Author: musicalitywrld

Open Your Ears to Musical U

At Musical U we are passionate about helping you express yourself in music. What appears as “natural” musicality is actually a combination of learnable skills – skills that are rarely taught in traditional music education.

We began with apps, moved on to publishing 1000 + and counting free articles in our blog, and over 40 Musical U learning modules on all aspects of musicality, ranging from ear training to getting confident.

But now we’re taking the next step.

Musicality training does take some time, and we know that you’re busy. But there are so many times during the day – commuting to work, waiting in line, even exercising at the gym – that could be put to effective use and move you forward in your drive to become a natural musician.

So we’ve pooled together the best minds in modern musicality to produce a fascinating series of audio episodes – a mix of interviews and teaching – so you can continue to receive inspiration and training, anytime, anywhere. Read more about this next step in your becoming more musical in Announcing: The Musical U Podcast!

A podcast is like an online radio show that you can listen to on-demand, whenever you want. And, as always, we keep putting the “U” in Musical U by reaching out to our email subscribers to give us their input, and with podcast previews and behind-the-scenes exclusives. Enhance your listening experience and sign up for Podcast Insiders for free.

Caroline Pennell Turns Yellow

Covers have been around forever, but YouTube has brought the art of the cover to new heights (and sometimes depths!). Popular “Voice” alum Caroline Pennell transforms Coldplay’s searing indie ballad “Yellow” into a haunting embrace, pulsating with hand drums and rolling acoustic guitars. Compare them, and you’ll learn much about musical form, instrumentation, and the process of producing in Before and After: Covering Coldplay.

Recording a new song requires a lot of decisions before committing any sounds to tape. With so many creative decisions, how can you possibly think about all the other aspects of recording? Who has that much time? Fortunately, websites like The Recording Revolution can show you how to record a song from scratch.

There are so many different options available once you decide that you are ready to finally record your new single or album. As we saw in this article, Caroline Pennell was able to make her mark through a single rather than a full album. Sonic Scoop talks more about the advantages of recording singles rather than full albums.

Caroline was able to get her start by being a competitor on The Voice. Competitions have also become a high-hype launch vehicle for classical musicians. But most of us will never get that big of a stage to showcase our talents. Without such a large platform, how can you make a name for yourself to start making a living with your music? Bach Tracks shares 10 Tips to making a living in music… without winning a competition.

Whenever we talk about cover songs, we spend a bit of time talking about how the structure of the song is often changed. This greatly changes the dynamics of a song and can bring in a listener’s attention… or cause them to change the station. Robin Wesley will reveal the secret to capturing the attention of the audience in less than 30 seconds.

Rhythm-me-this

Read this sentence in the stuffiest hoity-toity attitude you can muster: “Rhythmic regularity is firmly established by accenting certain pre-determined beats in the measure.”

Now once that is established, what happens when you throw the accent onto those other beats? Or even off the beat?

Now this: “RhythMIC reGUlarITy is firmLY estabLISHED by acCENTing cerTAIN pre-DEtermined beats IN the meaSURE.” Voilà, syncopation:

Syncopation brings rhythm to life. Even though it is everywhere, sometimes it’s hard to break it all down and dig into rhythmic goldmine in a way that’s useful. Take this fun approach in Playing Around the Beat: Syncopation.

And for a more indepth look, Get Rhythm: Syncopation.

Are you ready to practice syncopation on your instrument? It can often be difficult to translate music theory into your practice, especially with new concepts. But practicing your newfound knowledge will help to internalize the lessons and make it a part of your musical mastery! Jeff Rolka has great tips on how to practice syncopation:

Syncopation can be incorporated into music in many different fashions. A unique way of using syncopation on a stringed instrument is to mute the strings to create that “space” between the notes and get off the main beat. Learn more about this method with this muted strums tutorial from Ukulele Hunt.

How else can the stringed instrument player use syncopation in their music? How about through their strumming patterns? By varying your strum, the rhythm will naturally become syncopated and add interest to the music. To see how the experts have incorporated this, The Guitar Lesson has a tutorial showing how the guitar added syncopation to the Oasis song “Whatever”.

Where else can your new understanding of rhythm take you? How about into the world of composition? While standard classical music is typically fairly tame in the syncopation department, it can be quite flagrant in nearly every other form of music. This is especially true in pop, rock, jazz, and many other popular forms.

If you’re looking for a good start in the composition department, Oliver Lugg takes us through his guide to music composition.

Loopy

Looping has now been around now for a while, and many artists wow us with their ability to layer and control vast sound resources with nary a whine from the “band”.

However, did you know that beyond the effect, looping can be an amazing tool for learning and improving your musicianship on several fronts. Our guest author Noah Peterson (from Looping Live) demonstrates Learning by Repetition: How Musicians Can Improve with Looping.

”Nothing gets you better faster than listening to yourself.” We learned this in our article on looping. Becoming comfortable with hearing yourself play is difficult for many musicians, and can be hard to overcome. But recording your playing is so beneficial to your overall growth as a musician. Wired Guitarist explains why recording yourself leads to success.

Looping can be a very effective way of enhancing your practice sessions and become inspired once again. Musicians can often plateau, just like athletes, and can have a hard time progressing to the next stage in their growth.

What else can you do to break out of your routines and inspire new growth? Anne from Harp Mastery has some suggestions on creative music practice to help you grow.

A looping pedal isn’t the only pedal that can greatly enhance your creative juices. Piano players have three pedals at their disposal that make fantastic additions to their music. If you haven’t yet picked up the piano, it makes a fantastic second instrument! Here is PianoCub to talk about three pedal techniques that pianists need to know.

Are you ready to get started looping in your musical practice, but unsure of where to begin and how to use this new technology? Marty Music has some useful practice tips on looping pedals for guitarists:

Round and Round We Go

Looping your way into musical mastery? Helping an old song turn over a new leaf? Ready to “Turn the Beat Around” with syncopation?

The post Looping, Syncopation, Covering Coldplay, and MU Podcast appeared first on Musical U.

Here at Musical U we’re always looking for new and better ways to help you become more musical. Many of us spend hours a day with earbuds in, listening to our favourite music, maybe some ear training exercises to help you improve your skills as you listen, or maybe even an educational and entertaining podcast. This September we’re going to help you combine all three, with a new podcast from Musical U dedicated to helping you improve your skills to better play and enjoy the music you love.

Not sure what a podcast is? See “What is a Podcast?” section below.

For years I’ve been an avid podcast listener and always thought that a podcast could be a great way to help musicians with ear training and developing their musicality. But to do a podcast well takes a huge amount of work, and it wasn’t until now that the time felt right…

Finally we’re ready to do it, and I’ve been contacting all the top names and people I admire most to help us make the show as interesting, entertaining and valuable as possible.

Listen and Learn

The show will be a mix of interviews and teaching.

I’ll be interviewing some of the top names in modern musicality. The people behind the biggest websites and coolest products that help you feel more like a natural in music. We’ll be talking about their own musical breakthroughs and the ways they now help others succeed in their music training.

We’ll also be doing teaching episodes where we tackle a particular problem, such as “how do you know which chords go together?”, “what’s the best way to master syncopation?” or “what’s the point of the circle of fifths?”.

Of course we’ll be keen to hear from you, the listener, about what topics you’d like to hear us cover and who you’d like us to interview.

In fact, we’ve already been asking our email subscribers to give us their input, and providing them with sneak-peek behind-the-scenes info and exclusives. Want in? You can sign up for Podcast Insiders for free here.

Why a podcast?

From our original mobile apps, to downloadable training MP3s, to making sure Musical U works great for our members on mobile, we’ve always been dedicated to providing musicality training that’s flexible and which you can do in short sessions at your convenience.

Podcasts offer us a way to provide you with useful education in moments that are otherwise wasted. Maybe it’s a long drive, a gym session, or an unexpected delay. Any time your ears are free and you have your mobile device and earphones handy, you can listen, learn, and expand your own musicality.

I’m not naturally someone who puts himself out there, so initially, I wasn’t keen to be the voice of our podcast. Not least because I have mental hangups around the way I pronounce my “S”s! After doing monthly live Q&A sessions for Musical U members for two years I feel a bit more comfortable, and as we’re always telling our members, you shouldn’t let your fears of performance hold you back from your true potential. I’m using many of the tactics we teach in our Get Confident module to help me be comfortable and confident hosting the show. We’ll see what feedback we get, but so far I’m absolutely enjoying the chance to talk to amazing people on our interview episodes and hopefully my voice won’t be too off-putting to the listeners…

Why Listen?

As I said above, the show is going to be a mix of interviews and teaching. The interviews will let you peek inside the lives of successful musicians and music educators, see that they suffered from many of the same insecurities and limitations that you might feel, and learn from the insights that let them overcome them. They’ll also introduce you to new ideas, methodologies and resources to apply in your own musicality training.

The teaching episodes will bring the same kind of high quality tutorials and guides that we regularly publish here on the website to your earbuds in a denser and more convenient form. We might even sneak in a bit of ear training!

The most passionate musicians are always seeking new ways to improve their skills, and we’re hoping that our new podcast will find a valuable slot in your own life, to help you become more musical faster.

How to get the new podcast

The new podcast will be launching at the start of September. If you want to be notified when it launches just sign up for Podcast Insiders:

→ Sign up for Podcast Insiders

Once it’s live we’ll also be adding easy subscribe links to the site here so you can download it in iTunes, Stitcher, Overcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Here at Musical U we’re super excited about this new podcast and the chance to bring you some of the brightest minds and most interesting ideas in modern musicality. We hope you’ll join us when we launch the show in just a few weeks!

The post Announcing: The Musical U Podcast! appeared first on Musical U.

A phenomenal way out of this is looping – it will shake things up and put some fun back into your practice routine.

What is looping? Simple: looping is using software or hardware technologies to instantly record and play back sound. Here’s a simple introduction to the concept:

That video is actually showing just one of the many uses of looping; it isn’t necessarily about just recording and performing. It has a myriad of uses that can improve your musicianship, help you honestly critique your own music, and give you those “Eureka!” music moments that you’re looking for.

Here’s a quick guide to just some of the hidden uses of looping.

1.     Critical Listening

Nothing gets you better faster than listening to yourself. Loop pedals make it very easy to play and instantly listen back so you can hear where you need to make improvements.

If you’re working on a difficult passage or improvising through a set of chord changes just stomp the pedal, play/record yourself, stomp it again to play it back, and give yourself a chance to hear exactly how you sound.

You can hear what you like, if it worked, articulation, phrasing, intonation, timing… everything is there. And you can do it over and over and over.

2.     Composing

Loop pedals are excellent tools for creation and arrangement. You can repeat the song (or sections) endlessly while you try out new melodies, harmonies, chord voicings, or chord progressions. You can even experiment with moving sections around and adding harmonies to a verse or chorus.

If you play several instruments, looping will literally enable you to form a band with just yourself. You can arrange the piece in the privacy of your own space, trying out different bass lines or rhythm parts on guitar or keys, and building your song piece-by-piece. The only limit is your imagination.

Looping even enables you to create a multilayered masterpiece with a single instrument! Watch as violinist Tyler Carson creates an epic piece with just an acoustic violin, a horn violin, and some loop pedals:

3.     Creative inspiration

One thing that is often overlooked is the importance of just spending time playing your instrument. That’s practice, too. A lot of us are always working on this lick, or these changes, or this song, or whatever. You also need to work on fun. Music, even serious music, should be fun. It’s fun to make music, and it’s even more fun to make good music.

It’s one thing to work on scales, technical exercises, play along with recordings, or just “noodle” around. It’s something else when you use that pedal to record something and start playing along with it. You can play along with yourself in a myriad of ways: harmonize, do contrary motion, layer, and more. If you’re a wind player or vocalist, you can work on long tones and harmonize with yourself.

Besides giving you some “jam” time, it’s a great way to explore new ideas, try some licks out, make silly noises, and layer sounds together in a way that you might not ever do live. You’ll find that there’s some pretty cool things happening when you do that. You might find an idea for a tune, or a cool sound to use in a solo, or even a part for a song that you’re working on.

If you’re not in the mood to work on something in particular, but you still want to play – plug it in and make some noise. Productivity is far from being the singular end goal in music, and you don’t always have to grind the same stuff in your practice sessions! Loop stations are a great way to put your practice to work into a creative session.

4.     Practice for the Real Deal

Another excellent benefit of incorporating a loop station into your practice sessions is it naturally gets you ready for studio recording. Think about it: looping is recording. And if you’re working on it regularly, you can kiss those “studio nerves” goodbye. You’ll be ready to go, because your time, intonation, and execution will be tight. You’ll be used to recording, playback, and evaluating your take; you won’t get freaked out hearing yourself played back for the first time.  It won’t be new and you won’t be doing a lot of takes.

When I go into studios and knock out harmony parts, engineers are impressed with how quickly and perfectly I do it. When they ask me how I do it, I let them know I do a ton of looping. It’s literally practicing for studio recording.

5.     Ear Training

In addition to being able to harmonize with yourself, you can work on intonation. You can practice playing lines or scales in different intervals like thirds, fifths, and sevenths strictly for intonation.

If you’re messing around with harmonies and chord voicings, the constant playback and experimentation with voices will train your ear to recognize different types of chords, and those progressions you’re working on will be pounded into your subconscious. You’re going to be developing your ear, your songwriting skills, and your improvisational skills at the same time!

I have changed a lot of chord voicings because of these types of exercises. For example, after listening back to a recording, I decided to go away from a triad to doubling the octave and adding a third on top. It’s same amount of voices and the same major/minor quality, but has a very different sound.

Learning Through Looping

We live in a time where there are a lot of tools to help us improve the way we practice music. Looping can help you make the most out of the time you spend making music, by practicing smart. And there no reason why practicing can’t be fun.

Loop stations are excellent practice tools. There are a variety of pedals and programs available for your use – when you’re ready to check these out, here are some of my top picks.

Even if you never do a looping show, you’ll find hours of fun and useful practice are just a stomp pedal away. Visit www.loopinglive.com to learn more about gear, techniques, and innovative use of technology in music.

The post Learning by Repetition: How Musicians Can Improve with Looping appeared first on Musical U.

With these basics in hand, one of the first questions they have to ask themselves is whether they want to record a version they can plausibly recreate live, or if they want to build a multi-tracked tower of sounds, instruments, and vocals so layered and thick it melts all the computers in the recording studio. Think Johnny Cash’s album I Walk the Line on the former end of the spectrum and the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band on the latter.

The Original: “Yellow” by Coldplay

As Coldplay gained ground in the pop music charts, their budget expanded, allowing them to create and recreate more complicated arrangements in their live shows. The band’s first full-length album, Parachutes, however, was much simpler.

For the most part, the entire album can be recreated live with Coldplay’s four members: Chris Martin on keyboards and lead vocals, Jonny Buckland on guitar, Guy Berryman on bass, and Will Champion on drums.

“Yellow”, released in 2000 as the second single off Parachutes, fits this model with only the very small exception of sparse cello in the background of the verses.

Song Structure (Original):

The song has a standard format of alternating verses and choruses, but what stands out is the irregular phrasing within the verses. The most standard phrase length in pop music is eight bars. Coldplay’s phrases are six bars long, with the third phrase of verse one being offset by one bar, making it only five bars long. This irregularity gives the lyrics a free, dreamy quality that pushes the genre more to the alternative end of the rock genre.

While the instrumental parts, verses, and choruses each have different instrumentation, they stay consistent each time the individual section is repeated. The instrumental sections always have electric and acoustic guitar accompanied by a steady drum beat, the verses both have acoustic guitar, a simple drum pattern, bass line, vocals, sparse electric guitar, and faint cello, and the choruses use an intensified drum beat, backing vocals, and an eighth note pulse on the keyboard. The changes that occur in these repeated sections are subtle, such as the addition of a few distant backing vocals in the second verse that aren’t present in the first.

• Instrumental intro [0:00]
• Verse one [0:34]
  
  • Statement 1
  • Statement 2
  • Without vocals
  • Statement 3
  • Without vocals
• Chorus [1:29]
• Instrumental section [1:51]
• Verse two [2:14]
  
  • Statement 1
  • Statement 2
  • Without vocals
• Chorus [2:52]
• Instrumental section [3:14]
• Bridge [3:36]
• Outro [4:10]

The Cover: “Yellow” by Caroline Pennell

A challenge facing solo singers and songwriters like Caroline Pennell is how to create a full ensemble sound for her songs. Without the assistance of a looping system or backing track, a single performer can only manage one instrument at a time. A recording studio offers a convenient alternative to this. While Pennell doesn’t go to the extreme of melting any computers with her version of “Yellow”, she has taken a more layered, multi-tracked approach to the recording.

Gaining her following on the fifth season of The Voice, Pennell made it to the final eight before leaving the show. This early exit didn’t appear to do her much harm, as her EP, The Race, became one of the most downloaded albums of all alumni of The Voice. Continuing this trend after signing with Nettwerk Music Group, her cover of “Yellow” became one of the most popular off the label’s album, From Cover to Cover: 30 Years at Nettwerk.

Song Structure (Cover):

Pennell keeps the tempo of “Yellow” to within a click or two of Coldplay’s version, hovering around 86 bpm (beats per minute). Despite the tempo remaining the same, her airy vocals give the song a more relaxed feel.

Her version of “Yellow” slowly adds elements, each one continuing in the mix until the outro, at which point the mix thins, leaving only Pennell’s voice with simple guitar and piano accompaniment.

It’s not impossible, and probably not even that difficult, to recreate this arrangement live, but as Pennell is a solo act, to attempt to do this would add a substantial level of difficulty to the performance of this song.

If an entire album were structured with the use of the instrumentation detailed below, it would make its performance simpler, but Pennell approaches each of her songs with a different selection of sounds, making a performance of her recorded works a complex endeavor.

Cover Walk-Through

Let’s have a look at how this talented solo artist arranged the song to fit her style. We recommend listening to the song while reading through; this will help you pay extra attention to how all the elements are layered.

Instrumental intro

Like Coldplay’s version, Pennell starts out with acoustic guitar played in a fingerpicking style.

Verse one

Electronic sounds are subtly introduced during statement one [0:17], enhancing the dreamy quality of the acoustic guitar and Pennell’s vocals. In the second statement, male vocals enter, harmonizing with Pennell. Underneath the vocals, rolling piano similar to the guitar pattern slowly emerges. The third statement introduces a hand drum and shaker, giving the song a steady heartbeat.

Chorus

Here at [1:10], the introduction of strummed guitar helps to build energy.

Instrumental

This is roughly the halfway point of the song and it isn’t until this point, at [1:33] that we hear the bass. Bass is an element the ear won’t necessarily miss if it is absent from the beginning or throughout the entirety of a song, but once it’s there, removing it creates a void, as though the bottom of the song has fallen out. Introducing it late can have the opposite effect, as it does here, creating a grounded, solid sensation of depth.

Verse Two

While Pennell doesn’t add anything in the second verse [1:49], all the previous elements remain.

Chorus

To continue the impression of growth, the drum pattern changes, intensifying here at [2:23]. Additionally, synthesized string pads are introduced. Until this point, the chord progression has been covered by instruments incapable of sustain. Sustain is one of the primary reasons for the inclusion of bowed string instruments (violin, viola, cello, and string bass) in pop music.

This family of instruments can create what’s known as a pad of harmony, and it’s common to hear either the actual instruments or a synthesized version underneath unsustained instruments. Here, it fills out the harmony, adding to the sensation of growing energy.

Bridge

The bridge section at [2:50] doesn’t add any new elements, instead maintaining all the elements introduced earlier. By not adding anything new here, Pennell signals an approach to the end of the song.

Outro

At [3:24], all the elements drop out except the rolling piano, guitar, and voice, bringing the song to a close.

Differences and Similarities

Coldplay and Pennell have approached the recording of this song from different directions; Coldplay with the intention of recreating it live, and Pennell with a version unlikely to be recreated on stage. Another element separating these two versions is genre. Coldplay’s recording falls comfortably into the alternative rock genre, largely because of the use of electric guitar and a standard rock beat on the drum kit. Pennell’s version, however, leans heavily towards folk thanks to the distinctive sound of the hand drum and the fingerpicking style of the acoustic guitar.

A less obvious difference is the change in form. In Coldplay’s original, each of the verses has two bars without vocals that separate it from the following chorus. Pennell leaves out one of these bars in the first verse, and opts to remove both in the second, which makes it sound like she’s jumping into the chorus, perhaps to lend more forward drive to her version. She does something similar before the bridge, leaving just a two bar break before the chorus, whereas Coldplay includes an entire instrumental section.

The Finishing Touch

The final difference occurs in the outro. Coldplay’s original outro is simply a restatement of the first lyrics of verse one. Throughout the song, the chord progression within the verses stays consistent, basically repeating A major, E major, and Dsus2. In this final statement, however, they replace the E major chord with an E minor chord.

→ Learn more about major and minor

This chord seems to polarize the world of cover musicians. For every cover that stays true to Coldplay’s choice, there seems to be another that abandons it in favor of the E major the ear has acclimatized to throughout the song. Pennell is in the latter camp, sticking with the major chord. It’s just one more way she’s managed to make this cover entirely her own.

The post Before and After: Covering Coldplay appeared first on Musical U.

This week’s gathering of Musical U posts celebrates this coming together – whether it be the simple clapping of two hands, the joining of two rhythms to form syncopation, or the friendships that bond musicians, and the ascension of music into transcendence.

But first, let’s meet a musician who brings inner struggles out by combining her love of “beautiful” melodies with “ugly” sounds:

Transformer

Anastasia Voitinskaia joined the Musical U team as Assistant Content Editor earlier this year. In fact, if you’re a fan of Musical U posts (and if you’re not, you can start today!), you’ve enjoyed what happens when Anastasia brings together her many musical, writing, and graphic design talents to transform raw content into finished blog posts.

This week, we had the opportunity to learn more about Anastasia’s musician side.

You see, some of us chose music for love.

For others, music chose us – by force if necessary.

Despite the coercion, Anastasia dutifully put her all into her rigorous classical piano conservatory upbringing. Until one day something clicked.

Read more about how Anastasia continues to transform her musical life in Meet the Team: Anastasia Voitinskaia.

Hands Together Now

…or now, or – oops – now?

Clapping in time – something every child can do, right? Well, for some of us it’s not quite that easy. Ever notice that your clap doesn’t exactly line up with the crowd?

Ever wonder why? There is a reason, you know, and you don’t have to be embarrassed.

So what’s the big deal? Aren’t their musical skills that are way more important, like scales, scales, and more scales?

The truth is, bringing your two hands together in a rhythmic way is an important musical skill, and leads to fundamental understandings that will transform your musicality. So important that our friend, composer Sabrina Peña Young, wrote a whole post about it – so you, too, can learn How to Clap in Time.

Being able to clap with the rhythm is an essential component to becoming a confident musician. It seems so simple, yet is also very unappreciated in music education. Africappella has this short lesson on how to get started with keeping the rhythm by clapping.

Clapping is a great exercise to help develop an internal sense of rhythm and will improve every aspect of your musicality. Apart from clapping, what tricks can you use to help develop your rhythmic qualities? AJ Block, from Metronome Online. presents fun ways to practice with a metronome.

Of all the instruments, the percussionist or drummer takes charge of the rhythm. While most of us are not drummers, there is a lot that we can learn about how drummers develop their ability to keep the beat. Drum Ambition has five tips to develop good time keeping.

Once you have the hang of keeping in time by clapping with the music, you are ready to explore the broader world of clapping music. This form of minimalism replaces standard percussion instruments with clapping. And then takes it into realms of rhythm and syncopation that go way beyond the norm! Adam Neely demonstrates an example and explains the genesis of this form of music:

Off the Beaten Path

Music can be seen as an interplay of expectations and surprises. When these surprises come in the rhythm, we have – in the most general sense of the word – syncopation.

Composers have long played with various species of rhythmic surprises, and syncopation really took off when African and European music came together in the Americas. Yet there are so many ways to syncopate, and so many terms to describe it, that really understanding, recognizing, and creating music with all these different forms can be overwhelming.

The Musical U team untangles the whole mess so you can Get Rhythm: All About Syncopation.

Learning to incorporate syncopation into your music can be uncomfortable at first, but it is hardly a skill that is unattainable. A useful method would be to take a cue from the lessons we learned about the importance of clapping during your rhythm ear training. This lesson from Hub Guitar walks you through some basic rhythms to get you started.

Did you get through these first exercises from Hub Guitar? Now you have the basics of syncopation down! The Orpheus Academy of Music has a more challenging take on syncopation.

Syncopation can be a difficult concept for many musicians to master. To help you along your journey, it can be helpful to watch a video that walks you through the process of counting a syncopated beat. Ross the Music Teacher has this video to help you along your way:

Are you ready to take your syncopation mastery to the next level? It’s time to apply syncopation to jazz and improvisation. Bill Hilton will get you started with this video tutorial.

Weaving Together the Strands of a Musical Life

In his long and ever-growing career, Dave Bainbridge has learned many instruments,  jammed the blues with the likes of Buddy Guy and Jack Bruce, composed music for film and video, written, produced, and recorded many albums of music with bands like Celestial Fire and Celtic prog-rock famed Iona, enjoyed many side projects and duo projects, and is now touring with The Strawbs.

What has kept him going, kept him inspired?

Learn the importance of bringing together deep friendship with deep transcendence and you will understand the Making Music for Film, with Friends, and in Spirit, with Dave Bainbridge.

Dave owes much of his success to the connections that he has made throughout his years of performing music. If you are ready to form new relationships and expand your relationships, University of Rock provides the basics to music networking.

Dave talked about how his faith has influenced his musical growth and inspired many performances. He said, “I’m convinced that great art awakens something very deep within us, that can remain dormant for much of the time.” If music has inspired your spiritual growth, how can you find other like-minded musicians to collaborate and create beauty together? Ashley Danyew provides a non-salesy guide to recruiting musicians for your music ministry.

Musicians must always be looking for ways to continue to grow and expand their understanding of their craft. Self-development and continuing your personal music education will also provide opportunities to meet with other musicians. For more on the importance of ongoing self-development, this podcast from Music Entrepreneur HQ will inspire you to continue growing.

During one stage of Dave’s career, he experimented with film music and found that it required complete dedication. Apart from composing for film, getting one of your songs into a movie can really boost your career. How can you get started? Clint Productions has compiled these tips to submitting your music for film and TV.

Come Together

Are you inspired, like Anastasia Voitinskaia, to combine your talents in a musical job you love? Or, like Dave Bainbridge, establish deep friendships that feed a lifetime of music-making? Or bring different rhythms together to syncopate your sweet sinuous sounds?

Maybe you’re just trying to get your two hands to agree to come together at the same time…

The post Syncopate, Clap, Transform, and Transcend appeared first on Musical U.

Anastasia does wonderful work on the editorial team – researching, writing, formatting text and images – transforming raw content into finished posts for the Musical U blog. Let’s learn more about what’s “behind the scenes” with the multifaceted Anastasia:

I play piano, guitar, bass, keys, and am also a very occasional and very shy vocalist.

It started, as it often does, with a child being forcibly dragged to piano lessons at a young age. I took classical piano under the Royal Conservatory for a total of 15 years, hating it for at least the first seven. To be fair, what nine-year-old wants to spend their days playing Bach while their friends are outside skateboarding?

It wasn’t until I was doing my 6th level that something changed.

In a sea of the curriculum’s usual classical music, they’d thrown in a tune called Jazz Exercise #2, by Oscar Peterson. Shame that they wait so long into the program to throw jazz piano in there – because for me, that changed everything. That was the moment I realized that playing music did not have to be an obligatory chore.

I had so much fun playing that piece, and received a near-perfect score on it in my practical piano examination.

After I completed the ten levels of the conservatory, I essentially never touched classical piano again, but was still listening to and playing jazz a lot of the time.

I pretty much entirely shifted gears to guitar after finishing the piano program. I had taken guitar lessons around the time I was finishing my 6th level of piano, but quit after about a year.

I picked up guitar once again while in university, playing covers of songs in my bedroom and at open mics for all four years. Towards the end of those years, I finally started jamming with others, and joined my first “real” band a short while later, playing rhythm guitar.

The thing with being in bands is that it’s addictive. Not long after that, I joined a punk band called Nice (good name, eh?) as a bassist, an instrument that I pretty much lied about knowing how to play.

A short while ago, that punk band fell apart, right around the time that I quit that first band I’d joined.

Then something weird happened: right around the time those two projects were reaching the end of the line, two new ones asked me to come on board. As a result, I currently play as part of a post-punk-meets-pop-punk band named Secret Portals, and a psychedelic rock project that is yet unnamed.

On top of that, I finally started something new that I’d been loafing on for years (out of a combination of fear and indecision): a solo project! A friend asked me if I wanted to play his birthday show. It was super-short notice, but in the span of a couple of weeks, I downloaded Ableton Live, figured out how to use it, and threw together a set of five songs. Because of its rushed nature, it certainly ended up being rather half-baked, but I’m still reasonably proud of it.

I’m currently in the process of writing more, and planning more shows and a split release with a friend in mid-September.

I suppose music initially drew me to it, seeing as I was pulled into the claws of the Conservatory.

Initially, what really got me excited about music in my later life was the discovery of classic rock. That made me pick up the guitar and start playing again, after having quit lessons years previously. For practically the entirety of high school, I was that person skulking around in a Led Zeppelin shirt and ranting to everyone who would listen about how the radio was crap and only played vapid top 40 pop.

My taste and approach to music changed a lot after leaving high school. When I was 17, I moved to Montreal, which is essentially the Canadian capital of music.

Here in Montreal, everyone and their mother is in a band, and on any given weeknight there are about 20 shows happening in the city. The sheer creative output of musicians in the city is staggering and so, so diverse. Everything from indie rock (which Montreal is known for, thanks to bands like Arcade Fire), pop, and jazz to experimental electronic music, drone, and techno. This diversity is impossible to ignore; living here, you end up listening to all sorts of bizarre and amazing stuff.

Honestly, if I hadn’t moved here and befriended so many musicians, I doubt I would have continued making music this prolifically. People here have so much fun playing, and are very supportive and encouraging towards each other’s projects. It’s really another example of “The Scene That Celebrates Itself”. We all go to each other’s shows and there’s a lot of collaboration and cross-pollination.

At the moment, it’d have to be bass! I started playing less than a year ago, with the question of “Why not? It’s just a larger, weirder guitar,” in my head. When I first started playing, I treated it accordingly, literally not thinking about it as a rhythm instrument at all. Pretty sure I was trying to play chords on it for the first while.

As time went on, I slowly came to figure out the role bass plays in a song, and that the idea is to follow the drummer, and not the guitarist.

It’s really satisfying to play, being both a rhythm instrument and a melodic one.

Can I say an honorable mention instrument? I’m gonna do it. The Arturia Microbrute synthesizer:

I’m borrowing one from a friend right now, and I gotta say, it’s the most fun little toy ever. It’s a semi-modular synth that can make these amazing, gnarly, robotic sounds. Best of all, you sculpt the sound yourself, and you can see first-hand how tweaking a knob on the synth changes the sound.

This question (and this interview, in fact!) comes at a good time – I only just recently started a solo project, so I can answer this one as an individual, and not just as a member of a band.

This question is a bit scary because I truthfully have no idea, seeing as this project is very new and I’m still figuring out my sound. In a lot of what I write, the music itself is relatively uptempo and “happy”, but the lyrics center around themes of loss, nostalgia, confusion, and mental illness. Especially that last one – for better or worse, my mental illness informs a lot of what I write, and my music ends up being highly confessional and autobiographical. I’m fine with that – it’s easy to write and it’s good to get it out.

With my solo stuff, I use Ableton Live to make beats/synth lines, then play distorted guitar and sing over top of that. The result is noisy and semi-electronic, but with an easily discernable melody. I really like juxtaposing “ugly” sounds with “pretty” melodies.

A good ear is obviously important, especially for when you EQ things.

The trick is striking the balance between what the band wants and what you know sounds good.

I haven’t stopped listening to Powell since my friend in the UK sent me his stuff a while back. His track “Jonny” is everything that electronic music should be:

Brilliant beat, great melody – and I’m really into deadpan delivery of the vocals.

I’m the Assistant Editor at Musical U, meaning I am Content Manager Andrew Bishko’s (the editor-in-chief, so to speak) henchperson.

Everyone’s zeal for the work they’re doing is massively inspiring. We’re a small team, yet we accomplish so much weekly.

It feels really great to work with other musicians in a context that is not a band, or orchestra, or choir. Everyone’s coming from the same place of loving music and wanting to help folks love learning music.

Everyone’s incredible sense of humour! I have never before had a job where people exchange memes, jokes, and emojis so easily. I absolutely love it, and I get my full daily dose of humour from our discussion threads alone. And that’s not to mention our weekly team meetings.

Transformer

In her young life, Anastasia has already transformed so much: from forced piano conservatory learning into alternative guitar and bass creations in various flavors of punk; from loss, nostalgia, and mental illness into moving musical release; from raw content into finished works of written art that inform and inspire.

The post Meet the Team: Anastasia Voitinskaia appeared first on Musical U.

We first learned about Dave’s roots in the blues, celtic music, and his passion for instruments. Last time we talked, Dave shared his compositional big picture process with us. This time, we asked Dave about his experience with film music, his career highlights, and current array of projects.

But first, Dave’s faith has long infused his musical expression. The well known Celtic/Prog-Rock band Iona was saturated with the ancient tales of the early Celtic Christians, and Dave reaches for the spirit in every note he plays:

For me, the physical and spiritual realms are interconnected rather like the strands in a rope. It’s not a case of one or the other. I’m convinced that great art awakens something very deep within us, that can remain dormant for much of the time. My belief as a Christian leads me to describe this as our spirit.

Talking to other musicians about this, many I know have experienced this moment when the music they’re playing transcends the time and place they’re playing in. It becomes a bridge into a deeper experience of what it is to be human. It opens up new perspectives and bonds with the listeners.

Musicians who don’t share my faith have described exactly this, but just in different terminology.

So, rather than describing music in divisive terms (e.g. “Christian” and “Secular”), my belief and personal experience is that the God I believe in creates everything – every atom. Therefore we can find his presence and glory everywhere – if we are open to looking. Music can open us up to this reality.

I could write pages on this! But briefly, around 1987/88, David Fitzgerald and I were doing a lot of touring with singer-songwriter and visionary Adrian Snell. After soundcheck each day, we found we had a lot of time to jam together and we became very excited about the soundscapes we were coming up with, with the combination of David’s saxes, flutes, whistles and ethnic wind instruments and my keys sounds.

We decided it would be great to do something together musically, so we started thinking about possible names for the project. The works we were performing with Adrian centred on the Jewish roots of the Christian faith and, both David and I realised that although we shared a mutual Christian faith, neither of us knew much about the roots of Christianity in Britain.

To cut a much longer story short, (you can read more on the Iona website (in the History section), we both felt led to find out more. This led us to the discovery that in the 6th century, Columba, an Irish monk, set up a monastery on the tiny Scottish island of Iona. From here, Christianity spread throughout Scotland and Northern Britain in an amazingly organic way.

We discovered incredible stories of faith, courage, and miracles that inspired us to name the new project after the island.

We discovered a rich seam of our faith that these Celtic peoples outlived, that seemed more earthy and real than much of the version of Christianity that we had been presented with. We both visited Iona and spent some time there soaking in the atmosphere and history of this beautiful, remote place. We read everything we could find on its history and about Celtic Christian saints like Columba, Cuthbert, Aidan, Brendan and Patrick and others.

Much of the music on the first Iona album was inspired by these exciting discoveries and the beautiful landscapes of the islands of Iona and Lindisfarne. There is so much more I could say, but that’s it, in a nutshell!

There are now so many different college and university courses you can take – seemingly on every aspect of the music industry, but it’s very rare that anyone employing you as a musician, certainly in the musical fields I work in, will be bothered about whether you have a musical qualification. That’s not to say that qualifications are not important. They are, but more because to pass them you have to attain a certain degree of skill, which you can then use to be able to interpret your musical ideas.

What is equally as important is getting on with people and developing your own unique sound or skill set, so that a) people will hear you or your work and see something in what you do that is different to anyone else, and b) they will enjoy working with you and want to work with you again.

It is rare that you find someone whom you really click deeply with on a musical level, but, when you do find that someone, it is worth hanging onto that relationship and developing it, because it will lead to great music happening. Over my whole career so far I’d say it’s only happened to me perhaps five or six times, but it’s birthed much music I’m very proud of.

I’ve always loved the relationship between music and film and how the two can work together in a unique way to create a powerful art form. Not that long after finishing music college, a friend of mine, also a keyboardist and producer, passed on a job to me that he didn’t have time to do. It was to write some music for a corporate video for a building company – nothing groundbreaking!

I went to this audio visual studio which was fairly near where I lived and met the studio owner and the client, who had come up from London. I had no previous experience at writing for film, but the recommendation from my friend, plus my obvious enthusiasm got them to let me have a go.

They were very pleased with the music I came up with and, after that, the studio owner booked me regularly for all his AV jobs.

This was in the mid-1980s and although they could have used library music, the studio’s unique selling point was that every production they did, no matter how big or small, had music specially composed for it. I probably did getting on for a 100 jobs for that company over the next 10 years, writing music for all kinds of short commercial films and ads, and they still occasionally call me up if there’s enough budget to commission new music (it’s now run by the original studio owner’s son!).

The most recent I did for them was a music installation for a museum on the island of St Kitt’s celebrating the life of John Newton, who wrote the famous hymn “Amazing Grace”. That was about 16 minutes of orchestral style music and I was also able to get the amazing Scottish singer Mae McKenna to record a new arrangement of the hymn.

What doing all these often fairly small commercial films taught me was that every note of the music has to serve a purpose, to reflect and enhance the message of the film. It also really expanded my musical palette, as I had to write in whatever style the client wanted. Although I’m known through Iona for a particular style of music, in my film work, I’ve had to write in styles including contemporary dance, club, rock, jazz, blues, 18th-century Italian aria, 1920’s Dixieland, early 20th century English string quartet, soul, stirring Gustav Holst style orchestral, Marx brothers type madcap piano, Bach type organ music – to name a few!

The commercial work led to jobs for other types of film work – some short more art house type films and animations written for film festivals and a few TV commissions.

I realised many years ago though that if you’re really serious about being a film and TV composer, you have to pursue that to the exclusion of everything else. There is so much competition that you can’t just dabble in it. I came to the point after my first BBC TV commission, where I could have gone down that route, but at the time Iona was really taking off and that was where my heart lay – playing in my own band, playing live, playing my own music.

So these days I don’t actively pursue film work, as I’m busy with writing, producing and mixing CD projects and touring. But I really enjoy doing it whenever I get the opportunity and would still love to do a whole feature film, if it was something I really believed in.

As I write this I’m sitting in a tour bus, on the road in the UK with the band the Strawbs, with whom I’ve been playing keys for over a year. They are a great band – their original keys player was someone called Rick Wakeman! Dave Cousins, the singer and main writer has written some great songs and it’s an honour to be part of the Strawbs long musical heritage.  We have two UK tours this year, a US tour in November, then we’ll be on the Moody Blues (Moodies) cruise, sailing from Miami next January. We did that last year and it was great fun.

As Iona is sadly no longer a touring and recording entity, I’ve formed a new band over the past year or so called Celestial Fire. We play Iona songs, music from my solo albums and much more. It’s a really great band and I recently finished mixing our first release – a live DVD/CD recording called “Live in the UK”. You can now order it from Celestial Fire. There’s a promo video on Youtube and we hope the DVD will really help raise awareness of the band, so we can do more touring.

Additionally, I do quite a few keys and guitar sessions from my studio and have played guitars on the excellent forthcoming album “Cardington” by British band Lifesigns. I may be doing some live dates with them next year as well. I will be doing some live dates for them next year, in the UK and Europe and also on the Cruise to the Edge in the Caribbean.

Currently, I’m also mixing a few other projects for people and hope to get into writing an album for my Celestial Fire band this year.

I’m also working on a new Strawbs studio album and will be working on the album with acclaimed producer/engineer Chris Tsangarides in a few weeks time.

Well firstly I’ve been very blessed to have been able to sustain a career in music for so long and I think being able to diversify has been the key for me. There have been many highlights and surprises which continue to be very exciting. Being able to earn a living from writing and performing my own music, which expresses my own musical vision and reflects my faith has been huge and not something I take for granted.

Here are some highlights off the top of my head (would probably be a different list on a different day!):

• Hearing my own orchestral arrangements of my music played by an orchestra
• Hearing a renowned string quartet playing music I’d written
• Meeting many of the musicians I’d admired so much in my teenage years and in some cases finding out that they are now fans of my music
• Working with the late, great Jack Bruce
• Hearing from so many people around the world how the music has touched them so deeply
• Hearing how one young man, contemplating suicide, decided to continue with his life after listening to an Iona song
• Headlining in front of 25,000 people at Cornerstone festival in the USA in ’96 or ’97 and playing the Star Spangled Banner with Troy Donockley (uilleann pipes) just as a fireworks display went off (it was Independence Day)
• Releasing my first solo piano album “The Remembering” last year
• Playing with blues legend Buddy Guy
• Recording Moya Brennan’s incredible voice for an Iona album. I was a huge Clannad fan and first met her when she came to an Iona gig in Dublin
• Living through the amazing revolution in music and computer technology – things that can be done now were the stuff of science fiction when I started off
• Touring the world and meeting so many amazing people and experiencing different and diverse cultures
• Seeing how amazingly faithful God has been and how, when I look back, I can clearly see how perfectly he has interwoven the strands in my life

Learn and Grow from Everything

After getting to know Dave Bainbridge a little bit through these interviews, I believe that one of the secrets to his personal success in a life of music is that he has been willing to draw out the learning from every experience. Writing for film showed him the importance of each note. Embracing deep musical relationships deepened both his spirituality and his connections with fellow musicians. And his experience and learning are there for him when he steps into big new projects.

The post Making Music for Film, with Friends, and in Spirit with Dave Bainbridge appeared first on Musical U.

Though these may be uncharted, intimidating waters, they’re well-worth exploring! The concept of syncopation is, at its core, a simple one. Besides, if you’re not careful, music without syncopation can become a rhythmic snoozefest.

Read on for your introduction to how syncopation affects the feel of music, how to develop your ear for it, and how to apply it to your instrument to create your own songs with syncopation. Then, try our syncopation exercises to practice what you’ve learned!

What is Syncopation?

Syncopation is your secret portal to the world of intricate, complex rhythms that immediately add a spark of interest to the music they’re underlying. Since its inception, musicians from nearly every genre have dipped their toes into the syncopation pool, recognizing that great things happen when you play around with the beat of a song.

When you count, there is a natural “stress” (aka a dynamic accent in musical terms) on the downbeats (think “1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and”). A syncopated rhythm will often omit the strong downbeat or stress an unexpected part of the rhythm, often using 8th notes and 16th notes patterns (e.g. 1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and).

Where do you find syncopation?

As you can see, the concept of syncopation is actually quite simple, and can be applied to every musical style, whether you are mixing a new dance beat, singing jazz, and or jamming out with your indie rock band.

You can often find syncopation in musical styles like Latin music, jazz music, and funk.

In fact, wherever there is rhythm, there is the potential for syncopation. Even in dance: the dancer can syncopate with a strong step on a weak beat.

Yet syncopating while keeping the beat steady can be difficult to master. By working on your listening skills, you can teach yourself basic syncopation by listening and then imitating the rhythms.

Syncopation is important because without it your music can easily become repetitive and uninteresting. While that might be what some artists strive for, most musicians like to both entertain and challenge the listener with exciting new musical ideas!

How to Identify Syncopation

So how exactly does syncopation sound?

When you’re listening to a piece of music, you often end up subconsciously tapping your foot to the beat. Now, take note: are the strongest accented notes coming down right as your foot taps the floor, or while your foot is up in the air?

If your foot is up in the air, there’s a high chance the song you’re listening to deviates from the regular pattern of accented downbeats! In fact, if your foot is doing anything besides hitting the floor at exactly the time the accented note is heard, chances are you’re hearing a syncopated rhythm.

Where Did Syncopation Come From?

While syncopation has been around for eons in many musical cultures, it gained prominence in Western music in the late middle ages. After the Black Death swept through Europe, the entire culture responded with a major shake-up: the Ars Nova (“New Art”) composers’ playful experimentation rebelled against the prevailing rhythmic norms:

It may sound pretty tame to our ears, but reading these rhythms challenges even experienced classical musicians.

These rhythmic innovations stuck around (albeit in a somewhat tamer forms), with prominent Baroque composers such as Johann Sebastian Bach using basic syncopated rhythms in their compositions. Classical and Romantic composers followed suit, with big names such as Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, and Brahms also using syncopation to create variety in their music.

Try counting along with the beginning Mozart piece in “two” (duple meter), then in “three” (triple meter):

Which one fit better? Which one do you think Mozart wrote in?

Syncopation Skips On

It didn’t end there. 20th century composers, notably Igor Stravinsky, picked up on syncopation and ran with it, experimenting with accenting offbeats for incredible dramatic effect. Stravinsky’s composition “The Rite of Spring” spun the idea of rhythm on its head, incorporating highly irregular patterns and breaking away from the strict rhythmic structure so common in orchestral work:

Syncopation also found a comfortable home in jazz music. To the jazz musician, syncopation is as natural as breathing.

A Meeting of Two Cultures

Syncopation received a huge boost when West African music met European music in the Americas. Traditionally, West African musicians focused much more musical attention on the various dimensions of rhythm, creating complex, dynamic, and fluid rhythmic expressions undreamed of by their European counterparts.

When African-Americans layered these rhythms with the “squarer” European-derived rhythms, syncopation became the norm for ragtime, jazz, blues, rock, and now nearly every form of popular music worldwide.

For example, listen to the left hand part for Scott Joplin’s “Maple Leaf Rag”:

 

It’s a straight, steady, 2/4 European-style march. Now the more fluid rhythms in the right hand:

 

Combine them together, and you have syncopation:

Why Learn Syncopation?

If you’re sticking to straight, strict rhythms, you’re really missing out on a world of fun. Put it this way: syncopation is to rhythm what dissonance is to melody – it creates a desire for resolution and a reason for forward motion.

1. Play music you love with ease

Nowadays, most of the music you’ll hear and love will have a degree of syncopation. Learning the rhythmic structures underlying these songs will go a long way in helping you play them without getting your instrument in a tangle.

2. Add interest to your music

The unexpectedness of syncopation elevates your music from sounding “nice” to having real punch! The importance of syncopation in creating unexpected, “groovy” rhythms cannot be overstated. Rhythmically complex genres such as Latin music, funk, and jazz could not exist without the contribution of syncopation.

3. Make it easier to craft lyrics and sing along

Lyrics are, in fact, often syncopated! The very nature of language and speech means that it’s rare for phrases to fall perfectly in, say, 4/4 time with beats 1 and 3 being the strongest. Speech is more nuanced than that, with stressed syllables of lyrics often falling on sixteenth notes, thirty-second notes, and generally between beats.

If you have lyrics in mind, try creating a syncopated instrumental accompaniment that matches with the syllable stress pattern of the words you’re using.

4. Two birds, one stone

Learning syncopation will also enable you to make sense of one of the hardest-to-tame beasts in music theory: polyrhythms!

Polyrhythms give a feeling of multiple simultaneous meters. Consider the example of triplets over duplets:

The second and third notes of the triplets can be said to be syncopated; they fall outside of the expected “1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and” beat that the duplets provide.

Polyrhythms literally consist of multiple conflicting rhythms simultaneously being played. Thus, these grooves provide an excellent listening exercise; if you can make sense of polyrhythms, you’ve already understood syncopation!

Types of Syncopation

There are various ways that you can move around, add, or omit beats to spice up the rhythm of your music. It’s not always a complicated mess of a rhythm; basic syncopation is easily teachable to young children!

Let’s look at a few of the most popular and straightforward ways you can syncopate:

Even-Note Syncopation

Even-note syncopation is generally found in the rhythm section, and it’s perhaps the most straightforward kind of syncopation. This is ubiquitous in Western music, and occurs in “simple” time signatures with an even number of beats (think 2/2, 2/4, and 4/4 time).

Normally, the odd-numbered beats 1 and 3 are stressed.

If you want to add a bit of interest to your 4/4-time composition, try emphasizing beats 2 and 4 instead, and seeing what happens! The beat does not technically change, but the dynamic accents do, creating a different feel.

This is also referred to as a backbeat, and is commonly found in pop, rock, and electronic music. Ska guitar commonly uses a backbeat to accent the “upstrokes”.

Suspension

This one involves a musical “sleight-of-hand” to make the syncopation work. The strong beats are “masked” by using a tie, so the emphasis falls on the weak beats. Take a look at the score below: while the note of the strong beat technically still exists, the beat itself – poof! – “disappears”. Here’s an example of such a syncopated rhythm:

 

Missed Beat

While suspension involves masking the beat, missed beat syncopation means omitting it entirely.

In missed beat syncopation, the normally stressed beat isn’t shifted or split, but rather, replaced with a rest.

Offbeat Syncopation

This can best be described as a seeming shift in the beat, occurring when the stressed note falls between beats. Often, this is achieved by shifting the whole measure over by half a beat, so that the first note is half a beat long, therefore “skewing” the remainder of the measure. This is particularly popular in pop and rock music.

 

This is also a rhythmic hallmark of ska and reggae music; the accented beats and the piano/guitar lines hit the offbeat “and”s, giving these genres their distinctive groove.

Generally speaking, there are two types of offbeat syncopation: beat-level and division-level. Think of this as macro and micro-offbeat.

Beat-level

Think of beat-level syncopation as a shift in the beat; the beat still remains the same, but the shift creates emphasis on the “and”s of the count:

 

This is also sometimes called off-beat syncopation.

Division-level

This type of syncopation also signifies a shift in the beat; however, it occurs on a smaller metrical level, often making the syncopation more complex.

Division-level syncopation occurs when the “unit” being syncopated isn’t a beat, but a subdivision of a beat, and the subdivision (e.g. a sixteenth note within a beat containing four sixteenth notes) gets shifted.

A Syncopation Tickle Test

You can test yourself ability to produce and identify some of the syncopation types with this fun exercise: say “tickle” over and over again with a steady beat:

 

Now, try accenting the second and fourth “ticks”:

Which form of syncopation are you using?

 

Accent the “le” instead of the “tick”:

You might call this offbeat accent a little ska-tickle!

 

Now try taking out a “tick” here and there:

Now what type(s) of syncopation are we using? (Hint: we are combining two types!)

Syncopation for Different Instruments

Syncopation can occur in any instrument, and does not necessarily have to present in the percussion section.

Vocals

Music with syncopation is everywhere! If you’re singing, you’re most likely to be syncopating. Most popular music is highly syncopated, as is our natural speech. But learning how to describe or even notate this syncopation can be invaluable for your sight-reading, and for communicating with other musicians.

Rhythmic syllables are a great way to get in touch with syncopation and develop more precision in your interpretation of syncopated rhythms. These are popular in many cultures, especially in India.

Listen to Zakir Hussain (from the north Indian Hindustani tradition) and Vikku Vinayakram (from the south Indian Karnatak tradition) “talking rhythm” in the first highly-syncopated 25 seconds of Shakti’s “La danse de bonheur”:

When you want to “talk rhythm” in Western music, the Kodály approach syllables work the best.

If you’re not sure about your syncopation, sing some syncopated lyrics over a steady beat and melody – or even clap your hands and sing “off” the beats.

The Rhythm Section

Perhaps the most obvious place where you start with syncopating music is syncopating the percussion section. Syncopation videos and tutorials for drummers can be found all over the internet, with many illustrating how you can shift around where the kicks and snares land to create a distinctive new groove.

For a basic exercise, play around with displacing the usual pattern of kick drum on 1 and 3 and snare drum on 2 and 4. This guide gives some great starter beats for drummers looking to mix it up.

Syncopated drumming can be combined with an “unsyncopated”, straight melody for an interesting effect, or vice-versa.

Piano & Keyboards

Historically, syncopation has been incredibly popular in piano music, especially with ragtime, jazz, and swing piano.

Take some cues from jazz piano on how to displace notes for anticipation and dramatic effect.

Another popular use of syncopation in piano is in Latin music. By learning just a few simple chords and arpeggiating them, you can play your own syncopated Latin groove that Gloria Estefan herself would be proud of!

How To Learn Syncopation

To understand syncopation inside-out, it helps to have some knowledge of music theory, particularly familiarity with other elements of rhythm. But having syncopation explained to you isn’t enough; to really get a good grasp of it, you need to try it out for yourself, too!

Tools

As with anything in music, a well-trained ear will be your best friend in learning syncopation. Understanding different time signatures and where the stressed beats normally lie will go a long way in helping you make sense of syncopated rhythms. FIXME INSERT LINK + SUGGESTION TO A RELEVANT ARTICLE OF OURS MAYBE?

How to Count Syncopation

Remember the 1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and count we mentioned in the beginning? You can expand this to 1 e and a 2 e and a 3 e and a 4 e and a, which takes you up to sixteenth notes. Count out syncopated rhythms by stressing the spoken syllables that the beats fall on.

For example:

 

Start by Listening

Figure out what time signature the piece of music you’re listening to is in, then take note of where the stressed beats are. You might have to listen to the song several times over, but soon enough, you’ll be able to tap out the beat and determine which beats are accented, and where the accent is “off” the beat.

Practice makes perfect; the more syncopation you listen to, the better you’ll get at spotting these seemingly scattered beats, and the more you’ll see that similar syncopated rhythms exist in songs within the same genre.

As always, start small, and start simple. Listen to syncopation in 2/4, 3/4, and 4/4 time, and learn how to count and perform them.

When you’ve mastered counting and tapping out basic syncopation, try our exercises below for something a bit trickier…

Ear Training for Syncopation in Latin Music

Use your ears to hear how syncopation is applied in these examples.

1. Listen to the ear training example
2. Follow with the musical notation
3. Try to tap or clap the different rhythmic lines
4. Listen to the full track and try to tap the rhythm with the all of the instruments playing

In this example, you will be listening to a Latin music clip. In Latin music like merengue and salsa, the percussion instruments, piano, and bass line all work together to make an incredible intricate rhythmic web. In the clips below you will hear all of the different Latin percussion instruments solo. Then you will hear the full track (repeated once for a total of eight measures).

 

 

 

 

After you have mastered all of the rhythms above, listen to the full track below. Follow the notation. Then, take turns playing along with each of the instrument parts in turn. Once you are comfortable with these complex rhythms, pick up your instrument and create a melody that follows the different rhythmic patterns. If you are a vocalist, improvise a simple melodic line over the complex rhythms, occasionally incorporating syncopation into your melodic line.

 

More Syncopation Practice

Feel comfortable with these complex Latin rhythms? Then call a friend over. Each of you will take a different rhythm and take turns playing the rhythm and improvising over the syncopation.

While syncopation is found in many musical styles, Latin music has some of the most complex syncopated rhythms in popular music. You might find some syncopation in rock and jazz, mainstream pop tunes, dance music, and indie rock typically don’t stray as far from basic rhythms.

In hip-hop music, the syncopation is often found in the actual lyrics, and the truly talented hip-hop artist can create complicated rhymes as intricate as the most complex drum beats.

Listen to a few of the musical examples below to further explore syncopation in music. As you listen to the music, use your ear training skills to:

1. Find the pulse of the song
2. Tap a basic four note rhythm
3. Identify the downbeats
4. Hear how the instruments and/or vocals deviate from the stronger beats
5. Listen for rhythms on the weaker beats

If you are comfortable with syncopation, you can even take out a pair of sticks and try to tap out the more difficult rhythmic beats:

In a Rush to Syncopate?

In this music example, the entire band goes crazy with the beat, throwing in so much syncopation that it can be difficult to determine the pulse of the piece.

This includes a change of time signature to 7/8 (or seven 8th notes per measure instead of the typical eight 8th notes per measure to make standard 4/4 time).

Brick Syncopation

Almost by definition, funk music is syncopated. Whether it’s the bass player messing with the beats or the drummer skipping quarter notes left and right to play syncopated 16th note rhythms, if you want to find syncopation, funk is where it is at.

So Much To Syncopate

The Dave Matthews Band is one mainstream band today that is not afraid of experimenting with rhythms, time signatures, and syncopation.

With a myriad of musical influences, The Dave Matthews Band is a great example of mainstream music that can also challenge the listener.

Skipping Around the Beat

Now that you know some common syncopated rhythms, use your ear training skills to listen for these beats in music you already know. There are literally hundreds of characteristic rhythms used in all musical genres, from classic rock to jazz to samba.

Once you’ve really understood syncopation, try incorporating it into your music, whatever your instrument! If you are a vocalist, make up your own rhythms and vocal lines using nonsense syllables, like jazz scat singing. If you play the violin or another orchestral instrument, mess around with adding notes to these Latin rhythms or the other score examples in this post.

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