Musicality World

https://www.musical-u.com/learn/4-tips-composing-video-game-music/
How do they make such wonderful musical accompaniments to popular video games? Video game composer Dan Hulsman from Video Game Music Academy joins Musical U with his tips on how you can get started writing video game music. https://www.musical-u.com/learn/4-tips-composing-video-game-music/

https://www.musical-u.com/learn/how-to-clap-in-time/
If you have hands 👏 then you have all the tools needed for this fundamental skill of musicality. Musical U explores how clapping in time will enhance your performance and make you more confident with rhythmic figures. https://www.musical-u.com/learn/how-to-clap-in-time/

https://www.musical-u.com/learn/how-to-freestyle-a-guitar-solo/
Sweet guitar solo! 🎸 Freestyling on guitar can be a liberating musical experience. Learn more in this lesson from Musical U. https://www.musical-u.com/learn/how-to-freestyle-a-guitar-solo/

Though hearing a rhythm in your head or tapping along to the beat comes naturally to many musicians, it can be trickier to understand rhythmic notation and put a beat to paper. Enter Groove Pizza, a simple, interactive tool to help you understand rhythms using a visual grid system that lets you see exactly how the beat is formed. In this episode, we’re giving you a crash course, forming some common beats with Groove Pizza and tweaking them to see how the sound changes!

Listen to the episode:

Subscribe For Future Episodes!

Apple Podcasts | Android | Google Play (US only) | Stitcher | RSS

Enjoying the show? Please consider rating and reviewing it!

Links and Resources

• Interview with Katie Wardrobe
• Groove Pizza
• Honing your sense of rhythm
• Learning common beats

Transcript

In our last episode I was talking with Katie Wardrobe of Midnight Music and she mentioned an online tool that’s a great way to experiment with rhythm patterns called Groove Pizza. I wanted to pick up on this and talk a bit more broadly about the approach it uses: grid notation for rhythm.

One thing that puts a lot of musicians off traditional notation is the rhythm side of things. The idea of each note having a vertical position representing pitch seems sensible enough, and although it’s not as simple as it could be, the pitch side of things doesn’t take too long to get the hang off.

But what makes traditional notation seem so complicated is mostly the rhythm aspect. Every note length has a different symbol and there can be added complications with dots and rests and all kinds of things – which visually don’t make it obvious what the rhythm pattern is. At least until you’ve really mastered the notation and learned to sight-read it quickly.
So for quite some time there’s been an alternative which is particularly popular among electronic musicians who create music using software tools and often don’t have any background in learning traditional notation.

When it comes to putting notes into a tool like Logic, Ableton or Garageband, traditional notation may be available – but the default is what’s called “piano roll” notation. It’s called that because it’s based on the system that old mechanical player pianos used, in which holes or dots on a rolled-up piece of paper indicated which notes to play when.

It’s a really simple system: it’s a grid. The vertical position indicates pitch, semitone by semitone. The horizontal position indicates timing, and so the length of a note is represented by how long the note’s marker is.

This makes it a very natural visual equivalent to the patterns we hear. We’ll have some examples in the show notes to make this clear.

There are definitely limitations to piano roll notation but one area where it excels is rhythm patterns. If you’re programming a drum beat for example it can be incredibly helpful to see it in this grid form because percussion parts are often regular, systematic and repeated – which the grid system is perfect for.

I have to confess: when I first encountered piano roll and grid notation I already knew traditional notation and I thought they were just the “for dummies” version. Something you used because the software required you to, but wasn’t something that “real” musicians would find useful.

I was totally wrong. Spending some time with piano roll and putting rhythms into a grid gave me a whole new perspective on how rhythm works in music and it’s incredibly useful for developing your musicality on the rhythm side of things.

I’m going to talk through a simple example of using Groove Pizza to build up and then experiment with a drum beat. Since it’s quite a visual thing we’re discussing I’ll put screenshots of each rhythm pattern in grid notation in the shownotes. Or you can follow along yourself using Groove Pizza, we’ll have the link to that in the shownotes at musicalitypodcast.com too.

But I think it will be interesting just to listen along too – because part of why I love grid notation for musicality training is that it helps you build up a mental model of how all the beats and subbeats fit together quite differently to how traditional notation gets you thinking about it.

To me the big difference is this: with traditional notation you naturally think in terms of a sequence of notes. The timing of each note depends on the timing and duration of the notes which have come before. You get a kind of “reset” at the start of each bar where you can see a clear “one”, but for the rest of the bar you need to go note-by-note to know how it all fits together.

With grid notation you instead look at the whole bar at once, or even several bars. And each note can be placed directly in the position it should occupy – or if you’re looking at a pattern, you can see immediately when that note happens – regardless of what notes have come before.

That makes it perfect for understanding patterns like drum beats because if we say the kick drum falls on beats 1 and 3 we can see that immediately. If we want to see what happens if the snare drum hits are delayed by half a beat we can just move them and it’s immediately visually clear what’s going on.

Again I should say: this isn’t stuff you can’t do in traditional notation – it’s just much more visually obvious in grid notation. And that can make it more easy and fun to experiment with, and it builds up a really useful different way of imagining rhythms in your mind and interpreting them with your ears.

So let’s dive in to an example.

With Groove Pizza by default you get a pattern of 16 “slices”. I should mention this tool gets its name from a fun circular representation of your rhythm it shows you too – hence “pizza” and “slice” – but below that you have the standard grid notation and that’s what we’ll be talking about.

With 16 possible note timings you might interpret that as a single bar of 16th notes, or if you slow down the tempo it can be two bars of 8th notes or four bars of quarter-note beats.

We’re going to set the tempo to a slow one, 50 BPM, so that we can play around with 8th note patterns and still have it slow enough to hear what’s going on.

Let’s start out simple with a kick drum on beats 1 and 3 for two bars.

Note: We’re treating the 16 “slices” provided by Groove Pizza as two bars of 8th note subdivisions in 4/4!

You can count that as 1 (2) 3 (4), 1 (2) 3 (4). I’m emphasising the beats where the kick drum falls and still counting the others out loud just so you can hear the 4/4 beat.

Now let’s introduce the snare on 2 and 4 which gives us a pretty standard rock pattern:

One thing I should mention is that this particular tool doesn’t give you control over each note’s volume. So normally we’d be emphasising certain beats here to give a more musical feel but for these examples all the volumes will be the same.
There’s one part missing from our standard rock beat, and that’s our hi-hat playing straight 8ths, meaning it plays 8 8th notes each bar: “1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and”:

So this is where it gets interesting. In traditional notation this looks pretty clear and sensible, easy enough. We’ll put the image of that notation in the shownotes so you can compare.

But now we can start to play around, and each of our three parts is totally independent of what’s going on in the others.
What if we throw in an extra kick drum hit before the 3?

Or an extra kick after the 3?

Or we could try delaying the snare hit on 4 half a beat to put it on the “and” of 4 instead:

What if instead of filling with hi-hat 8ths we try just putting a few in to give some of those same off-beat effects without moving the kick and the snare at all?

If you’re familiar with traditional score notation then you can probably imagine listening to this how complicated it could get to write down or try to sight-read these slightly less-regular patterns. And we’re just using 8th notes for now! With sixteenth notes things can really get messy. With grid notation all of these are super simple to create or interpret.
One of my favourite features of Groove Pizza in particular is how it handles swung rhythms: You can actually see the effect of swinging the beat.

I expect you’re familiar with the idea of swung rhythms, where things just sound a bit more fluid, cool and jazzy. But literally what it means is that instead of each beat being split into two equal halves to form its two sub-beats, we split it into one long and one short sub-beat. Instead of “1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and” we get “1 and2 and3 and4 and”.
With Groove Pizza as you increase the swing factor you can actually *see* the impact: every other “slice” gets shifted right a bit, so that you can see that pattern of long-short long-short. This makes it super intuitive to take a pattern like this one we’ve been playing around with:

and understand what’s going on in the swung version:

It’s immediately obvious that the kick and snare aren’t affected at all because they’re falling on the beat. But every other one of our 8th-note hi-hat hits are off the beat and so they get delayed a little and create that long-short pattern.
Hopefully you’re starting to get a sense of how grid notation can be interesting, different, and useful!

If it’s new to you then don’t worry, I wouldn’t expect you to fully understand it just from this short description! Especially if you haven’t yet checked out the images in the shownotes. But hopefully it does inspire you to go and play around with a tool like Groove Pizza, GarageBand or another music sequencer.

Piano roll and grid notation are not just an overly-simplified way of entering music into a computer. They’re a really valuable alternative representation of how rhythmic patterns are constructed, and once you internalise this way of thinking about rhythm you’re going to have a much better ability to recognise and understand the rhythms you hear, as well as more easily creating your own interesting rhythms. So if you’re looking for a new way to develop your ear for rhythm: give grid notation a try!

Subscribe For Future Episodes!

Apple Podcasts | Android | Google Play (US only) | Stitcher | RSS

Enjoying the show? Please consider rating and reviewing it!

The post About Grid Notation appeared first on Musical U.

https://www.musical-u.com/learn/polka-party-confidence/
Who’s ready for a polka party! Join Musical U team member Andrew Bishko as he tests his musical confidence by taking a gig in a style that he has never played. And what he learned about himself along the way 😀 https://www.musical-u.com/learn/polka-party-confidence/

https://www.musical-u.com/learn/crazy-easy-weird-modal-improv-trick/
Why are modes so confusing? We hear this a lot within Musical U. If we told you that learning modes is easy, would you believe it? Take a minute to see just how simple applying modes to your musical experience can be. https://www.musical-u.com/learn/crazy-easy-weird-modal-improv-trick/

https://www.musical-u.com/learn/fascinating-rhythms/
Can you feel the rhythm? 🥁 Let’s take a musical journey and explore fascinating rhythms throughout the world! https://www.musical-u.com/learn/fascinating-rhythms/

David Kulma has made a name for himself with Music Corner, where he creates humorous, fast-paced videos to help people learn music theory. With clear explanations, practical examples, and a healthy amount of jokes, Music Corner has helped countless musicians recognize that music theory can be exciting and relevant to their practice.

However, this is far from his only musical endeavour – he also holds two music degrees, has taught music at three universities, and currently composes solo and as part of Trystero, who are soon releasing their own unexpected spin on opera!

Musical U got the chance to sit down with David to find out about the creative process behind his unforgettable videos, how he found himself in various areas of the music world, and the meaning of being a self-professed “public music nerd”.

I’ve been trained as a classical oboist. I took piano lessons as a young kid and also played percussion in school before switching to oboe just before I turned 12. I listened to the Beatles almost exclusively while in middle school, but became focused on classical music as a teenager and decided to be an orchestral conductor before I went to college.

While getting an undergrad in oboe at Kent State University and studying conducting with my college orchestra director, I decided to take composition lessons. I had composed a little before then, but I found I really enjoyed it. After giving up my conducting aspirations and aborting a masters in the oboe at Boston University, I returned to Kent to get a masters in music theory, which ended up as a masters in music composition.

While there I taught a section of the freshman music theory classes for two years and expected to get a doctorate later. Since deciding not to continue my education, I’ve variously been a freelance musician of some kind. I’ve taught at various colleges and universities as a part-time adjunct teaching academic music classes (I’m currently finishing up my last semester at Winthrop University), I play oboe gigs as they come to me (opera, musicals, less and less church gigs), I compose some in my free time, and I perform strange avant-garde things with my friend Dorian Wallace when we have time together.

All in all, my journey as a musician hasn’t been anything close to what I planned while in school, but it has been a very interesting one!

I was watching the Vlogbrothers’ Crash Course series and CGP Grey’s videos on YouTube, and it occurred to me that I could make something like these about music. I started making those other videos to teach myself how to do it. I’ve always been searching for a way to connect people with musical knowledge, which our society has chosen to not teach our children.

When most people discuss music intellectually, they talk about lyrics, because they learned how to examine words. But most people in our society don’t know how to examine musical sounds.

Is there a way to speak to grownups and teenagers about music that is interesting and also somewhat technical that gets the ideas across? My videos are an attempt to talk to people more deeply about music.

My process is rather time-consuming – finding a topic is surprisingly hard. I’m trying to avoid the most basic of musical ideas, because plenty of other people have videos that are about reading bass clef, playing simple chords, and the like. So, I’m looking for something more exciting that meets people at a deeper level of understanding.

Once I’ve chosen a topic, I draft a script, which I then edit to within an inch of its life. I try to say as much as possible in a short amount of time, while still being understandable. Keeping the fast pace I’m looking for means that there can be no lulls. it’s time consuming. In fact, the reviews have been asking me to make videos faster. It hasn’t worked, because of how much listening time I need!

As I’ve said, I’m not aiming to teach the basics. I want to connect what I think are understandable ideas to larger, more important things. Learning music theory basics is extremely tedious and requires lots of memorization that even the music majors I teach choose to avoid.

So, “music theory” ends up being defined in our culture as literally learning the vocabulary and grammar of a language rather than what you would do with a book: read it and discuss ideas. As someone with a graduate degree in music, I know that music is just as intellectually and psychologically complex and as deserving of exploration as anything else one can study, but most people never get far enough with music education to talk about ideas. My experience teaching graduate students in music even shows how much musicians are hampered by our lack of extensive musical education. So how do we get to the ideas?

My “Smooth Chords” video is applying an idea: moving one note in a chord to make a new one:

It’s a simple one, but it’s rarely explored in our musical educations. This musical technique creates a lot of “uncanny” progressions that are often used for magical moments in 19th century music. I wanted to introduce people to a method that creates different sounds, and that are not limited to what usually gets taught. How can I break into the interesting stuff about music and how can we talk about it?

I start with an idea any adult could understand, and see if I can explain it in a way that doesn’t require them to know what a minor sixth is. And if it does, then I just give you as little as you need to get there. People have lots of intuitive musical understanding, but what they don’t have is the intellectual framework to discuss it. I’m trying to bypass everyone getting graduate degrees in music, to talk about what is cool about it beyond any lyrics.

I’ve been fascinated with creating music through setting up a structure and then filling it in. I wanted to create something fast and exciting that was constantly changing, but also kind of spinning its wheels. It’s more about setting up a universe to live in, rather than a narrative of tension and release:

So to do this, I have to come up with a few numbers to define when the music will change and then decide what changes occur when each number happens. Once you’ve set up the parameters, you really just sit and write the piece down. Now, I generally know what the result will be, and the music still has my own particular voice because of the notes I limit everything to, but it involves very little of my intuition. My intuition would prefer to tell a story and have climaxes. To create a universe, I have to take a step back and consider everything more abstractly. Either way, I think the virtuosic piano sounds of Blink work really well for the purpose of zapping in and out of my fast-paced videos.

Dorian and I as a duo call ourselves Trystero, where we perform a melange of strange mixtures of spoken-word-like singing and free improvisation alongside other things as we see fit. Our collaboration is based around making each other’s ideas more unusual and singular. For example, Dorian had us write a 24-hour meditation piece:

We also wrote a weird album in my living room in two days. Our work together is always outside of what either of us could do separately.

I also have been working on making my own videos, which have variously been educational, silly, or artistic. For a couple of years I was making short videos I called Surreality, and I made one a day for 500 days straight. This had me writing a surprising number of weird songs and various kinds of soundtrack music. I worked on creating my own solo spoken-word, animated videos where I made everything myself (which I hope to make more of!) called Broken Links. Both of these are on my personal YouTube channel. The still-continuing project is the educational one, Music Corner, where I talk about music. Most of these have been animated music theory videos. The most recent four are album reviews.

Most people don’t know the composer Robert Ashley. You don’t need to know his magnum opus, Perfect Lives, to enjoy my work, but you do if you want to understand where I’m coming from.

Perfect Lives is an opera for television Ashley and his amazing collaborators made back in the late 70s and early 80s. Ashley speaks, intones, and cajoles his own text over a largely improvised musical accompaniment by “Blue Gene” Tyranny and Peter Gordon to surreal video made by John Sanborn. It’s about a bank heist, but only tangentially. Dorian and I have performed this work live in full twice where I perform the text from memory. It’s a ludicrous, yet deeply moving spectacle where even I don’t even know what is going to happen!

Dorian has wanted to us to write our own television opera out of this since we started working on Perfect Lives back in 2011. After a few false starts where I became the default librettist, I finally managed to write the 2 ½ hour text for Stories from the Microchasm, which is meant for YouTube.

There will be 12 ten-minute episodes, 6 one-to-two minute shorts, and 6 songs. Dorian and I have performed a few chunks from it, but more importantly the amazing video artist who worked on Perfect Lives, John Sanborn, came into our lives and is directing the opera. Dorian got some money from Experiments in Opera for us to create the pilot, the short, and the  song. It was screened at the Anthology Film Archives, which was reviewed by the New York Times and the New York Observer.

The plot comes down to a character I play called “The Fabulist” who is telling a bunch of confused and disconnected stories about how weird and strange our technological world is. The audience we performed it for laughed at many of the jokes, so I think it’ll work. I look forward to finishing the opera when Dorian has finished his music therapy licensure.

I wouldn’t say I got into it. I’m not at all involved in the industry that makes money off the backs of students. I helped write the textbook for Kent State’s freshman music theory classes, because while I was a graduate assistant teaching there, my teaching partner Meghan Naxer (who is now a professor at Kent) talked our professor into letting us (including Jason Clark and Krystal Kuhns) write a new textbook.

Kent has its own second year theory sequence that goes chronologically from the Middle Ages to about 1975 or so. We were trying to use the Kostka/Payne theory book in the first year, which is built for a two-year sequence, but we skimmed across the top of it in one year. It was a ludicrous, but very helpful experience to learn how to build a course from the bottom up and have to then design our own assignments.

Since I knew how to do that, when I was teaching at Winthrop and getting very frustrated with the Roig-Francoli book that we used, I decided to create my own online resource, which is similar to a kind of textbook, since I already learned how to do it.

Flippin’ Theory! was specifically designed to help my own teaching as a supplement to Harmony in Context, so that I could better explain concepts and focus my students’ attention. Sifting through an academic textbook for important information is difficult if you’re the person teaching the class; students have an even harder time. I can save a lot of heartache by writing it up myself.

I actually always had trouble remembering how to spell it myself, and after grading enough quizzes and tests where there aren’t enough G’s or P’s, or missing the I, I figured that creating a song video would work well. I found myself singing over and over the melody I came up for spelling the word, so I had an earworm. Then I sat and animated it to make a video. Now I can always spell it right.

This is a recent change to my website bio. I’ve been trying to find ways for a long time to talk to nonmusicians about music, while keeping it intellectually stimulating. I specifically designed a class on rock and popular music at Winthrop so I could teach nonmusic majors, and I’ve been making these videos practically for free for a while now. So, it appears I’m interested in being a public intellectual, but I wanted a more interesting term that would better fit my weird persona. I’m a nerdy white guy with glasses, so I’ve had to be willing to own my nerdiness.

Musicians don’t need walking music encyclopedias, regular people do. Is there a way to make learning about music as fun and necessary as learning about science? Neil deGrasse Tyson is a person I think about when I define a “public nerd.”

To be more straightforward about your question, I think there is a need for people who can connect musical knowledge to the wider world, because most of the people who know about this stuff end up preaching to the choir. Bass clefs and part-writing are important, but will only get you so far. How we got bass clefs and why we still part-write are far more interesting riddles.

On preaching to the choir, NewMusicBox is a wonderful webzine where “new classical music” practitioners talk to each other. I want there to be people who talk to everyone else. I’m personally ambivalent about me being this person, but in a way most of my work is an attempt at reaching people outside my bubble.

The present is so multifarious that I can’t get ahold of everything. There is so much music that it’s impossible to know what everyone else is doing. This is a good thing in many ways, but it also means that when you go to a concert of “contemporary classical music,” you have no idea what will happen. You have no grounding as an audience member. Every single musical style that has been created since Wagner still exists as a living tradition. I make music in a post-John Cage aesthetic that sounds nothing like Cage.

It’s hard to draw aural connections. So, I can’t predict the future, because I don’t know the present!

In lieu of that, I’ll give you what I wish. I wish that people still argued musical ideology. There are many ways that the current stylistic tolerance is wonderful. Everyone can “do what they want.” But this obscures the ways that we all disagree over how music should or should not be made and what role it should play in our society. As composers and “contemporary classical” musicians, we have to do the work of inviting people who don’t necessarily look like us into our circles, and more importantly, being open to changing our culture and music so that they will stay and thrive. Inclusion that doesn’t involve musical stylistic change is just tokenism, diversity initiatives, and yearly Martin Luther King Jr. concerts. We have to be willing to change the music to build a better society.

The number of people who have a career in composing is infinitesimal. Everyone I know does something else to make money. Even John Adams and John Williams conduct as a means of getting their work out! As a person who composes for their own pleasure and does what I can to get by, I can’t really tell anyone there is such a thing as a career in it. Bach had to teach Latin to his choir boys as part of one of his jobs. Real life is too complex to build a life doing only composing.

I don’t really like advice in terms of me telling you what to do with your life. I’ve been an adult now for 14 years and I still don’t know what to do with my life! I’m about to move from South Carolina back to Cleveland, Ohio so my wife can take over a musical instrument repair business, so I find myself at a crossroads.

In the end, here’s what I can say: make decisions that you believe are the right decisions for yourself, so that when they blow up in your face you can tell yourself that you did what you thought was best. If they work, you can celebrate. Every time I’ve made a life choice where I relied too heavily on other people’s opinions, I was really upset when things went wrong. And when they went right, I wasn’t sure I still wanted to do it.

Be honest with yourself and know that a lot of stuff won’t work. It has taken me years to figure out what kind of artistic work I want to make, and I still question this every day. I’ll leave you with a line from a beautiful John Lennon song that I can’t get out of my head these days: “Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.”

David Kulma is a musician and public nerd living in Cleveland, Ohio who composes, teaches, talks about music, and makes YouTube videos. On his YouTube project Music Corner, he creates fast-paced, entertaining music theory videos and reviews recent contemporary classical music albums. He holds degrees from Kent State University in oboe performance and music composition, and is one-half of experimental duo Trystero, who will be releasing a web-series opera in the near future.

The post Breaking Music Theory Out of the Box, with David Kulma appeared first on Musical U.

https://www.musical-u.com/learn/deconstructing-technical-metal-riffs-by-ear/
“Do you have the tab?” This is perhaps the most heard question on any guitar forum 🎸 @MichaelAveryMusic joins Musical U to discover how you can break down the music and transcribe it yourself 🤘 https://www.musical-u.com/learn/deconstructing-technical-metal-riffs-by-ear/