Logic Pro Keyboard Shortcuts Tips

When you start working on different platforms - Pro Tools and Logic Pro for example - you will need quick way to remind yourself of what keys you had to press. Even know if you were once an expert if you don't use them your memory can't keep up with you sometimes...

Or you know other software pretty well and you want to quickly get to know other software.. You can read books. .yes but that takes lots of time and energy..

so What do you do? For logic pro it's pretty easy.. Go to keyboard shortcuts, that lists almost all the things you can do. Basic editing skills remains the same but HOW and HOW FAST is often the question right? and key is Shortcut.
Shortcuts to auditioning, navigating, making edits, etc etc. those are the thing you need to know and I thought I'd compile a list of keywords you can search with.

Navigating:
zoom
marker
locator
go to

Editing:
split
nudge
play



(I'll keep adding to the list, bookmark if you liked it, or send me request to add something to the list)

Musical Instrument Warm ups and Practicing piano, guitar, violin, scales, etc.

I'm curious as to what people do when you do warm up.

Piano playing is not a simple task. It's composed of collection of complex muscular activities. Almost in a martial arts teaches. Difference is the purpose. Martial Arts whatever you want to say about it, it's the art of killing. I'm from Japan so I know about spirits, samurai, philosophy but it is the killing you do with it. Music on the other hand is to express ideas. Enrich people's life. Maybe it's yourself and your greatness you want to express.. but generally Composition has emotional or intellectual, philosophical meaning to be expressed.

Going back to practice so how can you find that in scale, hannon, stuff like that? That's the kind of the thing you want to be thinking when you play these things.

You can learn all the notes in scales. but You have to realize you don't need piano or any instrument to learn them and note names. They have to sound certain way. or many different ways to be exact. Where you accent, how soft you want to play. How long to keep notes or spaces. Those are the point you need to focus on when you practice.

Guitarists!! Playing fast seems cool at first but if you are only playing bunch of notes without any dynamics you are just showing off. All fast playing and all the things people just start dreaming needs purpose. (Hopefully other than amazing others with how fast YOU can play.. and not for your own ego boost)

For your good, think of how to play scales
Not just fingering, not just notes. learning them and moving in the way that book tells you to do is the part. ANYONE can do. Think of WHY you need to play them on that instrument. and why you want to play them with the instrument you picked or you play. Musical instruments all have different sounds and you want to get to know them in depth. Scale practices are very important because of that. You can keep all notes the same and basic theory of it is universal but you can just keep playing them and you'll never run out of things you can do with them. This scale practice is that deep.

The expression or your unique idea is YOUR part and you should practice that. You should concentrate on making them come forward. and You should really be listening and asking yourself if this is really what you want.


There are other issues in this regards.. (like how you should move or use your body to get those qualities you are looking for when you play scales, or anything..)
but that's what you should be practicing. I don't want to hear 32nd note scales at tempo 300. Meaningless. You just wow and you'll be forgotten the next moment.


books:
the craft of piano playing - alan fraser
art of violin playing - carl flesch
effortless mastery - kenny werner

Pro Tools: Shortcut keys: another way for changing modes & tools

That you can change modes and tools on Pro Tools with function keys is a common thing by now but there was on more that's not usually covered..

if you didn't know:
f1 - f4: select modes
f5 - f10: tools - pressing the same one twice will trigger next one down the list for those tools with options.
f6+f7 pressed together: Smart tool

that's good but there is one more to it.
You can press ESC and ~ to change them also... basically it selects next tool including smart tool.

Tilda or ~ or ` (key that's one below ESC) key will switch between Edit Modes.

and ESC will select next tool.

Unlike web browser it won't select one before even if you pressed shift key (shift + tab to go back to previous text field/tab stop in most browsers) but this is pretty useful when you are still thinking which one to press.

You won't have to look at the keyboard and that can make you more productive.
Try it out.

iTunes Music Store - Global listening

Well a little time ago iTunes have added a feature to select country at the bottom of your iTunes Music Store home page.

I find this really interesting because although lot of music are internationally distributed you still don't really know in what country what song is popular.. Question like is American music really popular in Europe? what's the Europe's trend?

one way to find out is through magazines but i think iTunes can function in this way also.

If you navigate to the iTunes MS for UK then you'll see something you can only see in UK version. France or french version will something that's only available in france. likewise you can just navigate through all stores and you can actually listen to music from all over the world.

you can search in their languages (if you know or if you just knew the title), i'm not sure about the downloading but at least you can listen to them.. and buy CD (well the quality of digital download is still lower compared to regular CD so actually it's cheaper if you buy CD in my opinion)

but it's amazing how easily you can listen to all kinds of music and cultural differences. at least for musicians or composers.

Synthesizer Tutorial Video

I've just found a few amazing synthesizer tutorial. Not really for beginners.. you'd have to understand at least what oscillator, filters are and their functions..

They were talking about FM synthesis, how to make drums beats with LFO, things like that.. good point to cover. and he explains it really well.

http://www.sonicstate.com/

learning the Guitar Fingerboard

It's been a while since i posted but i wanted to make a note about learning guitar.

finger board knowledge has been a biggest obstacle to me that no one seemed to know what the effective way of learning fingerboard is. (that is knowing notes)

now i have a guitar teacher who's been giving me great insights on how finger board works. and how to "memorize" them. memorizing all of them takes at least memorizing 24x6 notes without counting enharmonics. that's a quite a number. and you won't be able to just memorize. so he introduced me a couple of methods that can be done in like 3-12 minutes a day.
that was wow to me.

so here are them
1. single string playing
2. never ending scales
3. blues and chord inversions.
4. patterns.


i will tell you about 1 and 2 on this one.

just pick your favorite tune and start playing notes only using one strings. try jumping around and play melodies. it would be nice to have a tune or simple recorded chord progressions or just forever CM7 for the key of C.
this technique will make you good at one perticular string.

... but yes this is only good for one perticular string.. so not when you use all strings..here is the another technique comes into a play. The never ending scales... sounds like WTF? i know. but this is really cool.
you play scales using all strings. this sounds like normal stupid scale training but it's not.
you play the root on the 6th string and next note on 5th string, next one on 4th string and go up and down forever until you end up where you started. it will take some time but it will come back to this point.
only pitfall to this is that you can't really play melody or music with this. so you need to do single string practice. they complement each other.

cool huh but there is one more step to this, which is "do this for ALL 12 KEYS!"
after a while you know all your scales and all your notes.
simple and effective isn't it? probably a month or two to remember all notes on the finger board. if you do it every day 3-4 keys.

and this worked for me. more than any other books i've got in attempt to learn fingerboard. try this out.