Miscellaneous

As soon as you start working with cables, you run the risk of cooking up cable spaghetti. To help you organise your set-up, we’ve listed five cable management tips. Dive in before you tie yourself up in knots.

Solo-podcasting isn’t all that difficult. A simple USB microphone or an XLR microphone-plus-audio-interface set-up alone gets you pretty far. Throw in a pair of headphones and some recording-and-editing software and you’re practically all set. However, things get a lot more complicated the second you invite one or more guests to your podcasts. Luckily, with the help of this blog, you should be able to build a set-up that can accommodate them – whether they’re in the same room or calling in via Skype or Zoom!

At Bax Music, we’re well aware of just how many devoted music lovers there are out there. We’re also equally aware of just how much all of you lovely music lovers enjoy sharing their thoughts on the subject. As such, we want to open up our very own Bax Music Blog to any music-focused bloggers who want to share the love, and give them access to a wide audience, under their very own name!

Introducing the C-minor scale, this blog follows up on the ‘Learning to Read Music: The C-Major Scale’ blog and aims to teach you how to play the scale in different keys (D, E, F, G and A). Again, it doesn’t matter if you play piano, recorder, guitar or violin – any instrument can be used here.

You might know the deal. You’re at a wedding reception and an A4 sheet of paper is unceremoniously thrust into your hand. Ahhhhh … Auntie Pauline has taken it upon herself to re-write the words to ‘Your Song’ and you can only stand as witness as she very sweetly and very brutally murders one of the best love songs of all time. But, what if you wanted to offer the happy couple something even more unique? Something even more personal? Here, Guestblogger and singer-songwriter Kevin shares his tips for crafting a tailor-made wedding song.

Making a mixtape that’s good enough to enter into a contest can be a daunting task, but what you get in return is usually more than worth the hassle: valuable experience, exposure, new contacts, and so on … But how do you make a mixtape that distinguishes you, and only you, from the immense sea of other Djs out there? Guestblogger, Amar Amlani (Dice DJ) reveals everything he’s learnt about the subtle art of making contest-worthy mixtapes.

Gaffer tape or duct tape? Line up a few rolls of each and you won’t be able to tell the difference but as soon as you get them in your hands, you’ll immediately know which is which. This isn’t much of a surprise since they are in fact completely different things. So, while duct tape is known for being able to fix any of the world’s problems, why is it that lighting and sound technicians turn to gaffer tape instead? We explain all in this little slip of a blog!

If, as a musician, you find yourself staring at sheet music like an illiterate puppy staring at an episode of Countdown, then you’re not alone! It can be endlessly frustrating if you’re more than able to play your instrument, but learning to play a new piece costs you weeks if not months of your precious life. Maybe you give up halfway through, maybe you just keep plodding on; in any case, you probably wish you were just better at reading music. Or maybe you’re good at it, but just want to speed the process up. All of this is possible!

You’re likely to have seen a musician perform, or at least heard of one who performs with feeling as they play or sing. This particular musical feeling or expression is not only created using tempo, rhythm, and a melody, but conveying expression in a piece also has a lot to do with dynamics. This blog has been written for beginners who want to understand what dynamics mean when it comes to music, how this is notated by symbols and terms in a manuscript, and how to interpret these signs and symbols.

It’d be a shame if you avoided sharp (♯) and flat (♭) notes simply because you don’t know their exact meaning. However, this is important information to know if you want to play a wide variety of music using sheet music, chord progressions or another kind of music notation. As such, in this blog, I’m going to teach you the difference between sharp notes and flat notes, and how you should use them.

“That’s major!” some might exclaim when hearing that one of their mates has had a day of it. But in terms of music, Major can refer to something that feels a lot more cheerful, while minor tends to have a more sad vibe. But is this always the case? And how does this difference actually happen? In this blog, I’m going to be saying a lot about how ‘Major’ and ‘Minor’ actually works in music so that you can not only hear the difference, but actually understand it and why it happens at all.

And so we come to the third edition of our blogs about reading music. In the last two, we covered the C-Major scale and the Minor scale, which hopefully gave you a better idea of how to read notes on a stave. We also showed you how to find all of these notes on a piano, keyboard, and guitar. If you’re a drummer, you can find some helpful tips for reading drum notation in our blog, Drum Notation 101. In this blog though, we’re going to cover the mystery surrounding rhythm, tempo, and measure. Of course, if you understand all of this already and want to dive a little deeper, then feel free to check out our written-for-purpose music books.