Welcome, Students
Hopefully you are here because you, just like me, are interested in improving as a musician. Getting better at music is a life-long journey, one that I am on, and that my students are on. I keep working at it each and every day. As the title of my website indicates, I am an improving musician.
The goal of this section is to train your musical mind first. You can train your fingers to do all sorts of technical exercises, but unless there is a musical machine behind the fingers that KNOWS what the fingers are doing, then you are really just “typing out the notes.”
The goal of this website can be very simply put: AUDIATION.
Audiation
Audiation is the ability to hear and understand music for which the sound is not physically present. In short, it’s the ability to think musically. Performing music is a lot like speaking a language.
In order to speak, we must have a vocabulary of words, and the ability to put those words together into a sentence so it makes sense in the context of each unique situation.
In music, we must have a collection of tonal and rhythm patterns, and acquire the ability to perform them in musical context, that is, within the harmonic and rhythmic constraints of the tonalities and meters of our culture.
We must seek to understand how music works, so that we are not dependent on others to teach us music, or to rely strictly on musical notation. We want to be independent musical thinkers.
Start Here
I have created many free resources for you to help you get started on your audiation journey.
Take my free courses, Tonal Fundamentals and Rhythm Fundamentals.
Learn basic audiation skills in rhythm, harmony, and melody in these entertaining free courses.
In this course, students will learn the tonal audiation foundation: resting tone as well as tonic and dominant harmonic functions in major and minor tonalities.
In this course, we will learn the rhythmic components of the audiation foundation, including macrobeats and microbeats in Duple meter.
Get a copy of my free eBook, "How to Learn the Language of Music."
This very accessible PDF will give you the big picture of the main ways we learn how to audiate rhythmically, harmonically, and melodically, and will serve as a reference for you along the way.
Check out the Improving Musician free student library.
In the free student library, you will find student-focused resources, including eBooks, pattern sheets, PDFs, backing tracks, video resources and more.