Metronome practice tips

Sunday, January 24th, 2010

In response to @HansOngchua regarding how to best use a metronome for efficient practicing, I came up with this list, which was too long to fit into a Twitter message: Plan your practice session. Organize which sections of which pieces you need to work on. Figure out how much time it ...

Why hosting LilyPond music projects as open source Git repositories is good

Saturday, January 16th, 2010

For those of you unacquainted, LilyPond is music notation software. Unlike other programs such as Sibelius or Finale, which are both great in their own right, LilyPond deals with sheet music creation as source code in text files using a simple language. You run the files in a compiler, and ...

Create the change you want to see in the world, one environment at a time

Wednesday, September 30th, 2009

Today I came across this article from Peter Bregman on the HarvardBusiness.org site, titled: The Easiest Way to Change People's Behavior. It's an excellent read and highly recommended. What Peter discusses in this article is that one of the most important motivational factors in our lives is environment. If you put ...

Using JEdit with LilyPond on Mac OS X

Monday, June 29th, 2009

LilyPond is a wonderful way to write simple code that generates beautiful sheet music. I use TextMate for nearly all my coding. It's a great editor for the web and I have it fully customized to write code for everything I do including CSS, HTML, XML, XSL, Ruby on Rails, ...

Musicians, memory, and learning

Thursday, May 21st, 2009

Great post over at Scienceblogs.com by Dave Munger titled "Musicians have better memory -- not just for music, but words and pictures too" As musicians, we are constantly training ourselves to memorize. We spend hours upon hours memorizing music, and using mnemonic cues such as melodies, song form, harmony, music notation, ...