After spending a year in the field refining my performance and arranging skills, I am excited to share what I've learned with a new crop of select students. I'm looking for serious piano students who want to expand beyond their classical skills to become proficient in popular, jazz, improvisation, and/or composition. My diverse experience in just about every piano capacity imaginable helps me prepare students for college music study and/or professional careers in music. I can also help returning adults to re-gain confidence and find their own special gift. What will you learn? You will learn all the tricks and arranging secrets that I have learned over the past fifteen years. You will learn to listen and trust your musical intuition more. You will learn to make music from scratch, without relying on a piece of paper. I am also skilled in helping students to dramatically improve sight-reading, so that they can handle anything that is thrown at them. I do this by equipping students with a deep understanding of theory and chords, and through direct application of that knowledge in creative lead-sheet interpretation and score analysis. I teach all styles, drawing from my experience in composition & arranging, musical theater accompanying, playing with orchestras/bands, wedding piano, hotel/restaurant/party piano, dance accompanying, and vocal accompanying.
Accepting students by audition only. Call 571-439-0136 or e-mail info@musicbyjennifer.net for more information. SUNDAYS ONLY, IN YOUR HOME. LOUDOUN COUNTY AREA.
Visit my website at www.musicbyjennifer.net to learn more about my experience and qualifications.
Showing posts with label composition. Show all posts
Showing posts with label composition. Show all posts
Thursday, December 4, 2014
Sunday, August 3, 2014
A Dead MIDI Cable is No Excuse!
Yesterday my MIDI cable died. It just stopped working. When I awoke at 6am to write out my newest compostion, my trusty equipment was shot. I troubleshot every possiblility to diagnose the problem (reversed IN-OUT config, unplugged, re-plugged, re-opened software after cable attached, switched pianos, etc), and determined that the cable was indeed kaput. Since I need my MIDI cable for quickly scribing the notes into the computer (via hyperscribe in Finale software), it seriously hinders my data input without the cable.
What's a composer to do without her MIDI cable in 2014? I could have walked away from the computer and folded laundry. I could have run to the music store to get one, but music stores aren't open at 6am on Sunday mornings. So I decided to quit making excuses and use this handicap as an opportunity to learn a new skill. There are, indeed, a couple of ways to enter notes without a MIDI cable. One is simple entry, a method that uses tedious mouse-clicking. And there's speedy entry, a method I had yet to really learn.
Within Finale, I had been relying on combination of hyperscribe, cut-and-paste, transpose, and simple entry to quickly scribe my scores, but I had been avoiding speedy entry. My hybrid method worked very well, and was pretty efficient. But an orchestrator colleague I know only uses speedy entry in Finale (absolutely no hyperscribe). It is a typing-based entry method in Finale, and there's a learning curve involved. But once you learn it, it's like touch-typing on the computer...you become very, very fast. Some people swear by it, so I decided that my lack of a MIDI cable set up the perfect scenario to learn a new skill.
I delved into the online manual and googled for answers to my questions. I learned that 4 stands for eighth note, 5 for quarter, and 6 for half. See, I'm not looking them up on the chart and I already have this memorized. I learned that you can navigate from one beat to the next with the arrow keys, and that you can use the + symbol to raise a note a half-step, and the minus symbol to lower it. I did get a little frustrated when I went to enter three and four-note chords. I realized that, once again, I kind of need MIDI input via a MIDI controller/piano-- that is, if I want to be fast! I also reached a roadblock when I tried to enter triplets via speedy entry. It appears some MIDI input is necessary for this as well. So, given that my music has a lot of chords and triplets, I decided to abandon speedy entry for the moment and will re-explore this method once I get a new MIDI cable.
Bottom line - I started mastering a new skill this morning, and I will build on my new knowledge later.
What's a composer to do without her MIDI cable in 2014? I could have walked away from the computer and folded laundry. I could have run to the music store to get one, but music stores aren't open at 6am on Sunday mornings. So I decided to quit making excuses and use this handicap as an opportunity to learn a new skill. There are, indeed, a couple of ways to enter notes without a MIDI cable. One is simple entry, a method that uses tedious mouse-clicking. And there's speedy entry, a method I had yet to really learn.
Within Finale, I had been relying on combination of hyperscribe, cut-and-paste, transpose, and simple entry to quickly scribe my scores, but I had been avoiding speedy entry. My hybrid method worked very well, and was pretty efficient. But an orchestrator colleague I know only uses speedy entry in Finale (absolutely no hyperscribe). It is a typing-based entry method in Finale, and there's a learning curve involved. But once you learn it, it's like touch-typing on the computer...you become very, very fast. Some people swear by it, so I decided that my lack of a MIDI cable set up the perfect scenario to learn a new skill.
I delved into the online manual and googled for answers to my questions. I learned that 4 stands for eighth note, 5 for quarter, and 6 for half. See, I'm not looking them up on the chart and I already have this memorized. I learned that you can navigate from one beat to the next with the arrow keys, and that you can use the + symbol to raise a note a half-step, and the minus symbol to lower it. I did get a little frustrated when I went to enter three and four-note chords. I realized that, once again, I kind of need MIDI input via a MIDI controller/piano-- that is, if I want to be fast! I also reached a roadblock when I tried to enter triplets via speedy entry. It appears some MIDI input is necessary for this as well. So, given that my music has a lot of chords and triplets, I decided to abandon speedy entry for the moment and will re-explore this method once I get a new MIDI cable.
Bottom line - I started mastering a new skill this morning, and I will build on my new knowledge later.
But wait! I had nothing to show for my work this morning; no notes input, no score produced. I decided not to make excuses, so I spent the extra time needed to simple-entry my notes, a tedious process, but with cut-and-paste and transpose, the process is a little faster. And I have the start of "Moving On".
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