Using Technology
Monday, August 29th, 2011
In the last 2 weeks or so I’ve become completely addicted to Spotify. For those of you who aren’t using this yet, it’s basically a paid system where you can have on-demand music, and the artist gets paid anytime their songs are played. You pay a small monthly fee, and you can literally listen to anything that they have access too, and the best thing is that nobody’s getting ripped off here. Amazing.
Naturally as a drummer I decided it would be wise to figure out how to apply this new technology advance into my playing. So here’s what I’ve figured out, and maybe it’ll help some of you guys as well.
1) You can pull music by genre – much like Pandora – so if you want Hi-Hop, Jazz, Blues, whatever, you can pull anything if you just want to work through a particular style one day a week.
2) I can find music on there so I don’t have to have artists send me CD’s of songs they are looking to play. This is especially awesome in the Worship music circuit, the artists are getting paid for me listening to their stuff to write my charts, we don’t have to justify stealing it anymore :)
3) I have a ton of books that have “musical examples” of grooves, where you might get 40 seconds of the song that they could license for the book. Now with Spotify and pandora I’m able to listen to all these songs all the way through. I spend a great deal of time these days sitting down at night writing charts to every successful song on the radio.
Why waste the time charting these you ask? Well I’m so glad you asked. Charting has been one of the most effective learning tools I’ve had as a musician. If I can write it, I can play it, and if I can learn what’s selling records on the radio, there is a much greater chance that I’ll be able to pull of that feel more perfectly when I’m in a session situation. Plus, let’s face it, it’s more fun to play music, and more effective to learn using music than it is to play exercises all day long.
So take advantage of the technologies that are available to you, and find ways to apply them to your practices and to your life to help you reach your goals. If you don’t have goals, that’s another blog. haha.