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Basic Principles of Music Theory Hostility – Rhythm
Rhythm is King Rhythm serves as the physical laws of sound within the sphere of every song. It creates musical coherence in an otherwise chaotic dust storm of sound much like physics provides the scientific models that help make sense of the physical world we don’t understand. What’s beautiful is that we can dictate the [...]
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Basic Principles of Music Theory Hostility – Emphasizing Emotion
[This is part of my Basic Principles of Music Theory Hostility series. Check back for new posts!] Touch at a Distance RadioLab is a great podcast that I’m a huge fan of. One in particular, Musical Language spends some time on the idea that ”sound is touch at a distance” as quoted from Anne Fernald. A study examined how people [...]
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Slight Curvature Art Theory
It’s hard for me to stay focused on any one thing for too long. That’s a flaw of mine that I’m reminded about every so often. It’s been a pitfall in my career and schooling. The one place I think it was not a pitfall and it was an advantage is in art. With music [...]
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DIY, Music Theory, Technique, Uncategorized, Writing Music
Improvising/making new ideas
Improvising is how I come up with all of my ideas. This video illustrates that. You can see at the end of the video that I start stringing together chords to make an interesting transition. Although there is no song around this idea, you can see what the process looks like for me. Also, [...]
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Musical Influences, Technique, Uncategorized, Writing Music
Timing is everything
Put in the Time Malcolm Gladwell wrote a few books that I really like, Blink and Outliers. Outliers I really like because he talks about successful people and what made them successful. He states that to become an expert in any field, you need a minimum of 10,000 hours in the field. Do the math. If you [...]
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Business, DIY, Technique, Writing Music
Your comfort zone is you compromising
I want to get outside of my comfort zone. When I was younger and taught guitar, my students would force me outside of my comfort zone all the time by asking me to teach them how to play this song or that song. It forced me to learn things that weren’t in the genre I [...]
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RPM Challenge – Finished!
Release the doves! Cue the confetti and trumpets! We finished writing a new album this month. All done within February. A musical snapshot. A Family Portrait of Sound Our new songs aren’t perfect. They need a lot of work with arranging and mixing. But after listening to them for a while, the imperfections grew on me. It [...]
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Conquering New Ground–Where I’ve come from and where I am now
My relationship with music has changed a lot since I was kid. When I was a teenager I used to just put a record on the turntable and listen. I’d only listen to the music. I would rarely do anything else while listening. I was a sponge back then. Listening to my dad’s old records, [...]
