Or: Everything I Need to Know About Productivity I learned from Charles Mingus

There goes the title of Lifehack.Org's contributing editor and project manager, Dustin M. Wax. He is also an anthropology and women's studies professor in Las Vegas, NV where he lives with his partner and three children. His personal site can be found at dwax.org.

Wow, jazz improvisation is an example of productivity? Check out the article by clicking here

Check this out on Julian's blog!

It's pretty basic in the description and would be good for a newbie introduction to jazz band dynamics.

Splatspit, struggling student and ardent jazz fan shares with us his thoughts on how to "listen and appreciate jazz".

It is written in lay-man terms and is a nice, nifty introduction for newbies to jazz.

Check it out here:

http://splatspit.sstwo.net/2005/08/yesterday-was-last-day-of-jazz-rhythm.htm

PS: We asked him for his bank account number so that any Good Samaritan wanting to help him out, could just transfer the money in but he does not have enough money for one, so feel free to contact him at splatspit@hotmail.com

And not just Reshmonu, it's been used many times as a very effective substitution device for:

1. lengthy Imaj7 transition to IVmaj7,
2. or from Im7 (which is actually the relative minor or the VIm7 to the Imaj7 chord) to VImaj7 if we are talking about minor tonality in Reshmonu's case.

Fact is, this particular chord progression has been used many. many times by so many musicians that I have lost count. But it's great checking out for the newbies out there.

So let's begin evaluating the the evolution or development of this nice chord progression substitute.

For illustration purposes, let's keep the discussion to seventh chords.

1) Let's assume that we have a Imaj7 chord that lasts for two bars that goes into IVmaj7.



2) This can be substituted as follows:


Most pop songs do not go further than this and which is alright and quite adequate.

But to get that almost R&B flavoured sound, we need to move further.

[ Read More! ]

Do you want to do some home recording but am deterred by the absurd retail price for Cakewalk Sonar, or Cubase SX? I mean, after all it's only for your small demo...

Well, no - I am not encouraging you to get the RM10.00 version at Imbi Plaza. (You know what I mean )

Since many of us do not possess the funds nor high-end machines to run those cutting-edge Sonar or Cubase babies, may I interest you to download the free version of Protools LE?

It does not work on Win ME or XP based machines, but here is the link:

Protools LE free version!

As many visitors are still using Win 98SE, they may find this audio production tool very useful.

It is developed by DigiDesign, manufacturer of many digital audio/midi interfaces currently in the market. Enjoy!

* * *
UPDATE
* * *

For a cheap but arguably better alternative to Sonar or Cubase, please do check out "Tracktion 2.0".

I have been using the Not-For-Resale (NFR) version of Tracktion for a while now and it burns rubber!

There is an active user forum at KVR audio. Click here to visit!

There is also Audacity, a FREE open-source program at sourceforge.net which you can try out for fun. Thanks to Luke Bong for pointing it out.

Picking up where we left off last week, we would like to continue with the following observation:

The bebop scale on the dominant chord (V7) and on the iim7 (minor) chord are basically modes of each other.

Recall that the bebop scale for dominant chord is:



while the bebop scale for iim7:



So, in the key of Bb major, the bebop dominant scale would be:



while the bebop scale for Cm7 (iim7) would be:



[ Read More! ]

In response to a request, AllDatJazz.Com lists the "Blues Scale" for all twelve (12) keys.

Preliminaries:

Recall that the relationship between each successive note in a major scale (ascending) can be defined as intervals of half-steps (H) or whole steps (W).



So the notes of a C major scale are : C D E F G A B and C
Likewise, for a Bb major scale are: Bb C D Eb F G A Bb

Using the major scale as our base, and assigning the numbers 1 through 8 for each successive note, we can define the "blues scale" as:



There are other variants of the "blues scale" but so far this is most common.

[ Read More! ]

So, you've mastered the blues scale inside out. You've constructed and amassed an arsenal of riffs that you can use anytime, anywhere. Heck, you can do a blues solo with both eyes closed blasting away on your instrument! Congratulations!

Well, it's time to move on and develop that improvisation skill beyond the boundaries of the blues scale.

Thus AllDatJazz.Com invites you to take a closer look at BeBop.

History
In the 1940s, bebop musicians including Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker came up with a new approach to improvisation.

It resulted with long improvised melodic lines made up of eight notes, charactised by a high degree of chromaticism, syncopation and accentuation.

Why did they need this new approach?

There was a need to devise an eight-note scale that would place all the chord tones (the tonic, third, fifh and seventh) on the beats of the bar.

The regular modes derived from the major and minor scales only contain seven notes and thus there was considerable difficult in fitting with a 4/4 time.

Bebop Scale
Thus, the bebop scale was born.

It is an eight-note scale that would place all the chord tones (i.e. the 1st, 3rd, 5th and 7th) on the beats of the bar.

For Dominant Seventh chords, it includes a chromatic passing note between the minor seventh and octave of the scale



For Major Sixth or Major Seventh chords, the chromatic passing note lies between the fifth and sixth of the scale.



For Minor chords, the chromatic passing note lies between the third and fourth of a dorian minor scale



For Half-Diminished chords, the chromatic passing note lies between the fifth and sixth of a major scale



Examples:

For example, the corresponding bebop scale for a C7 chord is:



[ Read More! ]

Disclaimer

The information provided in this article comes without any warranty whatsoever. Use it at your own risk. Just because a program, book or service is listed here or has a good review does not mean that I endorse or approve of the program or of any of its contents. All the other standard disclaimers also apply.

- End of Disclaimer

FINALE NOTEPAD from CodaMusic

There are plenty of music notation software in the market but in my opinion, Finale Notepad from Codamusic still ranks the BEST in its category.

Finale Notepad is a FREE downloadable program from Coda Music, the company that produces the famous Finale family of music notation software including Allegro and SmartMusic.

I use Finale Notepad a lot to produce professional looking sheet music so that I can spare my fellow musicians from reading my ugly handwritten manuscripts.

The latest version at the time of writing, Finale Notepad 2005 even allows basic guitar and bass tabs notation.

However, it is very basic and is only meant to facilitate the transformation of your musical ideas into beautifully printed music in an easy manner. To ask anything beyond that for a free product is simply not possible.

Curious readers wishing to find out what are some of the things that it does not do can read on:

For one, there is no support for saving scores as MIDI, importing and exporting MIDI files.

[ Read More! ]

After some searching, it was surprisingly easy to discover a few good people who have invested their time, energy and effort into producing quality HTML editor software. But first the standard disclaimer:

Disclaimer

The information provided on this page comes without any warranty whatsoever. Use it at your own risk. Just because a program, book or service is listed here or has a good review does not mean that I endorse or approve of the program or of any of its contents. All the other standard disclaimers also apply.

- End of Disclaimer

Ok, so:

First in is Arachnophilia, which is completely JAVA based and multi-platform. Not exactly WYSIWYG but it gets the job done.

Another is NVU - Complete Web Authoring System which is supposed to be a novice version of Dreamweaver or Frontpage. It's Open-Source by the way and WYSIWYG-based. Has limited support for CSS but it's on the way.

For those of you who uses Mozilla Suite, (yes the free web browser), do you know that it comes with Mozilla Composer which is a WYSIWYG HTML, CSS Editor?

I have not tried these two yet:

AMAYA which is also a web browser that comes with a WYSIWYG HTML,CSS Editor.

Trellian which is a WYSIWYG HTML Editor.

I have taken off ACEHTML 5.0 FREEWARE as the publishers no longer support nor distribute the free-version.

Watch this space for more updates.