One of our contributors has just launched an exciting little company that looks after 5 of the best priced professional recording studios in the country, here’s what he has to say:

Hello, I’m Graeme Allen, director of Amati Studios. I’d like to introduce you to our new company and explain a little about what we do.

As is the case with all sectors, the music industry has been seeing some big changes recently, and the recording studio sector certainly has as well. No longer do you require the services of a big professional studio in order to get your songs recorded. Technology now permits the full production of decent sounding songs from your own bedroom, and the recording industry has taken somewhat of a blow as a result.

But, there are still so many benefits of using a professional studio. For example, you may know all the shortcuts on ProTools but you most likely won’t have the many years of experience over a huge range of genres that a professional sound engineer will have. You probably don’t have a range of custom designed recording spaces either, or a collection of microphones built up over years of working in studios. These things make a real difference, and that’s why a professional studio is still needed to give you truly great recordings that can compete with industry-leading artists.

However, studios cost money, and some can cost hundreds of pounds a day before you’ve even hired the sound engineer. So that’s where we come in. I’ve spent the last few months travelling the country and visiting several mid-sized recording studios and chatting with their owners and engineers. I’ve gathered the five best studios together and included them on our roster. Unlike a lot of their competitors, all of their prices include VAT and a sound engineer, and with day rates ranging from £200-£250 professional recording has just become available to everybody.

Keep your eyes on the blog, we’ll have various features and series that’ll be popping up including guides to the best venues, producer bios, music tech tips and the like. If you want any more information about our studios send an e-mail to info@amatistudios.co.uk.

Graeme.

www.amatistudios.co.uk

Comping (”accompanying”) looks impressive, but it’s not particular difficult. Improvising comps on the piano over a given chord sequence is a skill you can develop relatively quickly.

Below are two video tutorials on comps. These two focus on comping in more contemporary pop and ballad styles - later videos will deal with comping for jazz and other older forms of pop. Both videos are designed to tie in with Part 3 (”Lead Sheets and Comping”) of my book - How To Really Play The Piano. However, you don’t need to be reading the book to pick up some useful comping tips from these vids.

Comping tutorial 1:

Comping tutorial 2:

If you have any questions about the videos, comps or comping, just add them in the thread below - I’ll come back to you as soon as I can.

This is second screencast in my series on very basic harmony (you can find the first one here. Once again, it’s designed to tie in with my book, How To Really Play The Piano, but you don’t need to be reading the book to get the full benefit of the screencast.

What you will find useful is a basic knowledge of keys (as in key signatures, not keys on the piano). Don’t worry if you can’t follow the “flying fingers” on the keyboard - the main thing is to pick up an overal sense of the ideas I’m dealing with.

Questions? Post them in the comments thread of this post and I’ll come back to you ASAP.

The first in a series of screencasts designed to tie in with my book. This one covers really elementary harmonic principles - the difference between harmony and unison, how chords are constructed and how chords work under a melody as part of a song. If you’re working from the book, this screencast covers the material right at the start of Part 1.

If you’re not reading the book, no problem - you’ll still be able to use the information in the video. Also, don’t worry about learning the actual chord shapes that I’m playing. My fingers are moving fairly quickly here, so you might struggle to copy what I’m doing. The main thing is is listen carefully and grasp the overall principles I’m talking about.

If there’s anything you’re not quick sure about, feel free to post a question in the comment thread.

Woo! It’s finally here! How To Really Play The Piano is my brand new book, designed to teach people like you how to do cool stuff on the piano, such as:

– Get started with improvisation

– Break away from sheet music and learn new songs quickly

– Play in bands and accompany singers

…basically, the stuff your piano teacher never got around to explaining, because s/he was too interested in teaching you scales and classics. If you want to check out a sample of the book, you can download the introduction in PDF format by right-clicking here and selecting “save as”.

This isn’t a book for absolute beginners - I’m assuming you at least know the basics of how to play. If you can play simple pieces with two hands together, you know the basic key signatures and how to read basic (ish) music in treble and bass clef, you’ll be fine. If you’ve reached Grade 3 or 4 in your piano lessons, you’ll have no problems at all.

To make it even easier, accompanying the book is a bunch of free video tutorials, organised by section. Talking of video, here’s one of me - or rather my hands - talking about the book:

Buy it right here and right now for £14.95, including FREE postage and packing. You can place your order right now by clicking on the big PayPal button below. (You don’t need a PayPal account. To pay by credit card, click the link under “don’t have a PayPal account?” on the welcome page. PayPal is the web’s largest payment handler, and is 100% safe and secure.)

Don’t delay! Help me buy a new car Take the first step on the road to being a piano titan by ordering right NOW!

Any questions? Either email me, give me a shout on Twitter or post a comment, below.

Help! I’m American! At the moment we’re only shipping to the UK, Ireland and mainland Europe. This is going to change very soon (by mid-March 2010). If you’re in the States or Canada and you’d like a copy of the book, drop me an email and I’ll let you know as soon as it’s available!

Below is a full index of videos relevant to my book, How To Really Play The Piano. It’s divided into three sections: first, the video tutorials specific to each part of the book; second, some bonus videos that build on the material in the book and offer extra examples; and third, links to videos of some of the performances I reference in the book.

Note: many of these links still aren’t live, since I’m not going to be marketing the book really hard until April 2010. However, because quite a few people have been buying, I’m working hard to get them all up as fast as possible - right now I’m hoping to have all the essential stuff posted by March 20th.

Videos marked with an asterisk (*) were created before the book was written, and don’t contain specific page refs.

Main video tutorials

Part 1: Very basic harmony 1
Part 1: Very basic harmony 2
Part 3: Very basic harmony 3
Part 1: Dominant Chords*
Part 1: Chord resolution
Part 1: How chord progressions work
Part 1: More complex chords
Part 1: Adding ninths and sus fourths*

Part 2: Twelve-bar structures
Part 2: Blues tutorial I*
Part 2: Blues tutorial II*
Part 2: Blues tutorial III*

Part 3: How lead sheets work
Part 3: Lead sheets and early pop/jazz
Part 3: Lead sheets and more recent pop
Part 3: Comping
Part 3: Comping early pop/jazz
Part 3: Comping more recent pop (parts I and II)
Part 3: Loops and grooves

Part 4: Scales
Part 4: More advanced improvisation

App 1: Intervals

Bonus videos

…coming soon…

Performances mentioned in the book

Nerina Pallot - Geek Love This isn’t the best version available, but several of Pallot’s YouTube vids have been removed recently. If you can find it, there’s a superb version called “Geek Love Live” which is just Pallot in a studio with a piano. This version is still pretty good.

Nerina Pallot - I Don’t Want To Go Out. Song starts about three minutes in.

Tori Amos - Winter.

Elton John - Tiny Dancer. The cover by Ben Folds is also worth a look, not least because you get a clearer view of his hands than of Elton’s.

Ben Folds - Landed. Complex and rhythmical - brilliant stuff.

Ben Folds (with Guster) - Not The Same. Listen to the rhythm! I love this song.

Jerry Lee Lewis - Whole Lotta Shakin’ - not as hard as he makes it look. Check out the glissandi.

Stevie Wonder - Superstition

Fat Boy Slim - Praise You. No keyboard shots, but a great example of a piano loop.

REM - Nightswimming. Fantastic semi-looped piano part.

Nina Simone - My Baby Just Cares For Me. If you want to see a really incredible version - albeit one that doesn’t use the vamp I describe in this book - check out this one, with some of the most incredible quasi-classical improvisation you’ll ever see. Bravo!

Apologies for the lack of posts - Graeme is job hunting and I’m up to my neck in finishing off my new book, How To Really Play The Piano.

More stuff coming on Jamcast very soon - in the meantime, feel free to follow me on Twitter!

SoundHack is an excellent little bit of free software for Mac. Its time and pitch stretching effects are actually far better than the standard Digidesign plug-ins for Pro Tools, they’re just a little less intuitive to use.

Before we get stuck in, a couple of things to note:

Right then, first open up SoundHack, then click file > open and choose the audio file that you want to play with. I’ll use a little clip of some double tracked guitar. Before any SoundHacking commences, it sounds like this:

You’ll notice this window pop up, which represents the sound file.

How an audio file is represented in SoundHack

Now click Hack and the list of audio-mangling tools at your disposal will appear.

Phase Vocoder
I’ll start with the Phase Vocoder (because it’s my favourite). This is the tool that does all the pitch and time manipulation. You can change the pitch or speed of a bit of audio by a set amount, or vary it over time using the edit function. Here’s what it looks like:

SoundHack Phase Vocoder

There are various parameters here relating to what’s known as a Fast Fourier Transform, which is the computational method of pitch shift and time stretch. Unless you really want to get into the technical side of the process, I’d leave them be for now. Instead click the edit function, and here is a function of pitch over time. I drew in the following line:

The edit function in the Phase Vocoder

Then click done, and then process. It may take a little time to process, but when it’s done another window representing your new sound file pops up. That bit of guitar with that pitch shift function applied sounds like this:

If you want the whole thing just to be changed by a particular amound, deselect the button next to “scaling function” and enter a value in the box that appears above the pitch scale button. This can be applied to time stretching in the same way, just be selecting time scale rather than pitch scale.

Convolution
The convolution tool basically multiplies one audio sample by another, similar to ho a ring modulator convolutes a sound source with a sine wave. If we take our guitar audio and click the “choose impulse” button and then use a drum beat as the impulse, the result is this:

Er, well, it’s different to say the least. Let’s try using some pitched material as the impulse, a bit of acoustic guitar for example.

It takes some experimenting, clearly, but you get the idea!

Mutation
Mutation works in a similar manor to convolution. However instead of multiplying to audio sources together it uses one to mutate another. So if we pick our guitar track and choose the drum track as a target, this is the result:

Varispeed
Similar to the phase vocoder, this uses a function to alter the speed and pitch of a sound source over time. It is different from the vocoder because it varies the speed and pitch together, rather than separately. Here’s an example:

In conclusion…
This a great little bit of software, especially seeing as it’s free. How you can work in some of the weird and wonderful sounds into your own music is a different matter. It’s good to have the capability to make odd noises at your disposal though!

I’ll be looking into other ways to make “weird” noises soon. If you have any questions feel free to comment.

In my last post on classical music I took a very quick look at some of the main eras of classical music (Baroque, Classical, Romantic and Modern) and suggested some works you might like to listen to.

Personally, I’m not a big fan of the classical period stuff; it’s a bit too regimented and predictable for me. Obviously there are a lot of people out there who love Mozart though, so give it a go before you write it off. Baroque has its perks; I like all the fiddly arpeggio-type stuff, and Vivaldi does a mean violin concerto. If you’re new to classical music as a whole, it’s probably best you don’t start off with the modern stuff. There’s a fairly select group of individuals who enjoy the sound of a square wave flying around the room. For me, romantic is the way forwards. Get stuck in to the big pieces by the Russians and the Germans, it’s probably the easiest and most rewarding place to start.

How the classics can help your songwriting

There’s loads of ways classical music can really improve your musicianship and song-writing. Before even discussing the harmonies and melodies two key areas all the great composers really mastered were structure and instrumentation. The structure of a piece is incredibly important. Two main forms which earlier classical pieces tended to take, and which you might consider for your song writing, are ternary and binary. Ternary has a structure A-B-A, so you start with something, do something else, then go back to the first something. Binary can be A-B-C, or A-B-A-C etc. The different sections in binary tended to modulate to a different key, say the relative major/minor or the dominant. If you’re feeling particularly brave you might want to consider something more complex, like sonata form, which is (very) basically:

1. Introduction – optional, often a bit slower, eases you in to the main bulk of music
2. Exposition – This is where the main theme/tune is heard
3. Development – Here the material from the exposition is developed and changed, often with changing key signatures, tempo and tonality
4. Recapitulation – This is an altered repeat of the exposition

Even the modern electro-acoustic music has very strict structures. In fact when the notes and the rhythm of a piece are hard to distinguish then structure is pretty much the only thing left holding all together! Try and listen to some Iannis Xenakis or Trevor Wishart (if you dare) and through all the weird noises and baffling rhythms you should still be able to identify where a section ends and another begins. What I’m trying to say is; structure is important, have a good think about it when writing your music.

When you’re listening to a bit of classical music really think about what instrument is doing what. Think about the timbres of different instruments and what they’re being applied to. When writing your music why stick to the standard guitars, piano, drums, bass etc? Strings can really bring a bit of music to life, and everyone loves a sneaky saxophone solo. The instruments being used in classical music are not restricted to that genre, think about what you’d do if you had a symphony orchestra at your disposal!

So, in conclusion, go and have a listen to some of the music I’ve recommended in the ‘essential listening’ sections. I’d suggest starting off with romantic and classical to ease yourself in, and have a good listen to what the composer’s trying to do and think about how you could apply their ideas to your own music. Also, don’t be averse to popping along to the odd concert!

If you have any questions or queries, feel free to comment and I’ll get back to you ASAP.

If you want to learn how to write a song, it’s not easy to know where to start. There’s plenty of songwriting information on the web, but a lot of it tends to be a big vague, dealing with overall structure and the process of getting ideas for music and lyrics rather than the actual process of writing a song.

That’s no surprise - explaining how composition works is pretty hard! This is the first post of four or five on how to write a song. It includes two screencast videos along with a text transcript of all the major points I cover. The videos in this post cover the basics of writing a chord structure for a song. Subsequent tutorials will cover topics like adding lyrics and putting together and arrangement.

Videos and tutorial transcript

There are lots of different ways to write a song. Sometimes a melody occurs to you when you’re in the shower or out shopping, sometimes you get an idea for a few bits of words attached to a melody.

With the song I’m looking at in these video tutorials it was more of a case of it emerging as I sat and played around on the piano. I put some chords together, developed a hook, added some more chords, and before long I had a good provisional structure for my song.

So here’s my first key point: if you want to write good songs, having a decent level of confidence with your instrument is a big help. If you can sit down and mess about on your keyboard or guitar without having to stop to figure out where different notes and chords are, you can work up ideas easily and get stuff down before your inspiration disappears.

In this tutorial and the ones that follow it I’m going to assume you have a basic knowledge of chords and music theory. If not, now is the time to explore Jamcast! and other sites like it to improve your understanding of the basics. You might write some decent songs if you only know a few chords, but knowing just a bit of music theory will take you a long, long way to a professional songwriting level.

OK, so like I said, what happened with this particular song was that I was sat down at the piano, playing around. Specifically, I was experimenting with ninth chords – a particular harmony we’ve dealt with before on Jamcast. I started off playing an E9, and began alternating it with an A9 that had an added 6th.

By the way, don’t worry if some of these weird and wonderful chord names are a bit new to you – the important thing is to create your chords on the piano and guitar. If you don’t know their names you can use all-guitar-chords.com or the Piano World chord tool to work out what they are.

So, having played around with my two chords I wind up with a hook. Here’s the chord sequence, set in 2/2 time because this is turning out to be a moderately-paced ballad kind of song:

E9 | E9 | A6/9 | A6/9 |

Again, the rhythm I’ve got there is just the result of noodling around, having a little confidence on my instrument that’s born of some experimentation and practice.

Where do I go from there? Well, the song needs to move away from the initial hook and into a development phase, moving towards a chord like B major or B major seventh that’ll give us the feeling that we’ve reached the end of a phrase or section before resolving back on to the tonic chord, E major. If you’re not sure how this works, it might be worth checking out our post on chord resolution.

Again, it’s worth saying that this isn’t the only way of doing things. I’m building a fairly conventional chord progression here, based on movement from tonic to dominant and back again. If you were building up a song based on looped progressions, you would take a slightly different approach.

Anyway, to get towards my B major chord I need to play around with other chords in the key of E major. In this instance I’ve decided to get from my hook to my B major dominant chord via F#m7 and C#m7, like this:

[hook] → F#m7 | F#m7 | C#m7 | B |

Notice I’m sticking with B rather than going for a B7, which I think would probably sound a bit too cheesy and obvious.

A tune is beginning to emerge – there’s no real planning behind that, it’s just naturally growing under my fingers. Like I said, that’s not always the way I or any other songwriter develops melody, but it’s one way.

OK, so now I’ve got eight bars of chords, ending on a dominant B major – a ‘hanging’ sound that feels like it needs to go somewhere. I’m going right back to the hook, but this time I want to introduce some development. Development is a really important concept in western music, going back hundreds of years – and it’s as important in contemporary songs as it was in the symphonies and sonatas of Mozart and Beethoven.

In this instance, I’m going to add another eight bars that are a development of the theme in the first eight bars. Only this time, I’m not going to use that C#m7 chord. I’m going to go like this:

[hook] → F#m7 | F#m7 | B6 | Am6

Again, I’ve got the effect of a hanging chord – the sequence wants to move on somewhere, but instead of landing on B major I’ve brought myself down to Am6. Of course, the usual ‘A’ chord in the key of E major is A major, but it’s quite OK to slip in the minor, and it produces quite a distinctive effect.

I’ve now got 16 bars, and I’m going to keep developing the song. I wind up with 32 bars, a bit like this:

E9 | E9 | A6/9 | A6/9 |
F#m7 | F#m7 | C#m7 | B |
E9 | E9 | A6/9 | A6/9 |
F#m7 | F#m7 | B6 | Am6 |
E9 | Amaj7+9 | F#m7 | F#m7 |
B7 | B7 | F#m7 | F#m7 |
B7 | B7 | E9 | E9 |
A6/9 | A6/9 | B6 | Am6 (…)

Two things worth noting:

First, 32 bars is a good, natural length for a chord progression. Other natural lengths are 4 and 8 bars (a lot of loops are 4 or 8 bars long), 12 bars (like a 12-bar blues), 16, 24 or 32 bars. All of those tend to sound like natural ‘finished’ chord structures. If the verse or chorus of bridge or whatever in your song doesn’t match one of these lengths, don’t worry, that’s absolutely fine – it’s just that you’ll often find your progressions falling naturally into the 4, 8, 12, 16, 24 or 32 mould because that’s how natural sounding progressions tend – more often than not – to wind up.

Second, I’ve probably got enough here to develop a complete song. I could think about adding extra little bits of bridges, or maybe a completely separate verse or chorus, but I think there’s enough interest here to sustain a song. If this chord progression is repeated four times – let’s say three times through with lyrics plus an instrumental, and we include a bit of intro and outro material, we’ll have something close to a four minute song.

OK, in the next ‘how to write a song’ tutorial we’re going to look at the chord sequence in a bit more detail, think about lyrics, and begin to sketch out our ideas in GarageBand.

Finally…

It’s worth repeating the idea that the whole process of writing a chord progression for a song is based on moving away from the tonic, to the dominant (or something like the dominant) and back again. We’ll go over this concept in a bit more detail in the next tutorial.