A Twist In My Story

Slow down, the world isn't watching us break down
It's safe to say we are alone now, we're alone now
Not a whisper, the only noise is the receiver
I'm counting the seconds until you break the silence
So please just break the silence

The whispers turn to shouting
The shouting turns to tears
Your tears turn into laughter
And it takes away our fears

So you see, this world doesn't matter to me
I'll give up all I had just to breathe
The same air as you till the day that I die
I can't take my eyes off of you

And I'm longing, for words to describe how I'm feeling
I'm feeling inspired
My world just flip turned upside down
It turns around, say what's that sound
It's my heart beat, it's getting much louder
My heart beat, is stronger than ever
I'm feeling so alive, I'm feeling so alive

My whispers turn to shouting
The shouting turns to tears
Your tears turn into laughter
And it takes away our fears

So you see, this world doesn't matter to me
I'll give up all I had just to breathe
The same air as you till the day that I die
I can't take my eyes off of you

I'm finally waking up, a twist in my story
It's time I open up, and let your love right through me
I'm finally waking up, a twist in my story
It's time I open up, and let your love right through me
That's what you get
When you see your life in someone else's eyes
That's what you get, that's what you get

So you see, this world doesn't matter to me
I'll give up all I had just to breathe
The same air as you till the day that I die
I can't take my eyes off of you
This world doesn't matter to me
I'll give up all I had just to breathe
The same air as you till the day that I die
I can't take my eyes off of you

Stranger

Turn Around
Turn Around and fix your eye in my direction
So there is a connection
I can't speak
I can't make a sound to somehow capture your attention
I'm staring at perfection
take a look at me so you can see
how beautiful you are

you call me a stranger
you say I'm a danger
but all these thoughts are leaving you tonight
I'm broke and abandoned
you are an angel
making all my dreams come true tonight

I'm confident
but I can't pretend I wasn't terrified to meet you
I knew you could see right through me
I saw my life flash right before my very eyes
and I knew just what we'd turn into
I was hopeing that you could see
take a look at me so you can see

you call me a stranger
you say I'm a danger
but all these thoughts are leaving you tonight
I'm broke and abandoned
you are an angel
making all my dreams come true tonight

you are an angel
making all my dreams come true tonight

take a look at me so you can see
how beautiful you are
x4

your beauty seems so far away
I'd have to write a thousand songs to make you comprehend how beautiful you are

i know that I can't make you stay
but I would give my final breathe to make you understand how beautiful you are
understand how beautiful you are

you call me a stranger
you say I'm a danger
but all these thoughts are leaving you tonight
I'm broke and abandoned
you are an angel
making all my dreams come true tonight

you call me a stranger
you say I'm a danger
you call me a stranger

Song Writing: To Find Yourself In The Music You Compose

What is songwriting? What is composing? Do you really compose when you write songs or are you just copying?

If song writers make a living on their writing it will put a lot of pressure on them. Some song writers are constantly listening for what's popular and are trying to imitate hooks in songs.

I can see two ways to go as a song writer:

1. Listening to a lot of hit songs and trying to write similar songs. By listening to songs and reading a lot on what's up trying to feel what type of songs will be popular in the near future.

2. Trying to be yourself and just work on creating songs you like yourself in the hope that others will feel the same.

The last method is for me the most rewarding way to go as far as personal growth is concerned. I feel good and happy when I am creative as a song writer and feel that the process involves something about knowing myself better.

In the long run it might also create the best hit songs too. The song Yesterday is just one example of a different hit song.

Writing songs can be a very rewarding activity and the level of originality depends on how you write your music. You can help the creative parts of your brain to be activated or use the more calculating parts or a combination of both.

May I share a few tips from my own song writing experience:

1. Sit down with your guitar or at your piano singing or humming without expecting to create something brilliant. When you allow yourself to wander away a bit from your calculating parts of the brain and into the exciting forests of imagination and creativity you can come up with fantastic things.

2. Limitations can help your creativity. Give yourself some limitations by for example using a chord progression like G Em Am D7. Many songs use this progression but there will be room for more. You can of course use a more odd one like E C C#m G#m.

3. Record yourself playing around humming with your guitar or piano. Listening to what you have come up with a few days later can help you find interesting melodies or hooks to use in your songs.

Sometimes you can feel that you are not able to write songs like the song writers you like but they can't write songs that is you. A comforting thought, isn,t it!

How Many Chords Are There, Anyway?

Since chords (the main component of harmony) are one of the three most vital elements of music - the others being melody and rhythm - it would be useful to know how many chords there are. And it doesn't matter whether you play piano or guitar or some other instrument - chords are chords.

It's certainly not necessary to learn all the chords in the whole wide world, but it is necessary to learn some of them - at least enough to allow you to harmonize the songs you would like to play.

But meanwhile, there are 3 chords -- just 3 -- that you absolutely, positively have to know. If you don't know these three, there's hardly a song in the whole world that you could play. But by knowing just 3 chords, you can play hundreds, if not thousands of songs! And those chords are simply the primary chords in any given key:

·The I chord (the chord built on the 1st degree of the scale)

·The IV chord (the chord built on the 4th degree of the scale)

·The V chord (the chord built on the 5th degree of the scale)

For example, if you were playing in the Key of C, the I chord would be C (c, e, g), the IV chord would be F (f, a, c), and the V chord would be G (g, b, d).

But as you probably know, there are thousands of other chords, so it would be helpful to at least know of their existence and maybe someday learn them.

So here goes:

Since there are 12 major keys one can play in (not counting enharmonic keys - keys that sound the same but are written differently), there are:

*12 major triads (a triad is a 3 note chord)

*12 minor triads

*12 diminished triads

*12 augmented triads

*12 diminished 7th chords (4 note chords)

*12 major 6th chords

*12 minor 6th chords

*12 dominant 7th chords

*12 major 7th chords

*12 minor 7th chords

*12 half-diminished chords

*12 9th chords

*12 flat 9th chords

*12 9th/major 7th chords

*12 9th/minor 7th chords

*12 11th chords

*12 13th chords

*12 suspensions

*12 flat 5th chords

*12 flat 5th maj 7th chords

If that's not enough chords for you, remember that each chord can be inverted - turned upside down. So multiply all the triad chords by 3, and all the 4 note chords by 4, and all the 5 note chords by 5....

Then there are:

· poly-chords - chords that combine two or more other chords, and

· voicings - the way chords are positioned on the piano keyboard

And that's just in one octave. A standard piano has 7 octaves, so multiply all that by 7 and you get the answer to how many chords there really are:

More than you can count.

But again, you don't need to know them all. Just master enough so that you can play the songs you want to play, then gradually over time learn more and more chords. Your musical world will continue to grow and maturity as a musician will become obvious to others.

Digital Music - Home Studio Music Recording

Home recording has come a long way in the last few decades. Many people do not realize that much of what they hear on T.V. and in commercials is electric.

Many people still have a negative connotation about how electric music sounds. They think that it must always have a cheesy sound.

Part of this stigma is the confusion over midi. and wav. sound files. Simply put, midi is a signal that is sent to a sound card and triggers a note on a preset instrument sound. Therefore, the sound you get from a midi. sound file will only be as good as the sound card you are using.

Even if you record a midi file with a good sound card, if someone else plays it back using an inferior sound card, the result will be inferior sounds.

Now there are very excellent sound cards available and also software synthesizers. The thing to do is to convert your midi. file to wav. The way to do this is to play your midi file through the desired sound card and record it at the same time, using the recording application that comes with your sound card.

For windows PC, I like the SoundBlaster cards, such as the Sound Blaster 16 PCI 4.1

There are many excellent software programs for recording on windows PCs. One I like in particular is Cakewalks Plasma recording program. You can record multiple tracks, just like a professional studio. Plasma has software synthesizers and will also mix down your midi tracks to wav.

Once you have converted your midi to wav., it is a simple matter to burn it to CD. You will want to use the 44100hz setting in the audio tools for this.

To create midi tracks, you can put the musical notes on a staff with the mouse, if you know music theory, or you can connect an electric keyboard to your PC and play the tracks, setting each track with the sound of the desired instrument.

Of course, these programs also allow you to record a wav. track(s) directly, singing or playing an instrument into a microphone. Recording wav. Requires a lot of memory and a fast PC, but most new PCs are more than up to the task.

If you've ever had a song you wished you could record, you might want to check-out these reasonably priced software programs. It's a whole lot of fun!

Notes on the History of the Piano

Musical instruments with keyboards have been evolving since 220 B.C. when a Greek engineer named Ctebius created the "Hydraulis" to demonstrate, of all things, the principle of hydraulics.

The Hydraulis led to the organ and a technical evolution of that instrument that has spanned centuries.

Meanwhile came more instruments based on the concept of multiple strings, hammers and keyboards. First was the dulcimer, a multi-stringed instrument played with hand-held hammers. It has been claimed that the dulcimer was invented in the 9th Century A.D. by Persian Abu Nasre Farabi, who called it a Santur. The dulcimer has even been called "the first piano," but wait. The invention of the piano is most widely credited to the Italian Bartolomeo Cristofori (1655-1731) in the early 1700s.

By then, several more stringed keyboard instruments including the clavichord and harpsichord had come into play. The harpsichord couldn't control the sound volume and the clavichord couldn't produce the tone needed by the artist to perform in large halls. Cristofori had the solution.

Cristofori replaced the string-plucking mechanism with leather padded hammers. Now he had a keyboard instrument that played "piano" (meaning "soft"), and "forte" (meaning "loud"). This first piano was called "pianoforte."

While Johann Sebastian Bach and others failed to embrace the pianoforte, Lodovico Biustini published "Sonate da Cimbalo di Piano e Forte," the first work specifically for piano, in 1732. Yet nearly half a century passed before the next composer was to write specifically for the piano. It was Muzio Clementi, whose "3 Sonatas, Opus 2" in 1770 triggered the emergence of the new playing techniques and styles of expression needed to master the piano.

The piano's pivotal turning point arrived in the late 1770s when Johann Christian Bach redesigned it and more composers came forward with more music for the piano. Soon there were solo piano performances to packed concert halls in Europe and from there, the piano found its way to Great Britain and America.

Here the piano evolved from a fashionable status symbol in the mansions of the rare few to the mass assembly lines of Jonas Chickering and Heinrich Steinweg. Thanks to their industry, the public came to regard the piano as a necessary part of every American household in the late 1800s. Knowing how to play it was considered the best way to win admiration, love and respect, especially if you were a woman.

By now the piano had been through all manner of transformation: square, vertical upright, grand and variations of same, with all the accompanying technical changes. Piano design and manufacturing thrived in Germany, Austria, France, Great Britain and America. But at the turn of the century, just when the piano had achieved prominence as the primary source of home entertainment, oops, here came the movies and the phonograph. Not to mention the player piano, which "automated" what many piano owners couldn't do. Then the gramophone and the radio took over where the player piano left off.

Renewed public interest didn't hit until the 1930s when piano makers introduced the miniature upright. From there the piano has reached unprecedented standards of quality through significant technical and cosmetic change brought on by new materials, processes, techniques and innovative genius. Today this amazing 5,000-piece invention is not the household staple that it used to be, but it remains a solid investment and the treasure of those who find fulfillment in the piano as a means of creative expression.