Drum Instruction DVD: Achieve Success Practicing At Home
February 26, 2010 by Willie Cousins
Filed under Online Colleges
We do not have roll over minutes in our house. It is good to skip days sometime to let you family know that you are thinking about them. As any drummer knows, it is easy to get lost in time when practicing, especially when playing to music. So when your wife comes in and points to her watch, you smile and say, “Yes Dear.”
Your physical body can always do what you mind can conceive. Before you know it you will be producing you own style that others desire of you. It all starts in the mind.
Drumming at times can be a bit strenuous, though you will be able to play for hours when keeping the body relaxed. Without performing warm-up exercises before playing, the body can become tense and show signs of fatigue within a short while. We will explore exercises that are quick and easy encompassing the whole body from head to toe.
Vinnie Colauita once said, “Just play in 7 for like an hour”. This is especially insightful as we can often get caught up in studying things too closely and miss the point. Sheer repetition will help lead to more comfort in odd times.
Depending on the type of music, begin your solo to match the flow of the music. You might not want to perform a hard and fast solo to slow, smooth, easy listening jazz nor drum softly to hard, power-driven metal. Make your solo tasteful. Let it make a statement and signature of what you are creating. Utilize all the instruments of your drum set such as your snare drum, bass drum, toms, cymbals and other instruments that accompany the drum set. The final step in developing a solo.
However, six months is not an ideal time. If you have been playing the drum too often lately, consider changing it even though you may have changed it four months back. Signs that should tell you it is now the time for you to change are indents and cracks.
Well, I asked around a bit and was surprised to learn that the history of second line is a bit cloudy. Nobody can seem to agree on how it evolved, I heard stories about there being a line of musicians and staff that marched behind the mourners (second line) at a funeral parade in New Orleans. Apparently the musicians would play funeral marches on the way to the funeral and more livelier pieces on the return home.
Drummers like Zigaboo Modeliste and Johnny Vidacovich mixed second line with syncopated funk, developing a style called “second-line funk drumming”. This style was popularized in many famous bands that came from New Orleans like the Meters (see below). Second line drumming often involves a 3/2 son clave not dissimiliar to the Bo Diddley beat although it doesn’t necessarily always follow that rule, and Second line beats are also called “Street Beats”.
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GCSE Maths: Get A Top Grade With Seven Methods Best Students Use
September 22, 2009 by Luke Redding
Filed under Online Colleges
Preparing for General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE) maths requires a slightly different strategy as compared to other subjects. Here are some top tricks only a maths coach can tell you to help improve your grade.
Slug it out – The one sure-fire method of doing well in your GCSE maths exam is to practice every single day for a whole year. Nothing replaces practice when it comes to maths. But you don’t have to load yourself with too many sums. Just pick up as much as you can handle for at least one hour every day. Soon, not only will your speed increase but formulas and sums that didn’t make sense will automatically start becoming easy. Just don’t miss out on your practice session on any day. How well you perform at the exam will depend on how regular you have been with your practice.
Handle your GCSE maths course in bits and pieces by dividing your revision time into sections like shapes, space & measures, numbers, algebra and data handling. You can then mix and match your sessions according to your choice on a daily or weekly bases with different sections.
Maths is all about having fun and you should approach it with this idea in mind. Even before you schedule your practice sessions you can play Java games available for free on the Internet. These games improve your maths skills without you making any effort. Ask a friend to join you and both of you can prepare quizzes and mock tests for each other too. Start a hobby of collecting maths-related trivia.
One of the best ways of remembering a wide range of formulas and concepts is to prepare a bunch of about 50 small card-paper pieces. Spend one whole holiday morning doing this by going through your GCSE maths course. Place these pieces of paper randomly in all the pockets of your clothes and put some up on your bedroom walls. Every time you chance upon one of these pieces of paper, take a deep breath and study it for 30 seconds. You will be amazed at what you would have learned after six months.
Don’t spend too much time struggling with all the difficult formulas relating to spheres, areas etc. Just familiarize yourself with these tedious formulas because they will be there in the formula sheet you get at the GCSE maths exam. What you should focus upon is learning up the simpler formulas and using them at a real fast speed during calculations. This will improve your overall efficiency at the maths exams.
Cut the stress – Don’t worry if you have to do coursework because it will improve your final GCSE maths grade by as much as 20 per cent. If you spend greater energy on your coursework, you will find yourself more relaxed at the exam.
Even scientists use many simple short-cut methods for handling numbers like recognizing whether a six digit number will be divisible by a certain single digit or not. You can make a diary of all these ‘short-cal methods’ and attempt your GCSE maths exam with greater confidence. Most of these ‘short-cal methods’ are listed on various sites on the Internet. Getting a high grade at your GCSE maths can be effortless if you try these simple methods of studying for at least six months.
If you would like further help with gcse maths please visit home tutoring online
Online Bass Lessons: Design Your Own Music Program
July 13, 2009 by Marshal Washington
Filed under Online Colleges
Playing the guitar is one popular pastime nowadays. For some people, it is also a way of expressing themselves and elevates the hobby into an art form or sometimes, science. Playing the guitar, however, is no joke. It requires a lot of patience and practice. For some people, they would rather study playing the bass guitar than the regular guitar. Here are some tips on learning to play the bass guitar.
Tune all your strings one by one by matching the sound of the strings to the corresponding note on your tuner. Tuning your bass is not hard. But as with any other instrument it involves practice,and of course, practice makes perfect. After a while you may find that you do not even have to rely on an electronic tuner to tune your bass.
Whatever your reasons, you want to learn how to play bass. You don’t have to go to music school to do this. You can take online bass guitar lessons. You don’t even need a bass guitar to start out with. Any acoustic guitar will do, since the top four strings of any guitar are the four strings of a bass guitar. What you learn on an acoustic guitar you can then transfer to bass.
The standard tuning of a four string bass guitar from highest (thinnest string) to lowest (fattest string) is G-D-A-E. On a five string bass the tunings are similar with the addition of a low B string. On a six string bass guitar, a thinner (higher pitched) string is added, and is tuned to C, In other words on a 6 string bass guitar the settings are B-E-A-D-G-C, where B is the fattest string or lowest note and C the highest and thinnest.
It can be played by plucking, slapping, tapping, popping, or by picking the strings with a pick. The bass guitar looks somewhat similar to an electric guitar, but with a larger, heavier body, a longer scale length, and a longer neck. The bass guitar usually has four strings, tuned one octave lower in pitch than the four lower strings of a guitar.
In struggling simply to get out the notes, though, it’s easy to neglect developing these small muscles. The result can be a great deal of wasted energy and motion, limiting one’s technique. So here are some of the do’s and don’t's of hand position (the advice here is for righties; if you’re left-handed, adjust accordingly):
Also, crucial to slap bass is the “snapping” sound produced by pulling the strings up and letting them snap back onto the fretboard – this is called “popping”. Of course, all the other more usual techniques of bass playing are still used, such as hammer-ons and crosshammers, lift-offs, slides, string bends and harmonics – but rather than plucking the string with the finger or pick, it might be slapped with the thumb or popped.
A bass guitarist/bassist is like the anchor of a band. He/she outlines the harmony of the music being performed, while simultaneously indicating the rhythmic pulse of it. The bass guitarist is like the lifeblood of any band, and the bass guitar is his/her tool of choice, used to mesmerize audiences. A bass guitar is a bass stringed instrument that is played with the fingers.
Acoustic Guitar DVD Lessons: Learn How To Play Acoustic Guitar In A Few Weeks
June 7, 2009 by Rene Howe
Filed under Online Colleges
A little tip for you here: If a string breaks on your guitar, I would recommend you change the whole set, other wise you will end up with spare strings lying around everywhere, and for some reason, I always find there is a difference in quality of sound when I only change one string. Maybe I’m just a perfectionist, who knows? As far as practice is concerned, there are a couple of ways to approach it.
It is never a neutral experience and that can lead to us “forgetting” to record our guitar playing. You will be really doing yourself a favor by disciplining yourself to record yourself once a day. Using backing tracks is one of the great benefits of modern technology.
A growing trend at this juncture in time involves the number of men, women and young people who are taking guitar lessons on line. When all is said and done, the opportunities that are available to a person today when it comes to guitar lessons online really abound. This includes such guitar basics of finger picking.
You’ve got the blues, you’ve got a guitar–now you need to learn the scales. Those distinctive, southern, pre-Elvis post gospel scales. When it comes down to it, there are only 3 chords you really need to master. Every blues song consists of three chords. They’re the one the four and the five.
As a beginner learning to play the guitar can seem like a pretty steep hill to climb. There are notes and chords to learn and correct finger placement and technique to establish. Don’t be discouraged to quickly by letting these things get you frustrated.
Through this overview you will be able to closely consider whether learning the funk-skunk technique might be a good course for you to pursue when it comes to learning guitar. Before you are provided with some direction on where you might be able to access funk-skunk lessons, you really should have at least a bit of a basic understanding of what this technique is all about. In this regard, the reality is that people who are proficient in playing guitar generally agree that they really do not know how the term funk-skunk itself developed.
Classical Gas by Mason Williams might be a little challenging if you don’t think of yourself as a “real” guitar player but it is surprisingly easy to play. Of course if you are not likely to be playing for strangers, you will have some idea of the kind of music your friends like, so just let their tastes be you guide with a little of your own style thrown in.
Now to get onto more technical stuff, let us look at what a flatpick is and how to use it. A flatpick is made of tortoiseshell, plastic or nylon. If you want to learn to be a flatpicking guitar soloist, you will need to learn to use a thick pick. If you are like most guitar players you will be using a light to medium weight pick.






