Gary Burton's Advises To Me

OK, so how did I do in Gary Burton's BMP-112 Jazz Improvisation Class?

This is the follow-up article of my original post.

Well, the course is over now so let's review the types of things that were pointed out to me:

• Need to build up more Jazz vocabulary (this was the whole point of the class.) Key ones are common chord scales, guide tones among others. Isn't saying "it's a tri-tone sub" good enough?
• My fingers getting in the way of playing the piano. Verdict: He has handed a sentence to me as following:  Your hands will chained to Hanon in all keys and Czerny etudes in the classical dungeon of Château de Chillon with kindergarten violin students for life until you can do them in 168 bpm no wrong notes or shall not emerge or touch the Grand on upstairs visitor center area. Ugh! One of my classmate -- she will likely say: "Take him away immediately! And you will enjoy it!"
• Too much emphasis on playing on both left and right hand together. Gary, I am very well coordinated between two hands. What can I say?
• Not sticking to the theme (isn't 2 measures really enough, Gary?) and start to tell more story about the song. Gary's approach is to demonstrate unique compositional features of well composed songs. This, of course, will require our ability to recognize what are the key features in compositions in the first place.
• You don't know how to swing (so to speak): Well, Gary that's a complement to me, you just paired me with Dave Brubeck.
• Play like a butterfly. Well Gary, my wings are still damp, my fingers won't turn on a dime in just 12 weeks. OK?
• Using too many bag of tricks (unlearn them and learn new ones). Actually I even did not know I had a bag.

Final Grade: Given there were a couple of other formidable players in the class, given my hobbyist Jazz musician status, I actually did not too badly. Certainly a lot better than I thought I would.

Jazz Transcribing Tip, Slowing Down The Playback

 Note: There is a Follow Up Article to this. Be sure to read both!

Well, I am now done with Gary Burton's Jazz improvisational class and I will be moving on to studying Piano with a prominent Jazz recording artist in LA.

One of the first assignments I have gotten is to transcribe (to mean duplicate, not necessarily write out) solos.

If you are skilled at this, you can hear the quality of voicings and you'd be able to tell what the voicing are.  Occasionally you also run into people with perfect pitch and they can do it while in sleep.

While I got a hang on Jazz harmonies, it will not be an instant recall at this time, so it will be a bit of uphill battle for a while as I get up to speed with it.

As a musician in the digital age, I always try to use tools to make my jobs easier. That's tools are for!

So to transcribe a song, it is better for me to slow down the song. In the older time with tape only this would not have been possible, since if you slow down the tape, then it will also alter the pitch. But today, you can do the digital re-sampling and be able to play the songs slowly and at the same time with the original pitch.

If you have a digital audio workstation (DAW) this is a familiar territory. But for the purpose of just playing something slow, a dedicated tool is a much faster option. Also for many soloists, they do not have a full DAW setup.

So I did some search and I just came across the tool called Amazing Slow Downer, which sells for about $60.00 online. With it I can slow down songs as much as 20% of the original.

While you are processing the signal heavily it is not exactly like the effect of slowing down a MIDI track, but the processing quality is surprisingly and you can change speeds interactively, real-time, with just a slider; much more musician friendly!

On this tool, you just open an CD track or audio file and play with the slider. You are in business in a matter of a few minutes.

With looping presets, so you can  recall in-out points and loop around the parts that you want to practice or analyze. You can set up 10 or so pre-set in-out points.

Another nice touch is a MIDI event control. It learns your MIDI control signal, and you can program it to start to play or play a loop. That's quite nice since you can focus on your work from your keyboard. I mapped start and stop on the joystick so I do not have to reach the computer keyboard to start and stop it.

It's available on Mac and Windows and it can play CDs as well as common music file format like MP3 and AIFF.

Sewing for Musicians - Fixing a Torn Ear Pad on Sony MDR-7506 Headphones

I have a pair of Sony MDR-7506 headphones, which is really great. It fits well, the sound isolation is very adequate, and it is the old tried and tested production engineers choice. It's well worth $100. I had it a little over 3 years. There are other Sony headsets like Sony Studio Monitor Series Black Headphones - MDR-V6 (Google Affiliate Ad)

This weekend, I noticed that one of the ear pads was torn inside. One of the inside seam was split exposing the sponge inside and getting worse.

You are supposed to be able to buy the replacement. At one vendor I checked, they are out of stock. It runs about $7.00 each.

But because of this design, fixing it is also quite easy.

Assuming further delay, I looked into it a bit how it is built and in my case I was able to patch it up quite good by just sewing around the tear.

You may want to do that too. It should take only about 10 min to do this type of a fix. If you do not sew (you should have some basic skill on this though) I am sure someone close to you can.

Quick Tips:

Take the pad off the headset, turn it inside out to expose the torn seam. And stitch around like in a spiral fashion.

There, it is now complete and ready. If you use black thread, it would be un-noticeable.