I am in the middle of recording my new project and last week, took some time to learn Melodyne. Melodyne is an amazing piece of software that allows you to manipulate individual notes inside of a sound file. That sounds like a big deal because it is. Think of it this way. Let’s say that you […]
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 […]
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 […]
After publishing my latest free arrangement of “Christ Arose” last week, several of you asked for me to discuss it in a video so here it is. I wrote the arrangement in just a few minutes and I don’t consider it to be the best thing I have ever done. The one thing I consciously did while […]
After last week’s post about transitioning between songs, several asked me to demonstrate. Yesterday, I recorded this 15-minute video demonstrating the six tips in that article. * Planning ahead * Making modulations easy * Starting all transitions early * Playing fill music while waiting for the leader to start * Giving cue signals to the […]
Yesterday, we finished the first year of Online Music School. We had two 16-week semesters and I calculate that I talked in front of the camera for somewhere close to 200 hours. Roughly 150 students participated. Registrations were about equal for both semesters even though I only taught 5 classes in the second semester compared to […]
Work on this for a year and it will make a big difference in your music.
Merry Christmas! Big savings on albums, sheet music and instructional courses.