InTune

The Whole Note: October Contest Winner, Gift Cards, Songwriter Interviews and more!

Posted on Nov 21, 2008 by Monica in Contest Winners, The Whole Note

Earlier this week we announced the October Musicnotes.com contest winner. We were pleased to award a $100 gift certificate to our customer Daniel, and he was gracious enough to answer a few questions about his musical background.

We learned that he has been playing piano for approximately eleven years, and that he started taking his music seriously as a freshman in high school. Learning “In the Hall of the Mountain King” between six to eight hours, we learned this piano player is studying music, too.

When we asked Daniel, “Do you have any tips to share with your fellow musicians for learning this song?” He responsed by saying:

To increase fingering speed in general, I think it’s a good idea for people to play several Hanon exercises every single day. I always warm-up using scales and Hanon exercises and after I finish those “finger-twisters,” I feel as though it’s much easier and natural to play “real” pieces. One of the best ways to become accurate at playing is to practice the passages that you are struggling with stacatto. Obviously, it can also be a huge temptation for pianists to play to quickly when they hardly know the piece, so it’s important for people to play slowly until the piece has “sunk” into their fingers. Since I didn’t have much time (due to when I started learning the piece in comparison to the deadline) to practice accuracy, one of the biggest things that helped me was taking the sheet music and writing out the chord names above the written notes. Being able to see the chord progression and where “In the Hall of the Mountain King” goes musically was really helpful in learning it quickly, and for studying a piece in the long-term, knowing the chord progression ultimately improves your memory and you are less likely to have a memory slip while performing! — Musicnotes.com Contest Winner, Daniel

We hope you are practicing your YouPerform contest entry for November, and appreciate everyone’s participation. From comments to voting, we’ve gotten a lot of feedback and are taking your thoughts into consideration.

Give the Gift of Song with a Musicnotes.com Gift Card

We know how hard it is to not only find the right song, but to figure out what to get the musician in your life. We recently re-designed all of our Musicnotes.com gift cards to have more of a contemporary look and feel. Each gift card is customizable and we offer free shipping on our gift cards to continental U.S. addresses. If you’re looking for something more immediately, we have gift certificates available for email.

You can get a gift card or certificate in an denomination to fit your gift-giving needs. For as little as $5, you can give the gift of song to someone you know. This week’s popular song has been the Ingrid Michaelson Winter Song duet with Sara Bareilles. Be sure to read our story about this song for more information!

Songwriter Interviews with William Joseph and Philip Hansen

This week we were proud to premiere our first edition of a column called the “Songwriter Spotlight.” Our interview with William Joseph is a fascinating read. William has composed pieces both for piano soloists and with a full orchestra. When we asked him, “Can you talk about how the song-writing process is different for piano versus a full orchestra?” he responded, in part with:

Writing for an entire orchestra is absolutely thrilling for me… It is definitely different then writing piano solo pieces… In writing music you have a few different elements to keep in mind… Melody, Harmony, and the rest of the accompaniment… When you are dealing with the piano only, then there are only so many ways to play the melody, harmony, and accompaniment… After all… We have 2 hands and 10 fingers to work with… Writing for an entire orchestra opens a whole new world… –Interview with William Joseph for Musicnotes.com

We hope you will read the entire interview and show your support for this fantastic composer. We are also pleased to announce that we have approval to post our next songwriter interview with Philip Hansen, the composer for the popular Christmas song Santa Baby.

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Thanks for staying with us this week. We will not have an edition of The Whole Note next Friday. but watch for a special update on Monday, December 1st. We will be providing you with a special offer, announcing December’s free sheet music download of the month and closing another contest.

Until next time, remember that practice makes perfect!

Tags: christmas sheet music, contest, facebook, gift card, whole note