Let’s say you’re on a bus or out for a walk, and you’ve just come up with a great little bit of melody. It’s got great possibilities, you’re thinking, but you’ve always found it hard to remember the tune after even ten minutes, and you feel a bit too self-conscious to dig your phone out […]
When I taught ear training at university, I had students of widely varying abilities. Some could, as they say, hear paint dry, while others “couldn’t hear a bus.” One of the tasks my students had was to notate melodies as I played them at the piano. (I won’t go into the technique I used for […]
When it comes to technology that helps us as musicians, we’re living in wonderful times. Using smartphone apps or the internet, we have instant access to tuners, metronomes, mixers and recorders. We’ve got software that can write out our musical scores, then print up the parts, all correctly transposed. We can work out lyrics with […]
