Studying Music Online

Hey again. Michael Moyes, Student Advisor for Berkleemusic here. I have been furthering my harmonic knowledge this term and have been spending some time thinking about Tritones and their numerous functions in music of all types.

A tritone is a musical interval of three whole steps, or 6 half steps. The interval is also known as an augmented fourth, a dimished fifth, or the ‘devil’s interval’ due to it’s dissonant sound.

This interval has been and continues to be utilized in music of all styles and can be found in tunes like “Maria” (from West Side Story), “Purple Haze, “and even Rachmaninoff’s famous Prelude in C# minor.

Tritone substitutions in chord progressions use the same concepts used to build tritones, but the focus is on the harmonic level, not melodic. These substitutions can be used in 12 Bar Blues, ii V I progressions, and many more complex changes as well.

Let’s take a standard ii V I progression in the key of C major to show a tritone substitution in action.

The typical progression would be as follows…

The chord substituted in the progression will be the dominant 7th, the G7 chord. Three whole tones above the note G is the note Db, which will be our new root for our dominant 7th chord.

The new progression would be as follows…

Musicians use tritone substitutions to vary the feel of repeated chord progressions and to facilitate stepwise motion. Re-harmonizing is one of the more interesting advanced topics taught here at berkleemusic and is covered in Getting Inside Harmony 2, which is authored by esteemed Berklee Professor and Assistant Film Scoring Chair Michael Rendish.

Interested students should either complete Getting Inside Harmony 1 or have equivalent experience.

• Listen to a Tritone Example MP3
• Explore Berkleemusic’s online Music Theory courses and certificate programs

Student Advisor Amy H answers one of our most commonly asked questions, and explains how students interact with their instructors and classmates online.

Berkleemusic’s online winter term begins January 11, 2010. Find out more at berkleemusic.com.

Berkleemusic’s online winter term begins January 11, 2010. Find out more at berkleemusic.com.

Student Advisor Michael answers one of our most commonly asked questions about studying music online with Berklee.

Berkleemusic’s online winter term begins January 11, 2010. Find out more at berkleemusic.com.

Hey there, Liam McCormack, Student Advisor at Berkleemusic here! As we are approaching our Fall Term, starting on Sept 28th, I wanted to take a moment to speak about one of my favorite courses that Berkleemusic offers online, the Lyric Writing: Tools and Strategies online songwriting course.

I was a Songwriting major at the Berklee College of Music and I am very familiar with the content in the Tools and Strategies course. In fact, it was Berklee’s exemplary Songwriting curriculum that really drew me to the college. This course is a wonderful introduction into the world of lyric writing and instructs students on brainstorming lyrical ideas, developing rhyming structures, and many of the other subtleties that go into crafting lyrics to communicate a certain emotion and/or story.

Through experimenting with different rhyme patterns, line lengths, syllable stresses, and much more—you will learn how to take your lyrical ideas and creatively map them out to make your song the best it can be for your listener.

In addition to all the great advice and tools you will pick up in the course, you will also benefit immensely from the feedback coming your instructor and your fellow students. As a songwriter, I can recount many times where I have spent hours and hours on a song and then a listener makes a comment or asks a question about the lyrics–and that feedback opens a whole new creative perspective that inspires further revisions and lyrical improvements.

Lyric writing is a form of expression. Expressing a certain emotion–expressing your unique perspective–perhaps through a narrative story, or simply a catchy sing-a-long chorus.

The Lyric Writing: Tools & Strategies course enables you to channel and organize your thoughts and feelings into a catalog of accessible and imaginative songs. Have fun with it!

I hope you check out this  course and many of our other exciting Songwriting courses.

Hi everyone! I’m Julia Polanco, Student Advisor at Berkleemusic. Our online school has students located in many countries throughout the world, and as you could imagine, musical vocabulary varies between many of these countries. Some of our students already know all the terms in theory, solfege, and harmony in their own language, but they are missing key terms in American English.

Being an international student of Berklee College of Music, I remember wasting a lot of time translating note values, and accidentals while in class or speaking to other musicians. As I believe this to be a common issue, I decided to put together a few guides to help international students learn musical terms used in the United States.

I wanted the guides to be as user friendly and as professional looking as possible, I went to fellow staff member Jonathan Feist for his advice. Jonathan is not only the managing editor of Berklee Press, but he is also a composer, writer, author, and instructor. He authored and continues to teach our Music Notation Using Finale course, so I was thrilled when he offered his help in assisting me with this project.

Feel free to click on the guides below if you want to print them out!

Accidentals and notes.

Measure, staff, key signatures etc.

Note duration, quarter note, half note, whole rest etc.

Hello everyone! I’m Leigh McLaren, Student Advisor at Berkleemusic. Just like my colleague Liam, I work on the Retention side of the team.

I’m here to assist current and returning online students, make sure that they are well prepared before they start, help them choose their future courses, and check in on them throughout their studies.

Our summer term began June 29th and we are at week five of the term already. How time flies!

For the last few weeks, we have been checking in on our students to make sure that they are receiving the finest and most enjoyable learning experience possible. Between weeks three and five, I’m calling and emailing everyone to make sure that everything is going well. It’s very important to get our students’ feedback so that we can advise them in the best way possible.

My personal background is in music business, so I am especially excited to hear how our students are doing in our business courses, and what their future plans are! I also love to hear new things about our other subject areas like production, songwriting, arranging, theory, guitar, and bass.

One of my favorite things about being a Student Advisor is hearing each student’s unique experience with our online courses and programs. I love hearing how their studies have impacted their lives and careers differently—especially since our students come from all over the world, and represent a huge range of ages, from 15 to 70!

If I haven’t talked to you already this term, I look forward to speaking with you soon. I hope your course is going wonderfully, and if you do have any questions at all, don’t forget to contact an Advisor.

My name is Michael and I am an advisor here at Berkleemusic. I come from the world of classical piano where some may argue, reading and interpreting music is more important than creating it.

I felt a strong desire to branch out and explore the Blues and Rock keyboard styles that I love listening to and luckily I found Dave Limina. Dave is a professor in the Berklee College of Music Piano department and has had extensive experience as a pianist, organist, composer, and arranger. Dave teaches Berkleemusic’s online Blues and Rock Keyboard Techniques.

Through video, interactive exercises, discussions and audio examples, Dave easily took seemingly complex musical ideas and made them understandable and attainable for our class.
We learned how to comp and solo in the Chicago Blues, Texas Shuffle, Slow Blues, Rock & Roll, and New Orleans styles (my favorite). Common blues licks such as the cascade lick and professor longhair’s licks are also intertwined within the core content so we can add some virtuosic flare to our playing.

In my opinion this is the perfect course for any players who have been playing the keys for a while and want to branch into Blues, Rock, Gospel, and other modern styles of music. Students should have good basic keyboard playing and reading skills along with knowledge of major scales, 7th chords, and basic rhythmic notation. You will be submitting recorded assignments as .mp3 files. Since I am new at recording, I opted to use a free and easy to use program called Audacity to record my playing. I now have several great recordings I can share with peers and fellow musicians. You can download the program to make your own recordings here.

I created this .mp3 which showcases the “Slow Blues” and “New Orleans” styles. The New Orleans piece is an original tune I wrote for one of my lessons…

Blues & Rock Keyboard Recording (MP3)

Be sure to check out Blues and Rock Keyboard Techniques. You should also watch this amazing performance from Berklee Professor’s Dave Limina and Russ Hoffman below.

Happy Playing!

- Michael Moyes

Hi everyone, I’m Julia Polanco, advisor at Berkleemusic. We just launched the Advisor Blog and I wanted to share with you my favorite certificate of the week: the Specialist in Voice Technique and Musicianship.

Being a vocalist, vocal coach and a Berklee Alumni, I can speak from experience when I say that most singers are not always “respected” in a musicians’ world. A common belief is to think that all there is to being a vocalist is singing a melody line and reciting lyrics. Wrong! We are as gifted musically as any other instrumentalist. It is up to us to take our musicianship to the next level, not just to sing along but live our music, understand it, and interpret it like a trumpet player or a piano player would perform their tunes. Yes, your voice is an instrument and a powerful one, so use it right!

Our Specialist Certificate in Voice Technique and Musicianship is a collection of three courses. It will not only take your vocal and technical skills to an advanced level, but your musicianship as well. Add to it your talent and your dedication and it is the recipe to success for a respected and a trusted vocalist. Let’s take a look at the courses included in my favorite certificate.

Music Theory 101 is the key to understanding pulse, meter, triads, basic chord progressions, music notation and its relationship to a comping instrument: the piano. You will learn how to read, write, and notate music. It is extremely important especially when you have to prepare for an audition or for a rehearsal. It is best to know what the lead sheet you are giving your accompanist is about. Finding out as you are performing for the audition of the year that the song you’ve dedicated so much time to is in a different key, that you are out of tune since there was no intro and you didn’t know where to start is mortifying (yes, I’m speaking from experience).

Basic Ear Training 1 will teach you how to identify different parts of a song, rhythm, key signatures, intervals, and major/minor tonics and triads. You will find it especially useful to get your sight-singing skills up to speed and you will love the fact that you can finally hear harmony parts in a song, find your melody line without hearing the backing track, and start to arrange vocal parts for your background vocalists.

Voice Technique 101 is the icing on the cake. You will get rid of bad habits, polish your breathing technique, you will turn into a healthy singer with daily practice routines, you will feel your range expanding fast and your voice sound more powerful in no time. Getting rid of bad habits is hard, especially when you’ve been singing “the wrong way” for years. Starting fresh with an excellent foundation and no preconceived ideas is the best thing you can do when it comes to mastering such a delicate and fragile instrument in contemporary music.

I highly recommend this certificate to every inspiring or advanced vocalist out there. No matter what your goal is: whether it is towards your career or your personal growth, the most important thing is to approach it as an art and reach for perfection.

Hey, it’s Amy Heidemann!  Like my fellow advisor Liam mentioned, we get to chat with students everyday, so we wanted to feature a “Weekly Favorite” Certificate Program to give you guys the inside scoop.  I’m actually in the midst of the Master Certificate in Music Business and Technology myself, so you’re getting the DIRECT inside scoop here…

My ultimate career goal is to be a self-sufficient artist.  I want to write, perform, record, produce, and market my music!  The reason I chose the Music Business and Technology Master Certificate is because I already have a pretty solid background in performance and songwriting.  I wanted a program to teach me the business lingo and important topics on royalties, publishing laws, and marketing techniques for getting my music out there.  I also needed to know how to record my own, professional sounding demos at home.  There are so many great Certificates to chose from, so why this particular one?

First, I like that it splits Business and Technology right down the middle.  You get half business courses (all essentials for any artist or producer) and half technology or production-based courses.  Hiring a lawyer to consult me about that certain paragraph on a contract or agreement about money issues just doesn’t sit right.  I want to know the basics on how to read contracts and get what I want in terms of revenue and copyright ownership. On the other hand, when I write a song or want to put something down, I can just flip on my system and go!  I am also excited to learn how to edit my performances, tweak the vocal sound, and get a real effective demo put online as an mp3.  Paying $50 -$100 per hour at a studio got very frustrating, especially when it didn’t come out sounding the way I wanted.

Finally, after you’ve gotten into Publishing, Marketing, Recording, Producing, and other valuable areas of study, you have three elective courses.  I chose Critical Listening 1 because I had some issues with feedback and noise interference in my audio tracks.  Finding the solution for this can take a good amount of trouble-shooting, so I figured, why not eliminate it entirely?

Since I chose the Critical Listening course from the provided list of “Recommended Electives,” I am now able to choose the other two electives from ANYWHERE in the catalog.  So, naturally I took a guitar course (so much fun)! Rhythm and Groove Guitar with Bruce Bartlett taught me the real meaning of “pocket.”  Now my rhythm playing/accompaniment to my singing is a lot more natural sounding and diversified.  Prior to this course, I caught myself playing only one rhythmic figure—problem solved.  I’ll be saving my final elective for later because I’ve heard Berkleemusic is launching some awesome new courses this Fall.  In fact, Berkleemusic launches new courses almost every term—so why get tied down?

In conclusion, the Master Certificate in Music Business and Technology is a fantastic program that fits me perfectly.  I’ve recommended it for many other students who have similar interests and they always seem very relieved that there’s a Certificate Program that fits their goals so perfectly.  Get in touch with a Student Advisor if you’d like to find out if this is a good fit for you. If not, there are many other Certificates we’ll be featuring in later weeks.

If so, I’ll see you in class!