Interactive Guitar Teacher Tips and Resources For Modern Music Teachers

In this post, music teachers like you can have access to the latest guitar teacher tips and resources at your own convenience, even in your own comfort zones. This page is intended to most music or guitar teachers out there who are dedicated and inspired to teach their students either in a traditional music school or a private music studio. Well, you've got to read on and treat yourselves with the most reliable and useful music teaching tips and resources - making your students feel more motivated, inspired and enthusiastic.

It is true that more and more students around the globe are getting interested in learning music as well as initiating to learn how to play as many musical instruments as they can. Some of these are guitar, piano, flute and violin. On a personal note, the interest and the urge of today's youth to embrace music, love it and live with it marvelously have been good signs of their desire to take learning music to the next level.

Many guitar teachers nowadays are exerting efforts to enhance their skills, experiences, knowledge and expertise in many different ways. One of the many possible ways that they engage in is online education. In here, they may subscribe or register to many music teachers' websites that offer or conduct webinars as well as online conferences, discussions and forums. Through these online resources and programs, many music and guitar teachers from different states and countries can interact and communicate with one another.

Among these online forums and discussions, webinars have been the latest and the newest strategy, which are also made more and more in demand and cost-effective tutorial and instructional media online. In today's advent of webinars, these are web-based seminars, a presentation, a lecture, a workshop or a conference that is transmitted over the web. With its main key feature - interactive and innovative, these online workshops have the ability to give, receive and discuss information.

However, unlike web cast, webinars do not allow interaction between the presenter and the audience. These can also be an interactive online broadcasting service that enables online events, video conferencing and web seminars through its secure, global network. Providing easy-to-use, browser based web casting for webinars, on-line meetings, presentations and conferences, these are certified effective means of online communication together with some reliable guitar teacher tips and resources

Another useful resources for music teachers are those reliable music teachers' software and programs that can provide millions of music educators out there such convenience, privilege and opportunity of getting the latest guitar teacher tips and resources at their fingertips with just a very few clicks. Through these innovative and interactive software and programs on the web, the music teacher can get the necessary updates, tips and resources at no time.

On the other light, music teachers as well as all the teaching personnel and professionals should accept that they always need a room for improvement, professional development and career growth. This is necessary to modify and upgrade your music teaching strategies, instructional materials and other effective and useful techniques appropriate to your students of different ages.

So, take advantage of these useful online tips and resources today and see your teaching experience soar high - taking it to the next level. Good luck, fellow modern music teachers. Let's initialize and promote a contemporary approach in teaching our students and inspiring them to love music.

Modern Jazz and its Restless Identity

It is an illusion brought about by the record store racks that discrete stylistic barriers separate the music we love into camps of genre. Every music is a bastard at heart. While the contemporary apparatus for the consumption of music reinforces the notion of genre (notable exception: the internet), with Top 40 radio stations, hip-hop magazines, and the segmented organization of the Grammys, listeners realize deep down that all this division is a lot of baloney. Music is music.

Yet, despite the intuitive understanding that the theory of genre doesn't stand up under scrutiny, it remains a powerful principle in our culture (or more accurately, our culture industry). Not only do genres define the radio station to which you tune in and instruct you what clubs to avoid on a Friday night, genre is deeply interwoven with people's identities. High schools are the perfect laboratory for music-based social identity. The goths all seance together to the accompaniment of Manson and Ministry; Preppy kids rock the Dave Matthews while driving around in their parents' Hummers; skaters thrash to punk rock; and the weirdos gather around old jazz records, analyzing the theoretical arcana of the style and deciphering the liner notes as if they are gnomic texts. In short, the idea of genre, as much as we like to hate it, is a potent social and musical force in our culture.

But just as every individual understands that genre is a fluid concept, musicians are even more acutely aware of this fact. With very few exceptions globally, there isn't a music out there that hasn't stolen ideas from other musical cultures around it. Purity simply doesn't exist, since every style is the result of a long and often contentious dialog between people, places, times, and cultures. Every genre, therefore, is the document of some deep dialectic process that continues to morph even as you look at it; every music is a Proteus of possibilities.

This is all a long-winded way of winding up to the topic at hand, the state of modern jazz. Like everything else, jazz came about through a very American sort of mixture: Delta blues met with Sousa marching bands; Debussy encountered Negro spirituals; hymn tunes and Creole culture collided. Perhaps it is no surprise then that a slew of modern jazz musicians are turning to another genre, rock, to find inspiration. Jazz, since its humble inception and by its very nature, borrows.

This is not the first time jazz has succumbed to the Siren's lure of electric guitar feedback and throbbing back-beats. Miles Davis, Chick Corea, Joe Zawinul and a huge cast of early 1970s musicians incorporated these new sounds into their music, and the purists, predictably enough, wailed that "jazz is dead." Those guys were grabbing new sounds that they heard around them in an attempt to inject a little body and soul into a music that had gone a bit limp creatively at the time. The rock music entering jazz today, though, is of a different origin. To young jazzers today, distorted guitar is not a fresh new sound at all - it is the sound they grew up listening to. I don't know a soul who spent their formative years of 13 to 18 listening to Miles and Shorter to the exclusion of Mudhoney and Soundgarden. To young Americans, rock (and hip-hop) is in our blood, and jazz is a transfusion we got later in life.

Another point to mention: just as the erudite narrator in Kazantzakis's masterpiece envies Zorba's earthy, intuitive ways, so do the scholarly pursuits look upon the non-scholarly as a sort of pre-lapsarian Utopia of unmediated reality. The narrator questions his library of books just as a jazzer questions his arsenal of dense music theory. What is it about the intellectual character that looks longingly at the illiterate? I have a hunch that the ideal notion of purity has something to do with it, but more on this idea in another post perhaps; for now, let's return to the topic.

The generational shift and its mark on jazz aesthetics is becoming plain as day. Three recent records exemplify this shifting, more rocking self-identification. I don't want to labor them too extensively, so here's a brief description of a few rocking jazz picks from the last couple years:

The Bad Plus, Prog (2006)

This is piano trio music that strives for the sound of a power trio. I admit that I was a little skeptical when I heard that a "jazz" group covered "Smells Like Teen Spirit," but the Bad Plus's approach to hallowed standards of the rock world, from Queen to Black Sabbath to Bjork, is incredibly fresh. The pianist Ethan Iverson is classically trained and didn't start playing jazz until comparatively recently, and it shows (for the better): rather than playing all the standard jazz piano vocabulary, Iverson takes a neotonal, melodic approach to improvisation. It's as if Rachmaninoff sat down down with a rhythm section. Stand-out songs on this most-recent collection include a crashing take on Rush's anthemic "Tom Sawyer," complete with Neil Peart's machine gun drum solo replicated in perfect detail. The original tune "Physical Cities" features a two minute long stop-and-go rhythmic interlude with completely irregular hits. It is probably the most baroque, complex passage I've heard on a jazz record in years.

Brad Mehldau Trio, Day is Done (2005)

Another piano trio album by the indefatigable Brad Mehldau, Day is Done is much more of a traditional jazz album than Prog; heads lead to solos and all the formal architecture of the style is there. However, the material is all over the map, from the Beatles to Nick Drake and Radiohead. The opening cut says it all: with a rattling menace in the drums and thick, gloopy double-stops on the bass, Radiohead's "Knives Out" signifies from the get-go that this isn't cocktail jazz. Mehldau has cultivated a uniquely idiosyncratic voice on the piano and has mastered the technique of playing counterpoint to himself. On Day is Done, one hand is playing jazz while the other is pounding power chords and flipping off the establishment. It's a tour de force of the nascent jazz aesthetic, at once fiercely urgent and sublimely graceful.

Ben Allison, Little Things Run the World (2008)

One of the young leaders of the downtown NY scene, bassist and composer Ben Allison has never been a slave to genre. His previous albums blend psychedelia, avant-garde, and even Malian griot to create a totally idiosyncratic sound. On his most recent record from two weeks ago (with the band "Man Sized Safe," named after Dick Cheney's sinister office safe that can fit a man in it), Allison dives into more rocking territory with a 4-piece ensemble complete with overdriven electric guitar. The grooves are austere and stripped to the bare essentials of pulse, and the melodies are broach and spacious. It's a beautiful record, complete with Allison's signature avant-jazz weirdness but toned down and kept simple.

These are just a few records that spring to mind that define this newly developing identity of jazz (and of jazz musicians). The Ben Darwish Trio similarly occupies the space between rock and jazz, free-style improv and tight song forms, hip-hop groove and esoteric textures. From the perspective of a musician who has been playing and listening to the new jazz for years now, therefore, I can say that this sort of thing comes much more naturally than "Autumn Leaves" and "Solar." Rock is what young Americans grew up listening to, and the fact that jazz has been borrowing from it so heavily lately is a testament to the resilience and relevance of the style in 2008. For a great counter-example, see Sascha Frere-Jones's recent piece in the New Yorker, "A Paler Shade of White." Frere-Jones contends that contemporary indie rock ignores what earlier rock valued so much: musical miscegenation. Not borrowing from black music has created a sterile, rhythmically bland, "white" genre that appeals to - surprise! - white youth. It's a fascinating warning of what can become of music if it gets too pure. Of course, great jazz artists have always known this.

The State of Somali Music

Somali people have a rich musical heritage centered on traditional Somali folklore. Somali songs are usually the product of collaboration between lyricists (midho), songwriters (laxan), and singers (Codka or "voice"). Bands such as Waaberi and Horseed have gained a small following outside of the country. Others, such as Ahmed Cali Cigal and Maryam Mursal, have fused traditional Somali music with rock and roll, bossa nova, jazz, and other modern influences.

However, the current state of Somali Music although hampered by a non existent uncooperative government has managed to flourish fantastically with an array of talented new singers such as Aar Maanta and Farhia Fiska coming to the stage. In addition, legends such as Nimco Yasin and Hassan Aden Samatar are still keeping us entertained. However, there are two issues that need to be addressed in Somali Music and it needs to improved. I hope to discuss these issues in this article whilst providing plausible remedies.

Singers Copying Lyrics

I think we are all aware that lyrics used in the past are being used again but what we are not aware of is its reason. What we seem to do is place blame on the singers themselves. Granted they may partially be to blame but what we have to understand is that there are hundreds of singers and not enough lyricists. We currently have a count of 330 artists at somali-music.com and this isn't by no means a conclusive number. The number of lyrists that we are aware of can be counted on our fingers. The ratio difference is too wide.

Simply put, we need more lyricists and a smoother collaboration process between singers and lyricists.

Somali Music Videos

Another issue is the production of Somali music videos. The majority of Somali Music videos comprises of the singer standing in front of the video camera and swinging from side to side for the duration of the song without any activity. There is no story in the music video, there is no change of scenery except for those computer generated graphics. If we compare Somali music videos to what the rest of the world produces we are far behind.

This is something that the majority (not all) of Somali artists have been doing for a while and this needs to change. Again, we can not say it's the fault of the singers it is more likely that the producers and technical producers not being as advanced technically as we like them to be. Having said this, there is a fantastic array of Somali music videos that are produced and directed well but these are in the minority.

Lack of Resources

It is evident that there is a lack of resources within the Somali Music industry. Many musicians do not see singing as a career. They dabble in it when they can but they do not see it as a full time career for them and this is because there isn't a large enough financial reward and media attention for them to pursue it fully as a career.

Lets put the lack of resources into perspective by comparing the Somali Music industry to the rest of the world. A music video that Michael Jackson and Janet Jackson produced for their song "scream" cost $7M. We can say for sure that this has not happened within the Somali Music industry, in fact the whole industries worth may be less than this. The blame here is with the Somali government or lack of government.

In the past, when a strong Somali state with a government existed, singers looked forward to performing in theaters such as the Chinese built Somali National Theater which gave potential musicians a source of motivation to sing at a respectable place and to become an experienced singer. Dance and vocal training existed for potential singers too. The same can not be said for today's potential musicians and it is evident in some singers dancing technique.

If we look at the past and use Saado Ali Warsame as an example, she is a fantastic dancer and a talented singer and a great basis to compare other Somali artists. If we have a look at some of her videos, we can see she is clearly talented and the video has been choreographed well by trained professionals. Abdi Salaad Beerdilaacshe also shows us his a skilled twist dancer!

It is true that some people are more gifted in dancing and can come naturally however dancing is something that can be learned and improved upon. It would be great to see a little more action and movement in Somali Music videos in terms of dancing. It is feasible to say that better music videos will highlight the singers ability to dance.

Conclusion

Although this article points out flaws in the Somali Music industry it does not in any way intended to be inflammatory. It is simply written from a group of people who admire Somali Musicians and want them to rise to the top. A negative light has been shone on the Somali Music industry, this is not to say its all bad.