For those of you that are into playing with capos, spider capos and passarelle bridges you will be pleased to hear that I have just...

Continuing this series I am now looking at the second of four movements following the first movement covered in the previous post. Much...

The whole tone scale has a symmetrical pattern of notes separated by a tone, this is called Mode I of limited transposition by Messiaen,...

I have an interesting experience to relate to you that happened to me last week. After a gig had finished, I was packing up and the...

In this series my focus is on the four movement piece from 1989 by Japanese composer Toru Takemitsu. By now you are familiar with my...

In this first post of the series I shall focus on Messiaen’s Mode III. Its formula is as follows: 1 2 b3 3 #4 5 b6 b7 7 And in C it is: C...

I think its time to discuss the nuts of bolts of music, so here I am focusing on the frequency of A at 432 Hz and how we arrive at such a...

This is the universal rule in life and music is no exception: Everybody sucks at everything at first. Now, we can see the development of...

(I prefer to use Five ways to modulate to the 2nd degree minor key but Supertonic has a catchier title and moreover, I think being aware...

Here is an interesting way of developing perfect pitch which I have discovered by accident. I have been practising improvising over...

In this final instalment in this series I am looking at the first movement, the allegro. There are many points of interest including wild...

I am continuing this series with eagerness focusing on the fifth movement marked Con Slancio. This follows the previous posts that...

This is the third and final instalment in this series and will look at the final movement of Brouwer’s work published in 1983. It is far...

Right, this group is now active, welcome to all and I am going to start by posting a duet I have arranged with my partner in crime Tony...

In this series of posts I will be discussing the merits of substituting one or more scales for another when soloing. I am using the...

I thought I would share with my readers a technique that I often employ, although only with the more advanced of my students, that really...

The focus of this instalment is the second movement of EDC. It’s a great study in mimicking the properties of an echo and needs some...

In the first of this series I am analysing the modal approach that Brouwer takes in his three movement piece. As mentioned in my...

Recently, I started an analysis of El Decameron Negro by Brouwer and within half a page of work I noticed the similarity with Takemitsu’s...

For those of you unaware of the details of pitch axis theory, the idea is basically to connect scales or their modes via an unchanging,...