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Are bad practice habits holding your progress down? Then you need to attend this FREE masterclass by @FoxxPianoStudio from @MusicEducatorResources. Click here to register for your seat! https://www.musical-u.com/masterclass-registration/

https://www.musical-u.com/learn/4-ways-spice-scales/
Scales can be a real sore spot for musicians but they don’t have to be. There are a variety of ways you can make scales more interesting to practice. This can let you get the benefit of scales practice – without the boredom! https://www.musical-u.com/learn/4-ways-spice-scales/

https://www.musical-u.com/learn/music-mentor/
A great mentor can help you make significant strides in your musical path, whether you’re pursuing music as a hobby or a career. Let’s discuss some tips for finding an amazing music mentor. https://www.musical-u.com/learn/music-mentor/

https://www.musical-u.com/learn/practise-music-busy/
Musicians often complain they don’t have enough time to practise. In many cases, the biggest obstacles you might hear them mention are time constraints. Check out these hints to get the most out your hard work and dedication. https://www.musical-u.com/learn/practise-music-busy/

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.

https://www.musical-u.com/learn/applying-solfa-to-real-music/
Can you imagine listening to a piece of music and knowing exactly what notes you’re hearing? And what that would do for your ability to play what you hear on your instrument? Solfa is a magical key that unlocks the pitches and harmonies in all the music you hear. https://www.musical-u.com/learn/applying-solfa-to-real-music/

https://www.musical-u.com/learn/destroyers-of-mastery/
Are you ready to target the bad habits that demolish your capacity to play and sing well? A wilderness of wasted potential and unrealized goals awaits any musician that ignores these destroyers of mastery. If you can abolish them from your practice habits, then you may emerge from that wilderness and realize your musical ambitions. https://www.musical-u.com/learn/destroyers-of-mastery/

https://www.musical-u.com/learn/interval-ear-training-whats-the-point/
You may have wondered why intervals are such a hot topic in ear training. Intervals are often where musicians first encounter the idea of ear training and doing focused exercises to improve their musical listening skills. But why do interval ear training anyway? https://www.musical-u.com/learn/interval-ear-training-whats-the-point/

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.

https://www.musical-u.com/learn/how-to-do-an-ear-training-audit/
It’s an inescapable fact that great musicians have great ears. Unfortunately most musicians don’t have very good ears – and they’re understandably a bit embarrassed about that. So if you want to really reach your potential as a musician, it’s time you did an ear training audit. https://www.musical-u.com/learn/how-to-do-an-ear-training-audit/