Taylor Sappe Music Production

Updated 8/12/17

DAW software companies are making it easier to compose music with little or no musical instrument skills.

Just as some people are holding on to the old methods of marketing which no longer work, others are holding on to the philosophy that only people who practice hard on their instruments are entitled to the honor of composing music.

However, people who lack certain skills or don't play a musical instrument are no less creative than the studio musician. Creativity is in all of us. The DAW…

At some point in our lives we have all been deceived into trusting someone who betrayed us.  The depth of our setback depended on how deeply involved we were at the time we discovered the betrayal.  How much of our lives did we waste involved with someone who betrayed us before we found out?  There must be a way to find out early enough to avoid wasting time and energy with these people. 

More than 50 years experience in the music business has taught me a lot of lessons.  One valuable lesson I learned about…

A great way to get in tune with your environment and have fun doing it is to listen to the different pitches in your environment and match them with your instrument.

For instance, if a dog barks, a horn honks, a cat meows, sirens scream, a plane flys overhead, find the pitches on your instrument and try to play along with it. If you are familiar with scales, be aware of the scale possibilities being produced by the pitches you are playing.  If you are familiar with counterpoint, you can use the additional…

I hear this term used most often among singer-songwriters. Although the reasons may vary, the bottom line is that they are unable to make a living making music. Some will use the excuse that they don't want to sell out to commercialism. I have been there myself at one time, but it is in fact, an excuse.

In my 60 plus years of experience, I have discovered, first hand, that the biggest cause for the starving artist is a lack of professional attitude, and business sense.  I have seen so much talent go to…

I grew up in Hazleton, Pa., a small city that was once surrounded by wilderness.  This was convenient for us as children to go hiking in the woods.  Being away from the city and in the woods with the fresh and fragrant air, and the only noise being the sound of trees rustling in the wind, animals rustling in the brush, babbling brooks, frogs croaking, birds chirping, and the occasional whine of a black bear, brought a sense of peace within my soul.  Ok, maybe not the black bear, but everything else.  At the…

I have discovered in my 10 years of teaching that one of the best ways to learn is to teach.  Teaching keeps everything you learned in the forefront, especially when you teach many students at varying levels.  You never forget the basics or the intermediate or even the advanced studies that you learned.  Music is a never ending learning process.  I am constantly striving to learn more about it and more about teaching it and always consider myself a student first and a teacher second. As I learn something…

Often times we want to practice our instrument or craft to develop our skills to a point where we can turn that craft into art, or make a living at it, but there doesn't seem to be enough hours in a day to get everything done that we would like to do.  That's where time management comes in.

Until I learned how to manage my time, everything I did throughout the day was erratic and never seneemed to accomplish anything.  Once I learned how to prioritize, I was able to get much more done in a short period of…

All tasks, including reading or playing music, have varying degrees of difficulty.  You may find some things easy and some portions of the same task difficult. When learning a new musical piece, it is most effective to play through the entire piece to the best of your ability without stopping.  This way you get to see where the difficult parts and easy parts are.  Once you have determined the difficult parts, play them as slowly as you need to play them and still be able to read through them without…

The science of music

One of my favorite TV series is "Ancient Aliens".  In one of the episodes it is mentioned that theorists believe that there is a code programmed into our DNA that causes us to work against each other. I believe that the biblical story of the tower of Babel is an allegory of this because people of the time didn't understand the human genome.  I also believe that once we become aware of this we can overcome it by forcing ourselves to put our egos aside and learn to work together, there isn't any problem we…