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Make Better Music 82 : Online Piano Lessons

This sponsored guide will show you how to find online piano lessons that fit your skill level and busy schedule...

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Make Better Music 82: Monetizing Music (Part Two)

Working musician Simon Laffy ponders the recurring problem of making music pay...

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Make Better Music 81: Monetizing Music

Doing it for the love will only last so long. What happens when you have to eat? How to make better music, and make money doing so....

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Make Better Music – Creative inspiration

Make Better Music has been inspiring creative musicians since 2010. Helmed by academics Dave Graham, the late Stephen Miller and Simon Laffy over the years Make Better Music has covered the aspects...

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Make Better Music 80: The Art of Remixing (Part Two)

Be careful to maintain the integrity of the original piece, while at all times striving to produce something new. ...

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Make Better Music 79: The Art of Remixing (Part One)

A luxurious wonderland of musical mystery and adventure that both complements and embellishes...

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Make Better Music 78 :The Recording Process (Part Three)

Music is more about making people connect emotionally with your message than being impressed by your playing ability...

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Make Better Music 77: The Recording Process (Part Two)

Style should transcend technique, but it cannot replace it...

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Make Better Music 76 : The Recording Process

No matter how boring, frustrating, agonising or infuriating it may seem simply going over and over the parts to be recorded, the value of that repetitive hand-eye/finger-digit movement will bring to...

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Make Better Music 74 : Collaboration

The ability to listen, appreciate, evaluate and contribute towards a fellow-musician’s creativity is a high order skill and the rewards often completely justify the effort....

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Make Better Music 75 : The Producer

It is a rare gift indeed to successfully carry your own music throughout the entire creation process....

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Make Better Music 74: Notes on Composition

When approaching a music writing session, have some sense of the idea you intend to reveal...

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Make Better Music 73: Mindful Qualities

Quality requires a mindfulness and quietness to allow ideas to form, take shape, emerge and grow...

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Make Better Music 72 : Music Theory

Music theory is way of labelling sounds and ideas in a way that highlights the relationships between them...

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Make Better Music 71: Sound/Light

Though both deal with wave-like phenomena, sound and light each have their own peculiarities. ...

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Make Better Music 70 : Time

There is no aural analog of the photograph or still frame from a film. Sound is, at its core, inherently a time-dependent phenomenon. ...

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Make Better Music 69: On Sound

"It is common for us to be in situations where we can not see (or at least vision is severely restricted) but exceedingly uncommon to be in situations where we can not hear"...

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Make Better Music 68: Words and Music

Writing music comes easily to me for the most part, I’ve usually got a surplus of ideas, so the only the most interesting actually get worked on. The more derivative and unimaginative ideas get...

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Make Better Music 67: Raw Power and Sophistication

For some, measured, intelligent songwriting skills are the pinnacle of musical enjoyment, for others it can be the antithesis of what music is there for - the expression of raw emotion....

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Make Better Music 66: Embrace the Chaos

In the midst of a vast YouTube binge the other evening (I’ve got a thirst for seeking out to interviews with musicians I like, and seem to be hopeless at turning YouTube off), I happened to come...

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Make Better Music 65: A Musical Process

So this week, having been inspired by a particular piece of music, I’m going to focus on one particular kind of procedure - which doesn’t really have a name. I’ll just try to describe it....

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Make Better Music 64: “What Comes Next?”

Make Better Music 64: “What Comes Next?”The big question that always demands an answer, when you are writing music, is what happens next? It seems straightforward until you try it. Then...

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Make Better Music 63: Simplicity vs Complexity

Sometimes I like to overload a song with overdubs and production tricks - if that is what suits it. More can be more in this case. Of course the opposite is also true, less intensely produced music...

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Make Better Music 62: Working Out Your Musical Muscles

Of course, if you are writing a song every day, it’s unlikely that you are going to be churning out a double album of SOLID GOLD CLASSICS each months, but on the flip side, it will do you a lot of...

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Make Better Music 61: The Music Diet

Every few months I feel like I need this kind of diet for my ears - I’ve either been over-indulging in one particular artist or genre, or I’ve been gluttonous and chowing down way too much of...

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Make Better Music 60: Automation and the Human Form

On the plus side, a new generation (one that has grown up with remarkably powerful music tech tools) will do things with music software that are incredible, ground breaking, ear-catching and mind...

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Make Better Music 59: It’s not what you put in, it’s what you get out

One of the joys of music is that it always has something to say that’s worth listening to, even in tracks that you have heard a hundred times. There’s a richness and enough ambiguity of...

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Make Better Music 58: Go Where the Barriers Are

The idea is simple - things that are easy to do can be done by more people than things that are hard. You want to make your music available as a “self release” via a service like bandcamp? Go for...

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Make Better Music 57: Counterpoint

I regard writing fine counterpoint as a bit of a lost art. In some ways it’s largely redundant in todays music, where single ideas right up front are generally king. This is not any kind of rant...

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Make Better Music 56: Celebrating the Old

I wonder how it feels to be making music after fifty or even sixty active years. Some people have gone on even longer - Elliot Carter is about to turn 103 and is still an active composer - what can...

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