arrange • compose • conduct
How fast should you practice? I advise my non-pianist students to practice their parts at the tempo they can play the part. For me, circa college, that was about 30bpm. It’s faster now, but at the time, that was the perfect tempo for me to practice my music. Practicing slow […]
My primary strategy for solving my beloved Matt Gaffney’s Weekly Crossword Contest is asking the question, “What’s weird?” What’s unexpected, different, or unusual? What stands out from the background? Because very often, that’s part of the secondary puzzle I have to solve. I approach composing and arranging in much the […]
Our brains are great at filling in the gaps in our perception. There are so many optical and even auditory illusions that show the way that our brains extrapolate from what we experience, creating information inside our brains that doesn’t exist in the world. (I think that’s probably the explanation […]
Great new vocal harmony recordings are few and far between. We’re lucky to get a handful in any given year. Even rarer for them to come from a brand new group, as opposed to an established leading light such as New York Voices, The Real Group, or Take 6. What […]
Today, I could take a test in pretty much any high school math class and earn a passing grade. People are almost always surprised that I can still perform trigonometry, algebra, geometry, removed over a quarter century from my last math class. Doing math isn’t the superpower. But being genuinely […]
Sometimes you’re just excited for a weekend to work. I’ve been doing exciting projects on a lot of fronts, with weekends spent away at retreats, leadership training, and so on. My days are packed with the stuff of life, and it’s all really good stuff. As we move toward the […]
Do you produce a seasonal product? I live in a place with lots of season producers. Apple orchards, or Christmas tree farms. It always strikes me as pretty strange to work in an industry where so much of your income comes in a short window. They sell Christmas trees from […]
The gift of routine is time to think. The challenge of routine is that you can feel like you’re in a rut, just repeating the same actions, day after day. But that only happens if you don’t take advantage of the gift. Let the routine free your mind to think, […]
Stepping in to prevent failure is a great strategy, if you plan on continuing to step in indefinitely. Failure – or at least falling down – is an essential way to get your legs under you, regardless of the discipline. Great leaders know that a little bit of failure, particularly […]
Great leaders aren’t born. To become a great leader requires practice, repeated failure, study, and, yes, training. Just like great teaching, leading is not something you just wake up being able to do. I’m wrapping up my third of five days of intensive leadership training today. Twenty years into a […]