Music educator, director, performer, producer, arranger.
I want to play jazz – but where to start? Over the years of teaching piano I've often been asked to help a student learn 'how to play jazz'. This often seems like a reasonable request but can be hard to execute – depending on the students' proficiency in reading music, or understanding music theory,… Continue reading Play Jazz Piano with Ben!
Following on from my last blog post in which I laid out a method for 'condensing' scores in Sibelius (combining numbered instrumental parts onto one stave while retaining separate dynamic parts), I went ahead and made a video outlining another method for achieving this which doesn't involve needing to make a separate copy of the… Continue reading More on condensing in Sibelius
I've recently been doing some orchestrations in Sibelius as part of a fun project to introduce some of Debussy's piano music to youth orchestras. As it had been a little while since I wrote anything for large ensembles using the software, coming back to it for this project reminded me of a few problems for… Continue reading Orchestrating in Sibelius – condensing workaround
Are you a musician who sometimes needs to created notated music on a computer, but you feel like you haven’t kept up with what’s the latest out there? Are you still using Sibelius 5, or a copy of Finale you bought when you were a student a couple of decades ago? I’d imagine it’s beginning… Continue reading The State of Music Notation Software in 2021
