Simple Music Secrets

Conductors are usually present in one of the following situations;
Choir
Jazz group
Smaller instrumental ensemble

Some people are confused by the point of a conductor, what do they do? How can the players understand what they are doing?

Like instrumentalists, conductors also have their own sense of style and each will vary from ensemble to ensemble.  The style will also change according to genre as there are different factors to consider, for example, a band leader or conductor of a jazz group will keep the band in time as well as signal when performers are to take solos.

There are some general tips on how to treat conductors before understanding how to follow them.

1) When playing a concert, the performers should always stand an applaud to show respect
2) The lead instrumentalists of each section should follow the conductor the closest. It is their responsibility to lead the other players in their section.
3) Watch the conductor using your peripheral vision.  This will allow you to follow them as well as read your music.
4) When the composer states the next piece of music, quickly and quietly change you music, especially in a concert situation.  Talking and chatting in-between undermines their seniority.

A conductor does so much more than keep time.  They know the music inside out and shape the orchestra, leading them during a performance.

I wanted to share a few thoughts on reading music. I think it is essential to being a well rounded musician and it can really help in learning a new tune.

Often I have one particular song I want to learn and really want the easiest way to find it and learn it quickly. I go to musicnotes.com and there I search for the song. If it is available it costs about $4 at this writing to print it out at home. I can listen to it first at various tempos and keys with the player they provide.

I can also download it in any key. Than I can get to work learning  it.

I am not an affiliate of musicnotes, I just love it and use it to demonstrate the point of how knowing how to read music helps my music learning process.

music notation

Thanks for reading

Supporting what many of us who are not musically talented have often felt, new research reveals that trained musicians really do think differently than the rest of us. Vanderbilt University psychologists have found that professionally trained musicians more effectively use a creative technique called divergent thinking, and also use both the left and the right sides of their frontal cortex more heavily than the average person.
The research by Crystal Gibson, Bradley Folley and Sohee Park is currently in press at the journal Brain and Cognition.

“We were interested in how individuals who are naturally creative look at problems that are best solved by thinking ‘out of the box’,” Folley said. “We studied musicians because creative thinking is part of their daily experience, and we found that there were qualitative differences in the types of answers they gave to problems and in their associated brain activity.”

One possible explanation the researchers offer for the musicians’ elevated use of both brain hemispheres is that many musicians must be able to use both hands independently to play their instruments.

“Musicians may be particularly good at efficiently accessing and integrating competing information from both hemispheres,” Folley said. “Instrumental musicians often integrate different melodic lines with both hands into a single musical piece, and they have to be very good at simultaneously reading the musical symbols, which are like left-hemisphere-based language, and integrating the written music with their own interpretation, which has been linked to the right hemisphere.”

Previous studies of creativity have focused on divergent thinking, which is the ability to come up with new solutions to open-ended, multifaceted problems. Highly creative individuals often display more divergent thinking than their less creative counterparts.

To conduct the study, the researchers recruited 20 classical music students from the Vanderbilt Blair School of Music and 20 non-musicians from a Vanderbilt introductory psychology course. The musicians each had at least eight years of training. The instruments they played included the piano, woodwind, string and percussion instruments. The groups were matched based on age, gender, education, sex, high school grades and SAT scores.

The researchers conducted two experiments to compare the creative thinking processes of the musicians and the control subjects. In the first experiment, the researchers showed the research subjects a variety of household objects and asked them to make up new functions for them, and also gave them a written word association test. The musicians gave more correct responses than non-musicians on the word association test, which the researchers believe may be attributed to enhanced verbal ability among musicians. The musicians also suggested more novel uses for the household objects than their non-musical counterparts.

In the second experiment, the two groups again were asked to identify new uses for everyday objects as well as to perform a basic control task while the activity in their prefrontal lobes was monitored using a brain scanning technique called near-infrared spectroscopy, or NIRS. NIRS measures changes in blood oxygenation in the cortex while an individual is performing a cognitive task.

“When we measured subjects’ prefrontal cortical activity while completing the alternate uses task, we found that trained musicians had greater activity in both sides of their frontal lobes. Because we equated musicians and non-musicians in terms of their performance, this finding was not simply due to the musicians inventing more uses;  there seems to be a qualitative difference in how they think about this information,” Folley said.

The researchers also found that, overall, the musicians had higher IQ scores than the non-musicians, supporting recent studies that intensive musical training is associated with an elevated IQ score.

Source: Vanderbilt University

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The full version of this story is available online at http://www.physorg.com/news142185056.html

Lately I have been thinking about what methods I use to memorize songs. I am a guitar player and singer so I play the song on the guitar endlessly until the song can play naturally without me having to remember it per se.

I break it into sections, intro, stanzas or verses and ending. Your particular song may be in a different form but the concept is the same.

I try it in different keys to find the best key for my voice and also differrent keys on the guitar require different techniques and may provide me with insight or inspiration. Sometimes you find things you would not have thought of before simply by playing in a different key.

I find that if there are particular sections that are difficult or have a challenge of some sort that I need to work on this section first in my practice. This makes sure I do not overlook it and get lazy. If I always play through the song and stop when I get to the “hard” part then I will not ever get past it and it will actually become part of the final version. You must face yoru demons and work on the hard part.

Oh and the last part is to remind you that there are no shortcuts really. You have to play the song over and over and over and over and over…….

1. Essential to communicating with other musicians. Music is a language unto itself. Given that, how can you communicate if you cannot speak it? Ensembles, bands, choirs, opera, jazz all operate on the written notes first. Way before improvisation was the written note. Simply put, if you cannot read you will never be in any ensemble that requires it.

We could really stop right there.

2. Essential to understanding theory. The theory of music is by necessity based on the written note. All of the structure of chords, melody, harmony and so forth can only be understood completely through the written note. I know you say well this is boring, but someday you will be so glad you started now.

3. Learn a song without any other reference. You will not have to replay the tape or cd a million times or learn from someone else. How many times can you try to learn from a cd or from someone else and not know if you got it right? If you can read you can go straight to the book and get all of the basic information on your own. This greatly speeds up the learning curve. You cannot learn from a book the particular way a band performs the song, but you can get the basis of the song and go from there.

4. Know the way the author of those songs meant for them to sound. This is very interesting I think. I have many times been very surprised to find out a song was written very differently than I have always heard it performed. Perhaps the performer left of the “intro” for example. “Georgia On my Mind” by Hoagy Carmichael for example. Nobody plays the intro. Also there are other examples. I know this example is an old song that many of you may not know, but the fact remains that just because you have heard it on the radio a million times does not mean it was written that way. It may be even better the way the author originally intended it! If you are a song writer I am sure you would want people to know the way you wrote it. Think about that for a moment.

5.Discover new music. It is a wonderful thing to “find” music just because you are leafing through a songbook and you find something that really speaks top you. I have found many this way. These are songs that I absolutely love. I would never have known they existed without being able to read. 6.It is Fun! It may seem a little hard at first, but so was riding a bicycle as I recall. In fact the first time my father let go from holding me on a bicycle I ran into a post and knocked it over! I rarely do that these days now that I have learned how. In fact there are days when I don’t knock anything over.

7. It will make you a better musician. This may go without saying, but it really bears repeating. After all, don’t we all want to be a better musician? Of course we do. Are you prepared to discover new music, perform with people you might never have met otherwise, speak with authority about the origins and intent of a particular piece of music or composer? I think I know the answer. Learn to read music, you will not be sorry.

learn to read music