I put out a new YouTube video last night! Here's the link ..read more

So I recently realized that you can pretty much play all 12 notes over a dominant chord and it will sound good. 11 of the 12 are chords tones or some kind of extension: Chord tones (1, 3, 5, b7): Bb, D, F, Ab Unaltered Extensions (9, 11, 13): C, Eb, G Altered Extensions (b9, #9, b5/#11, #5/b13): Cb, C#, E, F# The only missing note is the major 7th, but there is a dominant-friendly scale that has that note, the Bebop scale. This got me thinking that if we already have ways to play all 12 notes over a dominant chord, why can't we use 12 tone rows to create new kinds of outside, altered lines ..read more

I found a solution to a pretentious problem that only a small percentage of Dorico users will ever worry about: inputting hauptstimme and nebenstimme symbols. This is easy to do in Sibelius since there is a dedicated hauptstimme item on one of the symbol dropdowns, but as far as I know, no such thing exists in Dorico. Here's what I came up with: 1. Find the symbol here on the SMuFl reference library. Select the symbol and copy it to the clipboard (ctrl + C or cmd + C). These steps will work for any other symbol in the library, too. 2. Go back to Dorico and select the note that you want to mar ..read more

Here's a quick post because I think I finally found a better justification for C-extensions than "composers wrote low notes and I need a way to play them" and "they look cool" and my personal favorite, "because I can." They can make any key a resonant key. Anti-climatic, perhaps. But I'm convinced this is the best justification for having a C-extension. Having the means to crank out low notes is just a nice bonus. Resonant Keys I think the conventionally resonant bass keys are C, G, D, A, and E, give or take a couple of accidentals. These keys all have notes that occur as open strings or as st ..read more

Here's a quick post with some updates on what's been going on in my life the past few months. In no particular order: I finally got my degree! I legitimately thought it would never happen due to a whole slew of life circumstances, but it did and I am very thankful for that. I gave my recital. I took a lot of chances and threw myself into it and certainly paid off. I'll probably write an entire post on it at some point, but that I have never felt so in control under pressure as I did that day. I also played my Schelomo transcription which you can read more about here and here. I moved back to ..read more

The last post I put out mentioned the bar of 11/8 that Bloch so conveniently slapped over a bar of 4/4 in Schelomo. I half-jokingly included this rewrite as the accurate solution to playing said measure, but now I actually want to talk about how I came up with the rewrite and how I approach learning polyrhythms. T A while back I read Arthur Weisberg's demystifying book "Performing Twentieth-Century Music: A Handbook for Conductors and Instrumentalists." I recommend picking up a copy partially because it answers a ton of questions and partially so I don't feel bad about stealin... er... adapti ..read more

Finally getting around to part 2 of these Schelomo transcription blogs. This post is mostly going to be a summary of how I practiced this piece and some of the decisions I made in regards to the actual transcription. Read part 1 here if you missed it! You can also purchase the full transcription at the end of this post! Solo or Orchestral Tuning? I decided to play my recital in orchestral tuning, a decision that was largely determined by this piece. Piano parts in solo and orchestral tuning exist for Bottesini and Arpeggione so tuning didn't matter for those pieces, but Schelomo presented some ..read more

A few years ago I said I would play Schelomo, a cello concerto, on my senior bass recital. I'm not sure how serious I was when I said that, but with my senior recital (finally) looming in the near future and not being one to eat my own words, I've decided to give it a shot. Why Schelomo? Schelomo is probably my favorite piece of music ever written. I stumbled upon it by accident in 11th or 12th grade when I found a copy of Yo-Yo Ma's The New York Album in a CD cabinet at my parent's house. At the time, it contained some of the most interesting writing I had ever heard: strange scales, dense or ..read more

Cross-bar tuplets came up a few times in the music I was working on this summer. This one in a piece I am transcribing for bass presented the added challenge of notation: most notation programs don't allow tuplets to cross the barline by default. I eventually figured out a workaround in Sibelius that is fairly straightforward but not immediately obvious. The Method The example above is in 3/4 and the quintuplet spans 2 beats across the barline: beats 3 and 1. If you try creating an 8th note quintuplet on beat 3 in Sibelius, you get this error message: This is a perfectly legal notation, but t ..read more

Back in March, I made a 31-Day Scale Challenge to ease some of the boredom of practicing scales. It was surprisingly popular and ended up being one of my most-read posts, so thank you to everyone that read it and sent in so much positive feedback! I am back today with another 31-Day Scale Challenge, this time with even more scales. The Last Challenge I created the last challenge by plugging 31 scales and the 12 possible root notes into a random list generator. Since I usually play three scales per practice session, I put three scales per day onto a blank calendar spreadsheet. You can see the o ..read more