Music

After you’ve studied a piece enough to play the correct notes and rhythms, you’ll want to start doing appropriate phrasing. Very much like the inflections we use in speech, phrasing is correctly executing how a group of notes should be “spoken”. Here are a few ideas to help you add some polish to your music….

mp3 has made music more accessible to people, it has also degraded the quality of music. Here are few ways other music files that aren’t mp3 may add to your listening enjoyment. 1. Mp3’s compresses sound: Mp3 is a lossy format, which means it sacrifices audio information for a smaller file size. This loss in…

Buying a guitar or bass amp can be a daunting task, especially if you’ve never done it before. Here are a few tips to help you with you purchase! 1. Quality of sound: Tubes and transistors (solid state) amps have different tonal qualities. Tubes have a history reaching as far back as the beginning of…

Guitar pedals can add a lot of interesting sounds to your rig. Here is a description of some of the most common pedals you’ll come across, and how they function. 1. Chromatic Tuner: The first pedal in many effect chains is the chromatic tuner. When activated the pedal will mute the outgoing signal and will…

The human voice is quite the delicate instrument. It is important for not only singers, but for anyone who uses their voice a lot, to maintain and take care of their vocal mechanism. Failure to do so can result in laryngitis, sore throats, or perhaps the worst, vocal nodules. 1. Drink Water: Very simple, water…

Musical composition is a rewarding and developmental process that not enough music students get to participate in. Not only is composition an obvious gateway to creativity; it is a musical teaching tool in which students may learn theory and history faster than just by practicing their instrument alone! 1. Melody: Every great piece of music…

Opera for new or amateur listeners seems to always be a final frontier. For most uninformed people, opera can seem like a bunch of people wearing huge wigs, squallering in some undecipherable language (sometimes even our own!) This article will serve as an introduction and hopefully a jumping off point into the fantastic world of…

If you haven’t already, you or your teacher will decide whether or not to participate in the NYSSMA festival. NYSSMA stands for New York State Schools Music Association. It is an annual music festival held in the springtime and consists of different components. Here are a few steps to guide you through the process: 1….

For those that take private voice lessons, many will, and are encouraged to, sing with their school choir. Not only is it a forum for where students may get the opportunity to perform, but it’s essentially a free voice/music lesson! Your director will (hopefully) go over these points more in depth, but here are a…

The human voice is an exquisite instrument that the majority of us inherit from birth. It is one of the most expressive instruments and because we all posses one, it makes learning and experiencing music very accessible. Here are a few guidelines into understanding how your voice works, and how you can begin to develop…