Musicality World

https://www.musical-u.com/learn/introduction-to-playing-by-ear-in-a-group/
What if you’ve never played by ear before, and no one in your band has either? Here are some great practical tips from guest expert Steve’s Music Room https://www.musical-u.com/learn/introduction-to-playing-by-ear-in-a-group/

https://www.musical-u.com/learn/major-minor-keys/
Was that song in major or minor? Understanding major and minor keys is a fundamental musical skill that you can develop.

Here are two simple ways to tell the difference between major and minor keys. https://www.musical-u.com/learn/major-minor-keys/

https://www.musical-u.com/learn/3-sports-ideas-help-music/
Summer is a great time for outdoor sports! How can you learn more about music and increase your musicality through playing outside? https://www.musical-u.com/learn/3-sports-ideas-help-music/

https://www.musical-u.com/learn/sampling-way-create-new-musical-sounds/
We are all quite familiar with conventional methods of making music: live instruments, voice, synthesizers, computer generated sounds and so forth.

But what about digital sampling? https://www.musical-u.com/learn/sampling-way-create-new-musical-sounds/

While you’re crafting that intricate solo during band practice, you may not realize that the tone of your Telecaster is totally flat and uninteresting. You may be so focussed on mastering that sonata that you don’t realize your piano is out of tune. You’re worried about memorizing those new song lyrics correctly – but at the expense of pronunciation and phrasing.

So take a step back from the technicalities, and listen to your instrument. What do you hear? Does your instrument sound bright, crisp, and in tune?

This week, we hone in on the topic of sound quality. We release a preview for this month’s Resource Pack on timbre, the musical key to understanding the quality of a sound. 88 Piano Keys’ Leila Viss talks about “stealing” ideas from musicians who inspire you and tweaking them to create your own unique sounds and songs. We interview indie rock band Carpool Tunnel on their powerful, guitar-driven sound, and how they honed it. And finally, we hone in on audio frequencies – a topic that goes hand-in-hand with timbre and understanding sound and music – on this week’s teaching episode of The Musicality Podcast.

Timbral Possibilities

Timbre is what differentiates two sounds with the same frequency, lending each a distinct, unique character – in other words, timbre is the reason your piano doesn’t sound like a bassoon.

In this month’s addition to our Instrument Packs, our resident pros have put together Resource Packs on the topic of timbre – with both general and instrument-specific advice on working with timbre, from dynamics and articulation, to technique and gear.

Head over to Timbre: Resource Pack Preview for a sneak peek at the valuable tips, frameworks, and exercises that the pros have cooked up for you.

Get a group of guitar players together, and they love to talk about the tricks and tips that they have developed to achieve their sound. No matter where you are on your musical journey, there are always things that you can change that will have a lasting impact on your signature tone. Best Beginner Guitar Today offers 15 quick tips.

When we are reading about music, we often come upon myths that have become common beliefs through repetition and adoption by musicians. Musikinesis explores whether or not a pianist can change their tone by adopting different ways of striking the keys.

Question: How many basses does a bass player want? Answer: One more! As you continue playing, you’ll likely have the urge to expand your musical collection with more and more instruments. Within the bass world, there is a clear distinction between active and passive basses, and many opinions about when to use each. Alex Jennings discusses how he mixes up his bass rotation.

Steal Like An Artist

One thing that is deeply undervalued and misunderstood in the music world is the idea of stealing – that is, taking an idea or element from music you admire, and repurposing it to fit your own musical projects and goals.

This is a far cry from plagiarism. Instead, copying often opens doors to creativity and experimentation. Though the starting point – like a short melodic motif or a chord progression – is a pre-existing idea, taking your personal brand of musicality to it can yield some unique and fascinating pieces of music.

In Getting Under the Hood, with Leila Viss, the author of the 88 Piano Keys blog talks about how copying her musical inspirations unlocked a world of creativity on her keyboard – and how she now encourages her students to use their inspirations as a starting point for their own musicality.

We loved hearing how Leila was able to take seemingly “simple” songs and understand how much musicality can be expressed through them, even when playing music that could easily be discarded as “easy”. Might Expert lists 50 guitar songs that prove themselves excellent examples.

Leila discussed how she has been particularly inspired by the book “Steal Like an Artist”, using many of its simple tips in her own musicality. This seemingly timeless book has inspired many musicians and other artists to explore their influences in their own creative expression. Daniel Hadaway discusses the lessons he has taken away from the book on his podcast.

As musicians, we often use our trusted friend, favorite tool, and keeper of rhythmic integrity during our practice sessions. Of course, we’re referring to the age-old metronome. But what about going a step further in rhythmic sophistication? Drum tracks are readily available on all devices, and as Mike Soca demonstrates, can help unleash creativity by inspiring you to get outside of your normal rhythm.

We often think of creativity as playing extravagant melodies and swooping solos, but creativity also exists in your ability to use rhythm. There are many simple approaches for becoming more creative in your use of rhythm. Josef at the Creative Piano Academy demonstrates some exercises that will have you plugging away at new rhythmic variations in no time at all.

Musical Minds Think Alike

You and your bandmates likely have a strong glue that holds the band together – a glue consisting of shared dedication, goals, and musical sensibilities.

This week, we interview San Francisco-based indie rock band Carpool Tunnel, a band with a melodic, seriously punchy sound whose members met through Vampr, an app dedicated to fostering connections between musicians.

In A Meeting of Musical Minds, with Carpool Tunnel, Musical U sits down with the band to ask about their music journeys and influences, how they connected online, and the band’s involved, open-ended songwriting process.

Starting a band can be exciting, inspiring, and… terrifying! How do you find other musicians? What are the first things that you should do when you finally get together? The Denver Music Institute has gives 5 tips to get you started.

Many bands begin by simply taking common tunes that everyone knows and jamming on them. This simple yet powerful act of just playing music together can form the foundation of your musicality and help you learn what everyone’s playing style is like. Most of these tunes will have three or four simple chords, as demonstrated in this video from Guitareo.

Facts About Frequencies

This week, we’re back with another installment on audio frequencies in music and why they matter – this time, focussing on the two major reasons that any musician should learn about them in the first place.

In About Frequencies in Music, Part Two, we discuss how sound is defined in terms of its frequencies, what this means for your instrument, how frequencies can be manipulated, and how this manipulation affects the perceived sound of your playing.

If you want to take the first step towards understanding sound in a complete, clear, and comprehensive way – don’t miss this episode!

Imagine if you were no longer able to hear certain frequencies. Unfortunately, that is something that we will all face as we get older and our ears begin losing some of their natural abilities. Fortunately, there are some things that we can do to protect our hearing as much as possible. Learn more about musicians and hearing loss from The Musician’s Brain.

Mixing music is easy, right? You just adjust this knob, bump up that slider, and things just work. Except that’s never the case! Unfortunately, that’s exactly how many musicians first approach working behind the console. Sound On Time explores the art of mixing music, with excellent tips on handling frequencies, panning, gain, and soundstages.

Learning more about frequencies and the science of music is part of the bigger picture of becoming more musical, no matter where your musical interests lie – and ear training happens to be a critical part of this development! Nathan Lively from Sound Design Live discusses the impact that just 30 days of ear training had for him.

The Specifics of Sound

Frequencies, timbre, tone, color, quality – these are all interrelated ways of thinking about the same overarching concept – how your instrument sounds.

Sound quality is a beautiful thing – it can breathe new life into your well-loved scales, chord progressions, riffs, solos, and melodies, and lend you a deeper understanding of your instrument and the many ways to play it.

The post Timbral Possibilities, Steal Like An Artist, Musical Minds Think Alike, and Facts About Frequencies appeared first on Musical U.

https://www.musical-u.com/learn/8-tips-for-playing-guitar-and-singing-at-the-same-time/
Learning how to play guitar takes time, hard work, and dedication. However, many guitarists are multi-taskers and like to take their playing a step further by introducing another instrument: vocals.

With Musician Tuts https://www.musical-u.com/learn/8-tips-for-playing-guitar-and-singing-at-the-same-time/

https://www.musical-u.com/learn/chord-ear-training-how-to-chord-progressions/
Learning to play chords by ear and improvise freely over chords are essential ear training goals for many musicians. Lets’ explore chord progressions ear training in depth. https://www.musical-u.com/learn/chord-ear-training-how-to-chord-progressions/

In the second instalment of our series on frequencies in music, we discuss the two major reasons why frequencies matter, and how sound can be understood, defined, and manipulated in terms of its frequencies.

Listen to the episode:

Links and Resources

• About Frequencies in Music, Part One
• Interview with Jeremy Fisher
• Frequency Fundamentals
• Contact us!

Transcript

In the first part of this two-part episode we talked about where musicians encounter audio frequencies, what exactly a frequency is, and how they relate to musical sounds.

If you haven’t already heard that Part One please go check it out, we’ll have a direct link in the shownotes for this episode.

I’m going to assume you’re up to speed on what frequencies are and how they’re related to all the sounds we hear in music. And in this Part Two I’m going to pick up where we left off: why do frequencies matter to us as musicians?

Why frequencies matter

Now that we’ve covered what frequencies are and how they relate to sound – why does this matter to us as musicians?

There are a couple of major reasons and a thousand smaller, more specific reasons. I would say that the big two are these:

1. Sound can be fully defined in terms of its frequencies.

We’re used to thinking of sound as something that can be heard, or recorded – essentially the movement of air, or the changing of numbers in a data file that makes our speakers move to reproduce a recording. And that’s perfectly valid.

But what’s interesting is that all this frequency stuff we’ve been talking about – it’s not just a little addon to how we can describe sound. It’s actually a fully complete system for defining the sounds.

Meaning that when we hear or record a sound, literally everything about it can be defined in terms of which frequencies are present, how strong, and when. The changing of frequencies in sound isn’t just an aspect of sound – it *is* the sound.

Which means that every interesting question you can ask about a musical sound, such as:

• What pitch is it?
• What’s the timbre of the instrument? Is that an electric guitar or an acoustic one – or is it actually a banjo?
• How many notes are being played?
• What does the environment sound like, is it a small room or a concert hall?
• How is the singer pronouncing their words?
• What kinds of effect pedals or plugins have been used to alter the sound?

Every single one of those questions and more can be answered by analysing the sound in terms of frequencies. That’s not to say that frequencies are always the best way to answer a question like this! Sometimes the explanation in terms of frequencies is so deep and complicated that it’s good for a computer but not much use to humans. But in other cases frequencies provide a seriously simple and elegant answer to a question that’s really hard to answer without them.

In the example of the question about how many notes are present, you might remember from our interview with Jeremy Fisher this isn’t always a simple question and sometimes frequency analysis can reveal subtle effects like the extra “ghost notes” he was talking about, where two singers can actually produce a third perceived note.

But it means that if we’re analysing a sound, or thinking about how to produce a sound, frequencies should absolutely be part of how we approach it because they’re not just a different way to think about sounds – they are a fully complete and comprehensive way to think about sounds. And this is a huge rabbit hole which I would love to dive into, but we’ll leave it at that for now.

2. Sound can be manipulated in terms of its frequencies

The second big reason frequencies are useful and interesting to musicians stems from the first one: Not only can we analyse and think about and describe all musical sounds in terms of frequencies – it’s also a great way to manipulate those sounds.

You might have already been thinking this as I went through those questions. If frequencies hold the answer to “why does an electric guitar sound different to an acoustic guitar” then maybe they can also tell us how to make our acoustic guitar sound more like an electric. That might end up being about playing technique, or adjusting the pickup you use to record, or doing post-processing – but frequencies can give you the clue as to what needs to be done.

This also comes back to the example earlier of mixing desks and equaliser settings as a context for musicians interacting with frequencies – because when you’re recording your music or producing a live show it’s essential to think not just about which notes are played by who when, but the overall mix of the sound in terms of its frequency balance. Learning to adjust certain groups of frequencies is an enormous part of making a recording or a live sound system sound good and letting the music be enjoyed to its fullest.

So I would say those are the two big concrete reasons to pay attention to audio frequencies as a musician and maybe explore this topic a bit.

To circle back to our question at the beginning of why we’re talking about audio frequencies on the Musicality Podcast: Ultimately we at Musical U believe that musicality is about having the inner understanding of music – call it intuition or instinct or if you must you can call it “learned talent”. That understanding which empowers and enables you to do whatever you want to in your musical life in a free, creative, confident way.

In that spirit we should be open to any and every new way of thinking about music and exploring what’s going on, and I hope this episode has made a good case that audio frequencies aren’t just some scientific or mathematical thing – they are an intrinsic and deep part of every musical sound you hear – and that makes them incredibly interesting and useful to every one of us as musicians.

So as I’ve said several times – this is a huge topic we could do many more episodes on. Audio ear training is a whole area parallel to the kind of musical ear training we often discuss on the show. Would you like more episodes about the audio side of things and audio frequencies? Let me know, visit musicalitypodcast.com/contact

In the meantime if you’re excited about these ideas I’ve been sharing today I don’t want to leave you empty handed. We have a great free tutorial series on our website which you can check out called “Frequency Fundamentals”. You’ll find a link to that in the shownotes for this episode at MusicalityPodcast.com .

The post About Frequencies in Music, Part Two appeared first on Musical U.