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Written by: Super User

Category: Personal Blog

Published: 08 May 2020

Hits: 2342

I finished my last final of my first semester at UGA yesterday and am now making my more definite plans for the summer.  Last night I went and played with the East Athens group at The Point where everyone was good about maintaining social distancing policies.  It was a nice diversion from what I have been doing and I will probably do that on and off throughout the summer.  I also exercises on the elliptical for an hour going for five miles while watching some more of Richard Harrington's course 'Creating and Managing a YouTube Channel (2018)' on LinkedIn Learning.  That's one of the things I want to go ahead and get set up properly and will be a focus for the summer.  There are several things related to the online presence project that I will be working on including this website and the sister site, the YouTube channels, and the live streaming program and today I will spend some time writing out those plans in more detail.  I will also spend time daily on my Spanish studies and instrumental practice as well as cleaning up sections of the house, particularly the studio and garage, and possibly do some work in the yard.  For now though I will be focusing on developing my online presence. 

As an aside, about eleven or twelve years ago I cataloged my life interests into groupings I refer to as 'domains.'  These domains are the personal domain, the music domain, the financial domain, the health domain, the educational domain, the spiritual domain, the home and yard domain, and the computers and technology domain.  This was actually an outgrowth of reading a book I stumbled across in the early 1980's while working nights at the Georgia State University Computer Center that was called "Success! The Glenn Bland Method."  It stressed the idea of maintaining a balance across four major areas in ones life and set me down the path of periodically writing up summaries of each of my domains with music being one of the most frequently updated.  I occasionally find it interesting to go back and read those summaries just to see how much progress I have made on my goals in each of those areas and helps me as I revise my plans for the future. One other thing that I've found to be especially useful is maintaining a journal in some form.  I have been doing that since the early 80's as well and I have no doubts that it will be an incredible source of inspiration as I begin to produce more music, particularly in regards to the area of songwriting.  I would highly recommend this practice to anyone regardless of what your goals are in life.  A final mention this morning goes to 'Getting Things Done' by David Allen.  If you sometimes feel overwhelmed by the things you have to do it offers a practical guide to getting organized.  And now I think it's time for me to get something (else) done.

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Written by: Super User

Category: Personal Blog

Published: 05 May 2020

Hits: 2474

May 5, 2020.  Let me start of saying I am not really a drummer but as a musician and prospective composer I need to have an understanding of not only applications for the various percussion instruments but also a deep, internalized sense of rhythm and meter.  I have struggled with rhythm for as long as I can remember.  I recall a class in elementary school where we were using claves to beat out a simple rhythm pattern among two groups of students and I just couldn't seem to get it right.  Later when I sang with the Atlanta Boy Choir I didn't have to worry about rhythm because the director did all the counting for us and let us know when to come in.  I understood the theory behind it - division by 2 or 3 - but sorely lacked the ability to apply that theory temporally.  My inability was somewhat reinforced by Wendell Burke, the drummer of the Montfort St house band, who once told me, "You're never going to be able to play drums."  That was fine with me because I wanted to be a keyboard player but I shouldn't have ignored the instrument so completely since applying rhythmic patterns is such a fundamental ability and skill for every musician to develop if he or she expects to have any basic competency on his or her instrument.

Fortunately, when I finally did get to take piano lessons with a good teacher she gave me the key to being able to play more complex rhythm patterns that differed with each hand.  This was simply to "use a metronome and slow down what you are playing until you can play it correctly at a slow speed and only then gradually increase the speed by a single notch on the metronome.  Only if you can play it correctly at that slightly faster speed do you even consider increasing it yet another notch."  By repeating that process again and again - moving backwards if you end up making a mistake at the faster speed - you will eventually be able to play the piece with the correct rhythms at the fastest possible speed.

While that worked for me for learning pieces on the piano - and the guitar as well as other instruments - I still didn't have a level of comfort with maintaining a steady rhythm or attempting to play pieces that had different rhythms in the different hands.  What I was lacking was an internal pulse or beat.  My sense of rhythm was simply not 'natural.'  It's something I still often struggle with and as my piano teacher, Anna Zhou, has told me, "You have to feel it from your heart."  That has more implications than the obvious relationship to a heart beat.  I find that I have tended to think of the rhythm as being carried in the hand or controlled from the head but for multiple reasons I believe I need to shift that mental centering of the beat to my torso.  This is because I find myself trying to maintain a rhythm pattern in the left hand or in my head and when I throw in something that is off beat or syncopated I inadvertently shift the beat to the off beat accent and that messes up everything.  The same thing happens when trying to sing and play at the same time.  We tend to follow the emphasized accent and make it the primary beat instead of following an independent internal clock.  For me, just the idea of shifting the mental focal point of the pulse to somewhere in my torso is challenging but when I am able to do it I am able to exhibit a much greater independence among my limbs or voice and the music sounds smoother.  I still look forward to the day this becomes natural.

It wasn't until 2010 or 2011 that I started to give some consideration to learning to play drums.  I was wanting to devote some more time to music and was getting somewhat disillusioned with the 9 to 5.  Retirement was on the horizon and I wasn't entirely sure what I wanted to do when that took place.  I had tried to maintain my playing skills as much as I could prior to that and had started playing with the Tascam to try and record a couple of songs.  That was when it finally dawned on me that if I wanted to make my own music, particularly if some of that was of a popular nature, I would need to have some way to generate drum sounds.  At the time the only drum sounds I had available to me were in one of the banks of the MP5 but I had very little understanding of how to put together a drum beat for a song.  I couldn't groove at all!  This was at the same time as I was looking into digital recording and was working on a cover of Shepherd Me, Oh God by Marty Haugen.   I did have the Haskell Harr drum method book but it didn't get into set patterns so I went to the local Barnes and Noble and picked up a copy of The Complete Idiot's Guide to Playing Drums (TCIGPD).  That was my first foray into drum playing.  I worked on the LR strokes using my hands when I could but I didn't pursue it for more than a few months.  At the time my focus was more on web design, my job, and musically, recovering from the degradation of my piano playing skills that had taken place over the previous two decades.

As I moved into retirement my focus gradually shifted toward wanting to produce the music that I've been hearing in my head for all of my life.  By 2015, frustrated with the endless game of trying to learn the next greatest software development language, I finally forswore web design and computer programming completely and decided to devote myself to making my music.  At the time the only other musicians I was playing with were members of the Praise Band at our church where I played bass guitar and occasionally the piano or some other instrument.  I decided that I needed to focus on piano basics and set a goal of attaining the proficiency of a graduating music major at the local university.  I wanted to focus on several aspects of music which included performance, composition, arranging, recording, theory, and teaching, all in styles including from classical, pop, spiritual, jazz, and christmas music on instruments that included piano, organ, electric and acoustic guitars, violin, flute, trumpet, bass guitar, voice, and saxophone.  You'll notice that drums wasn't specifically listed there but I realized that I would need to have some kind of proficiency with that to do what I wanted to do.

My wife, who teaches primary school, likes to visit her hometown of Singapore whenever she can and when school is closed for the summer we sometimes go there for an extended stay when we are able.  When we have gone I generally don't have access to a piano and so must pursue other musical outlets.  On the last two trips this has consisted mostly of hand drumming where I worked extensively on selections from the Complete Idiot's Guide to Drumming as I would wait for my wife and her sister to finish shopping whenever we went out.  The focus for me was as much on trying to maintain the pattern at as fast a speed as I could for as long as I could as on learning the rudiments and some basic grooves.  When I got back to my piano and other instruments the drumming stuff tended to get put back on the back burner but as I started to get more and more into learning about recording I saw a need for creating drum sequences and finally got around to implementing the Megababy drum sequencer in Reaper at a 'resort' in Pai 763 curves north of Chang Mai, Thailand in 2017.  I think I may have programmed fifty or more of the grooves from TCIGPD but it was still somewhat clunky to use and I still don't feel comfortable with it.  I also purchased an Alesis Nitro drum set which I hope to write a review about soon.  It's cheap and good enough to practice quietly on and has some nice features but my intent was to use it to record midi and to playback the drum samples. 

Last year Chris Henderson introduced me to the MTDrums plugin and it makes creating grooves and it makes generating midi drum tracks so much easier and also inspired me enough to pay more attention to drumming.  I was able to play with it a little last year on a trip to Europe which was where I got turned on to Modern Rhythm & Reading Script by Erich Bachtragl while staying at an Air BnB owned by a guitar player in Salzburg. It was also just prior to that trip that I made the decision to apply to UGA's Hugh Hodgson School of Music and to start taking piano lessons again that fall.  It was as I was preparing for the audition and just after Anna made the observation about needing to feel the rhythm from my heart that I decided to take percussion lessons.

My percussion instructor, Denis Petrunin, has thus far provided the guidance I have needed to develop a secure foundation for playing the drums, particularly in regards to basic technical issues that should be at the forefront of learning any instrumental technique.   Although I feel as if I am just scratching the surface of how to play the various percussion instruments available his teaching is a testament to the value of having a good instructor available who can point out corrections that need to be made in ones technique before they develop into bad habits.  Although books and websites like this can be very helpful in learning about many aspects of music they still doesn't compare to the added value of having a qualified instructor who can point out the best ways to get the most out of those books.  That is why I'm taking drum lessons and will continue with those lessons for as long as is feasible. 

Two other major factors have come into play in my decision to spend more time on drums - developing coordination and independence for playing the pedals on the organ and playing left hand comping patterns on the piano.  For the first it almost goes without saying that an organist has to have independence between both hands and feet in order to play some of the more challenging pieces written for organ and the hand foot coordination developed from playing drums lends itself to developing the rhythmic independence required for organ playing without having to be overly concerned with the additional factor of playing the correct pedal.  It was this thought that led me to develop the foot tapping technique that I am working to integrate into all my playing and about which I will soon be writing a separate article.  About this particular practice technique I will simply say that it employs a heel tap on the primary beat with toe taps for the secondary beats and was an outgrowth of the heel - toe pedaling technique described in the Gleeson organ method book.

The second factor is more targeted to the composition and execution of what would generally be considered as left hand comping techniques to accompany an improvisation, melody or other progression in the right hand when playing keyboards although this could be reversed, i.e., the right hand playing the comping pattern while the left plays the improvisation.  The nature of the pattern is such that a specific rudiment is selected and the harmonic content in the left hand applies that rudiment to the fingering of the harmonic content.  As a simple example take a paradiddle LRLLRLRR sticking pattern and apply it to a C major chord in the left hand with the L playing the root C and the right playing the fifth above (G).  Or you could invert it, or assign the R to both E and G to play the 3rd and 5th simultaneously, or any other pattern imaginable but the net result is that you have a constant, steady repeating pattern and as the overall harmonic progression of the piece changes the comping pattern moves to root on that particular chord.  When you add in inversions and 7th chords and other harmonies the variations appear to become endless.  Consider the same application to a swiss army triplet and you get the idea about how useful it can be to composers and musicians in general. 

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Written by: Super User

Category: Personal Blog

Published: 01 May 2020

Hits: 2585

The Spanish final is tonight and once it is over I will be able to turn my attention to those things that I want to do this summer.  There are a lot of things that I need to do around the house like cutting the grass, installing the dryer, and cleaning out various rooms and areas. Then there’s the tasks I should be doing every day like exercising and bathing but the thing I am looking forward to the most is getting back into my mi mundo musico.  I want to get the studio ready for ‘instant’ recording which won’t happen right away because it will take some time to understand how to set up and use the new mixer once I finally get it as it will take time to design, build and configure the studio computer(s) but I should be able to go with what I have until my ideal studio is ready.  Then there’s the actual playing to do such as what I want to work on next from the Bach preludes and fugues, the Chopin, the Mussorgsky, the Gershwin, the Ellington, various short pieces from the D’Mellow book, and various improvisation exercises on piano.  That list is subject to expansion and I’ll get to it all but that still leaves the drums, violin, trumpet, flute, and guitars to play around with.  Then there are the composition pieces that have been hovering on the edges of my consciousness for the entire semester, specifically, finishing the mass and writing a couple of Spanish songs.  And finally there are the multiple projects for developing my online presence that I need to maintain in a consistent manner.  The two websites need to have regular content added and I need to finish defining the menu structure for them.  The structure shouldn’t take more than a couple of weeks to set up and adding content will simply be a matter of notating what I am working on at the time in all the other areas.  That leaves making videos for the YouTube channels and creating a program schedule for live streaming and fulfilling that weekly commitment.  And when I need a break there is still the landscaping, retaining walls, fish pond, house foundation, and kitchen renovation projects to keep me busy.

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Written by: Super User

Category: Personal Blog

Published: 17 April 2020

Hits: 3092

I have spent most of today trying to understand and streamline the processes I am looking to use to enhance my online presence.  The goal for today specifically was to get a couple of practice videos posted on my Youtube Channel.   I got that done a few minutes ago but there were several things that sidetracked me throughout the process.  The intent when I started working on this process a couple of weeks ago was, among other things, to facilitate my music lessons since they have been moved to an online format.  It is my desire to set up my studio so that I can do multi angle video recording and as I was searching for a multi camera solution I came across the Corel Video Studio product which contains a program called MultiCam Capture Lite so I downloaded a trial version and recorded a practice performance to see if it would do what I wanted.  I was reasonably happy with the result except the trial version was limited to only two sources - two cameras or a camera and the computer screen.  I transferred the resultant videos to my OneDrive so I could share them with my piano teacher but subsequently discovered that the file sizes were so large that it was impractical.  Still, it gave me the ability to capture two angles and offered at least six with $19.99 upgrade.  I wanted to confirm some licensing concerns with the company so I initiated a chat session and discovered that I would have to buy the whole package which would run a minimum of $79.99 plus the $19.99 upgrade for the part that I wanted.  I have deferred that decision and am trying to determine if I can just use Streamlab's OBS Studio to do the capture.  Still, I managed to take the files I captured and run them through Handbrake to reduce the file sizes from around 2.5 GB each to just about 200 MB for each resultant mp4 file.  I then imported them into Premier Pro to simultaneously display both angles for each performance and got those uploaded.  I was going to edit another video to use as an introduction to the Youtube channel but it appears that due to not using a constant bit rate encoding the audio and video were not in sync when imported into Premier Pro.  I have yet to verify that Handbrake was able to correct that issue but, except for couple of hours studying Spanish and about an hour this morning playing the piano and drums, that is essentially what I have spent most of today doing.  Yesterday, among other things, I managed to transcribe 'Arkansas Traveler' for guitar with tablature using Finale and now I must prepare for a Spanish test.  If my plans work out I should be streaming live by this summer and have my online presence, including this website, the letspracticemusic.com website, and the Youtube Channel at a reasonably functional level that can be easily maintained by the time school starts again next fall.