bday gift ideas for soon to be 18 year old girlfriend?

bday gift ideas for soon to be 18 year old girlfriend?

July 14, 2009 By admin 4 Comments

my girlfriends birthday is in august, i wanted to buy her a set of earring with her birthstone but she said she REALLY doesnt want me to spend money on her

is there anything i can give her or make for her? im a musician and i can make a song but i really cant sing that well

she likes the fact i play guitar and im wondering if she would think of guitar strings from my favorite guitar would make her happy or if she would think its cheap and dumb

i thought of making a guitar pick necklace with the lil picture thing inside would she like that?

i have considered roses but it sounds so cliche

i can cook a lil bit so maybe a candle lit dinner?

please everyone out of those which would be the best?
or a combination of all?
please help me!
i have a budget of 50$

By: fitness_freak@ymail.com

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Filed Under: Ruby Information Tagged With: Birthstone, Budget, Cliche, Earring, Fitness Freak, Gift Ideas, Girlfriend, Girlfriends, Golf Advice, Guitar Strings, Lil Bit, Money, Musician, Roses, Wanted To Buy

Learning to Play by Ear

June 21, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

So perhaps you've learned your basic chords or scales on your respective instrument. You've been working on your technique, and it's starting to come together. There are a couple of songs that you like to play and they sound OK. When you play your axe, you're starting to get a feel for when it's really in tune. What now?

I cannot stress enough the importance of being able to play by ear. Everything that you've ever heard anyone play on your instrument is at your disposal - you just have to figure it out. Learning how to play tunes or instrument parts using your ear is just like anything else you practice: the more you do it, the easier it gets. If you do it often enough, you won't even need your instrument to figure it out. The concept of teaching your ear to decipher musical structures as they're being played is called ear training and it's been practiced and honed for centuries.

Whether you are interested in learning to play the guitar by ear, or virtually any other instrument for that matter, there are a number of excellent learning aids available to assist you! The current state of learning aids for ear training is quite well these days (thank you for asking). With a variety of books, CDs, DVDs, and even software, there's plenty from which to choose when you decide to add this important skill to your arsenal:

Ear Training Books -

In the musician world, there are two reknowned learning institutions, the Berklee College of Music in Boston, and Musicians Institute (MI) in LA. Both have their own take on ear training. For Berklee, it's Essential Ear Training for the Contemporary Musician and for MI, it's Ear Training - The Complete Guide for All Musicians. Homespun, which makes a large variety of books, CDs, and DVDs for all musicians and styles, has their take, which is Ear Training for Instrumentalists featuring a whopping 6 CDs full of exercises and drills. If you're a guitar or bass player, you'll definitely want to check out Ultimate Eartraining for Guitar and Bass by Tribal Tech's Gary Willis. My friend Chris, who's a working electric jazz bassist in NYC, absolutely loves this book.

Ear Training Videos -

Playing the guitar by ear, or nearly any other instrument for that matter, is not as hard as you may think! For videos, Berklee has produced Harmonic Ear Training (DVD). This 73-minute DVD will help you recognize chord progressions quickly and listen to music more analytically. Bass players get a real treat, as jazz bass great John Patitucci has released John Patitucci - Electric Bass 2: Soloing Ear-Training And Six-String Technique Video, which teaches soloing by stressing the importance of ear training.

Ear Training Software -

As you might expect, software is a natural choice for teaching ear training because it's interactive. The cream of this crop is Ars Nova Practica Musica which is both Windows and Macintosh compatible, covers just about every aspect of ear training, and features customizable exercises. Ear Training Coach is a more affordable option and offers a 10-grade curriculum in ear training and sight-reading. However, the piece de resistance and the one tool that should be in everyone's ear training bag is the SlowGold CD-ROM. This nifty piece of software lets you slow down any piece of music on CD or MP3s without changing the pitch. So if you're learning to play a passage from a recording, and it's too fast, just run it through SlowGold to hear every single note at the exact pitch it's played.

Ear Training Hardware -

Not surprisingly, music equipment makers have gotten into the ear training game, and not surprisingly, the offerings are particularly good for electric guitar and bass guitar. The Tascam CD-GT1 MKII Guitar Trainer and the Tascam CD-BT1 mkII Bass Guitar Trainer features the same slowdown technology of the SlowGold software, but have housed it in a standalone unit with a built-in CD player, effects, and a headphone jack for silent practicing. Tascam has even made one the vocalists, the Tascam CD-VT1 Portable CD Vocal & Performance Trainer, which has a Vocal Cancel feature that removes the vocal from the CD during playback. Karaoke will never be the same ...

Learning aids aside, one really useful exercise is to pick out a recording of a simple tune that you like. Listen to it very carefully. See if you can determine when the band is changing chords. If you can pick out where these chord changes occur, then you'll know the points in time when you need to determine what the next chord is.

Tune your instrument to the recording. Take the first chord in the tune. As it plays, try to pick out a low note on your instrument that best matches that chord. There should one note that resonates with the recording. Did you find it? This is the root note of that chord. If this note is a C, you know that the first chord is a C (something). It could be a major chord, a minor chord, a 7th chord, but whatever it is, it's a C version of that chord. If you're listening to "Hey Jude", the root note for the first chord is an F. If you're listening to "Wonderwall", it's an F#. If it's "Layla", it's a D ...

Now that you have your root note, the next step is determine what the quality of the chord is. Is it a major or minor chord? Is it a power chord? One surefire way to determine this is trial and error. Assume it's a major chord. Test out this possibility by playing the major chord for your root note along with the recording. Does it sound good? Does it resonate? If so, you've just figured out what the first chord is. If not, try a minor chord. Play the minor chord for your root note along with the recording. Does this sound good? Does this resonate? Try a few different choices. If you get stumped, look at the sheet music or transcription of this recording. This is your answer key, so to speak. If you're just starting out and need a lot of easy tunes for practice, there are some great 3-chord songbooks such as The Guitar 3 Chord Songbook and Favorite Songs With 3 Chords.

After you're figured out the first chord, go to the next point in time where this changes, and figure out what the second chord is. Repeat this process until you've covered the entire tune. A lot of popular music is cyclical in that the same 3-4 chord pattern will often repeat throughout the tune, so you may not have to figure out more than 3-4 chords for the entire song. Yes, when bands write great songs using just "three chords and an attitude", it makes your job a lot easier.

So why would you want to do this? Well, first of all, you're improving your ear. Secondly, you're improving your knowledge of chords because you're forcing yourself to play a variety of chords. If you know your root note for a particular chord is an F#, but you don't know what the quality is, you may have to test out an F# major chord, an F# minor chord, an F#7 chord, and so on. This solidifies your knowledge of chords throughout the parameters of your instrument. The more tunes you figure out, the easier it is to find and play these chords. The other benefit of going through this process is that you're playing along with recordings, which is going to make you're playing better, because you're subconsciously absorbing all the nuances of the recording into your playing.

The main thing is to not get discouraged and to do it on a regular basis. Turn on the radio and try your hand at whatever's playing. If you don't like the tune, change the station. Put it on the classical station - yes, you can play along with classical ones too. Don't be afraid. It's all just music, and in the end, armed with just an ear and the knowledge of some basic chords for the trial-and-error process, you can figure out how to play it.

By: Christopher Sung

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Christopher Sung
Learn to Play the Guitar by Ear

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Filed Under: Ruby Information Tagged With: Axe, Basic Chords, Bass Player, Berklee College Of Music, Cds Dvds, Centuries, College Of Music, Current State, Ear Training, Eartraining, Homespun, Instrumentalists, Learning Aids, Learning To Play The Guitar, Musical Structures, Musician, Musicians Institute, Reknowned, Scales, Training Books

The Do’s and Don’ts of Becoming a Successful Musician – Attaining the Right Mindset

June 16, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Pursuing a successful career as a musician is by its very nature a difficult and stressful process. The extremely competitive and sometimes unpredictable and chaotic nature of the music business will often prove to be all too overwhelming and can leave one feeling discouraged and unfulfilled. But, as in pursuing any other goal, if you take the right steps and prepare yourself properly for what lies ahead, the sky's the limit for what you can achieve. That being said, the first, and perhaps the most important step of the process is learning to dig deep inside of yourself and fashioning the right mental attitude; an outlook that will see you through the hard times and keep you focused on your ultimate goal. All battles are first won or lost in the mind and so before you rush into getting on stage or looking for a record deal, you have to make sure your head is in the right place. This first article in a series of five on becoming a successful musician will examine the importance of mental preparation and developing the right mindset.

For starters, try posing some of the following questions to yourself and then writing an in depth response to each. Some of this self-reflection will seem like common sense, but you would be surprised at the lack of thought most musicians put into their careers. Among the most basic questions are the following: 'Why do you want to become a musician?'; 'When did you first decide that you wanted to be a musician and what sparked that desire?'; Who are some of your favorite musicians and why?'; What would you say your music sounds like and what direction do you see it taking in the future?'. Of course, you'll know the answer to these questions-at least to some extent, but really dissecting the thoughts and feelings surrounding such questions will help you to solidify your 'musical sense-of-self', so to speak. Attaining a deeper understanding of this musical-self awareness will most certainly result in a huge boost in confidence in pursuing and attaining your goals, no matter if it be getting a record deal, performing, or garnering a fan base.

To further this point, let's take a look at the daunting task of getting a record deal. Record labels and production companies are more hesitant than ever to sign new artists and take risks on them, which means that regardless of how large a musical talent you may be, the labels are determining this risk factor based upon you as a person. So, your mindset has to be in the right place in order to prove that you're more of an asset than a liability. Even if you're the next guitar prodigy, if you come off as unsure of yourself and lacking in self-control, they'll just as quickly send you packing. In order to avoid that fate you will need to do a thorough self-evaluation and identifying the characteristics you possess that would make you an asset to any record label and more importantly, the characteristics that might make you a liability to them. Make sure you know exactly what worth you bring to the industry and try to correct any habit or behavioral pattern that a label might identify as a risk factor. For example, something as simple as showing up on time will reveal that you're responsible and that you keep your commitments. Get to know yourself and don't be afraid to admit to your weaknesses. Only after admitting these problem behaviors to yourself can you begin to fix them.

Practice is another area for which mental preparation is a must. Assuming that you've taken the time to develop your talent and you've started writing your own music, the next big step is practice. Achieving the right mindset here is extremely important because how you practice will always dictate how you perform. You can't expect to perform well consistently if you don't practice well consistently. So, the first attributes to develop are consistency and repetition. You have to be willing to put in the time and effort, full stop. Even if you've written a masterpiece, you need to practice it to the point of near perfection and every time you do so, you have to give it your all and no less. How else could you expect to be comfortable hitting that high note with the right amount of force and vibrato or shredding through an intense guitar solo while bounding on one foot across the stage in front of a large crowd if you don't first do it on your own? This means putting every ounce of effort and feeling into every note every time you sit down to practice. If you're having any trouble with this, try using a motivational technique. For example, something as simple as imagining that you're playing in front of a huge, fired-up audience whenever you sit down to practice can really help to get your blood pumping and your mind focused. Next, learn to keep your cool and not to get ahead of yourself. Patience is most certainly a virtue and getting yourself worked up can lead to developing unwanted nervous habits. Finally, and most importantly, make sure you're not turning practice into a painstaking and regimented process. Have fun with it. Remember how much you love what you're doing every time you sit down to do it. To sum up, consistency, repetition, patience, and an overall enjoyable and positive mindset are some of the more important things to focus on. Every time you sit down to compose or practice, take the time to go over these musical ideals in order to help get your head in the right place.

Perhaps the best way to sum up this article is to dismiss one of the biggest myths about making it in the music industry: Getting noticed and attaining fame is all about being lucky and being in the right place at the right time. This couldn't be further from the truth. Neal Boortz once famously said "Luck is opportunity met by preparation, and to be prepared is a personal choice." Remember, developing the right mindset is the first big step to being prepared. Achieving that mindset is not about accidents, but is entirely up to you. Ultimately, your prospects as a musician are very much in your own hands.

By: Gene Ruby

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