Yesterday’s Bonus Round: Dar Williams is Dorothy Snowden "Dar" Williams, an American pop folk singer-songwriter from Mount Kisco, New York. Hendrik Hertzberg of The New Yorker has described Williams as "one of America's very best singer-songwriters." Credit: Wikipedia
Her song, “Closer To Me”, co-written with Rob Hyman, is described by one reviewer as being about “ushering out a lover” (Rolling Stone), and appears on her 2003 Album “The Beauty Of The Rain”
Link to a YouTube video of “Closer To Me”
I collaborate with other musicians on an app called “Acapella” that I’ve written about previously as one of the indispensable apps for musicians - you’ll see why a little further down.
Today we’re going to talk a little about “practice” - specifically guitar practice, but practicing vocals, practicing lyric writing, recording, practicing figuring out how to capo to the right key, or transpose to a different key are all things guitarist musicians do, and it’s much less of a chore if you have a purpose to your practice. Rehearsal is essentially “practice” - if you take guitar lessons, you’re part of a band, play in a church band (highly recommended as a starting point - they’re often very forgiving, for obvious reasons), jam with friends, or collaborate via an app like Acapella, they all require at a minimum rehearsal (practice) and some knowledge of the language of music (yep, music theory!).
If you approach rehearsal, even if you’re never going to perform the music you play for anyone, as practice with a purpose, it becomes less of a rote chore, and more of a striving for performance level play. Even when just playing chords within a key, randomly, for the sheer enjoyment of hearing the music, you’re reinforcing skills such as finger placement, chord changes on the beat, and strumming/picking hand coordination with your fretting hand.
Many instructional materials stress warm up exercises such as scales, and I’m not saying don’t include them. Fingers and wrists need to be limber, and older joints take a bit longer to get there. I personally don’t have a warm up routine of that sort, but before I rehearse a song for practice, I’ll play chords in and out of a key just to hear and rehearse progressions. I often start on the “Majors”, for example, GMaj-CMaj-DMaj, the I, IV, and V of the key of GMaj and play them in random combinations, then play the “minors” Am, Bm, Em (the ii-, iii-, and vi-), and then start switching between them. It doesn’t matter which key you play in, the important thing is you’re doing several things at once: warming up, getting the “feel” of the key’s Major and minor chords, and then rehearsing through practice the chord combinations and progressions within the key. If you play random progressions (maybe add in the vii° chord, just play it as a minor), you’ll start to hear combinations that are from popular songs. In GMaj, for example, playing the progression GMaj>Am>CMaj>DMaj>GMaj should start to sound kinda familiar - it’s the chord progression for tons of songs. Change the timing, tempo, dynamics (variations in volume). You’re practicing! And rehearsing at the same time!!
Next week we’ll revisit how to find, print, and rehearse songs, either for your enjoyment, to fulfill a guitar instructor’s homework, or to jam/rehearse with friends and bandmates.
Here’s an Acapella I did with other musicians (that sweet vocalist is my daughter!!). Acapella builds in layers, each musician adds a layer independently, so communicating the key, tempo and time signature in the comments is critical because you don’t have an opportunity to talk with the other musicians (and probably don’t know who’s going to jump in on a collab anyway). I started this off with a picked chord progression of the song with one guitar and added a strummed layer with another. I rehearsed this song for a couple of days, and probably did 8 or 9 takes (maybe more!) before I was reasonably happy with the two layers. Even then you’ll hear me catch a nail on a string at the very end - the note is right, it just rung out glaringly during the quieter outro. After so many takes, I went with “close enough”. The other players are in various parts of the country as they added layers, and one is in England!
I look like I’m really grumpy in most of my Acapellas - I’m really not, I was having a pretty good time with this take. I had an earpiece in one ear listening to the song (same YouTube as above), listening to my guitars with the other (the strum takes were easy, the fingerpicked ones, not so much), and counting beats at the same time (I can’t remember if I used the “click” on this song - I usually don’t if I’m listening to the song on headset), so I sometimes make funny, grumpy faces when I’m concentrating. Still pranged a note at the end….
Link To An Expert: US Copyright Office
Hard to get much more “expert” than the experts at the US Copyright Office. Lots of good stuff here, and links
Correction from yesterday: CD Baby is a distributor, not a publishing administration business, though it does have an associated publishing admin business. Here’s a link to an article about one of their major competitors, Distrokid, you’ll note they recommend a competitor (Songtrust) to CD Baby’s publishing admin business.
Always do your own research, and maybe consult a lawyer before committing to any business that your income from royalties will depend on!!
I mentioned arpeggios a couple of weeks ago. If i didn’t provide a link then, here’s one that explains arpeggios (and more):
Bonus Round: A cover of a beautiful song from the 60s - performed by a famous rocker while portraying a character in an equally famous TV sitcom.
Cheers, and keep playing!!
Michael Acoustic