Over the past four weeks, I have been covering modulations, an starting next week, I am going to start covering chord progressions. Today, I want to take a breather and just talk about a few things that art important to me. I read something this week written by a very confident musician, and it made […]
Today, I want to talk about musicality. Musicality means different things to different people, but to me, musicality is the ability to rise above the technical aspects of a piece of music and communicate at a deeper level. A short time ago, I listened to a performance of a very good pianist. While she played […]
I have mentioned before in these lessons that you should spend about a third of your practice time on theory, including scales. In today’s lesson, I want to go into a bit more detail on why that is necessary and also tell you exactly how to get started. Like you, I started playing scales at […]
Because it is Christmas and no one is working on music anyway, I want to take a week off from anything too heavy and just give you some thoughts about how to practically learn music. This is a controversial subject and I am hardly an expert, but here is the way I see it. Imagine […]
Changing to the key a fifth below the current key is very easy, and can be useful sometimes. If the last chord you play in the old key is a I chord (and I normally will be), simply change it to a dominant chord by adding a minor 7th. This chord will automatically be the […]
I am in the middle of arranging my next CD at the moment and am very busy, so this is going to be short and sweet today. I am going to give you the simplest modulation possible, and believe it or not, I use it all the time. You can sum up the rule in […]
Modulating up a half step is probably one of the most common modulations you will use. It is very common especially when accompanying singers. Fortunately, there is a simple little formula that makes it very easy. Be sure not to start this modulation while any singer or instrument is still in the old key. Once […]
I have gotten many requests to post a lesson on how to modulate between keys. More and more churches are starting to either package songs together or change keys within a song, so modulation is becoming a necessity for church pianists. Modulation can be done in many ways, but today, I want to talk about […]
My daughter who is five years old plays the violin, and I often write music for her and accompany her. Recently, I gave her a new melody to play and started playing an intro. I was a little surprised to see that she instinctively knew when to start playing. It could have been because she […]
I was planning to go on to something else this week. However, during the past week, I have heard from several people asking me about the chord chart that I provided last week. Some questioned whether you can really use all of those chords when you have a C as the melody note. Below I […]
I hear from a lot of readers who ask me to cover particular things in these lessons. One of the most popular requests is how to do chord substitutions. I always explain that I am getting there but have not really built a foundation in these lessons to tackle that subject yet. I plan on […]