Every musician should have at least a basic understanding of the blues. Here’s a blues primer listing examples that best exemplify the blues for guitar, bass, drums, piano, vocals, and harmonica.
Category: Keyboards
How to Develop A Better Sense of Pitch
This is probably why Autotune infuriates so many serious musicians: those variations in pitch aren’t mistakes in the performance; they are the performance. If you clean up those “errors” and quantize everything to the “correct” pitches, all you’re left with is dry, robotic music.
Hammond SK1: A Vintage Lover’s Dream Toy
The Hammond SK1 is a vintage lover’s dream machine. It’s a B3 first and foremost, but comes loaded with other built-in sounds, from Wurlitzer to Fender Rhodes and grand piano. You’ve got to hear this thing to believe it. Which is why we made this video! Video stars Todd Hobin; produced by Drew Roberts
Hughes Family Band
“My parents were very musical, so it was natural when we were kids to sing together all the time,” says second eldest son Jason, 42. The family performed at church functions and small events around their hometown of Taylorsville, Utah. “My mom always had a way of making whatever it was sound like the biggest […]
You Can’t Be Sad and Play Polka
“When the doctors told me the news, my world stopped,” says LynnMarie Rink, a Grammy-nominated artist and entertainer, who began a journey she did not wish to take. “I was frozen. I thought my life was over—and my career. I even wished it were over. But in that ‘frozen’ period, I slowly began to write, […]
Our August Issue: Banjo and Beyond
With Bela Fleck as the cover story, a History of the Banjo two-page spread, and a banjo contest we’re running until August 15, our August issue is sure to please any banjo lover. But don’t worry: we haven’t forgotten about the rest of you! Other stories include Antique Piano Restoration tips for anyone interested in […]
Antique Piano Restoration Tips
How do I know if a piano is worth restoring or not? We posed this, and other questions, to a piano restoration expert.
Blind Winemaker Has Vision for Music
David Hunt grew up in a poor family in Lexington, North Carolina. Like many teenagers of the 1960s, he picked up the guitar and became a songwriter and singer in a band. “When I was 15 or 16 we recorded an album,” he recalls. “We used to do all the college tours, and I’d sing […]
Train Your Ear to Recognize Pitch, Intervals, Chords
Notes on a page are not music. We musicians sometimes need to be reminded of this. It’s easy to lapse into an autopilot practice regimen, in which you sit down and play your sheet music for a half hour without ever really hearing the sounds you’re making.
New Instruments, Vintage Sounds
In the age of hi-fidelity, lo-fi seems to be making a comeback. Vinyl records, for example, have become all the rage once again, with many artists releasing special edition LPs, in addition to standard MP3 and CD formats. It’s the warmth associated with analog, which doesn’t exist in the digital realm, that appeals to these […]