Jonathan Harnum's Blog, page 14

Pentatonic: Major vs. Minor. What. When and How to Use It.

Great content. I especially enjoyed hearing the “off” versions (sometimes with a chuckle), when Jake uses the scale in a less-than-ideal way.

Next-Level Musical Coordination

Viento de Agua – La Reina Mía: Daniel Díaz y su Tripandero

3 Things to Learn On Guitar: Rick Beato

The Most Surreal Reveal of a Custom Guitar You’ll See. Great Music, too, in 14/8.

Tool’s Adam Jones directed and composed the music for the below video: “The Witness.” It’s a trippy short film, with a great groove behind it (who knew 14/8 could groove, and when the drums come in, hoo!).

The film’s purpose is to announce Adam Jones’s 1979 Les Paul Custom guitar for sale (yours for $19K).

Percussion: Danny Carey

Bass: Justin Chancellor

Produced & Recorded By: Tim Dawson

Drum Genius? Jazz Beats

Playing with backing tracks is usually more fun than playing with a metronome. Not always more helpful, but nearly always more fun. I use iTabla Pro, Brazilian Drum Machine, Afro-Latin Drum Machine, and Djembe Studio pretty regularly.

I just downloaded the latest rhthm backing track/metronome DrumGenius and love it. Not only does it have a wide range of styles and selections (see pic), each beat can be tuned and (of course) sped up or slowed down.

[image error][image error][image error][image error]

Best of all is the educational aspect: it can be a challenge to remember (or even know, TBH) what a beat name is whether it’s a Boogaloo or a medium shuffle. This app will teach you. Super useful for composition or learning what a beat sounds like. Great for drummers, and any musician on another instrument who wants variety in their backing tracks or songwriting.

The app also gives you examples of players and tunes. For example, the Boogaloo #5 is based on Billy Higgins’s work in Sidewinder, by Lee Morgan.

You can preview all the rhythms for free and you can download 3 beats for free. Any more than that you have to purchse, but at $7.99 for unlimited credits (500 loops as of this writing), it’s a great deal. A tiny tasty robot jazz drummer with good feel right in your pocket. Yes, that was a pun.

Improvise With These Beautiful Scale Patterns

For Bb instruments (trumpet, clarinet, tenor sax), you’re a whole step higher than the piano, so your notes, if you want to play along are the C# minor pentatonic:

[image error] https://www.basicmusictheory.com/c-sharp-minor-pentatonic-scale

If you play alto sax, you’ll need to play the Ab minor pentatonic scale to play along:

[image error] https://www.basicmusictheory.com/a-flat-minor-pentatonic-scale

How to Play Bass (for guitarists, and beginners)

Bass player and all around musical braintrust Adam Neely on how to play bass. Subscribe to his YouTube channel.

Louis Armstrong on Practice

DIY Piano Tuning: Entropy Freeware

I’ve got two pianos that need some love: in my teaching studio is a 1919 juggernaut of an upright that is a full half step flat (and surprisingly in tune to itself), that has wonderful tone, and a much smaller upright at home that is creeping out of tune. Entropy as measured by intonation (or lack thereof).

You can do anything, but not everything.

Enter  Entropy, the free piano-tuning software. According to one well-conducted study, decade-seasoned pros can tell the difference between Entropy-based tuning and a high-end piano tuner (and software), but semi-pro and advanced students can’t tell the difference. Sold me. I just need my pianos to be better in tune at low cost.

This guide over at Instructables will show you (and me!) how to tune your piano using just a couple of tools and a free program called Entropy. Looking around for alternatives to expensive software, this one seems like a good fit and was recommended to me, so I’m giving it a try.

Here are the tools I have: Piano tuning kit (amazon link).

My main challenge, I beleive, will be making time to do it. Estimates of 4-5 hours for first-timers like me seem likely. I’ll let you know how it goes.

When should you listen to music to boost task performance? Music Psychologist Dr. Victoria Williamson

TLDR version:
Introverts do worse.
Extroverts do better.
(HUGE caveat: if you know even a little about research or life in general, you’ll know that this is a blatant, egregious generalization.) Drill down by reading Dr. Williamson’s short article, and pursuing some of her excellent links and graphs.

[image error] [image error]

Source: When should you listen to music to boost task performance? – Music Psychology