Sheet Music Guy !

During my time making content for this site, I’ve gained a lot of respect for performers. A good performances appear effortless, which really hides the amount of work that goes into them……whether it be for a piece of music, a dance, a speech or a presentation. In making the videos for this site, getting a good performance of a 3 to 3.5 minute song takes an average of 1.5 hours, and even then there might be edits involved. If you do the math, that’s about one quality performance out of 30, leading to a rather pathetic batting average of 0.033. Real performers have one shot. One. How do they do it?

Well, although I’m not quite there yet, the fact that I’m taping myself and reviewing the results quite closely really gives me a good idea of what works and what’s important. Based on these experiences, I believe all good performances in any medium are based upon the same fundamental structure, which I will attempt to outline here.

Although it’s numbered, keep in mind that this is not a list. The numbering denotes importance, but it’s built like a pyramid: To do #1 properly you need to achieve #2, to get to #2 you have to be proficient at #3, etc.

Anyways, here we go!

1) Passion

It should come to no surprise to anybody that this is at the top of the list. Any successful person you talk to, regardless of whether they are in the performing, artistic or corporate community, will emphasize having passion for what you are doing to be a key to success. Even if you execute flawlessly in a performance, with perfect tone, rhythm and phrasing, if you’re not doing it with heart, your audience will be able to tell. Even with all that work, a performance with no heart at the very best can only be good. Similarly, if you perform with enough passion and conviction you can actually override any technical shortcomings that you might have. In short, having passion and doing your thing with meaning and heart is by far the most important part of any performance.

The really cool thing is, when everything about your performance is spot on and you’re really putting your heart into it, you can feel it for yourself as you’re still playing it. Your own performance will have an emotional effect on you, as you’re still performing it. For me, when I’m doing a take and it gets there, I know that this take is the one….and assuming I don’t psych myself out before the finish, that one take will almost always shine above the rest of them when I’m reviewing the final tape.

2) Rhythm

As opposed to #1, I don’t think Rhythm receives nearly enough attention that it deserves. Any type of performance, whether it be music, dance, a speech, presentation, or comedy, will have a natural rhythm. Once the rhythm is established with the audience, the performer can play with the audience’s expectations of the rhythm, for dramatic effect. However, if there is no clear sense of rhythm to begin with, then there’s no rhythmic expectation to play with, which means it’s much harder to be emotive. Your audience will be so distracted in trying to lock into your rhythm, (which doesn’t exist,) that the rest of the performance will be meaningless. Rhythm is key.

Rhythm comes from within, not from without. For example, say you start nervously, and your heart is racing. If your heart is racing, your internal rhythm is going way too fast, and whatever it is you’re doing will sound like you’re rushing through it. The thing is, anything you do after that point to try to slow yourself down will actually come across that way exactly; that you are trying to slow yourself down. You can actually hear yourself actively fighting to pull yourself back in. It’s like reigning in a pack of wild horses, when those horses should have been going the correct speed to begin with. My old piano teacher yelled at me about this for years, and only now do I understand what she’s been talking about. That’s why they always tell you take a deep breath and calm yourself before doing any big public presentation. You have to calm yourself down and set your internal clock to the correct rhythm before you start. Otherwise you’ll spend the rest of your performance trying to fix (or find) your rhythm, when you should be focused on more important things like performing with heart.

For me, I know from watching my own tapes that this is one of my bigger problems, and stops me from getting into #1. For faster songs especially, I have a tendency to just run faster and faster. The first 5 takes or so of any performance I do are always garbage, just because I’m still nervous and have to adjust to the fact that I’m being taped. My tempo is all over the place. The horses are crazy. After that, I usually spend about 30seconds to a minute before each take just sitting, focusing, and setting my internal rhythm, before I can actually begin.

3) Know Your Content

Ideally, you should know your material like the back of your hand. This way, you don’t have to think about the content of your performance, and can focus your energy on the important stuff (heart and rhythm). If you’re playing a piece of music, you shouldn’t have to think about the notes. If you’re doing a speech, you shouldn’t have to think about the words or the topic. All the content should be automatic, and to get it to be automatic, you have to drill the content into your head by practicing endlessly. Eventually, you will be good enough to fake it, but that comes from experience, and experience usually comes from….well….practicing endlessly. Practicing endlessly is unavoidable, unfortunately. On the bright side, getting the content down is guaranteed if you practice enough and put the work in, while to achieve #1 and #2 need you to get to a certain ‘place’ come showtime. Knowing your content is actually the easy part, because all you need to do is put in the hours.

The consequence of not knowing your content is that you will instantly lose your focus on the performance, because you will at some point forget what to do, and panic to figure out what note (or word, or dance move) is supposed to come next. Even if you do find the right note, you still have to get back your focus and back in the groove, all while you’re still playing the piece in question. Not only is it hard to get back, but you’ll find it wasn’t as good as it was before you stumbled, and you’ll still be a little shaken up from the incident. Put the work in. Know your content.

For me, it takes about 2 weeks of spare time to come up with a SheetMusicGuy performance. A few evenings in the beginning go towards making the arrangement. One weekend afternoon goes to taping the performance. The rest of the time in between goes to practicing my own arrangement, and drilling it into my own head, so I don’t have to worry about the notes I have to play when it comes down to the taping. If you look at it that way, most of the actual time spent is in learning the content.

4) Technical Ability

Your technical ability your level of mastery in the medium of your performance. This is the foundation upon which everything else is built. If you’re a pianist, this is how well you play the piano. If you’re giving a speech, this is how well you speak English. The better you are at your medium, the more tools you have in your toolkit, and the better you can execute on all the other steps above.

When choosing the difficulty level of a piece for an upcoming performance, the best advice I can give here is to aim low. For music, pick pieces that you are very comfortable playing. When in doubt, pick something easier, especially if you don’t have too much time to learn it. Save your ambitions for the other things on this list that are more important. If you choose something that is too difficult for your skill level, you will put all your efforts into just hitting the right notes; you won’t be able to even get to the important emotional stuff.

This is not to say that you should not play challenging pieces, because if you do that, you’ll never get better. Play challenging pieces for yourself, on your own, so you can continue to grow your skills. What I’m saying is that you shouldn’t perform those challenging pieces until you reach a point where you don’t find them technically challenging anymore. By then you will be playing even harder pieces on your own anyways. This phenomenon is widely known in the scientific community as “Leveling Up”.

I feel that the technical difficulty of a performance piece should be about half of your total technical ability. When the spotlight’s on you and the cameras are rolling and everybody’s watching, you’re going to get a bit nervous. You will have a to focus on, and you don’t want the difficulty of your content to be one of them.

The arrangements I have on this site, for me, have an extremely low difficulty level….and it still takes me a few hours to film a 3 minute song because of all the other factors at play. Pick something easy, keep your content simple, focus on the more important stuff.

Tone and Showmanship

A couple of other important factors I want to mention are Tone and Showmanship. Tone falls under Technical Ability, as it is a key tool in your tool kit for you to use to express yourself…..especially in public speaking. It should also be part of Knowing your Content, because part of knowing your performance piece is knowing the appropriate Tone to be used, and when to use it.

Showmanship can fall under Content, because you might consciously choose to add certain physical elements to your performance as part of the piece itself. A public speaker may plan to use certain hand gestures, and a Rock Star might have a few “Rock Star Moves” that they may choose to deploy at certain parts of a song. Alternately, Showmanship might also fall naturally under Passion, because once you get really into your performance you are bound to naturally express yourself in some way physically…and the audience is sure to pick up on that. Either way, it’s not a bad idea to have a few ‘moves’ in your toolkit that you can use when you see fit…whether it’s planned or in the spur of the moment.

I wanted to highlight both Tone and Showmanship because they are essential parts of a good performance, although they already fall into some of the categories above.

And that’s it! I hope this article has been able to help you with some part of your life, or at the very least provided a nice distraction from your day at work / school.

Thanks for reading!

Having mentioned how behind I am in terms of good music, I’ve tried to make up for it by putting a list together of my favorite albums of the past few years (excluding 2007). This I feel is a much better representation of what I think is the really ‘good’ music, as these albums have been sitting with me for a while and have stood the test of time.

10) Manitoba - Up in Flames (Apr 2003) - This is the album the Chemical Brothers have been trying to make their entire career but still haven’t been able to, except it was made by some guy in Canada five years ago. Their later works are also good, it’s just that this one’s the best.

9) Red Hot Chili Peppers - Stadium Arcadium (May 2006) - Made me realize how much you can do with very little. Despite their rhythmless drummer, the bass is flawlessly funky and the guitar melodies are a perfect complement. Both discs are thoroughly solid, and neither of them get old.

8 ) Guillemots - Through the Windowpane (July 2006) - Like a sprawling indie/pop orchestra, with a good rhythm section and disco beats. Kind of like a less-loungey Zero 7, with a bigger sense of urgency.

7) Bloc Party - Silent Alarm (March 2005) - Bouncy, beat driven, angsty rock music, driven by the tightest and most effective rhythm sections in indie music today. Super-drummer Matt Tong plays drums in a stereotypically asian fashion - with mathematical precision, attention to detail, and a machine-like sense of rhythm.

6) The Streets - A Grand Don’t Come for Free (May 2004) - Imagine taking a quality TV mini-series about middle class British youths, and watching it through your ears. Descriptive and compelling storytelling with light beats and heavy English accents.

5) Stars - Set Yourself on Fire (March 2005) - Orchestral indie pop? Arh? The fact that I can’t think of a fitting one-line description or comparison for this album is likely a good sign. I can’t count how many times I spun this disc.

4) Broken Social Scene - Broken Social Scene (Oct 2005) - Imagine an indie-rock hippie super-producer, his dozen-plus hippie friends and a (possibly hippie) horn section, locked in a studio. Take the best 14 tracks out of the best case scenario of the resulting mess, and you have this huge and glorious rock album. The production is excellent, and yet it feels like it might all fall apart at any second.

3) Sufjan Stevens - Illinois (July 2005) - if Queen is rock-opera then Sufjan is folk-musical, except far better than that connotation might imply. A very pretty listen.

2) John Mayer - Continuum (sept 2006) - Putting this in the number 2 spot might make you think less of me, but it won’t be the first time you’ve been wrong. (oh!) Say what you will, but listening to this album makes me want to start playing and singing the blues….and anything that makes you want to take action should rank pretty high on any list.

1) Bright Eyes - I’m Wide Awake, it’s Morning (Jan 2005) - Listening to this makes me want to give up music altogether because I will never in a million years be able to write words and deliver them like Bright Eyes can. It’s so good, it sits in this weird realm of demoralization which lies just ahead of the stuff you might find inspirational. All this despite the album’s heavy folk and country taint. Amazing.

ok, the end! Thanks for reading!

I’m usually about a year or two behind the times in terms of new music, so something that’s new, exciting, or groundbreaking in 2007 I probably won’t listen to or understand until 2009. This is the list of ‘good’ music that I really enjoyed this year, with ‘good’ being anything progressive, innovative, or “cool”. Hope you like them too.

9) Jay-Z - American Gangster
It sounds like exactly what it claims to be: Jay-Z as the quintessential American Gangster. If you know anything about Jay Z and/or old-school gangsters, and can picture how awesome it would be if the two did business together, then you have a pretty good idea of what this album sounds like.

8 ) Justice - Cross
When I first heard of Justice and saw their album cover of a giant cross, I thought they were a metal band. It has recently been brought to my attention that they are in fact the exact opposite. Think of what Daft Punk would sound like if they were poppier, funkier, and weren’t robots.

7) Holy Fuck - LP
With a band name destined for mainstream success, Holy Fuck kind of sounds a jam band you’d hear at your friend’s house party…except instead of a guitarist you’ve got some weirdo with lots of random, broken-looking equipment. Noise generators he stole from the engineering lab, and whatnot. Also gone is the pointless meandering…no 10 minute jams. They say what they have to say, rock your socks off, and then move on to the next thing. Their tracks here are loosely played but very tightly arranged, averaging 4 minutes each. Did I mention they rock your socks off?

6) The Go! Team - Proof of Youth
Picture an 80s action-adventure theme song with funky horns, mixed with schoolyard jump-rope chants, mashed up with breakbeats, and played on a cassette tape and through an old boom box. That’s what the Go! Team feels like. If you know The Avalanches, it’s kinda like that, except really really happy. Proof of Youth is very similar to their first CD, Thunder Lightning Strike, so if you like this, get their first one too. After getting sick of this album in mid-2007, I went to their awesome live show and loved it all over again.

5) Burial - Untrue
Think of Moby’s Play album, except mournful, with less pop and more soul. Mix in the dark moody scratchiness of UNKLE or DJ Shadow and dub beats. Serve chilled through headphones after midnight.

4) Daft Punk - Alive 2007
I come from a weird position of being really familiar with Daft Punk’s old catalog, but never really liking them that much…until now. Think of every catchy hook or riff they’ve every played mashed and mixed together into one crazy live set. Most dance sets start at “low” and build up to “high”, but here it feels like they started at “high” and built up to “ridiculous”, periodically bringing it back down to “high” so they have room to make it “ridiculous” again. There are more “omg this is amazing” moments in this mix than in most other mixes I can remember. Not only that but the sound quality is surprisingly good; the beats are bigger, thicker and juicier than any of their studio recordings. I think I sprained my neck listening to this too vigorously. Solid.

3) Kevin Drew - Spirit If…
It feels like a Broken Social Scene unplugged album, except with the same level of messy, grandiose, hippie-style super-production……meaning it’s just as awesome.

2) Kanye West - Graduation
There’s a line in the 007 Casino Royale movie, where M says to 007 something to the effect of “Arrogance and self-awareness rarely go together”. How M feels towards Bond is how I feel about Kanye West. Although he is probably one of the cockiest people alive, his raps show he is acutely aware of each of his vices and has no problems sharing the details and consequences of each one….in rhyme, in detail, and with wit. Judging from his lyrics, he’s actually of the most grounded mainstream hip hop artists out there. Plus, not only are his beats hot, but his collaborations with people like John Mayer and Chris Martin actually work as real songs, not just a cross-genre marketing gimmick.

1) NIN - Year Zero
Before 2007, I was not a NIN fan…..this album kind of changes all that. As is expected from Trent, we get an album full of industrial beats and noise. Most of it here is at a menacing mid-tempo, which I actually prefer to the fast-paced aggressiveness of his earlier work. Although there’s nothing really groundbreaking to be found here, the execution is flawless - every track is amazing. In fact, I think the weakest song here is the big single “Survivalism”. Now, everything in the top 4 was well-executed and could be arguably more original…..but what sets this album apart from the others was the the marketing that went behind the album’s concept. The concept itself is, again, nothing new…..post-apocalyptic future, America as a police state, blah blah blah. How they put the plot into place was pretty amazing. In a technique not so much “grassroots” as “leveraging-your-obsessive-fan-base”, NIN got a PR firm to place ridiculously obscure clues that, when decoded, would hint at a series of secret websites that would draw you deeper into the Year Zero world. The sites themselves are thematically consistent, well thought out, and quite cool. A really detailed listing can be found on http://www.ninwiki.com, check it out. On top of this coolness, the heat-sensitive CD changes colour after you play it, which confused me endlessly when I spun it for the first time.

Anyways, hats off to Trent Reznor for building himself a fake conspiracy theory and pulling us all into it too.

Happy New Year.