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Effective Music Branding Strategies And Tips

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Branding is instrumental in defining and determining the success of any business. This goes without saying in the music industry. People connect emotionally and mentally with music. Finding a way to promote branded music services and to develop music-based marketing strategies for a wide range of clients is the clear goal of all music branding agencies. However, it is the creativity and emotionality that will produce the most optimal results in regard to music branding.

Music boasts tremendous power over human beings. We turn to music when we need motivation, when we want to be happy, and when we are going through rough times, in addition to a plethora of other reasons. Because of the strong emotional connection that music harnesses, many reputable companies and organizations contact music branding agencies in order to identify a way to leverage the power of music when targeting consumers. In order to ensure that your musical selection will empower potential and present consumers, it is imperative that you know your audience in depth. If you release an irrelevant sound, then it can cause you to lose customers and cause detriment to your success.

When used in commercials, endorsements, and sponsorships, music can easily attract attention and interest; but you will want to ensure that you are garnering the respect of your target audience and not merely random consumers. Deploying surveys, entertaining suggestions, and encouraging customer feedback are all avenues to explore when you are trying to deduce how to most effectively connect with your audience. These factors combined with the expertise of a music branding agency should enable you to develop a sound that will resonate with your employees and your customers. It is important to note that there can be high costs associated with your vision depending upon the artist, song, and the popularity of both when you are deciding upon a relevant sound.

Your music selection should convey a message that accurately represents your brand. It should define your values, your goals, and how you choose to communicate. Yet, it should also reveal emotional points that evoke a deeper understanding and connection between your brand and your customers. Music branding can work quite effectively so long as it harmonizes with your other initiatives and seamlessly flows with your overall marketing strategies while simultaneously connecting with your audience on an internal level. If you can successfully accomplish these three elements, then not only will you spark a sense of pride and unity among your employees, but you will also establish your integrity to your consumers.

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

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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.

Salsa Music – Cuba’s Musical Legacy

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Salsa music is sometimes referred to as Latin jazz, Afro-Cuban or Afro-Carribean music. Played in dance clubs or performed in concerts, this is the sound of Cuba, Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic, Colombia, Venezuela and New York. This is Cuba’s musical legacy that rose from its street culture, which shaped the country’s popular music throughout the past several decades.

Literally meaning “sauce” in the Spanish language, salsa is the type of music requiring the perfect amount of essential ingredients. To its enthusiasts, the spicier, the better.

The music starts with a clave rhythm, which commonly is eight beats long and has a 2-3 or 3-2 pattern. This serves as the heartbeat of this genre. The clave should be learned, applied and felt in order to play or dance this colorful and spicy music. Other ingredients in the salsa music recipe are montuno, tumbao and guaganco, among others. These are ostinattos, or patterns, played by the piano, bass, strings and horns all throughout or in certain parts of the song.

This Cuban original music has landed in different parts of the world years ago. Later on, its powerful tunes influenced its various destinations and vice-versa. This Latin music has evolved as it toured several countries. While it is one of the most famous genres today, it is, at the same time, one of the most specialized, since a certain level of musicality and skills is needed for it to be played, sung or danced. Once it is learned and owned, endless jamming and dancing fill the place with the distinctive energy that characterizes Latin culture.

Dance clubs around the world use salsa music frequently. The ballroom dancing boom worldwide only added to the demand for this Latin beat. Salsa clubs and Latin dance federations have grown in number internationally. Schools and universities in all continents of the world started to have dance and music organizations dedicated to teaching the fundamentals of the genre to the extent of flying in bands and instrumentalists from Cuba and Puerto Rico.

The heat of salsa became unstoppable like wildfire and influenced other genres, even classic jazz. Jazz performers and composers started to utilize Latin music in their pieces, either in a certain part of a song or for a featured solo section. The great Dizzy Gillespie, for example, did this in “A Night in Tunisia,” an ingenious mix of Latin and jazz standard.

Other genres influenced by its contagious rhythm are disco, funk, pop and even one of its roots, African music.

Salsa bands use a smorgasbord of percussion instruments including the clave, guiro, maracas, bongos, timbales, conga drums and many others. Their rhythm section is usually a party of bass, piano, guitar, strings or horns, a chorus and a lead vocalist. In some groups, they use a special type of guitar, either a tres or a quarto, a guitar that has three or four strings only.

The next time you listen to these bands, listen very well and you will hear them infuse other music styles into their salsa tunes. Other genres you may hear within a salsa piece are cha-cha-cha, bolero, guaganco, Cuban son montuno, Puerto Rican bomba and plena, and Dominican merengue.

If you are a fan of salsa or Latin music, you would love favorites like “Che Che Cole” (Willie Colon and Hector Lavoe), “Hechicera” (Oscar D’ Leon), “Congo bongo” (Larry Harlow) and “El rey del mambo” (Tito Puente), among others. If you would like to try listening to this genre for the first time, some recommended tunes for you would be “No Sabes Como Duele” (Marc Anthony), “Campina” (Afro Cuban All Stars), “Juliana” (Coco Valoy) and “Melao de Cana” (Oscar D’Leon).

Kids Music – Audiation And Learning

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An important building block for learning music skills and concepts is audiation. You may be familiar with the term inner hearing. The term audiation (inner hearing of music or silently hearing music) was coined by music education researcher Edwin E. Gordon.

Audiation is Gordons term for hearing music in the mind with understanding. It is the process of thinking music and comprehending music in the mind. Gordon describes audiation as the foundation of musicianship.

Audiation is the process of mentally hearing and comprehending music, even when no physical sound is present. It is a cognitive process by which the brain gives meaning to musical sounds. In essence, audiation of music is analogous to thinking in a language, as said by Edwin E. Gordon

Mary Ellen Pinzino states that audiation is a way of knowing in melody and rhythm. It is a unique human capacity outside the realm of words. To audiate is to “think” music, but in melody and rhythm rather than in words. Audiation is another way of knowing. Audiation is the musical imagination. It is the man-made music of the mind. It is the sound fantasy that provides the framework for understanding the music we listen to, the music we perform, and the music we read and write.

Audiation is a process. It is the construction of meaning in music. It is the process of making musical sense of the music we hear, perform, read, and write. Just as thinking is essential to speaking, listening, reading, and writing language, audiation is essential to tuneful and rhythmic performance, music listening, reading, and writing. Audiation is the whole of music literacy, as said by Mary Ellen Pinzino

Audiation or inner hearing takes place when we silently hear and give meaning to music without the sound, i.e., thinking a melody, clapping a rhythm pattern from a song while thinking the melody. The development of audiation is basic and invaluable in building all musical skills. We should always strive to cultivate the audiation of rhythm and tonal patterns, melodic lines, and phrases. Audiation must be the first step in ones music experience prior to introducing notation, and other aspects of music theory.

Try this exercise to experience audiation or inner hearing. Silently think the melody of Mary Had a Little Lamb. Did you think one note at a time? Or did you think groups of notes. Did you internally hear the notes as a pattern?

We do the same thing when we silently hear language. We hear words, not letters one at a time. The more words we have in our vocabularies, the better we hear and comprehend the meaning of what we are hearing. Just as we give meaning to language, we must give meaning to music through relevant patterns of tones and rhythms. Likewise, the more tonal and rhythm patterns we have in our music vocabularies, the better we will hear and comprehend the meaning of the music. To help your child or student develop music listening and speaking vocabularies, have the child listen and move to a variety of tunes. Invite them to sing many different melodies.

It is very important to develop audiation or inner hearing and listening skills in the early years of a childs life. What a powerful gift and music foundation to give a child.

The Extra Terrestrials Show At Chennai Music Academy

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The Premiere of the show Extra Terrestrials was held today at the Music Academy.

The show began with a performance by the Golden Power- the two men Sandor Vlah and Gyula Takacs who were painted in gold displayed an amazing combination of strength, skill and art by effortlessly performing hand balancing acts and taking on each other’s weight.

The audience was still recovering from the wonderful feats performed by them, when Wolfgang Bientzle the German Wheel Acrobat, came up with an awesome performance on the wheel to exclamations of ‘wow’ in the audience.

Erik Ivarsson’s antics on the unicycle left the audience speechless with amazement, while Jerome Murat a mime, illusionist and ventriloquist captivated the audience with his act. Watching him was like watching a magic performance- should be watched to be believed.

The audience was enthralled by Anton Monastyrsky as they watched him get in an out of the hula hoop and spin circles around it until the hoops almost became a blur. No wonder he is also called The Lord of the Rings.

Not only was Roma Hervida’s performance spell binding but her very presence was magnetic. Her dazzling performance had most of us in the audience at the edge of our seats!

The final performance by Laser man, Theo Dari who was bending, cutting and restoring laser points to create a visual display that was truly enchanting. You can take it from us-we did not want the performance to end!

What else can we say about the performances other than ‘Wow’?
You have to watch the show to believe how good it is.

The shows are taking place on February 3,4,5,6 and 7, 2010 thrice a day, at Music Academy.