Graham English

Topics covered: Songwriting for busy people, capturing song ideas, GTD (Getting Things Done), organization, productivity, iTunes, GarageBand, Logic Pro, inspiration, motivation, tagging, mood markings, songwriting techniques, review, Hit Song Cheat Sheet, and much more…

Lori has some useful tips if “you’re perpetually trying to squeeze more hours into the day to get more time to work on your music or other projects.”
Check her out: Useful energizer software for musicians who still have time-consuming day jobs

Topics covered: Shaolin Ear Training.

Learning to hear with absolute pitch requires both talent and tenacity. Little talent? Tenacity can help get you there. But if you lack tenacity, then you won’t even have the desire to learn. But focus on the reasons why you want to hear with absolute pitch and you will develop the muscles of tenacity and [...]

I’ve espoused the virtues of accelerated learning techniques and I’m on record as saying that every other absolute pitch ear training course out there could be drastically improved if they only “got it.”
And while I don’t like to go “off topic” in my blog too much, I felt I had to, given the significance this [...]

DICK GROVE (1927-1998) had a distinguished career as a professional writer and composer in Los Angeles and as a unique innovator in the field of contemporary music education.
In 1973 he founded the world-renowned Grove School of Music in Los Angeles and guided this highly regarded institution into the top rank of leading contemporary music schools, [...]

Inside you’ll learn…

The proper way to hold a guitar — you could be causing serious injury!
Tips for buying a new guitar — You really need to arm yourself well before you try haggling with your local guitar salesman.
Light speed guitar tuning techniques.
How to read tablature — in a few short minutes — and discover its [...]

Have you ever watched a lion or tiger on television, stalking and then bursting upon its prey? It leads the attack with its eyes. All the rest of its magnificent body follows its eyes as it watches sharply, calculating speed and distance, supremely focused, and then explodes across the distance between it and its goal. [...]

From: TONE-DEAFNESS
Tone deafness does not refer to a problem with the ears, but to a lack of training. Tone deafness is easy to fix by training the ears and the vocal muscles.
I’ve taught many people that thought they were tone deaf how to match pitches. You should see their faces when they do. It’s sheer [...]

Topics covered: Chord progressions, I-IV-V, The blues, classical music, mashups, melody, modal progressions, music software, rhythm…

From Mind Hacks: Tips & Tools for Using Your Brain
Hearing is the first sense we develop in the womb. The regions of the brain that deal with hearing are the first to finish the developmental process called myelination, in which the connecting “wires” of neurons are finished off with fatty sheaths that insulate the neurons, [...]

Counterpoint: a composition which is written strictly according to technical rules. In earlier times, instead of our modern notes, dots or points were used. Thus one used to call a composition in which point was set against or counter to point, counterpoint; this usage is still followed today, even though the form of the notes [...]

From Mind Hacks:
All abilities are skills; practice something and your brain will devote more resources to it.
Brain scanning of musicians has shown that they have larger cortical representations of the body parts they use to play their instruments in their sensory areas — more neurons devoted to finger movements among guitarists, more neurons devoted to [...]

Topics covered: Distinctions exercise, certainty and uncertainty.

Most of the music coaching and teaching I do involves information gathering. It’s important for me to clearly identify what musical challenges my students are having so that I don’t fix something that ain’t broke and so I impact the problem in a way that is truly useful.
Are You Unconsciously Hitting Delete?
With all of my [...]

The progression from V to I has the name “authentic cadence” and from IV to I, “plagal cadence.” A “deceptive cadence” is understood to mean the substitution for the expected progression, V-I, of the progressions V-VI or V-IV.
The effect is strong because the deceptive cadence creates the possibility of preparing the actual close again and, [...]

If you’re new to the world of playing music or even if you’re just now thinking about playing your very first note, here’s my 7-step plan for beginning musicians:

Get a cheap instrument.
You probably have an idea of what instrument you want to play already. Don’t waste your money on the best instrument money can buy. [...]

1. A generic term for Indian scales, consisting of five, six, or seven different notes and calculated to create a certain mood. Each raga is suited to a particular time of day. The word itself comes from the Sanskrit meaning “color,” so that an infinite variety of nuances is possible in the playing of ragas [...]

If you need more compositional choices or your music needs more depth, you might want to play with the textural qualities of music. This won’t be difficult because I’ve prepared a textural dictionary for you.

Polyphonic, while literally meaning “many-voiced,” refers to multivoiced texture of considerable interlinear independence, often imitative; it is understood to have qualitative [...]

Topics covered: Top 10 Lyric Writing Insights, line length, contrasting ideas, melody, metaphor, prosody, rhyme schemes, rhythm, song forms, spotlights…