Want an easy way to get a thicker, more complex sound in your music? One of the easiest tips I can give you is to start using major 7ths. In this short post, I am going to tell you what major 7th chords are, when to use them, and how to use them. Sometimes, music […]
Author Archives: Greg Howlett
When musicians ask me for advice about marketing their music, I usually start with the same questions. 1) Are you on CDBaby? 2) Are you on Pandora? The reason I ask these questions is because of how music distribution works these days. We all know that selling physical CDs is largely a thing of the past. I […]
There is a joke in Nashville that people are going to start turning studios into houses. This of course is considered funny because it seems like every other house in Nashville either is a studio or has a studio in the basement. Even on the famed Music Row in Nashville, many of the studios are former […]
I am flying home at the moment from Los Angeles after spending some time at NAMM, a enormous music industry show, and my friends with Whisperings, a group of concert pianists and recording artists. Here are some thoughts I came away with. NAMM encompasses 1.5 million square feet of every music product you can imagine […]
One of the great tragedies in the way music has been taught over the past century has been the irrational focus on rote replication of classical music. Over the years, I have heard from hundreds of pianists who tell me the same sad tale. Many of them have advanced degrees in music but once they leave the glass tower of […]
According to one of my online critics, I am not an arranger; I am apparently a deranger. I have been around the absurdities of the bickering that goes on in church music for a long time and thought I had heard it all but I have to say I have never heard that one. It […]
As of this past week, I finished all the big stuff I have been working on for the year. The last three months have been brutal but now I am trying to relax a bit and am thinking about 2015. I want to talk about one of the things I have been thinking about: social […]
My daughter Kelsey informed me on Friday that she had to play in church on Sunday so I had to arrange something for her. Due to the time, it had to be simple but I still wanted to do something off the beaten path. The video below demonstrates what we came up with. In the […]
I wrote last week about Vitabase moving out of our warehouse and our decision to move out too. A big problem related to that is that we have been sharing employees with Vitabase for some time, and with them moving, we can’t do that anymore. Over the past six months, as I anticipated this coming, I have […]
I came across an interesting quote the other day that I posted on my Facebook page. “I practice my saxophone three hours a day. I’m not saying I’m particularly special, but if you do something three hours a day for forty years, you get pretty good at it.” ~Kenny G. The takeaway here is obvious. […]
I love business and I am glad I am often asked for business advice especially about internet retail. I got a request for advice earlier this week about a website and it prompted me to write this post because what I told him might be helpful to a lot of other people too. This post is going […]