Musicality World

https://www.musical-u.com/learn/destroyers-of-mastery/
Are you ready to target the bad habits that demolish your capacity to play and sing well? A wilderness of wasted potential and unrealized goals awaits any musician that ignores these destroyers of mastery. If you can abolish them from your practice habits, then you may emerge from that wilderness and realize your musical ambitions. https://www.musical-u.com/learn/destroyers-of-mastery/

https://www.musical-u.com/learn/interval-ear-training-whats-the-point/
You may have wondered why intervals are such a hot topic in ear training. Intervals are often where musicians first encounter the idea of ear training and doing focused exercises to improve their musical listening skills. But why do interval ear training anyway? https://www.musical-u.com/learn/interval-ear-training-whats-the-point/

We first learned about Dave’s roots in the blues, celtic music, and his passion for instruments. Last time we talked, Dave shared his compositional big picture process with us. This time, we asked Dave about his experience with film music, his career highlights, and current array of projects.

But first, Dave’s faith has long infused his musical expression. The well known Celtic/Prog-Rock band Iona was saturated with the ancient tales of the early Celtic Christians, and Dave reaches for the spirit in every note he plays:

For me, the physical and spiritual realms are interconnected rather like the strands in a rope. It’s not a case of one or the other. I’m convinced that great art awakens something very deep within us, that can remain dormant for much of the time. My belief as a Christian leads me to describe this as our spirit.

Talking to other musicians about this, many I know have experienced this moment when the music they’re playing transcends the time and place they’re playing in. It becomes a bridge into a deeper experience of what it is to be human. It opens up new perspectives and bonds with the listeners.

Musicians who don’t share my faith have described exactly this, but just in different terminology.

So, rather than describing music in divisive terms (e.g. “Christian” and “Secular”), my belief and personal experience is that the God I believe in creates everything – every atom. Therefore we can find his presence and glory everywhere – if we are open to looking. Music can open us up to this reality.

I could write pages on this! But briefly, around 1987/88, David Fitzgerald and I were doing a lot of touring with singer-songwriter and visionary Adrian Snell. After soundcheck each day, we found we had a lot of time to jam together and we became very excited about the soundscapes we were coming up with, with the combination of David’s saxes, flutes, whistles and ethnic wind instruments and my keys sounds.

We decided it would be great to do something together musically, so we started thinking about possible names for the project. The works we were performing with Adrian centred on the Jewish roots of the Christian faith and, both David and I realised that although we shared a mutual Christian faith, neither of us knew much about the roots of Christianity in Britain.

To cut a much longer story short, (you can read more on the Iona website (in the History section), we both felt led to find out more. This led us to the discovery that in the 6th century, Columba, an Irish monk, set up a monastery on the tiny Scottish island of Iona. From here, Christianity spread throughout Scotland and Northern Britain in an amazingly organic way.

We discovered incredible stories of faith, courage, and miracles that inspired us to name the new project after the island.

We discovered a rich seam of our faith that these Celtic peoples outlived, that seemed more earthy and real than much of the version of Christianity that we had been presented with. We both visited Iona and spent some time there soaking in the atmosphere and history of this beautiful, remote place. We read everything we could find on its history and about Celtic Christian saints like Columba, Cuthbert, Aidan, Brendan and Patrick and others.

Much of the music on the first Iona album was inspired by these exciting discoveries and the beautiful landscapes of the islands of Iona and Lindisfarne. There is so much more I could say, but that’s it, in a nutshell!

There are now so many different college and university courses you can take – seemingly on every aspect of the music industry, but it’s very rare that anyone employing you as a musician, certainly in the musical fields I work in, will be bothered about whether you have a musical qualification. That’s not to say that qualifications are not important. They are, but more because to pass them you have to attain a certain degree of skill, which you can then use to be able to interpret your musical ideas.

What is equally as important is getting on with people and developing your own unique sound or skill set, so that a) people will hear you or your work and see something in what you do that is different to anyone else, and b) they will enjoy working with you and want to work with you again.

It is rare that you find someone whom you really click deeply with on a musical level, but, when you do find that someone, it is worth hanging onto that relationship and developing it, because it will lead to great music happening. Over my whole career so far I’d say it’s only happened to me perhaps five or six times, but it’s birthed much music I’m very proud of.

I’ve always loved the relationship between music and film and how the two can work together in a unique way to create a powerful art form. Not that long after finishing music college, a friend of mine, also a keyboardist and producer, passed on a job to me that he didn’t have time to do. It was to write some music for a corporate video for a building company – nothing groundbreaking!

I went to this audio visual studio which was fairly near where I lived and met the studio owner and the client, who had come up from London. I had no previous experience at writing for film, but the recommendation from my friend, plus my obvious enthusiasm got them to let me have a go.

They were very pleased with the music I came up with and, after that, the studio owner booked me regularly for all his AV jobs.

This was in the mid-1980s and although they could have used library music, the studio’s unique selling point was that every production they did, no matter how big or small, had music specially composed for it. I probably did getting on for a 100 jobs for that company over the next 10 years, writing music for all kinds of short commercial films and ads, and they still occasionally call me up if there’s enough budget to commission new music (it’s now run by the original studio owner’s son!).

The most recent I did for them was a music installation for a museum on the island of St Kitt’s celebrating the life of John Newton, who wrote the famous hymn “Amazing Grace”. That was about 16 minutes of orchestral style music and I was also able to get the amazing Scottish singer Mae McKenna to record a new arrangement of the hymn.

What doing all these often fairly small commercial films taught me was that every note of the music has to serve a purpose, to reflect and enhance the message of the film. It also really expanded my musical palette, as I had to write in whatever style the client wanted. Although I’m known through Iona for a particular style of music, in my film work, I’ve had to write in styles including contemporary dance, club, rock, jazz, blues, 18th-century Italian aria, 1920’s Dixieland, early 20th century English string quartet, soul, stirring Gustav Holst style orchestral, Marx brothers type madcap piano, Bach type organ music – to name a few!

The commercial work led to jobs for other types of film work – some short more art house type films and animations written for film festivals and a few TV commissions.

I realised many years ago though that if you’re really serious about being a film and TV composer, you have to pursue that to the exclusion of everything else. There is so much competition that you can’t just dabble in it. I came to the point after my first BBC TV commission, where I could have gone down that route, but at the time Iona was really taking off and that was where my heart lay – playing in my own band, playing live, playing my own music.

So these days I don’t actively pursue film work, as I’m busy with writing, producing and mixing CD projects and touring. But I really enjoy doing it whenever I get the opportunity and would still love to do a whole feature film, if it was something I really believed in.

As I write this I’m sitting in a tour bus, on the road in the UK with the band the Strawbs, with whom I’ve been playing keys for over a year. They are a great band – their original keys player was someone called Rick Wakeman! Dave Cousins, the singer and main writer has written some great songs and it’s an honour to be part of the Strawbs long musical heritage.  We have two UK tours this year, a US tour in November, then we’ll be on the Moody Blues (Moodies) cruise, sailing from Miami next January. We did that last year and it was great fun.

As Iona is sadly no longer a touring and recording entity, I’ve formed a new band over the past year or so called Celestial Fire. We play Iona songs, music from my solo albums and much more. It’s a really great band and I recently finished mixing our first release – a live DVD/CD recording called “Live in the UK”. You can now order it from Celestial Fire. There’s a promo video on Youtube and we hope the DVD will really help raise awareness of the band, so we can do more touring.

Additionally, I do quite a few keys and guitar sessions from my studio and have played guitars on the excellent forthcoming album “Cardington” by British band Lifesigns. I may be doing some live dates with them next year as well. I will be doing some live dates for them next year, in the UK and Europe and also on the Cruise to the Edge in the Caribbean.

Currently, I’m also mixing a few other projects for people and hope to get into writing an album for my Celestial Fire band this year.

I’m also working on a new Strawbs studio album and will be working on the album with acclaimed producer/engineer Chris Tsangarides in a few weeks time.

Well firstly I’ve been very blessed to have been able to sustain a career in music for so long and I think being able to diversify has been the key for me. There have been many highlights and surprises which continue to be very exciting. Being able to earn a living from writing and performing my own music, which expresses my own musical vision and reflects my faith has been huge and not something I take for granted.

Here are some highlights off the top of my head (would probably be a different list on a different day!):

• Hearing my own orchestral arrangements of my music played by an orchestra
• Hearing a renowned string quartet playing music I’d written
• Meeting many of the musicians I’d admired so much in my teenage years and in some cases finding out that they are now fans of my music
• Working with the late, great Jack Bruce
• Hearing from so many people around the world how the music has touched them so deeply
• Hearing how one young man, contemplating suicide, decided to continue with his life after listening to an Iona song
• Headlining in front of 25,000 people at Cornerstone festival in the USA in ’96 or ’97 and playing the Star Spangled Banner with Troy Donockley (uilleann pipes) just as a fireworks display went off (it was Independence Day)
• Releasing my first solo piano album “The Remembering” last year
• Playing with blues legend Buddy Guy
• Recording Moya Brennan’s incredible voice for an Iona album. I was a huge Clannad fan and first met her when she came to an Iona gig in Dublin
• Living through the amazing revolution in music and computer technology – things that can be done now were the stuff of science fiction when I started off
• Touring the world and meeting so many amazing people and experiencing different and diverse cultures
• Seeing how amazingly faithful God has been and how, when I look back, I can clearly see how perfectly he has interwoven the strands in my life

Learn and Grow from Everything

After getting to know Dave Bainbridge a little bit through these interviews, I believe that one of the secrets to his personal success in a life of music is that he has been willing to draw out the learning from every experience. Writing for film showed him the importance of each note. Embracing deep musical relationships deepened both his spirituality and his connections with fellow musicians. And his experience and learning are there for him when he steps into big new projects.

The post Making Music for Film, with Friends, and in Spirit with Dave Bainbridge appeared first on Musical U.

https://www.musical-u.com/learn/how-to-do-an-ear-training-audit/
It’s an inescapable fact that great musicians have great ears. Unfortunately most musicians don’t have very good ears – and they’re understandably a bit embarrassed about that. So if you want to really reach your potential as a musician, it’s time you did an ear training audit. https://www.musical-u.com/learn/how-to-do-an-ear-training-audit/

Though these may be uncharted, intimidating waters, they’re well-worth exploring! The concept of syncopation is, at its core, a simple one. Besides, if you’re not careful, music without syncopation can become a rhythmic snoozefest.

Read on for your introduction to how syncopation affects the feel of music, how to develop your ear for it, and how to apply it to your instrument to create your own songs with syncopation. Then, try our syncopation exercises to practice what you’ve learned!

What is Syncopation?

Syncopation is your secret portal to the world of intricate, complex rhythms that immediately add a spark of interest to the music they’re underlying. Since its inception, musicians from nearly every genre have dipped their toes into the syncopation pool, recognizing that great things happen when you play around with the beat of a song.

When you count, there is a natural “stress” (aka a dynamic accent in musical terms) on the downbeats (think “1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and”). A syncopated rhythm will often omit the strong downbeat or stress an unexpected part of the rhythm, often using 8th notes and 16th notes patterns (e.g. 1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and).

Where do you find syncopation?

As you can see, the concept of syncopation is actually quite simple, and can be applied to every musical style, whether you are mixing a new dance beat, singing jazz, and or jamming out with your indie rock band.

You can often find syncopation in musical styles like Latin music, jazz music, and funk.

In fact, wherever there is rhythm, there is the potential for syncopation. Even in dance: the dancer can syncopate with a strong step on a weak beat.

Yet syncopating while keeping the beat steady can be difficult to master. By working on your listening skills, you can teach yourself basic syncopation by listening and then imitating the rhythms.

Syncopation is important because without it your music can easily become repetitive and uninteresting. While that might be what some artists strive for, most musicians like to both entertain and challenge the listener with exciting new musical ideas!

How to Identify Syncopation

So how exactly does syncopation sound?

When you’re listening to a piece of music, you often end up subconsciously tapping your foot to the beat. Now, take note: are the strongest accented notes coming down right as your foot taps the floor, or while your foot is up in the air?

If your foot is up in the air, there’s a high chance the song you’re listening to deviates from the regular pattern of accented downbeats! In fact, if your foot is doing anything besides hitting the floor at exactly the time the accented note is heard, chances are you’re hearing a syncopated rhythm.

Where Did Syncopation Come From?

While syncopation has been around for eons in many musical cultures, it gained prominence in Western music in the late middle ages. After the Black Death swept through Europe, the entire culture responded with a major shake-up: the Ars Nova (“New Art”) composers’ playful experimentation rebelled against the prevailing rhythmic norms:

It may sound pretty tame to our ears, but reading these rhythms challenges even experienced classical musicians.

These rhythmic innovations stuck around (albeit in a somewhat tamer forms), with prominent Baroque composers such as Johann Sebastian Bach using basic syncopated rhythms in their compositions. Classical and Romantic composers followed suit, with big names such as Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, and Brahms also using syncopation to create variety in their music.

Try counting along with the beginning Mozart piece in “two” (duple meter), then in “three” (triple meter):

Which one fit better? Which one do you think Mozart wrote in?

Syncopation Skips On

It didn’t end there. 20th century composers, notably Igor Stravinsky, picked up on syncopation and ran with it, experimenting with accenting offbeats for incredible dramatic effect. Stravinsky’s composition “The Rite of Spring” spun the idea of rhythm on its head, incorporating highly irregular patterns and breaking away from the strict rhythmic structure so common in orchestral work:

Syncopation also found a comfortable home in jazz music. To the jazz musician, syncopation is as natural as breathing.

A Meeting of Two Cultures

Syncopation received a huge boost when West African music met European music in the Americas. Traditionally, West African musicians focused much more musical attention on the various dimensions of rhythm, creating complex, dynamic, and fluid rhythmic expressions undreamed of by their European counterparts.

When African-Americans layered these rhythms with the “squarer” European-derived rhythms, syncopation became the norm for ragtime, jazz, blues, rock, and now nearly every form of popular music worldwide.

For example, listen to the left hand part for Scott Joplin’s “Maple Leaf Rag”:

 

It’s a straight, steady, 2/4 European-style march. Now the more fluid rhythms in the right hand:

 

Combine them together, and you have syncopation:

Why Learn Syncopation?

If you’re sticking to straight, strict rhythms, you’re really missing out on a world of fun. Put it this way: syncopation is to rhythm what dissonance is to melody – it creates a desire for resolution and a reason for forward motion.

1. Play music you love with ease

Nowadays, most of the music you’ll hear and love will have a degree of syncopation. Learning the rhythmic structures underlying these songs will go a long way in helping you play them without getting your instrument in a tangle.

2. Add interest to your music

The unexpectedness of syncopation elevates your music from sounding “nice” to having real punch! The importance of syncopation in creating unexpected, “groovy” rhythms cannot be overstated. Rhythmically complex genres such as Latin music, funk, and jazz could not exist without the contribution of syncopation.

3. Make it easier to craft lyrics and sing along

Lyrics are, in fact, often syncopated! The very nature of language and speech means that it’s rare for phrases to fall perfectly in, say, 4/4 time with beats 1 and 3 being the strongest. Speech is more nuanced than that, with stressed syllables of lyrics often falling on sixteenth notes, thirty-second notes, and generally between beats.

If you have lyrics in mind, try creating a syncopated instrumental accompaniment that matches with the syllable stress pattern of the words you’re using.

4. Two birds, one stone

Learning syncopation will also enable you to make sense of one of the hardest-to-tame beasts in music theory: polyrhythms!

Polyrhythms give a feeling of multiple simultaneous meters. Consider the example of triplets over duplets:

The second and third notes of the triplets can be said to be syncopated; they fall outside of the expected “1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and” beat that the duplets provide.

Polyrhythms literally consist of multiple conflicting rhythms simultaneously being played. Thus, these grooves provide an excellent listening exercise; if you can make sense of polyrhythms, you’ve already understood syncopation!

Types of Syncopation

There are various ways that you can move around, add, or omit beats to spice up the rhythm of your music. It’s not always a complicated mess of a rhythm; basic syncopation is easily teachable to young children!

Let’s look at a few of the most popular and straightforward ways you can syncopate:

Even-Note Syncopation

Even-note syncopation is generally found in the rhythm section, and it’s perhaps the most straightforward kind of syncopation. This is ubiquitous in Western music, and occurs in “simple” time signatures with an even number of beats (think 2/2, 2/4, and 4/4 time).

Normally, the odd-numbered beats 1 and 3 are stressed.

If you want to add a bit of interest to your 4/4-time composition, try emphasizing beats 2 and 4 instead, and seeing what happens! The beat does not technically change, but the dynamic accents do, creating a different feel.

This is also referred to as a backbeat, and is commonly found in pop, rock, and electronic music. Ska guitar commonly uses a backbeat to accent the “upstrokes”.

Suspension

This one involves a musical “sleight-of-hand” to make the syncopation work. The strong beats are “masked” by using a tie, so the emphasis falls on the weak beats. Take a look at the score below: while the note of the strong beat technically still exists, the beat itself – poof! – “disappears”. Here’s an example of such a syncopated rhythm:

 

Missed Beat

While suspension involves masking the beat, missed beat syncopation means omitting it entirely.

In missed beat syncopation, the normally stressed beat isn’t shifted or split, but rather, replaced with a rest.

Offbeat Syncopation

This can best be described as a seeming shift in the beat, occurring when the stressed note falls between beats. Often, this is achieved by shifting the whole measure over by half a beat, so that the first note is half a beat long, therefore “skewing” the remainder of the measure. This is particularly popular in pop and rock music.

 

This is also a rhythmic hallmark of ska and reggae music; the accented beats and the piano/guitar lines hit the offbeat “and”s, giving these genres their distinctive groove.

Generally speaking, there are two types of offbeat syncopation: beat-level and division-level. Think of this as macro and micro-offbeat.

Beat-level

Think of beat-level syncopation as a shift in the beat; the beat still remains the same, but the shift creates emphasis on the “and”s of the count:

 

This is also sometimes called off-beat syncopation.

Division-level

This type of syncopation also signifies a shift in the beat; however, it occurs on a smaller metrical level, often making the syncopation more complex.

Division-level syncopation occurs when the “unit” being syncopated isn’t a beat, but a subdivision of a beat, and the subdivision (e.g. a sixteenth note within a beat containing four sixteenth notes) gets shifted.

A Syncopation Tickle Test

You can test yourself ability to produce and identify some of the syncopation types with this fun exercise: say “tickle” over and over again with a steady beat:

 

Now, try accenting the second and fourth “ticks”:

Which form of syncopation are you using?

 

Accent the “le” instead of the “tick”:

You might call this offbeat accent a little ska-tickle!

 

Now try taking out a “tick” here and there:

Now what type(s) of syncopation are we using? (Hint: we are combining two types!)

Syncopation for Different Instruments

Syncopation can occur in any instrument, and does not necessarily have to present in the percussion section.

Vocals

Music with syncopation is everywhere! If you’re singing, you’re most likely to be syncopating. Most popular music is highly syncopated, as is our natural speech. But learning how to describe or even notate this syncopation can be invaluable for your sight-reading, and for communicating with other musicians.

Rhythmic syllables are a great way to get in touch with syncopation and develop more precision in your interpretation of syncopated rhythms. These are popular in many cultures, especially in India.

Listen to Zakir Hussain (from the north Indian Hindustani tradition) and Vikku Vinayakram (from the south Indian Karnatak tradition) “talking rhythm” in the first highly-syncopated 25 seconds of Shakti’s “La danse de bonheur”:

When you want to “talk rhythm” in Western music, the Kodály approach syllables work the best.

If you’re not sure about your syncopation, sing some syncopated lyrics over a steady beat and melody – or even clap your hands and sing “off” the beats.

The Rhythm Section

Perhaps the most obvious place where you start with syncopating music is syncopating the percussion section. Syncopation videos and tutorials for drummers can be found all over the internet, with many illustrating how you can shift around where the kicks and snares land to create a distinctive new groove.

For a basic exercise, play around with displacing the usual pattern of kick drum on 1 and 3 and snare drum on 2 and 4. This guide gives some great starter beats for drummers looking to mix it up.

Syncopated drumming can be combined with an “unsyncopated”, straight melody for an interesting effect, or vice-versa.

Piano & Keyboards

Historically, syncopation has been incredibly popular in piano music, especially with ragtime, jazz, and swing piano.

Take some cues from jazz piano on how to displace notes for anticipation and dramatic effect.

Another popular use of syncopation in piano is in Latin music. By learning just a few simple chords and arpeggiating them, you can play your own syncopated Latin groove that Gloria Estefan herself would be proud of!

How To Learn Syncopation

To understand syncopation inside-out, it helps to have some knowledge of music theory, particularly familiarity with other elements of rhythm. But having syncopation explained to you isn’t enough; to really get a good grasp of it, you need to try it out for yourself, too!

Tools

As with anything in music, a well-trained ear will be your best friend in learning syncopation. Understanding different time signatures and where the stressed beats normally lie will go a long way in helping you make sense of syncopated rhythms. FIXME INSERT LINK + SUGGESTION TO A RELEVANT ARTICLE OF OURS MAYBE?

How to Count Syncopation

Remember the 1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and count we mentioned in the beginning? You can expand this to 1 e and a 2 e and a 3 e and a 4 e and a, which takes you up to sixteenth notes. Count out syncopated rhythms by stressing the spoken syllables that the beats fall on.

For example:

 

Start by Listening

Figure out what time signature the piece of music you’re listening to is in, then take note of where the stressed beats are. You might have to listen to the song several times over, but soon enough, you’ll be able to tap out the beat and determine which beats are accented, and where the accent is “off” the beat.

Practice makes perfect; the more syncopation you listen to, the better you’ll get at spotting these seemingly scattered beats, and the more you’ll see that similar syncopated rhythms exist in songs within the same genre.

As always, start small, and start simple. Listen to syncopation in 2/4, 3/4, and 4/4 time, and learn how to count and perform them.

When you’ve mastered counting and tapping out basic syncopation, try our exercises below for something a bit trickier…

Ear Training for Syncopation in Latin Music

Use your ears to hear how syncopation is applied in these examples.

1. Listen to the ear training example
2. Follow with the musical notation
3. Try to tap or clap the different rhythmic lines
4. Listen to the full track and try to tap the rhythm with the all of the instruments playing

In this example, you will be listening to a Latin music clip. In Latin music like merengue and salsa, the percussion instruments, piano, and bass line all work together to make an incredible intricate rhythmic web. In the clips below you will hear all of the different Latin percussion instruments solo. Then you will hear the full track (repeated once for a total of eight measures).

 

 

 

 

After you have mastered all of the rhythms above, listen to the full track below. Follow the notation. Then, take turns playing along with each of the instrument parts in turn. Once you are comfortable with these complex rhythms, pick up your instrument and create a melody that follows the different rhythmic patterns. If you are a vocalist, improvise a simple melodic line over the complex rhythms, occasionally incorporating syncopation into your melodic line.

 

More Syncopation Practice

Feel comfortable with these complex Latin rhythms? Then call a friend over. Each of you will take a different rhythm and take turns playing the rhythm and improvising over the syncopation.

While syncopation is found in many musical styles, Latin music has some of the most complex syncopated rhythms in popular music. You might find some syncopation in rock and jazz, mainstream pop tunes, dance music, and indie rock typically don’t stray as far from basic rhythms.

In hip-hop music, the syncopation is often found in the actual lyrics, and the truly talented hip-hop artist can create complicated rhymes as intricate as the most complex drum beats.

Listen to a few of the musical examples below to further explore syncopation in music. As you listen to the music, use your ear training skills to:

1. Find the pulse of the song
2. Tap a basic four note rhythm
3. Identify the downbeats
4. Hear how the instruments and/or vocals deviate from the stronger beats
5. Listen for rhythms on the weaker beats

If you are comfortable with syncopation, you can even take out a pair of sticks and try to tap out the more difficult rhythmic beats:

In a Rush to Syncopate?

In this music example, the entire band goes crazy with the beat, throwing in so much syncopation that it can be difficult to determine the pulse of the piece.

This includes a change of time signature to 7/8 (or seven 8th notes per measure instead of the typical eight 8th notes per measure to make standard 4/4 time).

Brick Syncopation

Almost by definition, funk music is syncopated. Whether it’s the bass player messing with the beats or the drummer skipping quarter notes left and right to play syncopated 16th note rhythms, if you want to find syncopation, funk is where it is at.

So Much To Syncopate

The Dave Matthews Band is one mainstream band today that is not afraid of experimenting with rhythms, time signatures, and syncopation.

With a myriad of musical influences, The Dave Matthews Band is a great example of mainstream music that can also challenge the listener.

Skipping Around the Beat

Now that you know some common syncopated rhythms, use your ear training skills to listen for these beats in music you already know. There are literally hundreds of characteristic rhythms used in all musical genres, from classic rock to jazz to samba.

Once you’ve really understood syncopation, try incorporating it into your music, whatever your instrument! If you are a vocalist, make up your own rhythms and vocal lines using nonsense syllables, like jazz scat singing. If you play the violin or another orchestral instrument, mess around with adding notes to these Latin rhythms or the other score examples in this post.

The post Get Rhythm: All About Syncopation appeared first on Musical U.

https://www.musical-u.com/learn/how-to-develop-your-new-songs-theme/
When you’re writing a new song, the seed of an idea often develops into a theme. This article will present you with a step-by-step guide on how any composer or song-writer can create a powerful theme for their track! https://www.musical-u.com/learn/how-to-develop-your-new-songs-theme/

https://www.musical-u.com/learn/talking-rhythm-the-kodaly-method/
Are you struggling with counting out basic rhythm? Do you wish that you could understand a rhythm on sight? Does sheet music confuse you? Fortunately there is a way to translate playing by ear into understanding written rhythms that is easy to use whether you are five or fifty-five! https://www.musical-u.com/learn/talking-rhythm-the-kodaly-method/

https://www.musical-u.com/learn/5-minute-guide-to-interval-ear-training/
What if you could learn everything you need to know about intervals in just 5 minutes? We took our Ultimate Guide to Interval Ear Training and condensed it down into just the essentials. https://www.musical-u.com/learn/5-minute-guide-to-interval-ear-training/

https://www.musical-u.com/learn/how-to-improvise-on-piano/
Piano is probably the most versatile of instruments in the variety of arrangements, styles and complexity of music it can produce – making it both one of the most powerful and most intimidating instruments for learning to improvise. Fortunately there are some simple steps you can take to gradually become an expert piano improviser. https://www.musical-u.com/learn/how-to-improvise-on-piano/

https://www.musical-u.com/learn/how-to-find-the-tonic-of-any-song-in-a-major-key/
Finding the tonic in sheet music is a fairly straightforward process; you have all the notes written out for you, and a key signature to help you out even further. But what if you don’t have sheet music? What about finding the tonic by ear? https://www.musical-u.com/learn/how-to-find-the-tonic-of-any-song-in-a-major-key/