Attention all musicians, arrangers, and composers!

I highly recommend you to visit the blog of a young, incredible composer of film!:

Benjamin Botkin

Botkin, 17, has spent over10,000 hours studying the topic of music and gained much of his philosophy from searching out the Scriptures. He is a remarkable young man and is a great role model to all aspiring composers. And a wonderful example to start using your God-given gifts and talents at an early age. His blog is a great place to gain helpful tips, interesting facts, get recommemded links to other composition sites, listen to samples of songs he’s composed (which are incredible!), read reviews of soundtracks, etc. It’s a great site to frequent.
I’ve gotten a lot of helpful information from his blog.

GO CHECK IT OUT ALL YOU MUSICIANS!

Having trouble sticking to the correct rhythm in your song? Try doing some of things below:

• Hum the tune while you play.
• Count (mostly with metronome, but after a few times, try counting without it).
• Play just one hand and hum the tune of the other while you silently play its notes. (Then switch.)
• Be the conductor of your song! (Literally. Make your hand [or if you have a wand] do the motions a conductor does and follow your song’s melody.)
• Come up with your own creative way and comment about it.

Each day I tried a different one of these techniques on my song ”Summer Sunset”  and they all worked really well! The two I thought worked the best were the 1st and 2nd ones. (I didn’t try the last one, however.  )

About a year ago I was working on “The Clear Stream by: Johann Burgmuller” and was to the point where I had it down, but the mood wasn’t right and something was missing! Natalie and I tried a couple different things, but the song still didn’t sound like a “stream”. We were thinking through different possibilities at my lesson one day…when all of a sudden, Natalie got the idea to check out YouTube. If I remember correctly, her thinking behind this was to see how others played the song and see how they approached it. So we watched a couple videos, and to my surprise, they were very helpful and insightful! I could see how they were phrasing according to the mood/style; I could tell they really brought out the dynamics (which were very key-especially with this song). And, they applied a very key technique I lacked: Right-Hand Rotation + Smoothness As you can tell, I learned a lot just from watching a couple online videos!

Next time you feel something’s amiss in one of your songs, try watching it on YouTube; I’m sure you’ll gain a few helpful tips.

Here’s the wonderful result I experienced after applying the things I learned from YouTube…ENJOY!: