Now that it’s a new year I wanted to make a quick post saying thank you to everyone that’s listened to my music, watched my videos, or read this blog.
Thank you.
I appreciate any support that I get. So thank you and I look forward to making more music, videos, and posts in the future.
ISJ
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Making music or practicing music consistently improves your playing much more than big practice or writing sessions.
For the past few years I’ve been teaching music and playing random gigs and making my own music on the side and the main thing that’s helped me improve those things is consistency.
I worked at a youth theatre and learned two musicals a year. That’s more than two hours of music every year that I’d play weekly and learn. My piano playing had never improved as much as it did with that gig.
Currently, I direct a youth orchestra and even though we’re doing online classes now we’re still rehearsing. That’s helped my conducting a whole lot because I’m consistently doing it, every single week. There’s a number of different orchestras at this specific music program and one of the other conductors plays every orchestral instrument, including saxophone. She’s been playing them for rehearsals for many many years, and that’s how she’s gotten as good as she has. Consistency. Regularly picking those instruments up and playing more and more challenging songs. She doesn’t have long practice sessions, but she’s been playing them little by little for many years.
Consistently working on something will help you improve a ton. Even if the incremental changes are small, the large scale improvement over a year will help a lot. Look for years of progress, rather than days of progress.
Start by doing something small. Small improvements will add up, and they’ll be manageable. You won’t burn out doing small things, but trying too hard to do lots of big things will burn you out.
ISJ
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It’s now 2021 and people are making new years resolutions and new goals for what they want to achieve. I have always made new years resolutions, but this year I’m going to pull it back and try to make new years habits. I want to make small changes, rather than large goals.
I want to make changes to the small things. Rather than do big large things. I want to keep writing on this blog, once a day, but I’m going to write for 25 minutes every day. That way I’m focusing on the act of writing, rather than the product I’m making. If I end up writing more posts they’ll just be scheduled for the future, but write every day for only 25 minutes. That seems manageable and honestly sounds easier than “write a blog post every day”.
It doesn’t sound as good or as cool as “write a blog post every day”, but I bet it’ll result in something better.
Another goal is to continue to release one YouTube video a week. I’ve released a video a week for a number of weeks in 2020 and I want to continue that output.
One way to make sure that certain goals get achieved is to make them very concrete. I made a goal to listen to one new album a week for 2020 and that didn’t really work out, but trying to do that achieved my goal to listen to more music. It’s also a good goal to have. It’s do-able. It’s very concrete and something that you can really track whether you’ve achieved it or not.
I’m going to continue to try to do that. 52 albums in 2021.
Good luck with whatever goals you may have.
ISJ
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One of my students recommended I listen to Polo G. So I listened to him and wanted to compile some of my thoughts about this song because it was my favorite song on his album The Goat.
Immediately when listening to this song I recognized the song that was sampled. It samples “The Way It Is” by Bruce Hornsby.
I learned that song on piano a while ago because I like the piano riff at the beginning. I like a lot of Bruce Hornsby’s piano playing.
But back to Polo G.
Sampling originally comes from hip-hop DJs playing two records at the same time and then later became common practice in recording studios and in hip-hop beats. Then it became more popular using small samples of instruments like violins for film scoring and certain sounds in other electronic music.
I love sampling. I’ve made a YouTube video on how to use samples to make your drums more interesting. I use sampling techniques in almost all of my current songs.
It’s influenced many different genres of music and has been very important in the development of modern music. So I want to make sure that I credit hip-hop music for having come up with that idea. I think it’s especially important considering what this song is about.
So what’s the song about?
Polo G has kept the theme of the song mostly the same as Bruce Hornsby’s. Bruce Hornsby’s song is about inequities, just as Polo G’s is. Bruce Hornsby’s song is about how little sympathy and help people in poverty get from wealthier people. Polo G’s song is largely about the same thing. It’s about how black people in the United States are actively harmed by the police and how very few people seem to be trying to do anything about it. It’s about a lot of different things. The main theme is that few people seem to care about the lives of black people.
Polo G makes it more relevant to today and more modern and more explicitly about the racial violence that the police inflict on black communities in the United States. This time though it’s from the other perspective. Bruce Hornsby being a white man singing about inequities is different than Polo G singing about inequities. Even if they are the same inequities. Polo G has a different perspective and I really like what he’s done.
Some specifically musical things that he does.
There’s a choir added. And it’s a gospel choir, which is a part of black culture. You don’t hear the words “the way it is” sung until 2/3 of the way through the song, but you have that choir still there, but humming. I think that’s an awesome addition. It’s hinting at the song in the beginning and playing a sample of the piano riff, but it doesn’t have the full song with those words until later.
He’s also changed the melody a tiny bit by adding in some vocal runs. Rather than singing it exactly the same way Bruce Hornsby does, he makes it his own and sings it in the style that he wants to sing it in.
He’s also added a bit to the melody. In the end, the gospel choir is singing “never, never / some things will never change.” This isn’t part of the original Bruce Hornsby song, but Polo G has added it to his song.
And when I hear this song with the words “that’s just the way it is” and “some things will never change” it doesn’t make me think that Polo G is simply accepting those things or saying that people should do that. It sounds more like he’s trying to point out that very little has changed in the experience of being a black person growing up and living in the United States.
This point I think is made even more clear and more obvious by Polo G using this song that was written in 1986. “Waiting For a Hero” comes more than 30 years after “The Way It Is”, but the struggles that black people face in the United States are largely the same. Hence the phrase “some things will never change.”
And another layer to be added to this point is that Tupac made a song called “Changes” that came out in 1998 that samples the same Bruce Hornsby song and is about police brutality and violence towards people of color.
So not only is Polo G referencing the original Bruce Hornsby song, he’s referencing Tupac’s own use of that sample about the same subject.
What makes this especially moving is that he (Polo G) is pointing out the same problem. He’s pointing out a problem that has been around for so long. And has been left largely unresolved for way too long. Racial inequities in the United States need to be fixed, especially ones that are dealing with police violence. People of color deserve to grow up safe and deserve to not have to worry about being harassed or brutalized by police.
Polo G even quotes Tupac in his own lyrics:
“Wish we could go back to them days when we played as kids
A lot of shit changed, that’s just the way it is”
When “Changes” by Tupac original has these lyrics:
“I’d love to go back to when we played as kids
But things change and that’s the way it is.”
Polo G also quotes Tupac with this line:
“Why would the devil take my brother if he close to me?”
And Tupac’s song has this line:
“How can the devil take a brother if he’s close to me?”
He’s paying tribute to the Tupac song by using the same sample and those same lines.
Even though the subject of the song is tragic, I think Polo G has done something incredibly clever quoting Tupac and using the same Bruce Hornsby sample. Things need to change, even if it seems like they never will.
So with all of that what are some things you can do to help make a change?
Donate money or time if you can to different organizations like the ACLU, Black Lives Matter, or the NAACP.
Thanks for reading and I hope you have a good day.
ISJ
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As musicians we often think a whole lot about the specific notes and rhythms we play. This can be great because that will help you play better music and make better music, but it can also prevent you from improving if you’re constantly worried about playing wrong notes.
When I was in my highschool jazz band I did this all the time. I would be so worried about playing wrong notes that I’d hardly play anything. It kept me from improving because what would’ve helped is me playing something and hearing that it’s wrong and moving on to find something that sounds better. If I instead thought of playing as the practice, improvising as the way to get better, then that would’ve helped me realize that playing wrong notes is part of learning.
In order to improvise well you need to practice improvising. In order to play good solos you need to practice playing solos. You need to play a lot of solos so that you can figure out what sounds good and how to incorporate the musical ideas you already know. Which means you might have to play a number of solos that you don’t like. That’s fine. But keep playing.
Without practicing the act of soloing you never learn those skills. Learning how to do it in the moment of playing a solo is the skill that needs to be developed.
Now I’m not super great at playing solos, but I’m definitely more comfortable playing solos and my solos have improved a ton by getting past that fear. They sound more natural, and honestly I’m playing a whole lot fewer “wrong” notes because I realize that I can just play something else after it. I can move on. I have to move on. The music keeps going so if I play something I don’t like there’s no need to dwell on it.
Stop overthinking the notes you play.
ISJ
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I just had this thought while trying to remember the Mario Kart Lick on melodica. When I’m trying to figure out a song by ear I often try to hear something with as much detail as possible. There’s a clip of, I think, Mulgrew Miller talking about this. When you hear music in your head hear everything as loud as possible and with as much detail as possible.
Try to hear the exact notes of each piece of music. Hear the exact intervals between all the notes. Hear the exact inflections. Hear the exact tone of the instruments. Try to add as much detail into your own mental audiation of a song as possible.
Basically try to hear in 4K. It’ll help your musicality because you’ll be hearing each specific thing and you’ll really be hearing it, rather than hearing or remembering some general idea.
I’ve noticed that this helps a lot with soloing and with learning songs by ear. If I can remember exactly how a song goes then I’ll be able to figure it out, but if my internal audiation isn’t detailed I need another listen.
ISJ
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Title says it all for this one. Make the music you like hearing. If you listen back to your songs and don’t like them, why write them?
That’s it.
ISJ
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Last year I worked on a short film for a 48 Hour Film project that some people in DC were putting together. I just found it by searching YouTube. I’d never searched for it before.
Most of it is Vienna Symphonic Library, made in Logic as one giant session. That’s not something that most composers do, especially if the film is longer, but because it’s about 4 minutes it didn’t matter a whole lot.
I was also working on an old Macbook Pro at the time that kept lagging and glitching while I was writing the music. It was infuriating.
But it was a ton of fun to work on and write music to picture again. Making sure everything synced up and fit the picture was a lot of fun to do.
ISJ
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This is one of the songs I’ve had my students listen to. I chose it specifically because William Grant Still is less commonly used as an example of classical music, he’s a black composer, and he writes music that mixes genres a little bit.
He mixes ideas in jazz with standard ‘classical music’ ideas. That’s what I wanted my students to hear; the breadth that is the genre of classical music. That alone is something more people should hear and realize, even within other genres as well. There’s a huge breadth of music within different genres to be explored and listened to.
The beginning starts with this solo English Horn and then some tense string chords come in. Almost reminiscent of Central Park in the Dark by Charles Ives.
Then you hear a melody played by a trumpet with a harmon mute. That specific mute is what Miles Davis often used, though Miles Davis would remove the stem to get a warmer sound. There we already have an example of blending genres.
Another example of this blending is in the rhythm. It has a swing rhythm, which isn’t notated in the score shown in this video so I’m honestly not sure if that’s something that William Grant Still originally intended, but it wouldn’t surprise me if he did indeed intend to have the piece swung considering how much influence from jazz there is.
The pentatonic based melody also can be thought of as an influence from jazz. Jazz musicians often use pentatonic scales in their soloing and improvising. There’s use of the “blue note” in the first theme, which is especially using some jazz ideas.
The “blue note” is a minor third within a major pentatonic scale. A pentatonic scale is scale degrees 1 2 3 5 6 from a major scale. The “blue note” is the b3, making the scale 1 2 b3 3 5 6. It’s used in lots of music, but especially in blues and jazz music. In C major those notes would be C D Eb E F G, with that Eb being the “blue note.”
Another thing that makes this sound especially jazzy is the pizzicato bass notes. Pizzicato notes were definitely around before jazz and are used in more music than just jazz music, but jazz bass players (especially upright bass players) almost exclusively play with their fingers. The technique is slightly different, but the sound is similar. Walking bass lines are almost always played with the fingers, and in this piece we hear the bass line played with the fingers as well.
I really like a lot of this stuff. I like hearing classical music that’s not dated and old. I studied classical composition when I was at Berklee College of Music and one thing that bugged me about the major and about the genre as a whole was how focused it was on old music. And I don’t mean old as in 50 years old. I mean 300 years old. The composers are great, and their music was fantastic, but there was an odd focus on such an old style of music, while ignoring a lot of the modern musicians who make classical music today or more modern classical music.
And that’s one big thing I like about this piece; it’s classical music, but if you started playing this for someone as “classical music” you might get a few weird looks. It doesn’t fit the standard image of what people think of as classical music, but it has all the characteristics needed to fit that genre.
I also like the use of harmony. A lot of the harmony sounds pretty functional, but voiced with fourths, creating “quartal” voicings. That’s another common thing used in jazz especially in some of John Coltrane’s music. Quartal and quintal (chords built in fifths) are also often used by Claude Debussy in his music. I’m a big fan of the sound that fourths creates. It moves away from the standard tertian harmony (chords built in thirds) that you hear so often in music.
Take a listen to the piece, it’s definitely worth listening to if you’re at all interested in jazz or classical music. Or if you’re interested in hearing how William Grant Still blends the two together.
ISJ
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I honestly think a lot of creative is built off of play. Playing around. Messing around. Sitting down with your instrument or DAW and just trying stuff out. Thinking “I wonder what this would sound like?” and then trying it.
At least that’s how creativity works for me. I often just sit at the piano and improvise, and completely mess around. No one ever has to hear it again so the stakes are low, but I get to hear what it sounds like. I can try out new ideas and see how they sound and see if I like them. Sometimes it’s atonal. Sometimes it’s tonal. Sometimes it’s nonfunctional. Sometimes it’s functional. But I’ll try it out to see how it sounds and test out different, new ideas.
I highly recommend doing this if you want to be able to write more music. You’ll think of lots of ideas and it’s kind of like brainstorming with music.
With brainstorming the idea is to just write down as many different ideas as possible. This is basically the same. Think of as many ideas as possible and just write them. Just go with them and see how they are. You can always cross them off your list later, but thinking of them and testing them out will get you some good ideas.
I had a teacher in college who had me do this. I couldn’t think of anything to write so he gave me a piece of manuscript paper and told me to write 10 melodies. And he gave me time to write, but if he saw I was stalling and not writing anything he’d say, “Just write. Don’t think about them. They don’t need to be any good.”
That phrase “they don’t have to be good” helps me write a lot.
If you sit down and do that, write 10 melodies, and 1 of them is good then congrats you have 1 good melody!
If you write 20 melodies and you have 1 good melody then congrats you have 1 good melody!
Throw the rest away. They don’t matter. But keep that one. That’s what matters.
ISJ
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