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...with your iMac!...
Introduction
Many musicians (including myself) use the computer not only) to directly create music but to learn about music, to do eartraining, composing, scoring, archiving of their music, editing of books or training material they want to publish etc. etc.
The iMac is the ideal tool for this tasks and your daily musical training work as it is both reliable, cheap, and the new iMacs seems to be even able to play audio at a good quality due to their special speaker systems.
In one chapter I will describe how to use the internet and to purchase Midi-Files but also scores for free from Web-sites, e.g. a complete collection of tunes for classical clarinet and piano.
up to overview...
Eartraining
The Mac offers a huge range of possibilities to train you ears:
One of the best ear-training programs I have seen so far (including very expensive PC based software) - Eartraining (I have tested the version 2.6.1) - made by Lars Peters, larspeters..., it is perfect for Jazz Musicians as well as the more "classical" oriented musician. Also you have a very long test period, that allows you to explore all the possibilities.
You can also use the following programs for training:
Band-in-a-Box (let it write songs or randomly create melodies an solos, try to write down or play this stuff on your instrument(s)...).
Opcodes´s Fermata, where you can write down songs, patterns, melodies or whatever you have to transcribe and check whether you transcriptions sound like the original.
A very cute tool are all kind of sound players that slow down the speed of a tune. Again Opcodes Vision DSP 4.5 is a cute tool (not only for recording) because it allows to slow down the speed of phrases without changing the pitch (!!!) at acceptable quality, also there very strong and precise Equalizers allow to easily "boost" the instrument you want to transcribe by boosting the frequency range of the instrument, you may even be able to mute the rest of the section. As you can steel Steinbergs tuning plug-in you can even try to use this to find the (precisely) correct pitch, eg. for scientific transcriptions but also in case you simply do not find the right tone on your instrument - quite often this is fairly difficult in expressive jazz soloing but also if someone uses old instruments etc.
You can also loop details of phrases to find out what an artist is exactly doing here - imagine too slow down Anna Sophie Mutter´s violin interpretation to analyze her use of vibrato, micro dynamics and phrasing -
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The practise tool...
Still many musicians have a very traditional approach towards practising, they are fairly busy all the week long, their teacher is correcting their practising on a regular base and maybe they have the possibilities to test their abilities to play with other once or twice pers week.
A few tips how to use you PPC to improve your musicals skills:
Write down what you hear in a Notation programme and listen to the results!
Slow down samples of recordings of your favorite artist, listen carefully to their phrasing -
Loop phrases for practising!
Get a Midi-File of a song for your live performance tomorrow - Analyze your own playing by recording and slowing it down with the computerUse pitch built in pitch control programs to improve your intonationPurchase information about music, books in prints online....You may want to go to my (free!) interactive and web based online courses as well... (Thomas.Oesterheld@gmx.net mail me your address, I will announce the site as soon as it is online.
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MIDI
So what is actuallz Midi?
The Midi-Standard - "Musical Digital Interface" was first of all developed to facilitate the communication between all kind of musical devices, not only keyboards and synthesizers but also computers, digital sound processors etc. Via a so called Midi interfaces you receive and send data like: "On channel 1, instrument No. 1, play an C1, a quarter, than D1 a quarter - E1 two eights etc.". Midi files are, due to this relatively compact information, compared with Audio or even with mp3 still very very small, but they do not represent precisely a sound of a tune. A Midi Device, e.g. a keyboard or your iMac is able to reproduce the song but it sound different on different devices. To ensure that at least the bass is a bass and the piano something like a piano there is standard called General Midi (GM).
What is in it for me?
As Midi Information is precise about pitch, duration, instruments this is also a possibility to directly extract the scores from given Midi-Files - so this is an interesting tool for teachers and music students: Opening a tune in a Notation Program makes it basically possible to directly convert a Midi File to a acceptable score - or at least to start here to make your own arrangement of a tune (a cheap and simple program for this is again Vision DSP or Opcodes´s Fermata-, later I will add a Fermata related part of this - there are some more tips and tricks how to do that and maybe we can share scripts etc.), you may even simply use a DEMO of Cubase - you can print the screen in Faxprint and "edit" the watermark or just print it with the watermark.
Tip: Very simple Midi files - that sound mechanic and stiffy are a very good opportunity to extract the files that you can print asap. It makes sense to have some routine concerning your Notation software to work on these kind of manipulations.
Also Midi allows perfectly to change pitches (transpose!) or to slow down a tune without changing pitches (so to practise a tune slowly).
It is also easy to find these files just type the expected name of the tune like with dot and the file suffix mid (eg. summertime.mid) in a search engine, e.g. hotbot and it will show various ressources to find them.
Quicktime can play Midi-Files as well (even not too bad), so you maybe want to first hear the file, or even your browser will just let you listen the files when you click on them (if you have to download them manually you just have to copy the filename into the download-files option).
up to overview...
...with your iMac!...
© by Thomas Oesterheld, last update 31.10.1999,
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