Becoming a Better Musician - Part 1 - Going back to the Text

I want to start a series of blog posts here concerning how to become a better musician and some strategies for doing it. In this first post I wanted to start somewhere simple, that being on your main instrument. Whatever it may be: piano, drums, guitar, bass, whatever. When someone asks "What instrument do you play?" what is the first thing you say. That's the one we want to talk about.

If you have played an instrument long enough, you will no doubt get to a point where you feel you are proficient. Maybe not as good as you once hoped you would be, but at least good enough for whatever gig you find yourself in. I made the mistake of resting in this point for a couple years time and didn't grow at all because of it. Those are definitely years I wish I had back.

Well how can you stretch yourself in your main instrument? My first recommendation would be to find a lesson plan that you have not tried before that will challenge you. Get a method book of some sort that is a notch above your level and dig in. Don't be afraid of trying something a little tough. You want to be the best player you can be? Well, running over that same pentatonic scale for the 10,000th time isn't gonna get you there. Sometimes after beating your head against the wall for a while and not getting any results, you should try a different approach.

My main instrument is the guitar. So here is one recommendation. If you know how to read some standard notation and want a book that will challenge you to learn so much, check out A Modern Method for Guitar - Volumes 1, 2, 3 Complete this is used as the basic text for the Berklee College of Music guitar program. 


If you are a drummer, perhaps something like 4-Way Coordination: A Method Book for the Development of Complete Independence on the Drum Set might be a good challenge for you (It gets rave reviews on Amazon, I think I'll order it), I myself am new to the drums just this year and would love to hear from some drummers about their suggestions for good texts.


But really whatever instrument you play, I'm sure there is something out there what will do the trick. I would suggest that you read reviews of any text before you purchase it, because there is a lot of garbage out there. Spend a little time searching for the right book and dive in. 


What method books or skill books do you recommend for your particular instrument? Leave a comment and let us all know!

Musescore Music Notation

If there is one area where computers and music can really work together, it is musical typesetting. My handwriting is terrible and when I try to write out music, either practice scales for my students, or charts for the band, it is much better when it is typeset. I have been looking for something to use for a while and have been avoiding laying out the money for Finale or Sibelius. That being said, I am a big fan of open source software. So when I found Musescore, still in a beta form, but already very usable, I was very interested.

Musescore is now in it's 1.0 version and is coming along fast! It is available for Windows, Mac and Linux. It currently works well for typesetting standard notation, with support for unlimited staves, 4 voices per stave. It allows for MIDI input and playback. There is great chord name support with chord names that can be transposed with your music. Of course it contains menus full of barline types, note head types, text options,  fingerings, articulations, dynamics, etc. Here is something silly I whipped up for this post in a matter of a couple minutes.
This was a 'save as png'. It was exported at 300 dpi (I resized it) with a transparent background which is nice.The dpi  is selectable in the options menu. Other export types include: PDF, png, svg, postscript, lilypond, MIDI, wav, ogg, flac and MusicXML. So it is pretty versatile in output formats.

Keyboard shortcuts are user definable (which could be handy if you are coming from other software).

Musescore also has a plugin engine that I have not even looked at yet. It has several included plugins for doing various tasks, but since the plugins are written in Javascript, it should be pretty easy to mess with.

There are a few UI issues that are still being hashed out by the developers, but I have found the forums on their site to be extremely friendly and Bug reports are actually looked at and when possible fixed in the source code.

Future Features:


One thing that the current stable version lacks is support for guitar TAB and guitar block chord symbols, but since it is open source, I download and compile a development 'snapshot' daily and support for these features has already been coded and the bugs are being worked out. Not only for guitar, but TAB support for any amount of strings and tunings, with many built in and user definable TAB staffs as well.  I expect we will see these in a stable version soon. It seems like they try to release a new version every 3-4 months, so since 1.0 came out last month, a new updated version shouldn't be too far away.

Overall, I am very glad I found Musescore. It has a great future ahead of it.

You can download Musescore for free at http://musescore.org

Are you using Musescore? What are you doing with it? Let us know, we would love to hear.

Welcome to DS al Coda

You've found my new blog 'DS as Coda'. I am a 35 year old musician from the midwest. I've been playing music all my life and have ambitions to eventually work in music full time. For now, I am writing this blog as both a growth experiment for myself and hopefully a help to you to find some new ideas, spark some creativity, discover helpful tools, read some reviews and maybe laugh a little while we are at it. I hope you enjoy the blog and always welcome your feedback!