If you have started studying music, one of the most important things you need to start doing is taking care of your hands. No matter which instrument you have decided to study, each of them presents a challenge to your hands and your fingers. Also, if you don’t take care of your hands properly, you’re going to limit yourself in terms of what you can learn and what you can do on your instrument. Continue Reading «Taking Care of Your Hands»
In Cateura, Paraguay, hundreds of gancheros, or recyclers, search through massive piles of rubbish dumped around the outskirts of their town every day. Amid tossed out washing machines, refrigerators, commercial insulation and more, they work tirelessly to locate scrap metal and plastic that can be traded in for enough money to feed their families. Meanwhile, the men, women and children of the impoverished landfill city must live among the garbage, facing the daily hardships presented by their environmental situation. Continue Reading «Landfill Harmonic: Turning Trash Into…»
Learning how to read music—specifically sight-reading—can be a challenge for a beginner musician. However, it does not have to be that difficult. In fact, if you have the skills needed to read this article you already have some of the basic skills required to read sheet music. The trick is learning to take these everyday skills and employing them in a new capacity.
At its core, spoken language is a musical phenomenon that uses controlled tone, pitch, and rhythm to convey meaning through sound. Each of these sounds is represented by a single, pair, or grouping of letters collectively referred to as an alphabet. When learning to read written language, our first attempts are characterized by the slow and rigorous process of sounding out each letter to produce words, sentences, paragraphs, stories, and eventually complex narratives depicting abstract ideas and emotions. Continue Reading «Similarities of Reading Music and…»