Portnoy was also considered to be the band's spokesperson, doing the majority of press interviews and announcements. Even at live shows, though James LaBrie acted as the frontman, Portnoy would take the microphone to make important announcements, such as when he announced that the band would be playing When Dream and Day Unite in its entirety in Portnoy was a driving force behind Dream Theater since it's inception, his name often being synonymous with Dream Theater.
Portnoy did consider quitting at one point in after poor experiences with Atlantic Records during the creation of Falling Into Infinity. However, he was convinced to stay by his band mates. Portnoy is considered to be, for the most part, a very approachable, friendly person who gets along easily with most people.
He has a good relationship with his band mates, with minimal conflicts. Portnoy had some resentment towards Petrucci and LaBrie during the making of Falling Into Infinity, though this was only temporary. Occasionally a misunderstanding can lead to the appearance of a feud, such as between Portnoy and Neil Peart, but these things are usually cleared up fairly quickly. Portnoy's relationship with fans can best be described as exceptional, as fans have found him to be approachable and amiable towards them, signing autographs upon request and chatting with fans.
Portnoy organized the "meet and greet" program at Dream Theater shows to further connect with fans, with the money from it going directly into show production. Portnoy's website has a popular forum which he posts on frequently, often conversing directly to fans or answering their questions. However, Portnoy can become frustrated with a certain aspect of the fandom, and feels that a small percentage will never be happy no matter what he does for them, leading to a few tirades and the song Never Enough.
In his spare time, Portnoy is a great fan of music of almost all genres, as well as film, television and sports. Portnoy suffers from Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, which can make it hard to keep his professional and personal lives separate, though it is said that his family is very understanding and will often accompany him on tour to spend more time with him.
Portnoy's OCD manifests itself in compulsive list-making, as he has hundreds of lists, some of which he will occasionally post on his website. Portnoy's religion is Judaism, though he does not practice it actively. Portnoy is a recovering alcoholic, having gone through the step program sometime after the tour in support of Metropolis, Pt.
Always a drinker, Portnoy's drinking turned into a problem in due to frustration with the band's situation. His drinking continued to increase and was said to be at its peak in , often manifesting itself in strange behavior and tirades at shows, something Portnoy is personally embarrassed about. One infamous incident referred to as "The Breakdown In Berlin" featured a very incoherent Portnoy at a drum-clinic, who wore underwear on his head, stumbled and fell on stage and ranted nonsensically.
Following his induction into Alcoholics Anonymous, Portnoy's outlook has shifted and he has turned his drive and obsessiveness into positive ventures. Portnoy penned the song The Glass Prison about his battles with alcohol, dedicating it to "Bill W and all his friends" meaning the founder of AA and all of its members. Portnoy soon after announced that the song was the first three parts of a 12 part saga that would detail the step program, which continued with This Dying Soul , The Root of All Evil , Repentance , and The Shattered Fortress.
Portnoy has reportedly remained "on the wagon" not touching alcohol since becoming clean. As a part of the AA program, he also gave up the recreational drugs he was known to partake in, including marijuana and cocaine. Although Portnoy is primarily known as an accomplished drummer, he is also an accomplished songwriter, being one of the primary writers in Dream Theater and many of the projects he involves himself with.
In fact, it's better to leave it out of your foundational playing unless a piece specifically calls for it. Instead, you'll benefit more from using it at a later stage when you're more equipped to realize its articulative potential.
And you'll thank yourself for it in the long run. Practice Sight Reading Musical notation is an essential language that any pianist has had to get fluent in. Playing or practicing piano means being in front of sheet music on a daily basis.
Your improvement can often hinge on being able to accurately translate those lines and dots from the paper. Make sure you spend at least a third of your practice time getting your sight-reading down. It's easy to gloss over notation if you've already heard the piece being played. But the real challenge is playing pieces that have only existed on paper for you. Like anything else, the best way to go about sight-reading is to get immersed in it more and more.
Try gathering a variety of scores from famous pieces to movie soundtracks, modern hits, and even Jazz standards. Getting a songbook or a Real Book is really helpful for this purpose.
There will be a lot of information packed into scores, so you want to go step by step. Start by learning how to read basic sheets and work your way from there. Make sure you have a metronome handy, so you're always able to play in time with the tempo on the score. You can also incorporate beginner practice books into your sessions. These let you get used to moving around the staff with different exercises and practice drills.
With consistent enough practice, you'll immediately start seeing a drop in the time it takes you to parse a score and translate it into play.
Set Time Aside for Polishing Your Theory Out of all the instruments available, the piano has some of the fewest mental shortcuts you can use to get around the instrument. That's why theory is a significant aspect of a pianist's life. Unlike a stringed instrument, you don't have the relative symmetry to always find your notes.
Each key leaves you having to play a different pattern of notes. That's why you're required to know precisely where each and every note of your piano is. But piano's necessity for music theory goes much beyond that. Any time you're accompanying yourself with your left hand, you need to know chord and interval relations. Every time you play an elaborate arrangement, you have to pay attention to things like inversions, modal interchange, compound meters, nested harmonies, and more.
As a beginner, there's no faster path to piano mastery than getting your music theory cemented to memory. After all, you're going to be playing a lot of notes together.
You might as well understand how they all relate to and affect one another. During any play session, ensure that you've set aside enough time to work on theory. You can either buy yourself a textbook, watch a video, or just look for sources online. But as long as you're putting in work to polish your theory, you're bound to see good results.
Use Fun Learning Outlets to Enjoy Practice Believe it or not, playing an instrument isn't all about working on your skills. Sometimes you're encouraged to have fun with your music. And if you can combine the two? Well, then you have a good thing going. Combining fun and practice can be as simple as experimenting with a different style of music.
Maybe you want to try playing some ragtime, saloon music, or some off-kilter campfire sing along? It may not seem like it, but you can do that while meshing in some rhythmic or melodic exercises that were too dull on their own.
Another path to take would be to use programs like Synthesia. Simply plug in a midi keyboard to a computer, load up a song, and let the guitar-hero style interface let you have fun while learning a new piece. You'd be surprised at the effect something as simple as alerting your mental framing can have. You get to have fun playing your instrument while unconsciously building your chops in the background. It's a win-win for everyone. Since then, this set of sixty exercises has become synonymous with building piano mastery.
This makes it an excellent resource for beginners looking to sharpen their skills. The great thing about the Hanon exercises is that they're good all-rounders for your technique. All sixty of the exercises were designed to increase finger strength, build speed, enhance agility, and maintain precision. It's the kind of skill-building buffet that you'd need to get your playing fine tuned.
Conveniently, all the exercises are designed to go up in complexity the further you go. They start with a set of preparatory techniques to get you warmed up, progress to virtuoso techniques, and finally end up on complete technical mastery.
This makes it extremely easy to start at a relative point of ease and only progress as much as you comfortably can. You're not forced to push yourself unless you can execute the preceding exercises properly.
You only need to move up once you feel like you've practiced all you can with a Hanon exercise set. Any pianist will tell you how much of a rite of passage getting the Hanon exercises under your belt can be.
It's one of the penultimate ways to bump your playing proficiency up a few levels. Exercise Dynamic Playing When all you need to do is press a key to get sound from your instrument, dynamics become a big part of the equation. In fact, they're the distinguishing factor that differentiates the piano greats. And they're a necessary component to your success. Adding dynamics to playing your practice pieces is an excellent way to start.
Try to use techniques like chunking to break bigger pieces into smaller sections. Then, play through each chunk multiple times while varying your dynamics. Your primary focus with this exercise is to alternate your note delivery each time. Instead of playing your notes straight, try experimenting with increasing your attack or lowering your release. You can even run through all the dynamic markings that you find on your sheets.
Building dynamics not only helps you achieve the right skill set, but it's also a window into building interest with your playing. As a beginner, there's no better finesse than being able to play a note a few accents softer or louder than the last. Final Thoughts Your progress on the piano can hinge on many different factors. But the one universal truth is that you can always work towards the path of improving your skills.
It might seem like a handful if you're just starting out. Hopefully, the tips above will give you enough insight into how to start being a better pianist in a short amount of time. All those hours of learning concepts and practicing exercises can finally come together to form something. But many musicians will struggle with getting their first song out.
The reasons can range anywhere from drawing creative blanks to not knowing the first step to take. The Basic Song Structure Every song is different, but most of them follow a fairly straightforward pattern. It can help to study that structure for your own song-making purposes.
So with that in mind, here the kind of format you can hope to expect from a track. Intro: An intro is pretty self-explanatory. Here, the idea is to build enough interest to draw the listener in. The key focus for your intro should be to establish the vibe of the track.
This means things like laying out the tempo, melodic structure, track energy, and more. You can think of it as a teaser for things to come. Verse: The verse is the part of your song where your theme gets fleshed out. For a verse, you want to unleash your main musical ideas. This is where you want your vocals or unique melodic ideas to start filtering in. Any narrative ideas for your lyrics will likely start here as well. Pre-Chorus: Not every song has a pre-chorus.
In terms of priority, your pre-chorus will likely be made after the chorus. You want to tailor it to how you want to accentuate building up your pace. For choruses that are similar to the verse, you want to slow it down to add a bit of a palate cleanser. But for choruses that are vastly different, you can do with having pre-chorus gradually pick up the time-feel.
Chorus: Choruses are the most recognizable part of your track. Choruses are the section to place your hooks. All in all, you want it to be the penultimate climax of your track. Bridge: The bridge is another optional additive that you can choose to include or omit. Bridges are used to take the song in an unexpected direction for a few bars. Bridge sections are all about contrast. Things like key changes or solos are some of the most common uses for a bridge.
Outro: All good things will eventually come to an end. Your outro is the lead-up to that end. You ideally want to use it as a signal to tell your listener that they should be expecting and end soon. Outros can be done in a number of different ways depending on what kind of vibe you want to go for. You can use conventions and cadences to your advantage to either play towards expectations or subtly subvert them. This means anything from gradually slowing down your song to letting it fade out or even just having it come to an abrupt end.
What Steps to Take When Composing Your First Song Now that you have a clear idea of song structures, you can start diving into the actual songwriting process. Here are the steps you should be taking to get your song into form. Be Inspired Inspiration is a big part of starting any artform. Without the right inspiration, it can be hard to even get a good sound going in your head. When you have a moment, sit down and try to get a feel for your song. Try asking yourself some key questions to narrow down your criteria.
What do you want your music to be about? How do you want your listener to feel? What kind of techniques do you want to incorporate into the arrangement of your track?
You can start using small ideas like these to start building toward the bigger picture. Just remember that it is your song. Make sure whatever inspires you is something you actually care about.
Not only will it come across more genuine, but it will also define the style of your earlier works. Gather Your Tools and Techniques Once you have a few good ideas going in your head, you can start to lay them out.
But how you translate them from your head to your sound can make the difference. Your first order of business should be to try and take note of your abilities. This will help ground your ideas into workable outcomes. On the other side of the equation, make sure you take stock of your tools of the trade. Everything from instruments, patches, studio equipment, and the software will dictate what you can achieve.
You may even have to transpose your melody into a different key based on what is possible and more comfortable to play. One of the best ways to do this organically is to experiment with ideas to see what stands out. Usually, the first thing to come to mind is the verse melody or chorus hook.
At this point, you really want to focus on the music without thinking about the vocals. A go-to technique that most songwriters use is to sing out your hook with random syllables or gibberish words. These act as a placeholder and let you focus on the feel of the melody without putting away attention for lyric writing.
Experiment with different melodic ideas either by singing out loud or using a midi keyboard. In fact, plenty of famous songs have had to go through several iterations. Try to focus on how you want to articulate your hook. Exploring points of stress or using expressive techniques can really change how your hook ends up feeling to the listener.
It can be helpful to refer to brainstorming techniques for your lyric writing. Start by placing a perspective on your idea. Decide whether you want to lay it out from a personal viewpoint or a narrative arc. From there, you can start putting the idea into words using emotion. Instead of basing your lyrics purely on facts, you want to use your feelings to make the words flow better.
Things like your key will be based on your chorus hook or verse melody. These can be guitar chords, string ensembles, or electronic soundscapes. Double it up by adding a bassline underneath it to add body to your sound. Something to keep in mind is that you should keep this structure malleable. For intros, you want a minimalist variation of what you have set up in the verse. On the other hand, you should go all out with your choruses to hit hard with that emotional punch.
Make sure you follow the tension-resolution arc of your song by changing your structure. While that may sound like an easy task, it can be the most demanding part of your track. How you want to record your song is entirely up to you.
You can do it all in one session or space it out over several instances. Just make sure you avoid any critical mistakes like going out of tune or stepping outside of the tempo. However, take it too far, and you might find yourself striving for the dangerous concept of perfection.
Your ideal mindset should be to follow the best practices like using a metronome and doing some warm ups. Closing Thoughts Composing songs is like any other. Hopefully, the steps above should put your mind to ease and have your creative juices flowing in no time. This band-turned-duo encapsulates everything that the music industry is skittish about. Not only are they a flag bearer for the new generation, but they also represent something new in music.
Something that has largely been thought to be lost to time. And you can owe a lot of it to their songwriting abilities. Twenty One Pilots manages to distill its strengths and use them to build songs that captivate huge swathes of listeners.
Their unique sounds, artistry, iconography, and lyricism have cultivated such a loyal fanbase. Lesson 1: Creative Rebellion Lets You Express Yourself Faithfully When a typical artist sits down to write a song, they tend to play to the norms and conventions of music-making.
By delivering their songs in pop shell, the band manages to subvert expectations in a way that adds the most shock value. They might catch you off guard by slipping the next phrase of vocals slightly off-beat.
Or they might even treat you to spicy intervals like the b6. These are examples of something a songwriter might specifically avoid. But Twenty One Pilots uses these elements to build a sound that they think represents them accurately. The lesson here is simple; you should be willing to break some rules if it ultimately benefits your purpose.
Nothing says that you follow guidelines or traditions for your songs. Lesson 2: Relatability Acts a Strong Binder for Listeners Songs are more than just words and sounds that please your ear. They can be used as vehicles to carry powerful images and motifs. Twenty One Pilots usually diverts its focus from common themes like love, heartbreak, or coming-of-age.
Instead, the band aims for hard-hitting topics like depression, self-criticism, suicidal ideation, and dark humor. Normally, you might find musicians running for the hills with anything like this. More importantly, it delves far further into this direction than anyone comfortably would. What this ends up doing is creating a deep connection to specific types of people.
Someone who might not have otherwise felt their personality catered to can become a loyal Twenty One Pilots fan instantly. The next time you write a song, try to think about who your listener will be. They could be anyone. But you have the ability to shape who they might be with your creative elements and musical habits.
The more genuine and down-to-earth you are with your personal exploration, the stronger your connection will be with your listeners. But while Twenty One Pilots talks about some dark concepts, they also set aside some humor for themselves. Featured alongside depressing lyrics are fourth wall breaking anecdotes that poke fun at the band, their image, and even the audience. Every so often, the band changes its musical direction with its newest point of inspiration.
This has kept the majority of their discography fresh and palatable to a lot of people. It imparts an all too important lesson about keeping your musical approach open to ideas. There are so many avenues to take your music that it almost never makes sense to confine yourself to one formula. You might get a feeling of trepidation for experimenting with new concepts for your songs, but they can lead to your biggest successes.
Something that will draw a lot of people to listen to it. And yet, Twenty One Pilots has done it while falling outside of that criteria. On the surface, it might not make much sense. And the band members make sure to capitalize on it. In any other context, these qualities would be just a little too nerdy for your average listener. You can take inspiration from this when you feel like your songwriting feels too technical. Instead of toning it down to increase the listenability, power it further.
Make it into your biggest strength. The band makes sure to add plenty of rhythmic variety in a lot of its song lineup. Having switched between different genres, you get to experience the full spectrum of groove from reggae beats, pulsing electronic drops, hip hop grooves, and funk rhythms.
But what if your personal experiences tend to be sour? How can you channel them into something creative? Well, Twenty One Pilots has the answer. When he feels weighed down by insecurities, he uses it to creative narrative devices like Blurryface in his lyrics. In times when the band feels a little too self-critical, they opt for exploring a completely new sound.
Instead of being bogged down with your weaknesses, you can accept them and utilize them to the best of your ability. Being driven up against a wall is only an unexplored opportunity to go off-menu. One that can take you to new heights.
Closing Thoughts Twenty One Pilots is one of few bands that understand their craft at a deeper level than anyone else can. It might be hard to capture their creative line of trajectory, but hopefully, you can learn a thing or two.
If you can take the lessons above to heart while writing your next song, you might just end up with something to help form your very own skeleton clique. How to Mix and Master a Song Recording. How to Mix and Master a Song Recording These days, practically every musician has a studio built right into their home. Gone are the days of dealing with record labels and producers. Nowadays, you can have your song recorded and released to the world in just a few minutes.
That leaves you to do a lot of the heavy lifting that comes with those roles. To do all that, you have to invest in the intricate art of mixing and mastering. You want your songs to sound polished and ready to be pumped into a pair of headphones, and these techniques will help you get there. It includes things like balancing volume levels, EQ, effects processing, panning, modulation, reverb, and more. By the time you get to the mastering stage, your song production should be more than three quarters finished.
In plain English, mixing is like applying a new coat of paint, while mastering is the wax that seals it in. You need both if you want your end product to sound polished. But understanding the difference between them can help you get a better grasp on the process. Just remember that you should take care of any compositional changes before you start work on mixing and mastering. Calibrate Your Listening Environment Sound is only as good as the space it travels through.
Start with the physical space that the sound is going to be bouncing off of. That means the walls and the floor in your studio. For the most part, you can get away with a few acoustic panels on your walls and a carefully placed bass trap or two. Add to that with a rug that kills some of the sound reflection. Next, move on to your actual equipment. Your amps, speakers, and studio monitors will need to be adjusted according to the room. For placement, you can refer to guides that let you calculate where everything should be kept, or you can even use space calibration software.
Ideally, you want a flat sound out of them where the bass, mids, and highs are balanced. Most professional studio monitors will have some way to control these ranges independently of one another. Fix Elements that Need Repair Never expect your first takes to be perfect right out of the gate. Start by looking out for any mistakes in the rhythm and pitch of your song. Not even a seasoned musician is safe from having minor foibles enter their sound.
Playing well and sounding polished are two different things. Ideally, you should aim for both. For minor fixes, you can apply quick fixes like pitch correction or time-stretching to salvage your tracks. But if the takes are too far gone, you might have to go and re-record them from scratch. Next up, you want to eliminate any noise that made it past your initial noise removal process. Lastly, make sure all your effects and layers are working as intended.
Balance the Combination of Tracks One of the biggest pitfalls of mixing audio is realizing just how sensitive a blend of sounds can be. It might even lead you to question your compositional skills.
Try to imagine where you would place each of your sounds if you were in a concert or live performance. When you mix your track, you want to think about assigning your sounds to a binaural field. For example, bass and vocals are usually panned dead center, guitars are replicated in left and right channels, drums are placed behind the listener, and strings sit on the edge of each channel.
Effects like panning, reverb, and stereo widening are designed to tackle tasks like these. Stereo width will help you create separation between instruments, while panning will help you shift sounds between channels. Reverb, on the other hand, will help mimic acoustic space. You can experiment with these effects by applying them individually to each sound. Everyone will have their own preferred plugin suites, but you can get by with some popular choices like Waves, iZotope, and FabFilter.
Equalize Your Sounds Equalization is an important aspect of mixing in your audio. With so many different frequencies fighting for the same frequency spectrum, having them stay tamed becomes a priority. You can think about equalization a lot like volume control but on a finer level. This, of course, grants you the ability to be very specific with what kind of sounds you want to accentuate or take away. Many sounds start getting overlapped over the same frequency range, and the mix ends up sounding busy and fatiguing to the ear.
Luckily, an EQ can help tone the bulk of that sound down and make your mix sound pleasant again. To use it, start by analyzing the strengths and weaknesses of each sound. Your guitar tracks might handle the mids well, but any unnecessary low-end will compete with your bass.
Similarly, string sections might live in the high end, but their sound can leak into the mid-range to fight against a vocal performance. Your track will stop sounding like a rough, unfinished project and more like a professional piece of audio. Although the end might be in sight, there will still be some last-minute tweaks before you can finalize your mix. The first item on your agenda should be to optimize your mix for consumer equipment. This means being able to create a mix that sounds equally good on your studio monitors and a pair of Airpods.
A great way to do this is by playing your music on a large variety of audio gear. Play it on everything from a cheap pair of earbuds to a home theatre system and even your car. Lastly, make sure you normalize all your audio levels. Voila, you have a completed mix. Make sure you give yourself time to walk away from the track before you come back to analyze it.
Give your track a listen or two to get a feel for it, and have a notepad handy. Try taking down notes as they form in your mind. At this stage, you want to hear the kind of problems that managed to slip under the radar, especially if it has to do with elements that you were too pre-occupied in mixing to catch.
If everything holds up well, then you should have the green light to go ahead. However, if you end craving for more drastic changes, then it might be wise to go back to the mixing process. Master the Finishing Touches Mastering will be the final piece of the puzzle to make your track whole.
Unlike mixing, the changes made during mastering will apply to the song as a whole. This will create a better blend for your sounds. You can use a brick wall limiter with a setting anywhere from Adjust the attack and release until you feel the sound taper off. Last but not least, you can do with some saturation to your track. Just be wary of oversaturating the mix too much, which will probably drown out your song. It contributes just as much to the creative process as composition, so it makes sense not to sleep on it.
Songwriting Lessons to Learn from Led Zeppelin. Each member of the band instills the qualities that it takes to truly transcend their instrument. With their high energy songs, exceptional stage presence, and flair for sonic brilliance, the band has certainly led its generation.
These very abilities serve as a learning framework for budding songwriters. Just grab a guitar riff or two, underlay some bass, throw in a drum groove, and hey presto, you have yourself a rock song. But what if your tastebuds yearn for something a bit more filling? Then you can learn a thing or two from Zeppelin. Something like hiding a quieter acoustic guitar take on top of a roaring electric guitar. Or maybe even panning dry and wet mixes of a track left and right to get a unique sound spread.
When the band turns their contrast dial all the way up is when things get interesting. The lesson here is about making the use of contrasting elements to enrich your sound. Cramming in as much variety of sound as possible into your song is a surefire way to increase its flavor profile. And one of the main ways the band has done that is by exploring its advanced harmonic vocabulary.
The basic framework for a Led Zeppelin song always starts life out in the minor pentatonic. But when we move towards overdubs is when things start to get interesting.
This starts to add a subtle hint of a dense and rich sound. But things are only just getting started. In any other context, this could very well be a recipe for disaster. By presenting the skeletal structure of the minor pentatonic, our ear is led to a slightly minor tonality.
Adding in the major third for the harmony helps orient the ear towards the major pentatonic as an anchoring point. Lesson 3: Take Ideas for Inspiration and Repurpose Them for your Needs Led Zeppelin is no stranger to borrowing a healthy bit of inspiration from other artists.
The band practically has an entire Wikipedia page dedicated to all the songs that it has sought creative influence from. But taking ideas is one thing and personalizing them is an entirely different ball game. The lesson here should be clear.
As an exercise, it helps you see beyond the horizon of your creative limitations. And in practice, it helps you construct songs that you can truly stand behind. Lesson 4: Be Conscious of Your Musical Recipe Part of the songwriting process is about being present as your ideas start to take shape. No band exemplifies this concept quite like Led Zeppelin. Every one of the band members uses their strengths and talents to add substance to the final sound. Instead of keeping your song confined by its musical elements, let it lead the pack.
Lesson 5: Using Unconventional Practices Can Unleash Your Sound When you sit down to write a song, you can refer to a lot of guiding material to get that all-too-typical package of a track. However, it comes with an opportunity cost that might hold your authentic sound back.
The Led Zeppelin approach to this is to throw all songwriting conventions out the window. When the band wants to write a unique song, they start off with an existing piece and morph it into their creative vision. For the songwriting process, they do things like taking a typical chord progression and turning it on its head to make it into a progression. Here you can play online the drum set that Mike Portnoy uses with the progressive rock band Transatlantic.
You can play the virtual drums with touch or with the keys matching the elements of Mike Portnoy 's drum set, snare drums, toms, cymbals and double bass drum pedal. Press "keys" from the game menu to change the correspondence between the keys and the drum set elements. Depending on the virtual drum game you choose, sounds, drum sets and keys are different.
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