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It’s Not Just The Notes You Play That Matters…

October 25, 2006 By Graham English

...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 … [Read more...]

Filed Under: Music Education, Prose Tagged With: energy, feelings, focus, listener response, Music Theory, MusicHacks, PerformanceHacks

Who is Dick Grove?

September 22, 2006 By Graham English

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 … [Read more...]

Filed Under: Music Education, Prose Tagged With: arranging, arranging music, composition, Dick Grove, Ear Training, education, Grove School of Music, improvisation, jazz piano, Music Theory, orchestration, Songwriting

The Rules and Principles of Counterpoint

August 18, 2006 By Graham English

Counterpoint

These rules of counterpoint are simple and easy to memorize. Use them during the arranging phase of your music producing. Counterpoint: a composition which is written strictly according to technical rules. In earlier times, instead of our modern … [Read more...]

Filed Under: Music Education, Prose Tagged With: arranging, chord progressions, composing, composition, consonance, counterpoint, dissonance, fundamentals, harmony, modes, motion, Music Theory, rules, Writing Music

Deceptive Cadences

August 14, 2006 By Graham English

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 … [Read more...]

Filed Under: Music Education, Prose Tagged With: authentic cadence, composing, composition, deceptive cadence, Music Theory, plagal cadence

Advice To Beginning Musicians

August 11, 2006 By Graham English

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 … [Read more...]

Filed Under: Music Education, Prose Tagged With: 80/20 rule, advice, beginners, Elite Musician Society, Instruments, music fundamentals, music study, music teachers, Music Theory, musicianship, Practicing

How To Master Musical Textures

August 10, 2006 By Graham English

How To Master Musical Textures

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 … [Read more...]

Filed Under: Music Education, Prose Tagged With: Arnold Schoenberg, bass, composing, composition, contrast, counterpoint, dictionary, harmony, Music Theory, musical textures, polyphonic, polyphony, reference, rhythm

Top Secret Patterns (shhh, they’re free!)

July 18, 2006 By Graham English

Patterns are a great way of putting scales to work. Not only do they get you out of any do-re-mi rut, they expand your musical vocabulary. They also expand your mind by forcing you to think about systems within systems—and sometimes within … [Read more...]

Filed Under: Music Education, Prose Tagged With: creativity, diminished patterns, diminished scale, music lessons, Music Theory, musical vocabulary, MusicHacks, patterns, scales, soloing, technique

Harmony’s Hidden Geometry Revealed

July 8, 2006 By Graham English

THE GEOMETRY OF MUSICAL CHORDS Dmitri Tymoczko, Princeton University Musical chords have a non-Euclidean geometry that has been exploited by Western composers in many different styles. A musical chord can be represented as a point in a geometrical … [Read more...]

Filed Under: Music Education, Prose Tagged With: Dmitri Tymoczko, geometry, harmony, Music Theory, Princeton

Who Else Wants To Master the Diminished Scale?

June 15, 2006 By Graham English

The diminished scale is an extremely creative tool. Due to the diminished chord's symmetrical structure of stacked minor thirds, we have two options of diminished scales: half step-whole step and whole step-half step. A major benefit to this … [Read more...]

Filed Under: Music Education, Prose Tagged With: creativity, diminished scale, John Coltrane, lessons, music lessons, Music Theory, MusicHacks, patterns, scales, symmetry

The Golden Mean in Harmony Part 1

December 9, 2005 By Graham English

If you ride chaos all the way out to its edge, you find beauty and order... and the Blues Chaos: complete disorder and confusion; behavior so unpredictable as to appear random, owing to great sensitivity to small changes in conditions; the … [Read more...]

Filed Under: Music Education, Prose Tagged With: blues, chaos theory, circle of fifths, fractals, fundamental, golden mean, golden section, harmonics, harmony, Music Theory, overtones, partials, phi, pythagoras, scales, sound, Western harmony

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Graham is a singer/songwriter and jazz-trained keyboard player, music producer and studio musician, best-selling author of Logic Pro X For Dummies, and serial entrepreneur.

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