Tip of the Day

A good rule of thumb is to play all of the bottom notated hole and just a touch of the upper notated hole. If you would like a more aggressive sound, use more of the upper hole (4 draw/5 draw is our best example of this).

1) Listen to the first chorus of your song and highlight phrase starts and stops.

2) Loop (set start and end points with your looping software to isolate the first lick in the chorus)

3) Listen

4) Hum (internalize the rhythm and contour of the melody)—know the lick before trying to play it on your machine.

5) Practice (without loop—pause the playback)

6) Listen Once, Play Once a) Once you feel that you’re getting it, play it 3 times and listen once.

7) Once notes, rhythm, and technique are dialed in, dial in: continue reading...

When you think you got it, don’t stop listening—you didn’t get it all. Important musical elements like tremolo, articulation, and dynamics are often missed if you stop after getting the notes, technique and rhythm of a lick.

Listen more, play less—when playing along to the original music you miss details.

The critical mind is important in practice but does not belong on the bandstand.

It’s challenging for new players to stay in time with a jam track. Grooves in the blues are commonly repetitive (often repeating every bar). Listen to your jam track for its repetitive pattern to become familiar with it. If the pattern doesn’t repeat every bar, count each bar (1 2 3 4) and see if you can hear the larger pattern (commonly two bars). Your goal is to become familiar enough with the song to really hear/feal beat 1 of each bar. Highlight what note is played on beat 1 of each bar in your sheet music. continue reading...

From fellow student Bruce Weinstein...

"Even though the CBS Sunday Morning segment below is about a classical pianist, both it and the new book it’s based on, “Every Good Boy Does Fine: A Love Story in Music Lessons,” may be of interest to my fellow School of the Blues and BluesHarmonica.com students."

https://www.cbsnews.com/video/pianist-jeremy-denk-on-why-practice-matters/

I have not read this new book. If any of you do, please report back in the General part of the forum. Thanks Bruce!

It’s challenging for new players to stay in time with the band (live or backing track). Listening more closely to the band while you play is key. The band will commonly play pickups to major chord changes (commonly the I Chord in bar 1, the IV Chord in bar 5, and the V Chord in bar 9). These pickups help telegraph when they’re changing chords. These chord changes act like signposts—use them to your advantage. Highlight what you play on the downbeats of bars 1, 5, and 9 and listen carefully to the band in the preceding bars for any hints (pickups) when the chord change is about to happen. continue reading...

Using a program like YouTube to MP3 (mediahuman.com) you can capture audio from a YouTube video to use in your preferred playback device (commonly to slow it down and loop it for study).

When new performers move out of time, it’s often because they’re too focused on themselves. When you focus too much on what you’re playing (monitoring how well you’re playing and where you need to go next), your ears close to what’s happening around you and you move out of time. Relax your mind and body—open your ears—be one of the parts that creates the overall sound. It’s not you playing “on top” of the music, it’s you helping to create the music.