SmarterMusic is dedicated to the exploration of music in all its forms and the promotion of musical understanding for all. Active contributors include:
Pianist, instrumentalist, vocalist, arranger, and molecular biologist based in New York City. Former Music Director of the Achordants. For arranging services, see Broze Brothers Music; for performing and lessons, see Yuri Broze.com.
Accomplished guitarist, vocalist, songwriter, and photographer.
Composer, arranger, double bassist, writer, and didgeridoo builder. Music Director of Brandeis University's Rather Be Giraffes. For arrangement and other sundry music services, check out MusicaRanger.
We like InterCaps.
~I wholeheartedly support all kinds of research that you can do before putting notes to a page. Steal ideas! Save yourself time! Don’t reinvent the wheel with every new arrangement, especially if you’re cutting your teeth for the first time.
~Ostinatos, or repeated bits of music, make teaching and retaining a lot easier…so you should do [...]
It’s just been stuck in my head lately. Nota, the winners of NBC’s The Sing Off, did an amazing fusion that’s been lodged in my brain of Jay Sean’s “Down”. Watch this:
If you can see this, then you might need a Flash Player upgrade or you need to install Flash Player if it’s missing. Get [...]
Not only does pitch exist, it’s part of the trifecta of all music (the other brothers Timbre and Rhythm will have their day).
Sound is a giant pitch. Not just one, but lots of pitches. Big pitches, small pitches, pitches you can pick out in a crowd, and pitches that don’t sound like a pitch but [...]
To start off the Music Theory section of SmarterMusic, I’ve written the first article in the Fundamentals land: Staffs, Clefs, Notes, and Rests. It is a brief introduction to the most basic music symbols and how they tell us neat things. If you have no music training or you chose to drift into a coma [...]
In this article, we’ll be going through the motions of arranging a song. Instead of looking at a completed arrangement, we’ll walk through every step of the process to show how an a cappella arrangement evolves and is finally completed. Today, the tune is Happy Birthday, that old standby of yore.
Read more…
If you went back in time with only your computer, it’s saved internet cache, and a love for a cappella, how would you teach an arrangement if music notation hadn’t been invented? Well, if you’re Guido of Arezzo, you’ll just invent notation and that will be that…or you could utilize some non-traditional notation techniques. Fortunately, [...]
Boys and girls, high and low, with every voice specialized like a well-run machine…ahh. Hopefully the group you’re arranging for is already balanced in terms of boys and girls, but make sure you know when you’re making a custom arrangement. It would blow if you wrote a SSAATTB part for a group that has [...]
Guitar is wicked cool. You know it in your bones; I know you do. You’ve grown up watching MTV rock stars shimmy and gyrate in that post-Elvis mold. You’ve seen the old videos of Eric Clapton and Jimi Hendrix in their heydays coaxing lava from Stratocasters. You’ve seen Bob Dylan’s woody box of protest songs [...]
A Notre Dame conductus from sometime around 1200. I’m worn out from writing admissions essays.
If you can see this, then you might need a Flash Player upgrade or you need to install Flash Player if it’s missing. Get Flash Player from Adobe.
This is haunting — only the most perfect consonances were treated as such; octaves [...]
This is a delightful track that bears closer scrutiny. It begins in an ambiguous 6/8 and 3/4 that also has an overriding 4/2 feel in the vocals that combines two measures at once. This is already incredibly clever, but at 0:38, suddenly we’re thrown for a loop into 4/4, with syncopated melody. Then, there’s a [...]
