Category Archives: music study

Leo Brouwer

Leo_brouwerI recently was reminded by a friend of the great guitar music of Leo Brouwer. I first encountered his music when taking classical guitar lessons at Miami-Dade Community College from the great Classical guitarist Carlos Molina.

Brouwer’s music is just really interesting.  His compositions are modern but they are Cuban.

I have now added Etude First Part from his Etudes Simples collection. HIs original score notates the piece at 104 although he doesn’t bother stating the tempo but notes when the piece should be finished in real time. However, Ricardo Cobo, in his Brouwer, Vol 1 albums play the piece at the more aggressive tempo of 184. In my opinion the syncopation of a piece really comes alive at the more aggressive tempos but in any case a great piece to study.

Below I have my rendition of the first few bars with some creative liberties added to give this snippet some sense of completion. I will work out the entire study and post that sometime later.

Brouwer 1 snippet

From Doodle to Music

from_doodle

 

Doodling is the act of just playing with abandon not really focused on being musical. Most of the time its at best relaxing, it can be exploratory if one is doing it over a changes i.e a chord progression but too much is a waste of time. Practice needs to be structured if one in going to progress so doodling in general is contrary to a serious musician’s objectives.

However, one area where a bit of doodling can be beneficial is in composing. Often , ideas come when one just let’s go and is free from the stress to produce. The key of course then would be to record your “doodling” and go  back and try to glean some musical lines.

For a recent doodle which like most of my doodles pretty much crappy run of the mouth line I went back and tried to salvage the underlying musical idea that was lurking in my subconscious at the time. What you see above is the notation of it and below is the audio for the midi playback.

It sounds better on the guitar. The performance includes slides and minor nuances that I can’t be bothered notating i.e. too difficult. Perhaps the transcription is not totally accurate though I think its quite close. You would not turn a lead sheet with all those rests but the cleaner lead sheet would have misleading playback i.e. more legatto than what I intend.

I’ll share a recorded guitar line later.

from doodle

Updated April 24th, 2013

from_doodle2

 

The above is a more accurate transcription of what I intend the line to be. This is amounting to the start of a solo as opposed to a melody.

Here’s the audio for it:

from doodle v2

The audio is just the midi playback for the scored line , the performance includes stylistic innuendo in the form of slide approaches which I will share.

Updated : 4/26/2013

Recorded guitar line:

from doodle v3 w guitar

Guitar Tricks

guitar_tricks_com

 

So for the price of two New York City guitar lessons and a few Starbuck latte’s you can get a full year worth of study materials at various levels of experience and across a number of musical genre’s. What’s the quality of the instruction ? Don’t know yet but  there must be something good among the 5000 plus lessons. 50,000 users could not have been duped?

This all reminds me of Line 6′s Guitar Online where thru their hardware you could of downloaded all sorts of lessons but in particular backup tracks and tone banks for your Line 6 hardware. Indeed Line 6 is probably behind this since for one I got wind of this via an email from Line 6 , so you wonder.

My gut feeling is that Guitar Tricks can’t be one’s exclusive source of learning. The guy that teaches you rock/metal can’t be the same guy that teaches you Flamenco, or can he or she? Maybe. Will that individual be a better source than Juan Martin who only does Flamenco, has had Flamenco coursing through his veins since birth and comes from the motherland? I mean the guy is a Spaniard for god’s sake. I am going to pay more attention . Having said that Guitar Tricks may have some tricks I can add to my bag of tricks, yeah I know pretty corny.

Did I mention that it cost about two NYC guitar lessons and with some coffee to boot ?

Overall, I”m guessing my conclusion is that there will be valuable material to glean off and that it will be a source of perhaps not inspiration but certainly great variety to keep one’s practice fresh.

Overall I’m guessing I’m going to conclude that its indeed a good deal.

Automating Music Training

automator example

My personal philosophy as far as to my music journey is that one has to put in the time in a consistent manner basically every day to get better. It follows that time is precious and since most of us don’t have much time it follows that every second count. So time fuddling around for sheet music and other learning resources is a waste of time. Sure if you are just working on one piece of repertoire or one aspect of your music self this is less of an issue. However, I have at least 6 burners on between the different styles of music I want to be able to cop, composing and sound engineering.

I use technology as much as possible to keep everything I need at my fingertips. Recently I decided to adopt that strategy to the use of music training dvds. I wanted to quickly be able to get any specific dvd up and running bypassing going back to my closet where I store my learning materials. On the mac I accomplished expediting this by using too utilities :

  1. Disk Utility
  2. Automator

Disk Utility allows me to create a .dmg file from the DVD media which I can then mount later. In other words the mounted dmg will behave just as if it was running from the DVD drive.

Automator then allows me to define a set of steps to mount and start the DVD player. I also have a Automator script for stopping and un-mounting the DVD.

So I now can easily and quickly use Spotlight to put on any of my music training DVDs. Of course, this all is stored on the Mac’s hard drive which means that  you can take along anywhere i.e. on your Mac notebook or Mac Mini.

Windows has similar third party excellent tools for accomplishing as much. Check out AutoHotKey for automation and Daemon Tools for virtualizing the DVD media. Of course , I should also mention the very excellent Launchy which works just as well as Spotlight on the Mac.

Learning the Conga

melbaycongasOne objective of mine is to become self sufficient from a music production / prototyping perspective. I should be able to compose / produce / engineer a tune without anybody else’s assistance.  Now I don’t mean that I will have the skills both musically and engineering wise to create the ultimate finished product but that I should be able to create a very good sounding reasonable demo which I can then take to the next level if the tune warrants it and if I can finance it.

Either one is very fortunate to have both lots of music friends and or lots of available cash to spend  time in a studio or you don’t. I don’t.

To that extent and because of the music I like to play and hope to compose I have added another project to my list which I’m entitling “Hand Drums”. My first goal in that project will be to work myself through Mel Bay’s The Tomas Cruz Conga Method.

Here’s a blurb fron Amazon where I just purchased the book and accompanying DVD.

In Volume I, Tomasito reveals the time­-tested conga method which he himself studied with “Changuito” and other master congueros at the ENA conservatory in Havana. Volume I starts at the absolute beginning and is designed for the person who has never touched the congas, but is also of great value to the advanced player who wishes to understand the foundation and rudiments of the approach that has allowed the ENA and the other Havana conservatories to consistently turn out so many world class congueros each year.

Volume I begins with simple exercises to develop technique and systematically works its way through rudiments and recursos for use in solos and fills and basic rhythm patterns such as Salsa, Cha-Cha and Bolero. These are presented using the unique Step by Step DVD Method, which enables the student to learn the patterns by watching the DVD and imitating Tomasito as he builds the patterns stroke by stroke. This, combined with a special type of notation designed to be simple for those who don’t read music, results in a conga course that really works, rather than just another reference book to add to the bookshelf!

Toggl : Keeping Track

togglTo achieve objectives one among other things has to know how one spends one time. Monitoring is key. If you are like me , you have several musical goals. Those goals are of different importance is the overall scheme of things. One way we give our goals different importance is by what we do and how much of our precious time we spend on a particular goal. Its therefore crucial if one is real about achieving one’s goals to measure what we are doing and how much time we are dedicating and then to measure that with how important we feel a goal is. If goal A is supposed to be 25% of your achievement basket then if you find that you are only spending 15% you then have a problem that needs correcting.

It comes down to if you are real you have to monitor your time so that you can reflect on how you spread your hours so that you can then correct. This is part of the what and when which is a big part of the equation , a big part of what it means to succeed in your musical goals as opposed to just pass time on your instrument. If that’s what one wants ok. But if not then monitor your time.

I used different approaches in the past. I’m now checking on Toggl, a free service which has a web app and counterpart Android and iOS apps.

Carcassi 1

Matteo_Carcassi_(1792-1853)Carcassi studies emphasize technique but are beautiful to the point that they are worthy of performance. I don’t have this at a performance level but the point is to document my progress so below I have attached the first 16 bars. Its very rough. I’ll make sure to announce when I have this at a reasonable enough performance level.

The first 16 bars emphasize scale runs with held bass note which are falling on beat 1.

 

 

Here’s my again very rough take of the first 16 bars:
Your browser does not support the audio element.

 

 

So may it secretly begin

still life talking

This is a great beautiful tune by Pat Metheny from one of my all time PM favorite albums.  My goal is to first learn the melody and then learn the solo. Secondly , I want to somehow clobber it into a Logic project i.e. come up with an adequate groove track, forget the piano solo , but put it all together into something that can make sense.

The best way for me to learn the head to a tune is to internalize it by trying to sing it back. Once I nail it by vocalizing it then I can proceed to the guitar.

Here’s my first crack at it, don’t have the full melody line down and frankly I think that some of the notes are beyond my range but perhaps for going into a falsetto.