Graham English
Songwriter, Recording Artist, and Blogging Musician
Songwriter, Recording Artist, and Blogging Musician
I’ve talked about the Shepard Tone before but NewScientist has just posted Five great auditory illusions.
Mark your calendars. 12 weeks of intense “Music Hacking” begins on October 15th. Visit Absolute Pitch University for all the details. But you must do it fast because seats are strictly limited.
So far, hundreds of Diggers are getting their mind’s blown over the Shepard tone audio Illusion. I have to agree. Listen to what I mean. When the video is done playing, replay it to hear the exact same audio seem to continually rise in pitch.
In an attempt to hack their creativity and artistic output, Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt created a deck of cards they called the Oblique Strategies. Whenever they came up against a creative dilemma–and especially while under a moment of pressure or deadline–they would pull a card and follow the directions.
I’ve used this technique constantly in [...]
Now that you have your musical strengths and weaknesses written down in a place that you will see everyday, it’s time to plan what to do with these lists.
Two Frames
For the best results in doing any kind of goal setting or personal change work, remember the following:
Problem Frame questions are less effective. This is when [...]
In this series, I’ll do my best to help you understand what it takes to be an excellent musician and give you as many techniques as I can to take you to the top.
You’re about to see two sides of me. One side is called tough love. That side of me is here to challenge [...]
I use the term “music hack” to refer to slick solutions to common musicianship problems. Some of them relate to making music and some of them relate to performing. But they all deal with how you think. So here’s the top Music Hack of 2006.
There Is Nothing Boring In Life. Only Boring People.
It’s Not Just [...]
…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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Lately, I’ve been excited about a new type of musical mini-model that I call a “Music Hack.” But first, I need to explain what modeling is.
Long ago, during the peak of the Human Potential Movement, the mind technology “Neuro-Linguistic Programming” was created by some very colorful and controversial characters in California.
The eccentric Richard Bandler (known [...]
Here’s the deal:
Absolute Pitch University is 12 weeks of personal coaching through bi-weekly teleseminars. Every teleseminar is recorded for you to listen to again and again… and in case you have to miss one. We’ll cover Absolute Pitch Power (and even those other AP methods out there), Music Hacks, Modeling, Hot Seats, and much, much [...]
Topics covered: Absolute Pitch University, NLP, modeling, hot seats, music hacks, life hacks, much more…
Topics covered: Absolute Pitch University, NLP, modeling, hot seats, music hacks, life hacks, much more.
Sometimes, all it takes is a little hands-on mentoring to take you over the top…
APU is an Absolute Pitch Master Mind (a coordination of knowledge and effort, in a spirit of harmony, between two or more people, for the attainment of a definite purpose) PLUS a whole lot more. But deeper than that, it is [...]
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 other systems. For example, this diminished pattern is a three note system:
within another [...]
about grahamI'm a songwriter and recording artist who sings, plays keyboards, and explores the vast world of sound hoping to find some magical moments along the way. I'm also a Mac geek.
Why Americans Don't Like Jazz http://dyske.com/paper/778 19 hrs ago
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