a few times a year in your local library you'll find stacks of books marked "FREE BOOKS". There's typically a dusty old sight-singing book that no one has taken out for the last 50 years right under "M" for music. If you flick through the pages you'll notice that very little has been added to the realm of sight singing in the last 50 years, and really what you need more than anything else is some music in the right range that grows progressively more difficult.

If you can get those things together you should be hard pressed to run out of material to work on for the next 30 years or so. Your tuning fork wont rust, and you'll never get through that sight singing method book, but it's about the journey after all, it's not about getting to the last page, the one that has been intentionally left blank by the publisher.

Keep Training those ears!

Wednesday, March 10, 2010

Lesson #19 - Faxin' with the Ear Trainer

Hi there Ear Trainer deputies. I'm real glad you came along. This episode we've got a few gems for you.

This week we're learning about seventh cords again, becase they're important, because it's not 1300 A.D. anymore. We're also going to continue our detour into compound intervals, the kind that sound over an octave. The harmonic major scale is introduced even though very few people use it; I just kind of like it. And of course a super duper melodic dictation.

As always you can keep a strong helping of lesson guide here, and send your questions to eartrainer@gmail.com if you've any questions, comments of qurries.

Friday, March 5, 2010

Lesson #18 - The 7th Degree

Hi there ear trainers,

After a breif break so that the ear trainer could prepare for his auditions (I'm a musician too!), the ear trainer podcast is back, better than ever, with a stunning new type of dictaction. It will knock your socks clean off your feet, right through your shoes! This will be an extermely painful process!

In this lesson I introduce the 7th cords, well, five variations on the theme of the 7th chord any ways. The minor seventh chord, the major seventh chord, the half diminished seventh chord, and the augmented seventh chord. Wee! Beyond that it's business as usual, so make sure to tune in!

As always you can find that dandy pdf lesson guide right here
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