I recently posted a picture that has received quite a few compliments. Everyone seems to feel it looks very painterly and has clarity and focus that's not often seen in most stuff on the internet. There are a few simple explanations.
One, I clean the lens on my phone so I get the best picture possible.
I've looked at a lot of pictures and paintings and have figured out what I liked about them, the tricks that the artist used to make their images pop.
They're not very fancy tricks, but they are tricks nonetheless. I simply repeat their tricks with my pictures.
I trust my eye and its sense of composition. I set up my subject carefully an a few seconds and am not averse to cropping after the fact.
After analyzing thousands of famous works of two-dimensional art, you start to see the tricks that da Vinci, Correggio, and Rembrandt used.
The most important factor in why my pictures tend to look better than many others is that I read the manual for the camera app on my phone.
I know the ins and outs of it, the resolution tricks, and the focus tricks. I don't mess with the filters that much because they're becoming cliché.
I stick with the basics.
Reading the manual is something most people avoid. It's boring, dry, complicated, and gets in the way of hands-on activity.
I have learned, though, that reading the manual is always the best way to get the best results.
It’s gotten to the point where, with every new piece of equipment I get, I read the manual before I even touch it. Think of it as technical foreplay.
The first serious keyboard I ever owned was a Roland W30. It was a sampling workstation with just over 14 seconds of sampling at 30kHz sample rate, which is infinitesimal by today's standards. I was using it to create and sell soundtracks for commercials, TV shows, movies, and ad campaigns.
As a little kid, everywhere I went I always – and I mean ALWAYS - carried a book with me – usually a Hardy Boys, Rick Brant, Sherlock Holmes, or something by Edgar Rice Burroughs. As an adult musician, I carried manuals.
That 212 page W30 manual was my constant companion. I studied it like a textbook every chance I had. I would close my eyes and envision myself repeating the outlined steps to create new and different sounds or devising was to squeeze out more processing power.
It got to the point that when I powered the keyboard on, I could race through the steps because I had pictured them in my mind so many times while reading the manual.
Every time I did a composing gig, I saved half of my earnings on the gig to upgrade my equipment. The W30 was bare bones, no effects at all, so I had to pick up a cheap Alesis Microverb to sweeten the dry sound a bit.
Now I had two manuals that I basically had to memorize.
The two-hundred plus page W30 manual was as extensive as the keyboard. By learning the architecture of internal software I was able to unleash hidden, powerful capabilities.
Next, I bought two Roland S330s that belonged to Tony Ventura.
A new manual! The rack-mounts had a similar architecture as the W30 so the learning cure wasn’t that steep.
Two years later, I bit the bullet and purchased a new, more robust keyboard – a Roland XP60.
My writing gigs had outgrown the scope of the W30 and so ran the XP60 in tandem with it via MIDI.
Another manual to memorize, this time, 248 pages.
I knew musicians who owned both the W30 and XP60 who only turned them on, pressed maybe five buttons, and took the pre-set keyboard sounds at face value.
They never touched the manuals, never got into the internal workings of the design of the software. For those people, the keyboards did just what they wanted.
But with my limited finances, and the need to make more impressive music that would sell, I had to master the manuals in order to master the keyboards.
And as far as “mastering” goes, that's not even talking about the improvements I had to make using my fingers on the black-and-white thingies to actually play the music I had composed after I learned how the keyboard worked.
Manuals and technology are no substitute for woodshedding.
The W30 and XP60 are long gone. I moved on to using Pro Tools and Reason as DAWs and Sibelius for notation. Their on-line pdf documentation runs into the thousands of pages. As much as I memorized the manuals, I still refer to them all the time.
I miss the old days and the simple 200+page dog-eared paper W30 manual that I carried along with me everywhere I went.
So why all this talk about manuals?
Because about right now, you are saying, “But Holmes, I'm not into all that technical stuff. I'm just a classroom music teacher, chorus director, band director. What’s the big deal about manuals?”
My advice is still the same: read the manual.
What? You didn't know there were manuals for teaching?
There are several that I would like to recommend. They are not specific to music education in the least but they will change the way you teach and the way your students learn.
Start with theses:
“Teach Like A Champion” by Doug Lemov.
“The Leader in Me” by Stephen Covey.
“Seven Habits of Highly Effective People” by Stephen Covey.
“Real Help” by Ayodeji Awosika
My blog
One of the common questions I was asked about my soundtracks was how did I get so many musician together for my recordings. Call it a trick, call it technique – it doesn’t matter – it was only me playing in the studio.
One, I clean the lens on my phone so I get the best picture possible.
I've looked at a lot of pictures and paintings and have figured out what I liked about them, the tricks that the artist used to make their images pop.
They're not very fancy tricks, but they are tricks nonetheless. I simply repeat their tricks with my pictures.
I trust my eye and its sense of composition. I set up my subject carefully an a few seconds and am not averse to cropping after the fact.
After analyzing thousands of famous works of two-dimensional art, you start to see the tricks that da Vinci, Correggio, and Rembrandt used.
The most important factor in why my pictures tend to look better than many others is that I read the manual for the camera app on my phone.
I know the ins and outs of it, the resolution tricks, and the focus tricks. I don't mess with the filters that much because they're becoming cliché.
I stick with the basics.
Reading the manual is something most people avoid. It's boring, dry, complicated, and gets in the way of hands-on activity.
I have learned, though, that reading the manual is always the best way to get the best results.
It’s gotten to the point where, with every new piece of equipment I get, I read the manual before I even touch it. Think of it as technical foreplay.
The first serious keyboard I ever owned was a Roland W30. It was a sampling workstation with just over 14 seconds of sampling at 30kHz sample rate, which is infinitesimal by today's standards. I was using it to create and sell soundtracks for commercials, TV shows, movies, and ad campaigns.
As a little kid, everywhere I went I always – and I mean ALWAYS - carried a book with me – usually a Hardy Boys, Rick Brant, Sherlock Holmes, or something by Edgar Rice Burroughs. As an adult musician, I carried manuals.
That 212 page W30 manual was my constant companion. I studied it like a textbook every chance I had. I would close my eyes and envision myself repeating the outlined steps to create new and different sounds or devising was to squeeze out more processing power.
It got to the point that when I powered the keyboard on, I could race through the steps because I had pictured them in my mind so many times while reading the manual.
Every time I did a composing gig, I saved half of my earnings on the gig to upgrade my equipment. The W30 was bare bones, no effects at all, so I had to pick up a cheap Alesis Microverb to sweeten the dry sound a bit.
Now I had two manuals that I basically had to memorize.
The two-hundred plus page W30 manual was as extensive as the keyboard. By learning the architecture of internal software I was able to unleash hidden, powerful capabilities.
Next, I bought two Roland S330s that belonged to Tony Ventura.
A new manual! The rack-mounts had a similar architecture as the W30 so the learning cure wasn’t that steep.
Two years later, I bit the bullet and purchased a new, more robust keyboard – a Roland XP60.
My writing gigs had outgrown the scope of the W30 and so ran the XP60 in tandem with it via MIDI.
Another manual to memorize, this time, 248 pages.
I knew musicians who owned both the W30 and XP60 who only turned them on, pressed maybe five buttons, and took the pre-set keyboard sounds at face value.
They never touched the manuals, never got into the internal workings of the design of the software. For those people, the keyboards did just what they wanted.
But with my limited finances, and the need to make more impressive music that would sell, I had to master the manuals in order to master the keyboards.
And as far as “mastering” goes, that's not even talking about the improvements I had to make using my fingers on the black-and-white thingies to actually play the music I had composed after I learned how the keyboard worked.
Manuals and technology are no substitute for woodshedding.
The W30 and XP60 are long gone. I moved on to using Pro Tools and Reason as DAWs and Sibelius for notation. Their on-line pdf documentation runs into the thousands of pages. As much as I memorized the manuals, I still refer to them all the time.
I miss the old days and the simple 200+page dog-eared paper W30 manual that I carried along with me everywhere I went.
So why all this talk about manuals?
Because about right now, you are saying, “But Holmes, I'm not into all that technical stuff. I'm just a classroom music teacher, chorus director, band director. What’s the big deal about manuals?”
My advice is still the same: read the manual.
What? You didn't know there were manuals for teaching?
There are several that I would like to recommend. They are not specific to music education in the least but they will change the way you teach and the way your students learn.
Start with theses:
“Teach Like A Champion” by Doug Lemov.
“The Leader in Me” by Stephen Covey.
“Seven Habits of Highly Effective People” by Stephen Covey.
“Real Help” by Ayodeji Awosika
My blog
One of the common questions I was asked about my soundtracks was how did I get so many musician together for my recordings. Call it a trick, call it technique – it doesn’t matter – it was only me playing in the studio.
I always combined elements of sampled sound (many that I created myself) with live recordings of instruments that I played in my studio – guitar, French horn, casaba, flute, etc. I rarely used quantization. It’s not enough to have sampling hardware. You have to understand orchestration, how instrument frequencies interact, idiomatic intervals, what ranges work at what dynamic ranges – in other words, while using technology, “keeping it real” as far as the sound was concerned.
These were the “manuals” where I learned these techniques. Check them out:
“Twentieth-Century Harmony” by Vincent Persichetti
“Principles of Orchestration” by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov
“Professional Arranger Composer” by Russell Garcia
“Sounds and Scores : A Practical Guide to Professional” by Henry Mancini
I also hit on some of these topics in these blog posts.
Read these “manuals”, carry them around with you (you’ve got a smart phone, right?), memorize parts of them so that the knowledge is at your fingertips while you teach. Infuse their philosophy into you daily life and be like that W30: tap into power and abilities that you never knew were hidden in your architecture.
I promise you that if you pour over those manuals and see how they apply to the technical aspects of teaching, you will be a better teacher and your students will learn much more about music – and life.
So if you're already teaching and haven't read the manual, may I suggest that you pick them up and start reading today.
You'll be happy you did.
These were the “manuals” where I learned these techniques. Check them out:
“Twentieth-Century Harmony” by Vincent Persichetti
“Principles of Orchestration” by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov
“Professional Arranger Composer” by Russell Garcia
“Sounds and Scores : A Practical Guide to Professional” by Henry Mancini
I also hit on some of these topics in these blog posts.
Read these “manuals”, carry them around with you (you’ve got a smart phone, right?), memorize parts of them so that the knowledge is at your fingertips while you teach. Infuse their philosophy into you daily life and be like that W30: tap into power and abilities that you never knew were hidden in your architecture.
I promise you that if you pour over those manuals and see how they apply to the technical aspects of teaching, you will be a better teacher and your students will learn much more about music – and life.
So if you're already teaching and haven't read the manual, may I suggest that you pick them up and start reading today.
You'll be happy you did.