Author Archives: blogger

The Different Types Of Spanish Music

Posted on by

Salsa

One of the more well-liked varieties and entertaining to dance to is the salsa type. Its rhythm can be detected the moment it’s heard which makes a person to want to begin dancing and moving toward vibrant sound. It’s very easy to find and is available on many different variety albums making it simple to attempt. There are also a multitude of sites where a fan can enjoy free online music, which fortunately won’t cost them nearly anything but some time. Having some of this great dancing music in your collection is going to be fantastic for your dancing footwear and thus consider downloading free music-get some tunes without paying!

Tejano Music

Another wonderful type of Spanish music is often a type that began on the Texas border and frequently blends both English and Spanish words. The sound is similar to rock, rock country and R& B. The term Tejano refers to a number of the Spanish community that resides in Texas. They’ve got their own traditions and ideals that come across evidently in their music. Although it borrows from both Mexican and American music it is unique and has its very own essence. Among the most well-known singers known for applying this style on many radio channels was Selena and her music is still appreciated today.

Nueva Cancion

This Latin American music borrows influence from Chile and Cuba giving it an individual sound that is both soulful and delightful. There are many folk style variety groups that an individual can enjoy as well as individuals who make this style known and pleasant. It is often a progressive, very lyric influenced type that typically offers social commentary along with wonderful tunes.

Styles That Are Imported

There is a really wide variety of different types of Spanish music all originating from the various nations which use Spanish as their primary language. From Spain you will find Rumba, Pasodoble, and Flamenco. All three of these types have made it into the many other nations that use Spanish and are enjoyed for both dancing and hearing enjoyment. It is also quite feasible to find them as free online music. Consider downloading free music and try Argentine Rock or Chilean Rock for a little bit of lively fun. Both Cuba and Mexico offer their own make of Hip Hop that is a hit on American dance floors and incredibly gratifying.

How Does Music Influence Our Daily Life

Posted on by

We cant deny that music can affect our state of mind, influencing our daily life, and the reason for this is mysterious. We always look for a music that is something livelier while doing some physical work or exercises or out socializing on a larger group and keep listening to relaxing music for a nice and quiet romantic dinner. An increased rate of car accidents ican be caused by listening to fast music while driving and based on recent studies the Mozart effects claim to increase intelligence. We might have heard of farmers who increase their production by playing music to their animals. Below are the main aspects of music and their facets in turn that influence our daily life.

Tempo & Rhythm

Pitch Melody and Harmony

Music suggests movement as it moves in time. Tempo and Rhythm is combined to have an immediate physical impact on our perceptions. The rhythm of an object suggest more or less frequent movement to qualify the repetitive nature of the underlying beat, even though the tempo of a piece of music might be slow and relaxed. The tempo of a piece of music roughly equates with the heartbeat associated with corresponding state or emotions that the music suggest. A high frequent of notes can suggest a degree of contained excitement within that relaxed state. Music tends to have a steady tempo to it, often measured in beats per minute “. Most of the music based on simple observation is in the range of 50-200 beats per minute, the same as the extreme range of our heartbeats.

Anything in the range 60-80 beats per minute is calm and relaxed, less than 60 often very relaxed, introspective or even depressed. 80-100 is moderately alert and interested. 100 upwards is increasingly lively, excited or agitated and, since we crave some degree of excitement from our entertainment, 80-120 is quite a common tempo, and even 120-160 is common in some energetic situations, since there is a strong degree of suggestion between the heartbeat and music tempo. Music moves in time and suggests movement, and we tend to associate music unconsciously with movements made by our bodies while talking, walking, running, dancing, riding, etc.

Pitch, Melody & Harmony

Pitch on its own affects our perception. It depends on how we perceived sounds and music providing a basic scale from high= light, happy, carefree” to low = dark, sad, ominous.” We must find a large thing more threatening than a smaller one as part of our evolutionary heritage. In general bigger objects make deeper noises whether long column of air or long strings in a musical instrument, big chest, large animal footsteps, or large objects banging together. Conversely smaller instruments, short columns of air, short strings, small animals or objects make higher pitch noises. A Melody can be preferred if sounds are reasonably close together with a variety of nice harmonious intervals between them and a rhythm is similar to that of speech. A good melody (even if it doesn’t have words) is often one that we could hum, sing or whistle. Generally melody consists of a linear sequence of tones. The notes should have durations which are not too short and not too long, and should not be in an extreme range or shouldn’t have large awkward jumps between them. Although instrumental musical can stretch those boundaries a little, melodies in its way are very similar to sentences that our brains are designed to speak and listen to.

Harmony is the combination of tones with different pitches, Even though some are seem to be close to the combination of notes is completely the natural set of different notes produced by something vibrating and easily demonstrated musically of brass instruments. Those natural (without keys) instruments such as bugle, octaves, fifths and thirds produced are a series of notes. That is so well together to make harmonious ” sounds like major chords. String instruments can be demonstrate the lowest notes of the harmonic series by playing the strongest ” harmonics” of the strings which divide the length into fractions like halves, thirds, quarters, fifths, etc. All that varies in degrees within all notes, and their proportions help to make sounds their unique color or tones, is always presented by harmonic.

Repetition is the simplest form of PATTERN. If we see something familiar, then it triggers memories and related thoughts are sometimes consciously and unconsciously. The repetition need not to be exact but “similar” enough to trigger familiarity. The aspects of our intelligence allowed us to adopt in so many different climates and conditions that make the best use of available shelter and resources, to build language and culture to communicate to each other in succeeding generations. It also allow us to appreciate and to create pattern for its own sake in the form of visual and aural arts which human brains particularly seem to have a highly developed and flexible pattern recognition capability.

How To Improve Your Sight-reading (organ, Piano And Keyboard)

Posted on by

As an organist, I have been working in club land in the North of England for the past 30 years or so and one of the crucial qualifications in this environment is the ability to sight read music on demand.
When I say music this can be anything from a beer matt to a ripped piece of paper repaired with selotape and stained with beer.

To be fair most of the music is written by professionals and is nice to read but not always easy.
As a club organist, you do not get a band call. In fact, you are lucky to get five minutes to scan through between 10 and 15 pieces of music. Some written in different keys, and every organist will tell you they hate it when they get the dreaded 6 sharps or 6 flats or even 7 sharp keys in a piece of music that just happens to contain a solo especially written for you.

So how do you improve your sight-reading? Well I asked my music teacher this very question as I embarked on my club land career. His answer was to practice sight-reading. He went on to tell me that session musicians practice by picking up any music book start playing on page one and continue until they have finished the book.

Does it work? Yes it does. Try it for yourself, pick up any piece of music you can find, preferably one that you are not that familiar with, then start to play, but do not stop. If you make a mistake it does not matter, you are not practising how to play this piece of music you are practising sight-reading this piece of music.

If you really want to test yourself. Get yourself an audience. I practice my sight-reading every week in front of a 200 plus audience. Its surprising how your concentration improves.

Calm Stress – Using Music To Effectively Reduce Stress And Anxiety

Posted on by

Most of us are familiar with the fact that music has an effect on our mood and feelings. It can allow us to relax or help us to come alive. Some people even find it hard to function without continuous background music. The great news is that music has been shown to effectively reduce stress and anxiety and can be of great help in relieving certain symptoms. If you’re looking for a quick and easy way to reduce stress, then perhaps it’s time to try a regular dose of your favourite music. Read on to find out how music can help you reduce stress and anxiety.

Stress and anxiety are brought on by our perception of being in a situation where we are not able to cope effectively or where fear is involved. When our stress response is activated, it tends to raise the heart rate and release stress hormones such as cortisol and adrenaline into the body, which suppress the immune system and stimulate us to prepare for “fight or flight”. When stress happens on a regular basis, we will start to experience stress related problems such as heart disease, stomach and bowel disorders and reproductive problems.

Some people cope better with stress than others and this often depends upon your personality type and your perceptions and outlook in life – for example, whether you view certain situations as challenges or problems or how much support you receive from the people around you. Men tend to react more to stress factors more than women, although when women take on male roles, this difference is not so pronounced.

The good news is that music and music therapy have been shown to reduce the activation of these responses and calm our symptoms of stress. Tests in various clinical situations have consistently shown music to help patients face their fears and reduce their anxiety. In one test, when music was played before and during surgery, 93% of patients found it helpful in reducing stress. Studies have shown that music helps to lower blood pressure, reduce heart rate, and lower levels of stress hormones in addition to decreasing anxiety. In some studies, those with the highest levels of anxiety were found to benefit the most.

Of course the music that can help us to reduce stress is often subject to individual preference and specific situations. Our response may vary, depending upon volume, type of music, familiarity and current mood. Loud or fast music may have the effect of stimulating us rather than relaxing us. Generally the most relaxing music would be relatively slow with a repetitive rhythm and stable contours.

So, next time you start to feel stressed, why not sit back, relax and try listening to one of your favourite soothing tracks, to help relieve those symptoms? There is a weight of evidence to suggest that this should help you to feel better. And, if you find that it does help, be sure to incorporate music amongst your regular stress management strategies.

How To Get Your Music On Spotify – And Earn Money On It!

Posted on by

When I first started making music back in the 1980’s, I didn’t think I ever could get my music out to a large audience – and getting payed for it never ever crossed my mind.

During the years I created thousands of tunes. Many compositions were created together with friends, and later I started to make demos that we sent out to record labels. Together with a friend, we got signed on a small Swedish label that wanted to release one of our techno/trance tracks. We were of course very happy for this, and had big plans for the future. This is the first time I came across talks about earning money in context of our music.

However, that record label got into economic problems and we never saw our tune get released. Sadly so, because we both thought it was a very good song and we had a strong concept. The band name we choose was Cube, and we created some sort of mix between techno, trance and euro-disco.

The whole disco scene has always interested me, and I started up a large streaming radio channel via an online service back in the late 1990’s. This proved to be successful, especially since I played only Italo Disco and had many very obscure and different songs in the playlist. At one time, the radio station – then called SouthPole Radio – was the largest Italo Disco radio station on the internet.

But it is costly to run a radio station. Not only hosting and bandwidth – it also costs money to make it legal. All this was done by the online service, but I never got anything back. My radio station was free for all to listen to, and even though I recieved many happy emails about how good the station was, I spent more and more money on the music.

The station did inspire me to keep writing my own music, and I started yet again to create own tunes. This lead to buying equipment, and somewhere during 2000-2001, I created songs with an Amiga 1200 as sequencer (and sampler) hooked up to a Novation BassStation keyboard, a Roland TR-505 (a not so good drum machine) and a Roland SC-88 MkII – a very nice synth module with lots of good sounds.

But over the years, different software sollutions proved to be an improvement to the hardware. The equipment was sold and production started with only different sort of software programs, using everything from PC, Mac and even Atari computers.

When I first laid hands on Spotify I was amazed. Spotify is a very good music streaming service that is free in many parts of the world. But even the paid accounts are worth the money. Spotify tries to distribute all music ever published, which I believe is a hard and tough, but very good, goal.

Since Spotify is available all over the world today, and the fact that they have so much different music, there were no more use for an Italo Disco exclusive radio station anymore. SouthPole Radio was therefore turned into a record label, and in November 2009 SouthPole Radio released its first album: Antarctica, by Pingo (spotify:album:7zUqiTY4BmwXXUWhP1kyti).

Before we released any album at all, we made a lot of research on how to actually release music on Spotify. First, we wanted to release for UK and USA charts too, and other media centers as Apple’s AppStore, Amazon and such. However, this proved to be fairly expensive, and without our label and artist name well known, we didn’t want to take that chance.

However, several different online systems (Ditto Music was the one we finally signed with) had very cheap methods for distributing to Spotify. SouthPole Radio therefore decided to exclusivly launch the first album on Spotify via this online system. It was very easy too!

Here is how we did it:
First we saved all the tunes in mp3-format in 320Kbps or higher resolution. After that, we created an account with Ditto Music and payed the 2 up front fee. This is a monthly fee that has to be payed for hosting, accounting and such. It is very cheap, and if you get 100 streams per month, you will break even.

You then upload the tunes together with a 800×800 pixel JPG-picture that is your cover art.

That’s it! After that, it takes about 4-5 weeks, and then your music is live for as long as you pay the 2 monthly fee.

For each stream that people listen to in Spotify you will get 0.02. This is also payed out to you monthly.

This is probably the most easy way – and maybe even the cheapest – to get your music on Spotify – and get payed for it! With a bit of marketing, you will get a lot of listeners, and the more listeners, the more you get payed.

If you then update your account on Ditto Music with downloads and other sales, you can keep selling your music for a profit.

If you want to know more, check out SouthPole Radio’s Official Website (http://www.SouthPoleRadio.com) and read our constantly updated news where we write about our newest releases, how to create your own album, how to get more listeners on Spotify and other interesting and important information that will help your own music career.