“Everyone should save. Just saying.”
– Mathieu Bellemare, in Music Technologies class this morning
Category Archives: Music
What if I don’t play piano?
What follows is thoughts spilling out of my head, prompted by several conversations I’ve had with students over the past week. If it sounds scattered, incomplete or just dumb, well, you’ve been warned.
In my life as a college teacher, I spend most of my time teaching “Music Technologies” classes. The content of the courses is mostly up to me, which is both great fun and a real challenge. This term I’m teaching a basic course in GarageBand and a more advanced Ableton Live class. We also cover notation software (Sibelius) in a different semester. One of the big challenges in these courses is trying to help the students develop some literacy in “Music Technologies” rather than just facility with a few specific programs.
While this really comes down to a problem of general musical literacy and musicianship, facility with the programs is a big issue, and wrapped up in it is another issue: piano playing. The problem is that the most obvious and natural method of getting notes into any mainstream sequencing program is to play them on a MIDI keyboard. If you’re a piano player. I’m lucky to be one of those, but many of my students are not. As the keyboard has effectively become the only metaphor for notation in mainstream music software, this can create a serious bottleneck in the creative process, if the goal is (as it is here) to make music with a computer.
So, no matter how well I teach the software itself, a lot of people still get hung up at, “What if I don’t play piano?” I’ve been thinking about these questions a lot, and I’ve got some thoughts; some are more technical, less conceptual and possibly less helpful suggestions, and some are less tied to procedure and have more to do with how you approach making music.
Lead Sheet: Inor Man
It’s been a while since I put up a lead sheet, but Sheridan just upgraded me to Sibelius 6 and this was good opportunity to try it out and get back on the horse. Wow – Sib 6 has some great improvements. It’s a lot smarter about automatically moving things out of each others’ way, and it’s great at guessing chords without needing a drop down menu.
Here’s the Deborahs (Roger Travassos, Paul Mathew, Chris Banks and me) playing Inor Man:
And here’s the chart: Inor Man (pdf).
Shuffle
Christine just wrote about a project we’d conceived earlier this year called Shuffle. She’d set out plans to get three projects done this year, and this is the last one, so the pressure’s now on. You can read bits of our grant applications (which were rejected) in her post, but the general idea is more or less as follows:
Christine and I both have a bit of trouble fleshing out ideas – I’ve got a lot of little snippets of song kicking around that are lovely but unlikely to grow into full pieces. So instead of recording a regular 8-10 song album, we’re going to record 40 or 50 little snippets of music – just single ideas. The catch is that each track has to be able to somehow connect to any other one. You put them in your iPod and hit Shuffle, and you get a different piece of music every time.
I’m really looking forward to working on this. It’s both really creative and really geeky. Just my thing.
Nfld
Off to St John’s Newfoundland tomorrow at some ungodly hour. I’m playing with The Worst Pop Band Ever at the Wreckhouse Jazz Festival. Hoping to hook up with some friends (there are a lot of Toronto folks playing).
I’m trying to travel light, which is sort of offset by the fact that I’m packing a synth, so I’m going to be worrying about oversize/overweight/fragile checked luggage. But on top of that, I’m bringing a change of clothes, a pair of shorts, my swimsuit, my laptop, my phone and a book. Yay traveling light. Not sure I’ll ever get it. But I need all this stuff. Here’s what I’ve set out for myself, if I miraculously end up with nothing to do in St John’s:
- Try to understand Henri Bergson (the book: Thinking in Time by Suzanne Guerlac)
- Set up an iPhone/Ableton Live/Pure Data rig for some upcoming gigs with Kush
- Work on some stuff in Pure Data for an interactive project with Simon and Javier
- Find some good fish & chips
I’m pretty sure I can pull off #4.
Lead sheet: They don’t have to be pretty
I wrote They don’t have to be pretty after hearing Dean’s Dragon one night. It’s not a comment on their appearance. They look great. They also sound amazing. They’re clearly mostly crazy.
On Monday I got to play this tune twice – once with Christine at the Tranzac and once with The Worst Pop Band Ever at the Rex. Needless to say, they were pretty different performances, and both tons of fun. One of my favourite things about writing music is what happens when other people get their hands on it and I have to relinquish some control.
Lead sheet: They don’t have to be pretty (pdf)
Listen to Christine and I play it here.