Your suggestions

Thanks for typing up and giving me your feedback yesterday. It helps me to get a sense of what you're interested in and what we should spend more time on. I will really try to help you learn what you want to learn about music. If you have more ideas, please email them to me at crunde@bavc.org.

Some of the things people found hard from the last term included:

• musical language; the names of the different things in Reason
• the quizzes
• mixing
• doing fades
• using the piano (timing)

Some things people want to work on this term include:

• Intros
• finding sounds that work together
• using the piano 
• counting bars and beats
• crunk beats
• creating original music (rather than imitating other artists)
• panning/FX
• creating original musical works (instead of just imitating other artists) 
  
• quantizing notes
• recording vocals

I think that the best way to become a better musician/producer is to become a good listener. Meaning that you should be paying close attention to the music that you listen to and learning how other artists put their music together. Then you can pick out the stuff that you like and incorporate it into your own music.

So...

Your assignment is as follows:

1. Pull out your iPod or go onto the internet and find a song that you are really feeling.

2. Listen to it and pay close attention to the following things:

• Tempo - fast/slow?
• Types of instruments used (not just drums)
• How does the artist build up the different parts of the song?  (Intro/Verse/Chorus)
• What do you think works really well about this song?

3. When you are done, type up your answers quickly in Word (don't type an essay, just make little notes.

4. We're going to go over these songs together as a class, so be prepared to talk about yours.