Doper Musicians of All Stripes; what are your most useful instructional aids?

Cafe Society
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[QUOTE=GorillaMan]
[li]Youtube, iTunes, and sometimes MySpace. Infuriatinly, however, the two websites are blocked on most school networks, even on teachers’ accounts.[/li][/QUOTE]
This kid explains a lot of technique in a surprisingly approachable way.

As for myself playing Viola, I can’t say anything in particular was a decent aid other than lessons. However different techniques on the viola can be self correcting. When playing an octave, your open string will vibrate if you’re playing a true octave, test intonation versus open strings, etc.

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Gang, many thanks for an interesting bunch of responses. Please, keep 'em coming.

cosmosdan Not to mention Glen Morangie, Tal Isker and Johnny Walker. I personally have a 1 1/2 drink sweet spot, but it’s almost impossible to attain without accidentally going one over the line. According to an NPR Jazz Profile about Oscar Pettiford (bassist), he was one of the rare exception of someone who could continue to play well long past the point where Ray Brown would be unable to hold the bass, let alone play it.

F. U. Shakespeare I love Bob Brozman! I’ll take some time to check out some of the others you mention - I’m not a slide guy at all, but I’ll steal from anybody good if I can.

Panurge I’ve always had the utmost respect for anyone who wants to take on the Tabla - it is by far and away the hardest percussion instrument from the purely technical standpoint, and yet the really good ones I’ve heard make it sound absolutely effortless. There just aren’t a lot of teaching aids out there for the instrument, at least not that I know of. My friend Azed plays, and he has something amazing - Alla Rakha stayed at his dad’s house in Brampton one time when he was through Toronto, and his dad got the Master’s permission to video-record his warm-up. Azed then copied that tape and kept the original someplace safe. Apparently, it’s a fantastic warm-up - Azed has worn through two tape copies, and he currently works with a DVD copy…

GorillaMan I’ll check through those. You bring up an interesting point - virtually all of the fundamentals/harmony/theory/counterpoint books I know of were written by pianists or organists. As a result, they tend to proceed in a way that recapitulates how pianists learn their instruments. I don’t know how it is for violinists and other orchestral string players, but for guitarists, this gets quite annoying - we’re working on a harmonic instrument, too, but we approach our instrument in a very different way. I’ve taken to writing my own handouts about the whole she-bang, using the pieces we’re working on as the basis for explaining how harmony works on our instrument. I also make them sing in order to explain how harmony works. Nothing gets the concept of voice leading across faster than having to find the notes (or sing the monotonous alto part!) you just wrote out… Between two violins and two voices in the room, you could do fugues. :smiley:

Eureka I used to play handbells in the church, and it was such a prime mind bender; I loved it! The fact that it could be harder to play just two notes on handbells than the whole piece on guitar or piano drove me bananas for months, and when someone couldn’t make it to rehearsal and we had to either miss out notes or redistribute the parts - AAUGH! Then, I don’t really know what triggered it, but we started to bond musically, and we figured out how to really listen to each other without losing ourselves. It became the closest to a string quartet I’m ever likely to experience. I still subject students to that kind of thing in singing, even though it’s even harder to keep a singer from singing someone else’s note.

Cunctator I won’t get a chance to read that for a couple of months, but it’s on the to do list.

I, too, have to thank real live human being teachers for lots and lots of what I’ve learned, and I’ve become less fearful about approaching really good players and asking for a lesson or a master-class. Yeah, I also couldn’t do without lots of gadgets in the studio - the metronome, the tuner, the recording/playback device that runs through the amp (for the guitar).

For singing, I record all my lessons and coachings, and I listen to them and sing along softly while doing day to day stuff like the dishes, the laundry, the packing. Something about the combination of a kinetic activity with the brain work makes them memorize deeper, and I get used to the multi-tasking that I will have to do onstage.

I have my programs, too, like Sibelius, Transcribe, Band in a Box on the PC side, Garage Band on the Mac side.

Perhaps this is just another manifestation of Gear Acquisition Syndrome, or perhaps I am way, way more of a geek (or a sucker) than I thought, but I have the worst time with collecting waay too many DVDs, videos and books with enclosed CDs. I guess I’m the guy keeping Mel Bay in business. They don’t even have to serve any didactic purpose or even be very high quality - if it’s a performance film of just about any jazz guy, I want to see it at least once. I’m not even talking about scores, sheet music, books of repertoire (got lots of that, and lots of duplicates so I can compare Segovia’s fingering to Bream’s to Manuel Barrueco’s), but commentaries, biographies. Those Jody Fisher Art of Solo Guitar books with the CDs - one of the most fun things about them is I started cribbing and then transcribing the CDs and comparing them to what was already written as a way of woodshedding my transcription. When I see something that is totally beyond me, like the George Van Eps 3 volume Harmonic Mechanisms for Guitar or the Mick Goodrick’s Mr. Goodchord’s Almanac of Guitar Voice-Leading , I just get a twitch in the wallet. Am I the only one?

That’s all for now, many thanks to all of you, I am on vacation and I am missing a very inspirational sunset. I have to go listen to the lake and the wind sing in different meters at the same time while the sun and the moon chase each other to the horizon.

Talk to you tomorrow, M. le Ministre.

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Another excellent thread! Thanks, M. le Ministre.

Several of the things already mentioned have been useful to me in the past, but the thing that has helped me the most is an MP3-capable DVD carousel and access to lot’s and lot’s of music. I load up five discs of mp3s (about 60 hours of music) and set it to play at random. Then I try to keep up with whatever comes. The point is not to learn every song, but to adapt to whatever gets thrown at me.

The reason this is so useful to me is because I’m basically lazy and playing along like this is fun. And by trying to play to a wide variety of music, I am motivated to actually figure out how to play something it never would have occurred to me to try to play. (Too many "to"s? Two?)

I suppose this is not much different from playing along to the radio, but what radio station (any more) will play “Glad/Freedom Rider” > " “Concerto for Jazz-Rock Orchestra” > “Mustang Sally” > “Funk #49” > “Bound and Determined” > “I Burn For You” > well, you get the idea. Plus, there are no commercials and I can skip anything that is too boring.

It’s kinda like practising improvisation (as much as it’s possible to practice “throw yourself off a cliff and try to fly”).

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I have only just revisited this thread and realised my response clearly didn’t actually show an understanding of the question being asked. Oops. Must pay more attention :slight_smile:

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Well, the title could have been a bit more clear, but I’m actually interested in the question from the standpoints of students, teachers and self-teachers. Why is there so much self-instruction material for guitarists and not for, say, pianists? As a teacher, I’m always on the lookout for someone who has come up with a new way to explain a given technique. As a perpetual student, I’m always on the lookout for the same thing.

Whether you call it a hammer-on or a ligado ascendente, the actual technique is the same, and it is a technique which transcends genre. I also think there are many techniques and ideas about music which transcend instruments, and that’s why I’m curious about what other musicians find useful. And the SDMB provides such an interesting cross-section of styles, levels and instruments that I can’t help asking this group whenever I have a question that fascinates me…

More later; I’m watching the constellation Casseiopeia as it drifts past the walnut tree off our deck and imagining a note being plucked every time a branch obscures a star.

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I’ve never seen a tool like this (shows it lefty):

Stevie’s version:

Nice acoustic version:

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Hmmmm, interesting question. Perhaps part of it is simply the traditional attitudes towards the instruments and also towards specific musical styles, the piano being see as an instrument suitable to lessons from a young age, whereas the guitar is something you just pick up as you go along. Or, to put it another way, the amount of self-instruction material for classical guitar is perhaps more comparable to that for piano, while on the other hand look at the proportion of self-taught jazz pianists (both with or without a classical education).