I’ve notice that people who have a stable life enjoy a very healthy amount of practice, and therefore make good progress with their instrument. And, at the opposite of the spectrum, that it is very difficult to keep spending time on the piano when your life is in transition. For example, if you’re about to…
I was watching a video with Vinnie Colaiuta playing in a fusion brass band. Vinnie, if you don’t know him, is one of the great drummer that ever lived. He has played famously for Frank Zappa or Sting among many, many others. He’s a great technician, for sure, but that is not the purpose of…
There are a lot of conundrums in music because it’s a very organic activity, and we are, after all, analog beings, prone to chaotic or non-sensical behavior and thinking. One of the common mystery is speed. Question: how do you work on speed? For fun, I’ll name the 2 common answers I see most often.…
I get them sometimes, but I think differently about them than most of my self-employed colleagues. I think of them as a little respite, almost a vacation that’s beneficial to my sanity. I am talking about dry spells. A dry spell occurs when your phone or your email box doesn’t ring with new prospects, when…
I am doing reviews these days. Not just for myself, but also for my students. I am trying to resolve that pickle for them: how do you make reviews interesting, even exciting? So, I am writing pages of exercises and composing music to play along in order to explore that concept. This is going to…
I used to think that dynamics were the be-all and end-all solution to carry emotions in music. But, as I move forward on my journey towards ultimate music (I’ve still got a long way to go), I think that it’s a bit more complicated than that. Here I will mention something fairly obvious. For most…