Step 1: ANALYSIS

Divide the piece first into main sections, and then subdivide these sections into phrases. The phrase is the basic musical and expressive unit of any piece, and therefore should also be used as the basic learning unit.

Step 2: FINGERING

Mark all of the fingerings for both hands. Since left hand fingering is included in most editions (but should, nonetheless, be carefully examined for possible improvements), this will entail more work on right hand fingering. Careful consideration should be given to finding the easiest possible fingering with the best musical effect. It is important to practice a given passage with the same fingering each time in order to learn more quickly and to produce an accurate, consistent performance.

Step 3: PRACTICE

Begin practice, starting with the first phrase only, carefully avoiding any mistakes. Study should begin by using the metronome set at approximately one half the future performance tempo (this initial speed will depend greatly on the difficulty of the composition). When playing at this speed is mastered with appropriate dynamics, articulations, and timbre, the metronome should be moved up one notch. After this speed is mastered, then one more notch, etc.

When the player has achieved three fourths of the performance tempo, he should go on to the next phrase in the same manner, and so on. After a section has been learned with this method, the whole section should be practiced with three metronome speeds: slow, medium, and fast (the performance tempo). This is the way the section will be studied from now on in order to maintain and perfect it.

Step 4: MEMORIZATION

Using the above method, memorization can quickly take place, again using this phrase by phrase approach.

Step 5: PRACTICE PHRASES OUT OF CONTEXT

After the entire work has been learned thoroughly and memorized, phrases should be practised out of the context of the piece (this is especially useful for compositions that do not lend themselves to easy division into phrases, e.g., fugal writing). Practice the last phrase of the piece (or of a major section) by memory, then the next to the last, and so on, moving from the end forward. Practice similar phrases together so that there will be no confusion under the pressure of public performance.

Step 6: ADDITIONAL TECHNIQUES

Practice without looking at the fingerboard.

Study away from the instrument by mentally recalling all movements of the hands (left hand positions, bar chords, fingerings; and right hand strokes, fingerings, string changes).

So, let’s talk a little more about this John Surman. He actually is from the same generation as my mother (little coincidence hehe), so has been a musician for a long time and achieved great things, another reason I’m so “upset” about not having heard of him before. I mean, how is it possible, some south korean girls band launches a video that you can’t even listen to until the end for being so impossibly bad (this didn’t even happen to me with Lady Gaga, so go figure…), but it has 16 million views in a week and everyone talks about it. And who talks about real great musicians like John Surman? Anyway, back to focus: he especially plays saxophone and bass clarinet and has been playing in lots of different projects with many other great musicians (just to name a few: Dave Holland, Richard Galliano, John McLaughlin, John Taylor, Jack DeJohnette) and although his main genre is located somewhere between Jazz and Ambient / Fusion, he does not limit himself to this, his compositions and performances cover a large spectrum of inspiration, from English folk music, Choral and church music to songs of John Dowland. He also has written music for quite a few movies and dance performances.

But well, if you want to know more about his biography, read on over here.

Wait, while you’re reading, have a listen to some of his tracks:

Winter Wish

Portrait of Romantic!

Whistman’s Wood

Enjoy!

About this series:

One of the ideas I have for this blog is to start periodic post series about a few interesting topics. Like one post a week or a month, about the same topic but always bringing you new (or classic but little known) musical discoveries.

This series that I gave the name “The Alternative Music Lounge” is about presenting you bands and projects that I like a lot or respect much because of the quality of their music although they haven’t made it into the so called “main stream” and therefore probably will remain unknown for many people.

Whatever might be the reasons for this (sometimes their creations are just too good, too unique, lacking any “commercial characteristics”, othertimes it’s just another case of being disregarded by the music industry, we all know what’s usual to happen…), I think the’re more people out there who might like their music but just didn’t have a chance to discover it yet, so I hope these publications of mine might be helpful.

By the way, if you’re a musician and think I might like your music and would like to propose your creations for being featured in a post of this series, you’re welcome to comment this post or any other future post of this series, stating your project’s name, a link to where I can listen to some tracks and a way to contact you.

I promise to try and listen to everyone’s tracks and respond, even if I happen to not accept the proposal.

He was born perfectly healthy and beautiful, eyes wide open and crying on the first second, with 3205 g and 49.2 cm, we called him Pedro Jacinto and immediately fell in love with him.

Now it’s been one week that we left the Hospital and it has been a great adventure, absolutely fantastic, and everything is going well, despite all the little moments of tension / worries and lack of sleep.

I know this is not really adequate on here, but it is such a special and unique moment in your life, it simply has to be shared.

Becoming a father definitely changes you for the better and makes you more complete.

P.S.: I don’t publish a foto of him, because for several reasons I believe it is a bad idea, afterall you never know who is around on the internet…

P.S.2: the title of this post was borrowed from the name of a song by Bezegol, that I have known for some time and really like the lyrics, here they are:

Still remember like it was today,
On my nerves till the nurse came and say:
“your baby’s born everything is o.k.,
Momma’s good you will see them right away.”
Standing next to the door i wait,
Any second its a minute late,
And i wait, and i wait, always wait for you,
To give you my love, and my love is true.
Letting you know i’m always on your side,
No matter the loops that my life goes by.
You know sometimes don’t go like we planned,
But what i need is you to understand,
That dad is doing all the best he can,
So you may grow and be proud of him.
There’s no god in the sky’s above,
Coz for you i have forever love.

What may come in your life for you to conquer…
The quest is to remain stronger.
Watch your steps, don’t get mislead.
The everyday battles are the ones you make your own bed,
Son! i never wanna see you on the run.
From times we together please pay attention.
And listen to the story of my life,
I know its hard past but from me you know it right. aight!
Forever love, keeping our relation tight,
Life struggle. you can count on me on to fight.
Whenever you may need me son, you know that ll be there,
Whatever may be the problem son, you know that i don’t care.
More then a shinning star,your are the light that i see,
I want you to know that you are everything to me.
No mountain high enough, no god up above.
Sincerely yours your father, son.
Forever love.

Moby – Porcelain

Massive Attack – Teardrop

Zero7 – In the Waiting Line

Air – Universal Traveler

Nightmares On Wax – Passion

Chris Coco – Starlight

St. Germain – Rose Rouge

Mr Scruff – Music Takes Me Up  (Ft. Alice Russel)

Triangle Sun – Buddha

Groove Armada – At The River

About this series:

One of the ideas I have for this blog is to start periodic post series about a few interesting topics. Like one post a week or a month, about the same topic but always bringing you new (or classic but little known) musical discoveries.

This series that I gave the name “The Alternative Music Lounge” is about presenting you bands and projects that I like a lot or respect much because of the quality of their music although they haven’t made it into the so called “main stream” and therefore probably will remain unknown for many people.

Whatever might be the reasons for this (sometimes their creations are just too good, too unique, lacking any “commercial characteristics”, othertimes it’s just another case of being disregarded by the music industry, we all know what’s usual to happen…), I think the’re more people out there who might like their music but just didn’t have a chance to discover it yet, so I hope these publications of mine might be helpful.

By the way, if you’re a musician and think I might like your music and would like to propose your creations for being featured in a post of this series, you’re welcome to comment this post or any other future post of this series, stating your project’s name, a link to where I can listen to some tracks and a way to contact you.

I promise to try and listen to everyone’s tracks and respond, even if I happen to not accept the proposal.

Star Trek Google Doodle

As usual, the Doodle is interactive, so you can explore the scenary and actually “go on a mission” (including the famous transporter which beams the onto some weird planet far away with a strange creature on it that you have to defeat…)

Other elements of the picture make play some of the characteristic sounds from the original series.

For those not familiar with the Star Trek Universe, here are some links:

http://epguides.com/StarTrek/

http://www.imdb.com/find?q=star+trek&s=all

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek

http://www.startrek.com/

Now, go check out the Doodle live on Google’s startpage.

So, I wanted to be able to play them on my computer, especially now that I have a new laptop and a nice Ubuntu 12.04 install already tweaked “al gusto”. I’d already done it once, some years ago, so I knew the basics about arcade emulation and even remembered the names of some programs. Then I updated my operating system, changed the pc, so I lost all of it. But in the world of technology, things progress very fast, so when I first started looking again, it wasn’t easy to find. It took a little research, especially because the first program I found (and works quite well) is not able to play one of my favourite games (normally each emulator has a list of compatible games – that often grows over time but almost never reaches the total of all games ever created for certain arcade platform). That’s why I wanted to share my findings, so I might make life a little easier for someone having the same interest.

First, a little about the arcade platform for which I was looking for emulation:

It is a ROM-cartridge based arcade board called NeoGeo and was made by japanese company SNK and was produced from 1990 until about 1996 when it was substituted by more modern products. Many popular games were released for this platform.Here’s the Wikipedia article.

NeoGeo Arcade Machine

The first program I found was gngeo (http://gngeo.berlios.de/), it is quite well known in the Linux emulation world and quite mature and easy to install (some distros even have it in their repositories, that’s how I installed it – along with the graphical frontend xgngeo which makes this emulator very nice and easy to use). I especially like the ease of installation and usage aswell as the graphical frontend. It also is light-weight and seems to work quite well (until now only tested with two games, though), supporting quite a few configurations without getting too complicated.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t run SuperPang, though. Not even the “normal” Pang. Tried to create rom driver files for it (without knowing much, obviously failed…). You don’t know Pang? It’s that great little game where you have to split some “colourful objects” (normally spheres) until they can’t be splitted anymore and disappear. When all objects have been splitted and disappeared, you go to the next level. But if you’re hit by one of them, you lose a life…

Super Pang (game flyer)

I continued my research and found (or “re-discovered”, because I had used it before but didn’t remember) MAME (http://mamedev.org/) and its “derivatives” or ports or whatever you want to call them. This program is a large project (at least regarding number of code lines) because the acronym stands for Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator. One of them is the NeoGeo platform.

The first port I installed (can be found in Ubuntu’s repositories) was the sdlmame port. It does work, and runs Super Pang. But it does NOT feature any of the scale improvement filters which I really, really wanted to have (and which gngeo does feature and I also remembered them from first time I explored the world of emulation). They come with names like hq2x, scale, hq3x, lq2x, etc., and they work by interpolating the image when scaled, thus improving quality (=less rasterization) like explained in this Wikipedia article.

This is very important for me, because most arcade games were made with very low resolutions and today’s screens have high resolutions, so the only choice would be to play a tiny windowed game or to scale with full rasterization (which looks awful).

So I thought: I have to find a emulator capable of playing SuperPang but also of rendering video with a high quality scale improvement filter.

After some research, and having discovered that the xmame port (which I had used some years ago) had died a slow death (and wasn’t mantained anymore), I stumbled on AdvanceMAME ( http://advancemame.sourceforge.net  – also not very active nor mantained, but still very available and quite mature).

This is a port optimized and changed so that it supports many, many video modes, even totally weird ones, designed to drive directly real arcade CRT monitors. Or anything you like. And it also has the hqx algorithms, aswell as many other filters, included by default. All this, obviously, makes the program quite complicated to configure. It’s not in any modern distro’s repositories, AFAIK. But fortunately, it is easily available and compiles without hassles and doesn’t need too much support libraries. So I managed to install it with success. But then I still had to figure out configuration. After reading through lots of documentation and searching the net, I found the necessary options (for the config file which is – at least on my system – located in .advance/advmame.rc in my home directory) and list them here, for your delight (:D) :

To get sound working, I had to use these options:

device_alsa_device dmix
device_sound sdl

Video options (I have a widescreen laptop):

device_video_output fullscreen
device_video sdl
display_aspectx 16
display_aspecty 9
display_expand 1.2
display_magnify 2
display_mode sdl_1366x768

And finally, for the hqx filter to work correctly, I have to use this:

display_resize integer
display_resizeeffect hq

Image format is a little bit distorted (the display_expand tries to correct this, but 1.2 isn’t the 100% correct value, although close), but quality is great, emulation works fine and quick and games are totally playable.

Success!

Another great game I like to play, by the way, is Metal Slug. Here, you are the hero who has to progress in a virtual world full of unfriendly (though stupid) soldiers and their tanks, machines, buildings, planes, etc, all of them being the army of some crazy dictator inspired by Adolf Hitler and you have to kill them all – with obviously extremely powerful weapons and fantastic little funny details in the middle.

Metal Slug (game flyer)

This is also the game I used for comparing the emulation of gngeo and mame. This is what I found:

Sound is much better in Advancemame.

Video performance is similar in both.

Image quality is also very similar, although gngeo seems to have a tiny bug: about 10% of the image on the left and right side is cut away.

Screenshots (made with digicam because I couldn’t take real screenshots):

Metal Slug (under AdvanceMAME)

Metal Slug (under gngeo)

Super Pang (AdvanceMAME)

(just a final notice: for those who don’t know arcade emulation, you might have been wondering how and in which form you get the games themselves. They come in so called “ROM-dumps”, normally in zip files, which is basically a dump read from the original ROM cartridges. They can be found on the internet, but due to their “slightly dubious” legal status (remember they are “copies” of original, paid and copyrighted products) I can’t give you any direct links. Try searching for neogeo roms in google.)

On a more serious note, I can explain the long absence from posting (two months): in July I had to take care of the last (but most complicated and most stressing) tasks related to my job as a music teacher in public school, like preparing exams, watching some more exams and judging some more exams, again. And add to this the usual meetings. On the other hand, me and my wife had to take care of moving out of our (temporary – that is, for one school year) home. At the beginning of this year, we promised each other we would NOT take more stuff than we needed into this home, but I guess we failed a little. About three cars went full with stuff. In the meantime, the month was coming to an end and finally, we had some (very) deserved holidays, of which we spent two days at Sines.

Sines is a rather smallish town at the portuguese west coast, something like mid-way between Algarve and Lisbon. Normally it is known for its very important international harbour and its petrol raffineries. On another hand it also has a nice beach and pitoresque streets and houses, as well as an old castle to offer. But more important than all this (at least for me):

It is the setting of FMM (“Festival de Músicas de Mundo“: something like World Music Festival).

I’ve already been there two years ago and became instant fan. Absolutely great venue, very nice atmosphere, nice people, no stress or hectic masses of audiences (although it does get really crowded) and fantastic choice of bands and musicians from all around the globe. So, I had to come back this year, and will try to go almost every year, too.

This edition, I managed to attend the following concerts:

• Couple Coffee (http://www.myspace.com/couplecoffee)

Portuguese traditional music meets the classics from Brazil with the very musical and alternative interpretation of two brazilians who came to Portugal:  Luanda Cozetti (vocals) and Norton Daiello (bass) with the help of Ruca Rebordão (percussion) and José Peixoto (guitar) recreate their own versions of all-time classics and also some originals of their own, where they play from soul to jazz-funk.

• Dubioza Kolektiv (http://dubioza.org/)

Bosnian band emerging from the ashes of civil war and becoming one of the most popular projects in eastern europe, mixing folclore with reggae, hiphop and plain, hard and noisy rock. Original and interventional lyrics paired with strong rhythms.

• Astillero (http://www.astillerotango.com.ar)

This promising project from Argentina might be one of the best examples for the modern state of Tango, aware of the traditions but inspired by the crowded and uncensored life on the streets of Buenos Aires, taking their tools from Jazz, Rock and even contemporary instrumental composition.

• Fatoumata Diawara (http://www.myspace.com/fatoumatadiawara)
  

A very talented lady from Mali who grew up with the ancestral blues music from the Wassolou region and although having started as an actress, never stopped believing in herself and made her dream come true: become an internationally known singer.

• Staff Benda Bilili (http://www.staffbendabilili.com/)

All members of this ensemble from Republic of Congo have some kind of physical handicap, in fact most of them appear on stage in wheel chairs, making this project a great demonstration of courage and winning the most difficult adversities in life.  Their music, pairing traditional rhythms with Funk and Rumba, won’t leave anybody indifferent.

• Diabo a Sete (http://www.diaboasete.com/)

A portuguese Folk-Rock project with unusual compositions and also a unusual line-up: from a Hurdy-Gurdy (strange instrument, but sounds great… look here if you don’t know what it is: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurdy_gurdy) to traditional flutes, bagpipes, concertinas, mandolin and “cavaquinho“.

• Dhafer Youssef  (http://www.dhaferyoussef.com/)

Definitely the best concert of all, and one of the greatest I’ve ever been at. Absolutely soberb performance, great musicianship and perfect sound. Stunning. I’ve already dedicated one chapter of my series “Alternative Music Lounge” to Dhafer, check it out here for more details. That’s also why I include the video-report of the actual concert he gave at FMM Sines 2012, rather than one of his music videos, those you can find on the article or directly on youtube.

• Mari Boine (http://www.mariboine.no/)

In 2010 (at FMM as well) I heard for the first time one of the very special “throat-singers” of the Norwegian Swami people (Wimme), now it was time to hear Mari Boine, also representing these unique Shaman music traditions.

And that’s it. I wish I could have stayed longer… See you next year, FMM Sines!

I really enjoyed his tunes… dreamy and inspiring, very melodic and showing great musicianship of him and also all other members of the quintet (Alfio Origlio – piano, Jérome Regard – double bass, Julien Alour – flugelhorn, Pascal Rey – drums).

On YouTube I was not able to find videos of the same combo (first two videos is Daniel Mille together with André Ceccarelli, Jérôme Regard, Stéphane Belmondo while the third is with Remy Vignolo, Eric Legnini and Pascal Rey and the last features Alfio Origlio, Jérôme Regard, Julien Alour, Andy Barron) but the music is as good as what I heard on radio, so have a listen by yourself right now:

L’Attente

Les Beaux Jours

Ouro Preto (original by Daniel Goyone)

At Montreal Jazz Fest (video is an excerpt)

To finish this post, here are some more links about him:

http://www.myspace.com/danielmille

http://daniel-mille.artiste.universalmusic.fr/

About this series:

One of the ideas I have for this blog is to start periodic post series about a few interesting topics. Like one post a week or a month, about the same topic but always bringing you new (or classic but little known) musical discoveries.

This series that I gave the name “The Alternative Music Lounge” is about presenting you bands and projects that I like a lot or respect much because of the quality of their music although they haven’t made it into the so called “main stream” and therefore probably will remain unknown for many people.

Whatever might be the reasons for this (sometimes their creations are just too good, too unique, lacking any “commercial characteristics”, othertimes it’s just another case of being disregarded by the music industry, we all know what’s usual to happen…), I think the’re more people out there who might like their music but just didn’t have a chance to discover it yet, so I hope these publications of mine might be helpful.

By the way, if you’re a musician and think I might like your music and would like to propose your creations for being featured in a post of this series, you’re welcome to comment this post or any other future post of this series, stating your project’s name, a link to where I can listen to some tracks and a way to contact you.

I promise to try and listen to everyone’s tracks and respond, even if I happen to not accept the proposal.

It’s an instrumental track, more precisely classical chamber music (string quartet and flute), with a dreamy, slightly sad but beautiful melody, composed by Rita Faleiro and produced by me (production environment was ReNoise, using samples and the final mix was done in Audacity).

Go to this page to listen to the track, a free download is also available.

Hope you enjoy

This post is about an oooooold “addiction” of mine (and many other people as far as I know), more precisely a video game (and believe me, I’m not the video-game-guy AT ALL, I hardly ever play anything…):

Worms Armageddon

Yes, that funny game from 1999 by Team17, about a “nuclear” war between worms.

What?! Don’t know it? Go right now and read more about it, then keep on reading here.

Anyway, this post is not only about this game and me having re-discovered it (again, yes, for the second time, first time was about two years ago, playing against my house mates in my university days), but about something much more special, at least for me:

I am playing it – with almost EVERYTHING working! – on my Linux laptop, yes, you’re reading correctly, here’s a screenshot:

I have to say that this is something I always wanted to do (as I don’t have any windows anymore), but until most recently it was very complicated and didn’t work well at all and you had to mess around manually with patches for WINE.

And so I thought I’d share this with you, might come in handy for someone else on the internet out there aswell.

Well, the secret is a program developed by a programmer and “Worms Addict” who calls himself Lookias, that program is a wrapper and also includes – obviously, that’s the heart of all – a patched version of WINE and libraries.

With this program, all you have to do is install W:A (don’t want to know from where you get it or how, that’s not my business) and then you can directly launch it from there, it will run at first attempt (at least did so in my case). You will find instructions in the package itself and also on the other site I list further down on here.

Great work, Lookias!

The only issue I had was sound, first wouldn’t work at all, but then I did a search on the net, and found the solution (which is NOT well documented on the websites I will list further down on here), so I thought I’d better share it aswell.

Sound will start working if you set “Audio Acceleration” in the WINE Settings dialog (under the Tab “Audio”) to “Software Emulation”. Yes, strange at least, but really effective. Will work 90%, which means, sometimes sound will stop working for a minute or so but then start working again, by itself.

With this, the game is 100% playable, and really well. Only thing I didn’t test (never played it before anyway) is Online playing. But as far as I can read from other users’ experience, this should work aswell.

So, here are the links:

Official Website of W:A

Lookias Website (here you get the fantastic frontend)

Website of ViolatoR (quite well written userguide for the frontend)

Have fun!!!