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A cool website to practice music theory

The website eMusic theory has put online miscelaneous exercices to help you practicing music theory.

You can train yourself at note reading, chords reading, intervale hearing, rythm and more ... and it works for any instrument (even for singers !) . Moreover they're quite fun (funier at least than 1h spent in a class room with an old music teacher)

Trip d'une nuit de printemps on mp3.com

This version is quite different than the one available on youtube (see below). While the youtube version is 100% live, this version has been recorded using cubase (or was it cakewalk ?? I don't remember actually ! It was a few years ago already) and every part has been recorded sperately, plus there are 2 pianos and one synth.

Check it out on mp3.com : http://www.mp3.com/artist/dinaiz/summary/


As usual comments are welcome !

Thoughts about improvisation

One day I read a post on the piano players group on couchsurfing.com website, of a classically trained girl who wondered about how to improvise on a piano. She seemed to have a very good technique but didn't know where to start with improvisation. I tried to explin my view about the topic, because despite my poor technique, I still try to improvize a lot. Surprisingly, some people like this post, according to the comments I received on the site, so I decided to share this post with you. Maybe you can grab a few hints, but overall, don't hesitate to add you comments and share your knowledge. this is only my humble opinion :-)

Jazz means improvisation, and improvisation means hearing what you are going to play !

I started the piano when I was 16 and like you, I had to stop because of studies. I just restarted 2 years ago and decided to realy dig into improvisation.

Sometimes in life, weaknesses become strengths ! Maybe if Ray Charles hadn't been blind, he wouldn't have been an outstanding piano player. I'm not Ray Charles but, for sure, I have always been very very very bad at score reading. As a result, instead of spending hours reading scores, I always tried to play by ear, and I think this the basic for playing jazz.

To play jazz, you have to hear what you are going to play, and to do that, you have first to be able to play what you hear. Do you follow me ? ;-)

Training your hear is not difficult ! First you have to learn chords. You'll find a lot of info on the internet on how to play basic chords (Majors, minors, and 7th, only). I must insist on this point : knowing chords a(and knowing them well) is mandatory for jazz.

Then first try with REALY easy songs (children tunes for example). Listen to them, and try to reproduce them. Then try to find the chords on the net, and compare with what you're playing. At the begining it will seem realy difficult, but you'll see after a few weeks, it will be a game.

When you feel comfortable with that, try with pop songs (as an example, one of the first song I learnt this way was "Can you feel the love ?" by Elton John - Hint : it starts with an F major chord) .

When you feel comfortable with that, you can start improvising . What I do when I want to improvise is :
- I take a set of chords
- I play them for a while
- And while playing only the chords, I imagine a melody
- when I have the melody in mind, I try to play it.

That's it. After a while again it will become natural .

Then what you will need to improve is :
- more imagination
- a better technique

I don't worry for the technique, as, after 11 years of classical music, you must not be too bad. You'll have to learn jazz chords (M7, min7, sus4 , half-diminished, etc ... ) and the associated scales, but I'm going a bit too far for the moment !

And for imagination, my personal technique is : to listen as much music as I can to grab ideas from other musicians and ... to sing. Just try to invent melodies and sing them. It will wake the creator who sleep in everyone of us.
And moreover, singing will make you happy ;-)

Now, you know where to start ! :o) (at least according to me)