Graham English

If your ear can’t understand whatever it hears, then it’s suspect. Whatever the application — composing, songwriting, singing, playing the guitar, piano, or any other instrument — there is a logic to becoming a spontaneous musician. Your goal as a musician should be to get your musical intellect to the point where it becomes intuitive.

Here’s the story. About two years ago I was at a Halloween party and it was off the hook. The dance floor was packed and I was tearing it up. You know, back in the day, I was a pretty good break dancer. So when the dance circle formed, I was first to glide into [...]

Singing what you hear is an important part of improving your perception. Let’s look at it from a body/mind perspective.
Recognizing that C and F is a perfect fourth is a cognitive exercise. You have to think about it. Maybe only for a split-second, but you still have to translate your physical experience, a verb, into [...]

NaSoAlMo is a free yearly competition where musicians write and record an entire album during the month of November. The idea came from NaNoWriMo, National Novel Writing Month, where writers attempt a 50,000 word novel during the same month.
It’s all about enthusiasm and perseverance — Not perfection. It’s about silencing your inner critic for thirty [...]

There is a common misconception that “things” can be boring. You may find doing your taxes boring. But some people find it riveting. Therefore, we can’t say that doing taxes is boring. “It” is not boring. Then what part of that sentence or thought is boring? It is the person doing the thinking that is [...]

Division of the octave into intervals smaller than the half-tone, the smallest interval used within the tempered scale. Examples include Fokker’s thirty-one-note organ, Partch’s forty-three-note percussion instruments, etc. Microtonal music, compositions based on microtones.

…but the person who plays the music.
You do a lot of work on your instrument technique, your knowledge of music theory, and your craft of music composition. Do you also have a plan to improve you, the musician?
Take two musicians and give them the same four bars of music to play. One musician will sound [...]

Learn these 4 tricks to help you write the best songs of your life. It will take you just 10 minutes to learn, too.
The First 10 Seconds
Imagine being inside the mind of a busy A&R guy or in-demand producer. It’s running over important decisions to make, artists to direct and develop, managers to call back, [...]

Topics covered: Hooks, song titles, song ideas, lyrical insights, melodic insights, hook placement, and much more…

The Christmas season, my favorite season of the entire year, is ALMOST here — and courtesy of Jermaine and HearandPlay.com, I have a PERFECT gift idea that YOU or one of your relatives would LOVE to see under the tree (…or better yet, on top of their piano)!
Jermaine just let me know about his brand [...]

Then submit your sage advice at the Songwriting Tips Group Project at BloggingMuses. Your tips will be highlighted on their very own page and you can even promote your website or music project or whatever you like.
I’ve already submitted my own songwriting tips. It’s fast becoming a serious songwriting tips resource.
See you there.

Find another musician or composer — and with their permission — elicit the strategy they use to choose what to compose or the strategy they are using to compose a current piece of music. Use their strategy to decide what you are going to compose or to help you with the music you are currently [...]

Elicit from another musician their strategy for choosing what to practice each day. Make sure that you have a detailed sequence and make sure that it is a very different strategy from yours (if it isn’t, choose someone else). Use their strategy for choosing what you will practice tomorrow, knowing that this is only an [...]

A Random Article from Wikipedia
Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies
A Random Word
A Random Sentence
A Random Paragraph
A Random Web Site
You have to put something into your mind to get something out.

Access a learning state fully. Remember a specific time when you were a virtual learning machine. What can you tell about your learning strategy? How do you know when it is time to learn something new? What internal steps do you take to ensure that you are learning the material or task? How specifically do [...]

…the key to dramatic improvement in any field is — that’s right — practice. But, it has to be what Ericsson calls “deliberate practice.”
“A lot of people like to do things that they’re already good at, but what deliberate practice says is you need to find those things that you are weak at and that [...]

Elicit your motivational strategy for dong something that’s not necessarily fun, like practicing scales. Next, elicit your motivational strategy for doing something you love, like jamming with your friends. Are these strategies the same or different? What are the most significant components in these two strategies? Are these components the same or different? What did [...]

While practicing your instrument today, notice your decision strategy for choosing what you are going to practice. Slow the decision process way down and write down each step of your strategy. Identify the visual, auditory, and kinesthetic components of your strategy. What do you see in your mind’s eye? What do you hear or say [...]

Topics covered: The art and craft of absolute pitch hearing.

Joe Hyams author of Zen in the Martial Arts tells us what a dojo is:
A dojo is a miniature cosmos where we make contact with ourselves–our fears, anxieties, reactions and habits. it is an arena of confined conflict where we confront an opponent who is not an opponent but rather a partner engaged in helping [...]