One of the great things about the Creative Commons license that we use on music2work2, is that it enables other media creators to easily use our music in their projects. Last week we got a request from a Croatian channel asking if they could use the music from Irene to highlight the problems that a local family are facing after their house burned down last year.

If like us you don’t speak or read Croatian, the family in the video lost everything in a terrible fire more than a year ago. They were put into an absolute ruin of a house without flowing water and just one room that is safe from collapse and that can be heated. Apparently they have been forgotten by social services in Croatia so a number of independent artists have got together to raise awareness of their plight. Video’s like this are used to get people interested in helping them out.

If you would like to use music2work2 in a project – give us a shout

Part of keeping on top of music2work2 means that Charlotte and I spend a little time every day curating a page over on
Scoop.it on the effect of background music. We are interested in the psychology and science behind what is going on when we are listening to music and the positive effects that listening to music can have on seemingly every part of our lives.

We publish the latest stories using this groovy little widget. Click on any image or story that interests you…

It has been a funky couple of days – fabulous fourth of July weekend down in Venice – playing guitar – watching the world go by – capturing audio here and there.

I might work this up soon – it’s about time some guitar made it into music2work2. The guitar track comes from the audioboo recording – lots more of them here – the keys come from this morning.

I love the saxophone – whether it’s Baker Street or Just the Way You Are – Lisa Simpson or Charlie Parker – there’s something about the instrument which is just – excuse me – fucking cool.

Born To Run

Clarence Clemons died this weekend and I’ve been thinking about his music; his playing touched me and made me smile. I remember being blown away by Born to Run – the album cover: this dude with a telecaster – clean and white – simple typesetting – a handful of songs and a big ass black dude with a saxophone. I sat up half the night listening to it

And the music; strings, guitars, stunning piano playing, that amazing horn and the stories…the stories were pure genius. I wanted to be the Rat, I wanted to be the Poet, I sure as hell wanted the girls and ended up marrying a Wendi.

I fell over laughing listening to New York City Serenade from The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle. The first three minutes of that song let me be a piano player in a rock band – it enabled me to pursue music in a way that made sense to me. David Sancious – and Bruce Springsteen – thank you too!

Bat Out Of hell

This Sunday morning’s playlist included Bat out of Hell; if you haven’t listened to it for a while – go take 45 minutes out of your day and crank it up – Paradise by the Dashboard Light taught me everything I needed to know about rock and roll.

More amazing music – more E street band players – and similarly to Born to Run – long songs. Funny that two of the best selling albums eschewed the single format.

Richard

It was Richard who left me alone with Born to Run 25 years ago – one of those evenings that imprinted hard on my 16 year old brain. He’s a super guitar player, singer songwriter and I love to play music with him.

We haven’t played together for a year – possibly more – but we grabbed an hour the other week – iPhone recording in the room…

Clearly this doesn’t work if you’re listening to the piano after work in the pub, but a report in the Archives of Internal Medicine shows that if you’re getting on in years this might just be what you need to stay on your feet.

Dalcroze Eurhythmics

Sure, this may sound like a sweeter version of an 80′s pop group, but it is actually a form of music and movement education. Developed a century ago by the Swiss composer Emile Jaques-Dalcroze, it is a way of using your body to gain a fuller understanding and deeper meaning of musical expression. It sounds a little weird but actually makes a huge amount of sense and you naturally do it anyway when you’re tapping your toes or waving your hand to the beat. If you want to learn more there’s a great write up and explanation on the Dalcroze Society of America website.

Back to the research

The study, conducted by Dr. Andrea Trombetti included 134 adults over the age of 65 who were at an increased risk of falling. Over a 6 month period the study group performed a series of multitask exercises that challenged the body’s balance control system, these included walking in time to piano music and responding to changes in the music’s rhythm. The study found that not only did those in the study group have fewer falls than the control group, they also increased their walking speed and stride length.

Music to Walk to

I think this is brilliant and is just one more piece of information that supports the idea of music being good for you. If you would like to try this out with some piano music I would recommend you try out the Solo Piano Playlist. You can stream the music directly from the site or become a member and download the tracks to your iPod.

Sign up for Free Membership – Download The Writer’s Playlist

Sign up for Annual Membership $15 – Download all Playlists including the Solo Piano Playlist

Here’s one of my favorite piano pieces – written for a very brave lady who survived cancer:

Emma – 20 minutes 4 seconds

Piano track written for a friend who was fighting cancer at the time – Liner notes

Starting the mix in the next couple of days – I like this new ending

Download audio file (coyote-end-rough-2.mp3)

Makes me very happy listening to it.

Download audio file (reason-101-click.mp3)

Basic rock piano is not about scales, chords, arpeggios or riffs – it is about the relationship between your right and left hand. The best way to teach yourself basic rock piano is to investigate what sounds good when your hands are playing something different.

Practice with a metronome

As a piano player, a rocking groove only works when your hands are agreeing on time. The only way to really understand time is to practice with a click – a metronome.

If you practice to the click you will be surprised at how quickly your chops develop.

Learn the basic “rocking” rhythm

You are going to create a 3 finger chord with your right hand and then “rock” it back and forth while keeping time with your left hand.

Set your metronome to 101 beats per minute – if you have a digital metronome you can set the signature to 8 / 4.

Start out in C major so you don’t have to worry about any black keys. With your right hand, place your thumb on middle C, your index finger on E and your little finger on G (This is also known as placing your fingers on the 1,3 and 5 of the C major scale.)

Listen to the metronome and count out loud, 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8.

On the 1 count, play the E and the G (index and little finger)
- on the 2 count play the C (thumb)
- on the 3 count, play the E and G
- on the 4 count, play the C

repeat.

Once you have the rocking motion down with your right hand, add the left hand.

Place your left hand thumb on the first C below middle C and then using the same 8 count, play the C on the 1, the 4 and the 5.

Initially for most people this feels pretty weird but after a couple of passes – it starts to make sense. Once you understand how it feels – then practice it – a lot. The more you play it – the more it makes sense – you start to think about finger velocity, about tone, about expanding the octave, about syncopating the left hand, about playing in different keys, etc…

Learn the blues scale

Rock and roll comes from the blues – and the blues is awesome. In C – the notes in the right hand are:

C, Eb, F, F#,G, Bb,C

With the blues you tend to have the left hand keeping time and structure with the right hand hitting the melody and doing all the fancy stuff. The most basic introduction to the blues would be a classic 12 bar blues.

In C major the left hand would play the notes that make up the following chords.

C, C, C, C, F, F, C, C, G, F, C, G,

Set the metronome and start playing – once you can play different things in the right hand without falling off time in the left hand then you can start to experiment: make chords of the notes in the left hand, play with sliding off the black notes onto the white notes, play with not hitting every note in the bar, slow the tempo down, speed it up – practice.

Play – a lot!

Once you have these tools “under your belt” – play as often as you can – the more you play the more your ears change and the better the whole experience becomes

Quora post text:

Have been hard at work – mixing this and tinkering with the website. Three string passes on top of the piano in 7/8 at 59 beats per minute.

Download audio file (willmix1.mp3)

Need to listen to this for a week or so but I’m digging where it’s going – check it out at around 9 minutes – some of my favorite stuff this year

Hopefully we’ll get a nice image from Sam over at explodingdog.com

Came across this study through a post by Tom Jacobs over on Miller-McCune that referenced the original study here. Here’s the Abstract:

The present study investigated whether and how a musical rhythm entrains a listener’s visual attention. To this end, participants were presented with pictures of faces and houses and indicated whether picture orientation was upright or inverted. Participants performed this task in silence or with a musical rhythm playing in the background. In the latter condition, pictures could occur off-beat or on a rhythmically implied, silent beat. Pictures presented without the musical rhythm and off-beat were responded to more slowly than pictures presented on-beat. This effect was comparable for faces and houses. Together these results indicate that musical rhythm both synchronizes and facilitates concurrent stimulus processing.

Kinda cool huh? From my own study – I have seen how music can help performance – but it’s interesting to see a rhythmic component come into play. Tom quotes from the study that they speculate that rhythm can affect "attention allocation policies", which apart from sounding totally awesome – does kinda make sense; once you identify a regular beat – it makes up part of your aural environment that is now predictable – the brain starts to look for it – to expect it. If you expect to see something – i.e. – if you know it is coming and you have an idea of the direction in which it will appear – it is likely that you’re going to see it faster than if you weren’t expecting it.

I believe that music acts like a “warm-up” for the brain; it stimulates background neural activity which enables it to move information faster – analagous to an athlete warming up – you get better performance when the muscles are stimulated than from a cold standing start. Add rhythm as a tool to indicate to the brain when to selectively focus, remove the lyrics so you don’t get distracted by someone else’s story and you’re talking about the best work enhancing tool ever invented.

Image Credit: Dave Makes – Flickr

We’ve been quiet for a week or so – projects, family, sickness – in no particular order. With some of these still ongoing – here’s a wonderful piece of music and video that I can’t stop listening to. A live version of their song Excuses by The Morning Benders.

Thank you to my brother Richard for hipping me to this

I’d heard a few spins of their other track “Promises” that is now featured over on Pitchfork – it’s got a killer guitar hook that you won’t forget – but I was blown away by this version of Excuses. What I love is the sheer musicality and joy that is present in the room.

In a time where production and story is everything

– where the brand is more important than the band –

watching a bunch of musicians create something so pleasing to listen to and watch – well – that’s why I’m in this game.

Excuses and promises are both on their latest release – Big Echo which I bought through eMusic here – but you can also find on iTunes and all the usual suspects. Strangely enough they’re using topspin widgets but not TopSpin’s ecommerce – which seems pretty odd to me – but then – what do I know!

The Morning Benders website

Christopher Chu (Vox) on Twitter

The Morning Benders on Facebook