(Part 3) Best products from r/Learnmusic

Have you ever seen Whose Line Is It Anyway? If you haven't, the idea is that a bunch of actors get on stage, take suggestions from the audience, and create wildly creative set pieces on the fly. Improv seems like an unachievable creative feat--but it's not.

In his book Impro, Keith Johnstone demystifies improv and narrative play. At one point, he has a lady who insists she's not creative participate in a narrative game. She asks plot questions about an unwritten story, and he answers yes or no depending on the way she phrases her questions. In the end, this "uncreative" creates a story about giant killer ants seemingly from nothing!

The key to creativity is being open to stupid ideas. People have ideas all the time. Deciding to put hot sauce on your pizza is an idea. Deciding to cut through Park Lane while on your morning commute is an idea. Deciding to dance the funky chicken after reading this comment is an idea.

What makes an idea creative? That's a toughie. A lot of times, you'll feel it in your gut or sense it in the approval from your audience. But you normally don't reach that creative peak until you get through some duds. :)

Creativity is easy. Creativity is hard. Anyone can come up with ideas. It's the editing--and the follow-through--that makes the difference.

Absolutely! Start by learning about solfege or functional ear training. There's an app for Android or iPhone called functional ear trainer that's very useful for learning about it.

Also, I recommend working on solfege one note at a time. Play a I, IV, V progression and just try to sing "do" or "one". When you can consistently do it every time, then start trying to sing "sol" or "five" until you can do that consistently as well. Then go on to "mi" or "three", and then just go on with the rest of the major scale, one note at a time.

Another couple of products that really helped me are A Fanatic's Guide to Ear Training and Sight Singing and Voice Lessons To Go V.2- Do Re Mi ear/pitch training

Best of luck!

1. Score study. After you finish the great orchestration books, the primary source of further study is always the works of great composers.
   
   
2. Form in Tonal Music by Douglass Green is good for this purpose, although it's not comprehensive. Perhaps what you're really looking for is something like the Anthology for Musical Analysis by Burkhart & Rothstein.
   
   Sorry about the prices of those books on form. That's pretty typical for forms & analysis books since they're primarily text books.

I've been learning flute for the past year, and here's what I've found useful:

• cyberflute.com
  
  
• Nina Perlove on YouTube
  
  
• etudes by Anderson (24 Progressive Studies) and Gariboldi (here's the collection I have)
  
  
• The Wye Practice Books for the Flute in one volume - This is absolutely wonderful for learning how to play well. He talks about tone, intonation, technique, vibrato, double tonguing, etc. Definitely worth the price.
  
  My practice is oriented in two directions: Celtic-style songs and techniques, and general classical style. I'm currently working on the Am Partita by Bach. The hardest thing for me about learning flute (I'm also a clarinet/sax player!) is the subtleties of embouchure, and playing in tune (which are related, I suppose).

>you might be surprised just how little someone like me has to say to a student who is sight reading material.

Wanted to see something like this just to mention "The Inner Gamer of Tennis"..

Principles are similar. There's a story in there that basically follows this: get the pupil to focus on taking action instead of thinking so much that they cannot concentrate and do what needs to be done.

It seems like they get used to the difficulty upfront, and get a chance to relax and focus on the easier passages afterwards. Letting them know that they need not produce excellent results on the difficult pieces is crucial to help them relax.

Another example is one I've gleaned from weightlifting. TL;DR version: You're stronger than you think. Keyword: think (and how it can be limiting at times)

I'd say your student has all he needs to sight read, he just needs practice and focus.

Piano is hard. IMHO, it's one of the hardest instruments there is because you have to get used to splitting your mind in two and playing one line of music in each hand. On any other instrument, you are only playing a single line of music. Grab a Hanon book, they have great exercises! There's also this awesome book on Scales, Chords, and Arpeggios. Unlike the violin where you have moveable scale shapes, every key feels different under your fingers on the piano.

If you can afford a small midi keyboard like this you can get a program/game like Synthesia for free and make a game out of it.

It doesn't really teach theory but, it will get him playing along with and learning songs. Then in a couple of years if he is still interested you can get him some proper lessons and his hands should be able to keep up with the theory he is absorbing like a sponge.

If you have $1299, you can get a Roland RD 300nx. I have a slightly different model (rd700sx), but all of the keyboards in this series are great. Has nice weighted keys, sound, and can interface with your computer via usb. https://www.amazon.com/Roland-RD-300NX-Digital-Piano/dp/B004KCLX8W/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1469289985&sr=8-1&keywords=roland+rd

I have a Kala KA-15S. It's a soprano and is made of mahogany. I am just a beginner also but I've been extremely pleased with this one the month or so that I've had it. Very pretty tone and louder than I expected it would be.

> For what it's worth, I like synthesizers a lot, and electric pianos, so traditional classical piano is pretty uninspiring to me. So anything relating more to jazz/rock/blues would be probably interest me more.

Technical drills tend to be very classical by nature. Non-classical music just doesn't push raw technique anywhere near as hard.

The two standards for technical drills are Hanon and Czerny (several books, but this is probably the one to get first). Hanon works on sheer finger speed, strength, and dexterity, while Czerny works more on fingering patterns. In the one I linked, the first two are about scales, the next two are about arpeggios, etc.

A book you can get that will help is this book, which talks about the different types of music used in video games, different methods of composition used in video games, and how to get around them. I don't have the same advice as these folks, but I think this book might help. :)

I went to berklee and this was our textbook:
https://www.amazon.com/Tonal-Harmony-B-Music/dp/0078025141
Also ear training helps, it is pretty hard though, you have to practice alot. Im sure you can find some youtube vids to help.

I've been playing around with electronic music for years, but only started taking it really seriously the past year. I've read a lot of books, and honestly, NOTHING has been more helpful to me than The dance music manual.

Pasted from a similar thread:

I've recommended this to others in a similar situation: http://www.amazon.com/Piano-Handbook-Complete-Guide-Mastering/dp/0879307277

Also here is some pretty easy stuff, most have MIDI tracks to listen to first: http://www.gmajormusictheory.org/Freebies/freebies.html

Thanks for doing this. I am a beginner (male) taking voice lessons. I've been doing the warmups from this book.

Towards the end, there are some exercises dedicated to the 'mixed voice'. I don't quite know what this is or how to find it. I can't tell by listening to the singer on the recording either. Do you have any tips for me on this?

Alfred's All-in-One Adult Course book is really great, though if you only have 61 keys you'll have to cut some corners. I still highly recommend it.

And this guy has tons of free lessons, if you can deal with his particular teaching style which is rather long winded and full of bad jokes. (That's not a criticism, he's great at what he does)

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0879307277/ref=oh_details_o00_s00_i00 this will help out a lot.