Although I don’t use these terms at all in my teaching, bubbles, clicks, and bumps are an important thing for teachers and students to be aware of. These terms are used by horn player (and composer/conductor) Gunther Schuller to describe various imperfections in articulations, slurs and the slotting of notes. […]

Bubbles and Clicks and Bumps (and Mouthpieces), Oh My!

With the newest iPads announced at Apple’s event just a few days ago, I thought that it might be worth updating my tablet recommendations since I first posted about using a tablet as a digital music reader years ago. iPads Although not everyone is an Apple fan, and certainly there […]

Digital Music Reader: Buying Guide [Updated Sept 2019]

Using one or two words to improve your concentration or establish the character of a piece is not a new teaching technique. I know I’ve personally heard about using these kinds of “trigger words” for a couple of decades. These are especially useful to establish the mood or style of […]

Trigger Phrases to Improve Performance

Junk mail, spam email, robocalls, and now…spam Google calendar events. I had the delightful experience of getting some of this spam about 2 weeks ago. Basically I just saw a repeating event for “Win a new iPhone” every day at 6-9pm that endlessly repeated. While this is definitely an annoying […]

Google Calendar Spam is 2019’s Junk Mail

samsung pro portrait mode with music
It’s no secret that I’m a fan of technology, and that I’ve enjoyed using my tablet as a music reader. While originally I was looking forward to the convenience of always having the music I needed at my fingertips, I didn’t anticipate one of the more unique use-cases for digital […]

Outdoors with a Tablet: Pros and Cons

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While I usually fill this space with some technology news (or something depressing in the realm of security and privacy), this past week I’ve gotten a little sidetracked. It started when I started reading this article on the favorite Ars Technica video games from 1998-2008. That article led to lots […]

So I Got Sidetracked…

One of the first things I put on this site (way back in 2014) was my page on basic horn maintenance and cleaning. And in recommending it to a student, I realized that it was due for an update. So I’ve just recently overhauled almost all the text and some […]

Cleaning and Maintenance Page Updated

For software security, many people prefer open-source software. It’s usually functional and inexpensive, although it’s not always pretty. It also (generally) has a reputation for being more secure than closed-source software. But a rash of supply chain attacks have infected many popular open-source projects. Oftentimes the infected code is small […]

Open-source Dangers: Supply Chain Infection