Tools-Using ALL our Tools to Assist our Practice

Good morning, Deborah. And good morning, everyone. Little technical hiccup. You know, when you get when you first wake up, sometimes your body isn't ready. Well, the computer wasn't ready, and it had to go back and do it stretching like a cat to be ready for today's today's thing.

So here we are. Today, we're gonna take a look at with the Dulcimer crossing, Wednesday livestream, we're gonna take a look at using all of our tools. There is a handout for this for this conversation. And if you wanna write to me at steve@dulcimercrossing.com, I will send you the handout. And let me go back to I wanna make sure that if people are there we go.

Okay. And there is a there is a slowdown in that, so I wanna be able to see anybody who's asking questions in the Facebook side. So there we go. Okay. So taking a look at our tools.

We have a lot of tools in order to play to play the music we want to. And I wanna talk about the tools that, we can use to develop our musicianship. And some of those tools are you might say, well, of course, I know that, but let's talk about them anyway. Tuner. If you're gonna play an instrument, it's gonna give you a lot better response if you have it tuned when you're playing it.

When I first started playing instruments good morning, Nan. Good morning, Doug. When I first started playing instruments, the choices for tuning were usually a pitch pipe, which was a little piece of plastic with a couple of metal things and a reed inside, and they were giving exact pitches what I needed. I was playing a guitar. I had a harmonica, which was the exact same thing, but more notes.

With the pitch pipe, you'd blow into that, and you'd make the the strings match the sound that you were blowing. One of the things you learn pretty quick is that the sounds you're making can be a little sharp or a little flat depending on how much air you push through the reed as it vibrates. The faster air makes it go a little sharp. The slower air makes it go a little weak. So it wasn't always you could blow your pitch pipe and try to match it, which is a skill.

That's a skill to learn. But when you do that, you might be a little bit zealous or anxious and blow too hard, and everything's not everything's matching up. So you're having some difficulty with that. Then there was a tuning fork, and that actually came before the pitch pipe, but not for me. And then the round pitch pipe requires.

That's right. So hello, William. Good to have you here on the Facebook side. I'm just gonna say hello over there. William.

So hit hit a pitch by or a tuning fork, and you put it on your knee, you put it on your instrument, and it vibrates. And again, you can hear that tone louder. So that's what I used sometimes when tuning my guitar. I would tune the a string because a 440 is I'm gonna type that over here. A 4 40 Hertz is how fast the vibration happens to give you the a.

It happened to be I don't know if it still looks still the case, but it happened to be the, dial tone in Australia or in Austria for several years. So you could dial up and tune your a string on your on your violin or your your viola or your cello or your bass, using the telephones. I don't know if that's the same with with Handys, with the handheld instrument or, phones, but that was something that that did happen then. So I'm gonna take that away so it's not in our way anymore. So having a tuner that was an electronic thing was huge in and having it be chromatic and responsive to everything that I did, listening to what I was playing in order to let me see.

I'm gonna show you, one of the thing this is one of those modern ones. And let's see if I can get my webcam settings up here and zoom in on that. We're gonna zoom in. So when I turn this on, of course, there it is. It's responsive to what I'm playing, and it's given me a graphic readout of what's going on on the instrument.

And if I'm if it if it's straight up in green, this is a snark tuner, and it's on its little things. This is the dulce tune that comes from Dusty Strings. I I actually where is my camera here? There we are. This is something that I have available for my students.

It fits on the instrument, not only back up. It fits on the instrument so that it it can pick up vibrations directly from the instrument. This is set for auto harps and for hammered dulcimer pins. But as it's picking up those vibrations, it's letting me know, that's that note's a little sharp. It's too far to the right.

It turns yellow. But when I when I change and and, stretch or loosen the string with my tuning wrench, it'll bring it back into place like it was when I played the g string. That one well, I guess that one is a little sharp too. There we go. One of them is.

That's the thing with hammered dulcimer. You got more notes right next to each other, and you gotta get them both in tune with each other. So the this is a wonderful tune or a wonderful tool that can help you listen to your instrument. And and having it connected with your instrument is really, really helpful thing. Some of us have those kind of tuners that clip on to our mountain dulcimers as well.

They can clip on the head and or they can sit somewhere on the instrument and pick up the vibrations. And so you can but I also have let's see here. On my phone, they have created tuners, and I'm gonna show you the small version on my phone. I use a iStrobusoft tuner, and what it's doing is it's like the band tuner that I had when I was a kid. Well, I didn't have.

Mister Mac had in the band room. And we would play. And as we're singing, it would be tuning my voice and our goal. Was to play a pitch that made all these things line up and not be spinning one way or the other. If they're spinning up, it's sharp.

If they're spinning down, they're flat. And this is a kind of thing that can be this works for, instruments that are transposing, so you can click the little dial and change to which way you wanna be seeing it. Here's a large print version of it on my iPad, which, a lot of hammerdolls for players will some I've seen this. They'll put it on the music stand because it's nice and big, and they can read it. But you can see it's changing with my voice.

It's changing. Going up and down. Now these things are both going through the air, which means they can pick up ambient sound. And that can confuse your instrument or your tuner because it doesn't know what exactly to listen to. Now let's turn you off, and I wanna go back over here for the next thing in a minute.

There we go. Okay. So that's why having something like this, which is in contact with the instrument or having a way to let it touch your instrument is something that helps with getting it accurate and getting only what you wanna hear. Here's another tool, an instrument stand. That's holding up my mountain dulcimer for a minute.

So one of the things I do with mountain dulcimers is I'll lay it on the instrument, and I'll play. Let's see how we're doing today. Now these are tools with your extra from the instrument. They can help you get connected with a pitch that's out in the world, connecting with the vibration the frequency vibrations. But then the fine tuning thing is knowing the tool of your instrument.

I want my middle string to match what is going on on my bass string at the 4th fret. I want my melody string to match what's going on at my middle string at the 3rd fret. On a guitar, it's the magic of the 5th fret. On the hammered dulcimer, I'm gonna move over here again. I I looks like I have a connection.

It's a little bit dicey, so I'm gonna close down a couple of cancel. Okay. And I wanna quit that. Okay. I think I'm good.

Here we go. I'll put you, and let's put you. Okay. That might help a little bit. What I would do is with my tuning fork originally, I would tune in a and that a is hidden behind this microphone.

I would tune this a and that would let me get that a and that would let me get the octave a and this a is the same as that a is the same as that a and that gives me this octave a and so I would tune all the octaves. The other side of the a is an e. Well, that let me get all my e's. And the E on the other side of give me a B and I would go relative tuning, and I call that the tuning gain. I would do this, and that I would when I just had the, the tuning fork, I would tune the a using the tuning fork, and then I would tune everything else by relative pitch.

And that I called the tuning game, and I still have that available. It's on the, on the Dulcimer Crossing website. I'm just reading your chat, Doug, talking about the experience with the tuning of the different things, and I gotta agree with you there. So these are, what I was doing is learning using relative pitch to tune that. So I was using the tool of my brain and training my ear at the same time.

Okay. So that's tuning, and we have these apps that are available. The key thing is you wanna get in contact with your instrument because they pick up more accurately if that's the case. So now let's look at timing. There's a lot of, tools to help us with our timing.

Here's a visual only reference on this one, and there's a sound one. I can turn it so it's visual only. And this one has a little it's look like a little AM earbud. When I was I would use this when I was playing for, Irish dancers because the the timing of jigs and reels is very specific in order for the dancers to be able to successfully dance. And this was something that was very helpful, but I had to put the earbud in because when it sat over by the instrument, I could hear the the instrument would use some of the same sounds as this, and that was that was a problem.

Let's see. I had this one for a long time. That battery is not good, so let's see. This one also works very well. It's very flexible.

It's in the same box that my some of my tuners were. This is a chord metronome, and right now it's set for 4 beats a minute or 4 beats in a measure, which is is a duple meter or simple meter. Everything can be boiled down to twos. And I can pitch I can take the tempo up or down. If I hold the button down, it jumps, and the loud beep tells me when one is in the measure.

1, 2, 3, 4. 1, 2, 3, 4. 1, 2, 3, 4. Or I can slow it down. 1, 2, 3, 4.

1, 2, 3 4. And that can help me. Now I can also change let's turn off the sound. Oh, this lets me, do some tuning stuff too. Yeah.

And I can calibrate it. So I wanna change it, so it's my beats are 3 in a measure, and, I'm gonna go 123. 123. 123. 1231.

12 3, 123. Now how using a tool like this is really helpful? My friend, Aaron Rourke, says the problem with metronomes is they speed up and slow down. And and what we're laughing about when he says that is no, they don't speed up and slow down. We do because a metronome is an out it's like playing with a friend who doesn't get mad at you, but also doesn't change to make you sound good.

I sometimes tell my students that I'm not the best I'm not the hardest task master because part of my life is being an accompanist and making the soloist sound good. So I keep I keep moving to make them sound good. So now I'm going to do you use that again? Come on. Come on.

I don't know if you can hear that I'm getting separated from this. And I'm not keeping the time with it the way I I need to in order to be. But it also might mean that the natural tempo of what I'm playing is not I have not set the metronome right. I have to adjust the metronome to make to match the tempo that I really am feeling this in. And if I'm trying to, I'll do this when I'm, writing orchestra pieces for dulcimer orchestras, and I need to give them a tempo of here's what we're actually gonna be doing this, the speed we're going to be doing at, or this is a good learning tempo.

I have a tune. Tuning. We did that first, right? So that's a jig. It's called Byward Tower.

I wrote it in England at the Tower of London. I can't remember the tune up. I'm going through this because I wanna demonstrate something. In that section of the tune, when I went to record it, I would be playing with my friend who was my recording engineer. He says, you're speeding up.

And I said, no. I'm not. I'm not speeding up. He says, let's put it on a click track. And so what what he did was set up a click track in the recording studio, and we're playing together.

And sure enough, when we got to that middle part, I kept speeding up so fast that there was no way for anyone to play with me. That's what he was trying to tell me. If you want me to play this with you, which he did for the recording, we're gonna have to settle this down. We have to nail it in. We have to get it in place.

Question here. Man's asking, do I have a phone app metronome that I recommend? There are there are several. I like the strobe tuner. So this is ISTROBLSOFT, and it I I paid, you know, an exorbitant amount of money for it.

I think it was, $9 or something like that. In app world, that's a lot of money. And there are a lot of free ones. So, oh, that's I'm sorry. That's the tuner app.

So the yes. We're gonna talk about micro, metronome apps, which is next. Thank you for leading us in that direction. This is what I demonstrated last week. It's, Afro Latin drum machine.

Oops. It went away again. So let me put it in. Now here's here's why I'm I'm mentioning this, and I I get the paid version because I don't want the ads popping up, and I wanna support the people who do this work. So I'm grateful for the people who create these tools that we're using.

Hi, John. Welcome here. So this one, there's a free version, and I paid for the the the other one. But here's what I like about this. Let's turn up the sound.

It gives me not just a beep beep beep. It gives me something to feel that I can play along with. And there are lots of changes in here that I can make. Now you may not feel the the Afro Latin feel, things like I do, but I really like these. And they inspire me to stay in time, but also to have something more interesting to listen to than a simple beep.

And it's like having a drummer as your friend. So that's the one I use for inspiration and for what I want more than just a simple click. But having a simple click is what we need. We need that outside thing to learn to trade in both ears. The one that's listening to us play and the one that's listening to the that play.

I wanted to show you another one. So let me open up this is drumbit.app. This is an online drum machine. So let me get this over here. Now I'm gonna share my screen.

And Let's see what happens. We this may not go exactly the way I was planning to. There we go. If I if I just go through here, I can click on these all these different sounds. And then play it.

Let's see what happens when I do this. So in this case, I just created that that that, online thing, and I'm gonna stop sharing now. If I I can I can change any one of these at any time? But this is and this is this is a free thing that's on the Internet. So that's that's a way cool kind of thing that lets you experiment with some different ideas.

You can change the sounds, but the point is it's got pitch related. It's got different thing, and you can play with what you want the sound to be. It ends up being a very creative thing as you are doing your arranging composing as well. Because sometimes, if you're like me, you get tired of what you're doing, and you want something that's gonna help you just move forward a little bit. You're welcome, Mary, and, I'm glad that's helpful.

So that's another tool that can help our musicianship too. Are there any more questions about metronomes? I wanna I wanna keep we have several other things I wanna take a look at here. And you can type those into the Facebook win chat or the, live chat that's in the stream here. And I'm also interested.

Is there anybody watching this right on the front of Dulcimer Crossing? Because for the first time, we have embedded it there at the same time that we're doing everything here. We haven't had that we haven't done that before, So there's no chat there, but we're seeing what happens. Okay. Well, let's go on.

They so we've talked about tuners. We've talked about timing. Now we're gonna talk about capturing, capturing a performance and or capturing ideas. And this is where we live in a time that's wonderful for all the possibilities we have. We're we have phones that have cameras on them.

You can capture with a video. You can capture yourself. You can have a friend use the camera. You can use your iPad or tablet that's got a camera. There is, let's see.

I also have an app called Recorder Pro, and this is just a voice memo thing that I can use, but I can also capture myself. I just click record, and it looks like a little microphone. And I click that, and now it's recording what I'm saying, and it's showing me that it's gonna create a little sound file. I can save that sound file. I can edit that sound file.

I can rename it. Right now, it's untitled 4 m a dot 4 m a or m four a. And that'll be there. This is how I capture ideas sometimes when I'm on the run, and I have a musical idea or I have a thought of something on it right. But it's also a way to test some things if you're doing some harmonies or things like that.

You can sing 1 and then hear it and sing back to it. It's great to have friends, but in this time when we can't be with our friends, we can use our tools to be our friends. Hi, I was glad to have you here today. Excellent, Deborah. That's very cool.

So, a video camera that's just separate. Let's see. Do I have one? Sorry about that. Here's a separate video camera that I use in my studio.

That is a way to capture a video. Now it's also possible to capture audio. This is my Zoom H4n recorder. It's got 2 microphones in it plus a couple of microphone inputs. It can be a 4 channel, audio capture machine, and it does a good job of capturing ideas.

And because it is 4 channels, you can actually, within it, add some different pieces, or you can use it to capture 2 microphones plus the 2 microphones that are built in. And there is an SD card that is is in the side here. You can take out and put in a computer when you if you wanna, edit it in some other way. There. Put that back in there.

And this has been a good tool that served me well. When I wanna do something that was, well, I didn't always have a smartphone. I had a flip phone, and I had this. And so this did a better job of capturing than the smartphone did. Now once you've captured what you what you wanna capture, then the question is, what do you do with it?

Having having files that you can listen to. Good question, Arthur. Why is Recorder Pro better than the voice memos that comes with iPhone? You know, I've never tried voice memos. I couldn't answer that question.

Maybe I didn't need to get Recorder Pro. You you might have to if you use voice memos, then you're doing exactly what you need to. You found tools that you already had in your belt. And maybe I just missed that boat. So I I can't compare.

So I'm sorry. I can't I can't give a con comparison about that. I use Logic Pro. Let's see. I don't know if this is gonna take too much CPU.

Let's see what happens when I do this as it opens. Logic Pro is a software that lets you work with your tracks after you've saved them. You can import them and play alongside. That's the the professional version of Garage Band. Audacity and Adobe Audition or Audition or Cubase are all different, softwares that okay.

That'll work. So let me go back to share screen. I wanna share the application window. So what you're seeing now is this is a project. I have a track here that's now playing.

So it shows me an, visual representation of what the track sounds like, and it's like it's this is what recording studios use. A lot of them use pro tools. But these generally, a digital audio workstation, a DAW, d a w, is gonna have some way that you can see here's what this track is. You can add more tracks if you want to, and it's gonna but one of the things you're gonna have to know is what is the input and what's the output. And there's all these settings that go on.

So there's a learning curve that goes with this. But this is how you can capture your music and then save it. So I'm gonna stop sharing, and then quit that. I don't wanna save any changes. Alright.

But all of the it doesn't matter which one it is. There's gonna be some visual representation to see what's going on, and you might have seen there's bits of and they they can be different colors. You can assign things. You can move things around. You can copy and paste.

You can splice All the things that are it's called lossless edge editing. But that might be way more in-depth than you're looking for to just capture the idea and play along. But it is a way to test some things as well. I wanted to also open up GarageBand. See where do I have that?

On here, I want I have a student who uses GarageBand, and so I had to go get it for my iPad. I have not used GarageBand on my iPad until, Monday to test things. And I'm I'm pretty impressed with how they've they've changed things and taken taken, tools away from it. But you can see right now, it's listening to my voice. It's set up to use the microphone in the iPad and speaker in the iPad.

And I could get a separate microphone and speaker as well. Now one problem one one caveat to think about when you're using these devices that have an a microphone and a speaker in the same place is that they can feedback one to the other. If you have something too hot, you can end up with a problem that way. And so that's why it's like in this time when we're doing a lot of things on Zoom and things like this, I have the separate microphone over here. I don't have sound coming through my computer.

Because right now, if I listen to the sound, I'm hearing they can feedback 1 to the other. Because it's taken a while to get to the satellite and to you and then back to me. And so there's this big delay. And, the headphone keeps the speaker separate from the microphone, so that's capturing in real time. I can and this is that's getting way too, deep into it, I think, for what we might wanna talk about.

But we have all these tools. One other tool that I didn't even put on the paper is we have available to us not just recordings that other people have made or that I have made, that are, you know, in the in the marketplace. They're released for you to listen to. We have YouTube. We have videos.

We have Facebook live. We have all kinds of places where music is happening. And somebody, Deborah, by the way, somebody saw your Dulcimer Crossing concert window live show and wrote to me and said, what is this song that she's playing? And I said, it's a Fleur of Northumberland. She goes, that's wonderful.

And I told her it was in your book, you know. And so, but she was doing her research, and she loved that tune. She wanted to play that tune. She was trying to figure out what's the name of it. And then she wanted to see, maybe I have that.

I might have the stack of music that's as thick, and that gets us to the next one. But being able to go look and watch other people play, and that's that's a tool that we have not had until fairly recently. A whole lot of of, our musical time has been the biggest tool is the neighbor. And we can go sit with them on the porch and play and listen and play knee to knee. And that's my preferred way of doing it.

But in this time when we can't do that, here we are. We can do it this way. Now there's another way to capture things, and that's the old fashioned way. Having an idea, capturing it with a pencil, writing it down on paper saying, your arrangement you you have an idea for an arrangement. You just say, I wanna do this the first time through.

I wanna do this the second time too. You're writing in English. I wanna do or Spanish or French or German or, you know, Chinese, whatever your language is. But you're writing down, here's what I wanna do. Four times through, I'm gonna do this first time, second, 3rd, 4th.

That is an arrangement. It doesn't have to have notes attached with it. It's just something to jog your memory. However, sometimes you wanna you wanna grab something, and I'm gonna go to the free section of Dulcimer crossing, and I'm gonna share my screen again. Because on the free section, if you get the down for for, theory for mountain dulcimer, we have tablature for that are blank tablature pages that you can print out.

This is free. And you can write at the top here. You can write your notes. At the bottom, you can write your tablature eulberg. So it can go back and forth from whichever way you're going.

We have it for a grand staff. If you're just gonna write notes for you're doing some piano or or something else, we've got a lead sheet, which is, just if you're gonna put the the melody and you have room for lyrics and some chord, right, chord names above it. Those things are also down here in the hammered dulcimer side as well. Hammered dulcimer, there has not a standard tablature that has been developed yet. There are a lot of things that people try.

I wanna get into hammered dulcimer skills to show you. Wake up. There we go. Tabletsure reading. We have these lessons where tablatures explained, and we, this is a 3 section.

We'll compare lots of different stat tablets or styles that people use for hammered dulcimer. We also have those for mountain dulcimer skills. So if you're wanting to bone up on that or comparing different ways, we've got a lot of historical ways that people have done tablature. So those are all lessons. When in Dulcimer Crossing, if if the background is white, and you you can play one of the lessons in the front, but everything else is not these are things you can't click on, it's because you're not logged in.

And you have to log in as either a basic or a premium member. If you're logged in as a basic member, everything's yellow. If you're logged in as a premium member, everything's background is blue, and you have access to different things. Yes. Excellent, Doug.

I'm glad you've been able to use those. Okay. So we are capturing with a pencil and a paper. Now there are also computer programs or app apps that you can use. Woah.

Let's hold on here. And I wanna get to music. That's not the one I want. Notate me now is a program that is kind of interesting. Because what I can do is create a new score, and it will listen to me sing, and it'll it'll it'll put ideas down.

I've gotta fix everything after that. But it's a way to capture it and get it quickly into some musical notation. I don't use that a lot, but it is it is one I have experimented with. 4 score is is a a wonderful way to organize scores and and lessons that you've actually, that's hard to read, isn't it, with the light? But I don't know if you can see that there are handwritten there's red and things like that.

You can have a score that you take a picture of and put in 4 score, and then you can use your pen and use your finger and make yes. Exactly, Deborah. You can you can use your finger to write out notes and things like that on the on the screen. 1 of my friends and students makes this a lot of use of this. She organizes all of her music.

She has books and books and books and music, and she's organized it in here. It does it's not automatic. I mean, you have to assign what categories you want and what tuning is in so you can organize it. But it's like anything else you have to organize. It has to make sense for you.

Getting there are 2 music program 2 different styles of, computer programs if you're trying to do music for both kinds of dulcimers. There's the kind that go from musical notation to tablature. I use Finale. Note notate me now. Yeah.

That's is the is that one, Deborah. Where you write in the music, and then from that, you figure out what the tablature is. So that's finale, Sibelius, and things like that. They're intended to be visual musical representations of what's going on. They have tablets or functions in them where you can take the music and drag it down onto the staff.

There are definitely limitations in terms of dulcimers. Finale, so far, only that automatic tablature function works great for chromatic instruments. For diatonic instruments, they're only set up for 2 tunings. And I use way more tunings than that. So it's doesn't end up being useful for me.

But I came at this first from musical notation. So I use the musical notation, and then I write in as lyrics, the tablets or numbers. And that's the way the Dallas Klein out east did it. When I first I think it was the first time I ever talked to Maddie McNeil on the phone was because she had written in Bellsprayers News that somebody had figured out a way to use Finale to do tab tablature. I've been using Finale as a music program since 1989, which I later found out is when it came out.

I didn't know that. And I begged them for a long time, do you make the tablet your function work for dulcimers? And they finally did, but in such a limited way that that's I already had my work around. I wasn't gonna go back. But it's because I called Maddie, and she said, well, here's Dallas's number.

You can call her, and you can and they sent me templates, and and I learned from their templates about how I wanted to do it. And that's the beauty of the Dulcimer world. People share and are helpful with each other. Hi, Sally. Welcome to welcome here.

That's where you're going from musical notation to tablature. The other way is to go from tablature. I know where the thing I know where the frets are on the, the fretboard, and I can write those numbers down. Now what music is that? That's that's where you put it in, and it either appears on the musical score or you have to move it there.

Table edit or tablet it, depending on who you're talking to, is one of those. Guitar Pro is the guitar way that that happens. Both of those are ways that when you enter it in in tab on in fret numbers, it'll show up above in a location on the musical score. A frustration for me with table edit tablet edit is everything ends up looking an octave higher than it actually sounds, but it doesn't tell you that. And I there's supposed to be a setting that you can make things look in the actual pitch that they sound, But, I don't use it that often, so I don't know where that setting is.

Steven Seifert is the one who uses that a lot. Aaron O'Rourke, Aaron May Lewis, a lot of people in the mountain Baltimore world use that. Neither of neither of those are gonna help you with hammered Dulcimer because what we do there is musical notation. And the difficulty with musical notation is it assumes or it's really good for telling you pitch, the length of time, how to interpret the note, the loudness, the softness, when not to play the note. It tells you all those things.

It doesn't tell you where on your instrument to find that note. That's why tablature was developed. The 13 string loop had a lot of different places to say play the same pitch. Mountain dulcimer have a lot of different places to play the same exact pitch. And that's why and the hammer dolsoners have even more.

That's why tablature was developed to help us understand that. So I can so I can have that little it's like, going across the river and knowing where the stones are, so you don't fall all the way in up to your up to your knees or something like that. Melanie Johnston In Asheville, North Carolina has a book and teaches classes about this. Let me see. I think you can find her on Facebook.

I'll look and see if I have a website for her. She's also really good with 4 score. The book is available through Footcraft. Excellent. Thank you, Doug.

This is the community. Yay. Thank you, Deborah. And since that's not my stuff, go support them and use the resources that are gonna work best for you. Now the, other thing that so I'm talking about tools.

We had tuning, timing, how to capture 1, which is capture performance, capture ideas using a pencil or the computer or your your iPad or something like that, then organizing your ideas for score is, I just wanna say a little bit more about that, I guess. Let me got it. Let me get that. I'm gonna say I'm done with that. Do not save.

I don't know if you can see. This now lists there's a list of all my scores and by topic, by composer. I can sort them by genre, by tags, by labels, and then I can also have them connected with the sound file, and I can have it page when it gets to a certain place. I can train it to do that. I don't use it that way, but there are people who do and make great use of this.

The other thing that this can do is when you're playing in an ensemble that has multi pages, I mean, you can you can scan by taking a photo. It used to be you had to do a whole separate thing, but this has got a photo on it. Take a photo of your PDF, put it in here. If you have multiple pages, you can get a foot switch and tap on it, and it'll flip the page when it's time so you don't have to take your hands up and swipe it on the screen. You can also if you are a lot of people playing the same piece of music that has to have the same page turned at the same time, you can make your iPad be a slave to the controller who will tap their foot, the page turns, everybody's pages turn at the same time.

It's just crazy. Now what this also, means that we need another tool, and that's our own sense of responsibility and our own sense of community. Because what people can very easily do now is just take pictures everybody's work that has worked to put together music and notation. And once it's in here, it's easily shared, which is dangerous. Because when you pour your blood, sweat, and tears into creating something, and somebody takes a picture of it and then thinks they own it, and then they can give it to whoever.

And they're talking about the value of here. Look at the developer community is so great. It's got all this free stuff. You're robbing the person that created it, especially if they created it as a as a item for the marketplace, which is how they survive in the world. So we have to also be grown up and think about responsibility and sharing responsibly, and making sure we have permission to do it.

If we if I reach over and take your hat off and walk away with it, you would not be happy with me unless you hated the hat. But it's not my hat. So why do I think I can have the hat? If you loan me the hat and I don't give it back, I've still stolen the hat. And, eventually, I wanna return the hat.

Same we we need to be responsible. So that's an internal tool that we sometimes have to learn. Well, we always have to learn. We all have to learn. And we can get excited when things are available to us and share exuberant exuberantly.

Let me give an example. I create these Dulcimer Orchestra arrangements. I'm teaching a workshop, and everybody has their parts. The the arrangement with all of its parts and its score and the sound files goes in 1 in 1 piece for a certain price. And you can find those on my All Mountain Music website if you're interested in that.

But the idea is I've created this so that your ensemble can play it. I'm giving a workshop with it, and everybody has their parts and they love it. They say, how do we how do we get the other parts? And I tell them how to get the other parts. And right in front of me, one of my students who comes to see me weekly says, well, I can go make copies and give them to you.

And I just looked at her, and I didn't know exactly what to say. And later on, she said, did I do something wrong? I said, yes. She was trying to be helpful, and and and we have that. And, the more and so we ended up we had a conversation.

It was all fine, all worked out. But that's that that's that thing that happens. We wanna be helpful for other people, and that's not always helpful help. Is anyone using OnSong? Good question.

Is anybody here? That's one I don't know about. And being able to to share the resources with each other is part of what this is about. So I really like the conversation you're having with each other. We're coming to the top of the hour.

We did have a little bit trouble getting going today because my computer needed to stretch, you know, like when you get up from a nap and the cat takes a long time to go like this. That's what my computer was doing. The final thing is that mental framework in my list of things. And, again, if you want to if you would like to have, edit, I wanna say, Steve at You would like to have the handout for today's live q and a. Just write me at steve@dulcemercrossing.com, and I will send it to you.

Now as some of you who requested 1 in the past can realize I might send you the wrong one first, then you get 2. Okay, Doug. You're using Symphony Pro 5 and Notion. Okay. Cool.

Good job. The mental framework we're talking about in terms of responsibility is important, but we also have a I have a few quotes here I wanna share with you. My friend and colleague, cartoonist, Lucy Bellwood, has written a book called A A 100 Demon Dialogues. We all have this little demon that's sitting on our shoulder or somewhere around us telling us we're no good. Linda Rastat's voice, you're no good.

You're no good. You're no good. It keeps telling you we shouldn't even be doing this because we're not any good. Why are we doing it? But that's a wonderful thing to remember that that negative voice that we have, keeping us from our creativity is something we might need to give a job and tell to stand in the corner.

Don't let perfect be the enemy of good. Sometimes we are so harsh on ourselves. We'll go through and play a piece, and there's one thing wrong, we'll say it's crap. It's like, no. It's not either or.

There's a continuum. And I got 90% of it right. There was this 10% I gotta work on and improve for the next time. The other thing is that practice makes permanent. It doesn't make perfect.

Practice makes permanent because what we're doing is rewiring our brain. And so the tool of practice and repetition is the way that we get we we encode it so that we don't have to think about every single thing we're doing. However, if we do that practice without mindfulness, we can practice and make our mistakes permanent. That's why a lot of us know the beginning of a song really well and never any past that, because we always stop and try to fix something in our way in. I always say, remember, we don't work music, we play music.

So keeping a playful attitude as I'm playing a light touch, meaning I'm not trying to squeeze. I'm a I shared a poem on Facebook the other day, about the the sadness of when you the the poet is saying, I tell my students, put the poem up to your ear and listen to it. Feel it. He's using all the physical senses to say, do all this with the poem. My students take it with a rubber hose and try to beat it to get meaning out of it.

We do that to ourselves when we're playing music, and that's one of those metal framework things I would like you to stop using. And to keep a beginner's mind, doesn't matter how long you've been doing something, doesn't matter how good you are at it. There's always room to begin. There's always openness. There's always that other way that we haven't thought of, or the way that we discarded in the past, that now is it's an idea whose time has come.

It wasn't ready. We weren't ready for it. It wasn't ready for us before. Now we're ready for it. So that's, using all of our tools to help develop our musicianship for today, our conversation.

Next week, we're gonna talk about the 5 finger practice regimen and other strategies for structuring your rehearsal time. These are designed from dulcimer crossing to be a way for us to answer the questions that are coming up. So as you have questions, and it's not limited to Dawson crossing, I would like I'm I'm interested in your questions, but these all started with here's questions that I have. How do I do this? How do I do that?

I'm stuck in this point. I wanna respond to those. And so if you have questions, write to me and say, here's something I'm really puzzling about, or here's an idea I have, and we can share it too. So it doesn't have to just be a deficit. It can be capacity as well.

So it's good to have you join us today, friends. This is archived on the Dulcimer crossing site in the livestream events, or the livestream events page for, members that are logged in. It's also here on Facebook and our Dulcemer Crossing YouTube channel for everyone. So, you can go back and, listen and watch these. Correct me if you need to or write me later.

You don't have to do it all in real time. But, joy to you. Happy Earth Day. I hope you get a chance to be out appreciating the the air and the the the glory that the earth provides to us as a reminder that we may be distracted by things, but it continues to do its best to blossom. And so may you.

Bye.

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