Honestly, this has been a brutal week. I should have several songs recorded by now for my new project but I don’t have any. There have been a few technical things that have ruined what I have done so I have to start over. In the meantime, I recorded this video to give you a bit of […]
One of the lessons that I have to understand as a recording artist and concert pianist is this: I can’t play all kinds of music. That is a humbling thing. It is a hard thing to accept. I have struggled with it. In fact, if you listen to the music on my projects, you will […]
Years ago, I read something about investing as a Christian that has stuck with me. There are two general rules that should guide our management of our assets. 1) Our investments should be active. We should not just be sitting on cash or other assets like a miser. 2) Our investments should be working for good. […]
If you want to watch the earlier parts of this interview, here they are: Part 1 (Danny’s bio and how he got into professional studio work) Part 2 (How the studio music process works) Part 3 (Charting) In this last portion of the interview, Danny discusses licks (what I often call fills). I actually get […]
We have talked about turns before but to summarize briefly, a turn is a set of chords that are inserted between phrases in a song to give more harmonic interest and connect the phrases together better. For example, let’s say a phrase ends on I and the next phrase starts on I. In that case, […]
Read Part 1 here Read Part 2 here In this segment, Danny discusses how charts work. For those of you who don’t know what I mean by a chart, I am referring to the music notation used by studio musicians. Basically, a chart contains the overall roadmap of the song down to every bar but […]
Read Part 1 here. Here is the second (of four) segments from my interview with Danny Crawford last week. In this one, he discusses how a song goes from an initial rough idea to a professional-level recording and the process used to generate an entire project worth of tracks in one day. Keep in mind […]
One of the things I like to do here is try to get you inside of the production of professional music. I think it is incredibly interesting. Some of you will agree with me but even if you are not into that scene at all, there is still a lot to learn from the people in […]
I heard a curious thing a while back. I heard a young person play two pieces of music. The first one was an extremely technical classical piece. It is the kind of piece that only the top classical music students would tackle. I know it well but I would not touch it with a ten […]
When I was young, I practiced on an mid-upright Baldwin Hamilton piano that my parents bought for us. That piano was everywhere back then because it was sort of a happy medium between a spinet (an “upright” piano that was maybe only 4 feet tall) and a full upright which we all coveted but could […]
I know that many of you don’t really care about what I am going to write in this post but some of you will and maybe it will help you in some way. At any rate, I warned you that I was going to write about some studio stuff since I am knee deep in it […]