photo credit: dobroide via flickr

Change of plan: in the future I’ll keep the posts regard­ing my monthly chal­lenge goals short and sweet.

There’s 3 main rea­sons for that:

1) I don’t want to bore you

2) It takes too much prep time to write about it

3) I don’t want this blog to turn into just my per­sonal prac­tice diary

I’ve been think­ing about it and came up with this solution:

I’ll still post my per­sonal goals for the month. It might only be a few words, I might add a few sen­tences clar­i­fy­ing things, it might turn into a mon­ster post. Who knows... depend­ing on what­ever my goals will be that month. Read the rest of this entry

This music video has been col­lect­ing cyber­dust on my hard drive for way too long. I pro­duced the audio track in late 2007 and started mess­ing around with the video in the sum­mer of 08. Just never got around to fin­ish it. Until now....

During my early twen­ties I’ve been fas­ci­nated by a TV pro­gram called “Space Night.” That show fea­tured Hubble pic­tures as well as satel­lite movies show­ing beau­ti­ful Earth land­scapes, oceans, etc..

And in the back­ground always played some cool, ambi­ent, elec­tronic music pro­vid­ing a really mes­mer­iz­ing and some­what hyp­notic effect in com­bi­na­tion with the pictures.

Hopefully, I’ve achieved a sim­i­lar effect with my lit­tle trib­ute track and video.

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Mind map­ping is an extremely pow­er­ful tool. It’s easy to quickly cap­ture your brain­storms and then orga­nize them.

The main idea and con­cept is to start from a cen­tral topic and branch out — group­ing together all your asso­ci­ated ideas and thoughts. This lets you see and explore what’s in your mind and dis­cover new ideas and relationships.

Basically all you need for cre­at­ing a mind map is pen and paper. However, there’s some excel­lent com­puter pro­grams avail­able to help you cre­ate dig­i­tal mind maps.

The dig­i­tal ver­sion has the fol­low­ing advan­tages: Read the rest of this entry

O.k, what’s this Bobby McFerrin video got to do with learn­ing to hear all the 12 chro­matic notes?

Actually, the video in itself has noth­ing to do with learn­ing to hear all the chro­mat­ics. However, there’s an impor­tant les­son to take-away and build upon. Let me explain...
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Before I post the new chal­lenge goals, I’d like to do a quick recap about my November results.

First of all, I’m really proud of myself for com­plet­ing the November chal­lenge with­out miss­ing a sin­gle day. Doing ALL the exer­cises EVERY day not only does feel great as an accom­plish­ment in itself, but it really does make a dif­fer­ence in terms of the musi­cal results you get.

Let’s not for­get, the Challenge of the Month is a means to an end — it’s not (just) about doing the exer­cises every day, it’s what comes as a result of doing the exer­cises that counts.

However, fol­low­ing through builds your dis­ci­pline and that is impor­tant as well. Read the rest of this entry

The Omstrument — by Jack Haas

What do you get when you com­bine a harp, a tan­pura, a dul­cimer, a gui­tar and a strum­stick?
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In gen­eral gui­tarists learn their chords in a rather un-systematic way.

There might be a teacher or a gui­tar play­ing friend show­ing you some stan­dard voic­ings. Then there’s the odd chord gleaned from a chord book or tran­scrip­tion. Some chords you find while exper­i­ment­ing and noodling on the instrument.

You get the picture.

So even though you might know quite a few chords, the ques­tion is: how well do you know your chords? Do you know them inside out so you can uti­lize them in a chord melody style?

If your answer is no, don’t worry, I’ve got good news for you.

It ain’t that dif­fi­cult to get started on the road towards a per­sonal chord melody sys­tem.

Let me show you how.

Read the rest of this entry