Here are 100 books that Mel Bay Presents How to Make a Band Work fans have personally recommended if you like
Mel Bay Presents How to Make a Band Work.
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After dabbling in music in my youth, I returned to playing roots music over fifteen years ago. I’ve joined music circles, jammed, made new friends, and learned a lot. My husband Gene and I have recorded three albums and played at bars, festivals, weddings, and listening rooms. Professionally, I’ve spent years as a writing teacher and writer, and I also teach at an annual folk music camp. I wanted to share the joys of music with others, so I talked with dozens of musicians, dug down to find rare resources, and pulled it together into Making Music for Life to make it easier for others to pursue their own musical journey.
Barry Green suggests a method for shifting your musical focus from external achievement, which can lead to performance anxiety and misery, to the quality of your experience and the pleasure you gain from learning and playing music—the inner game. I found his method helpful for my own struggles with self-doubt and stage fright, and a good reminder to enjoy the amazing journey of making and sharing music.
The bestselling guide to improving musical performance
The Inner Game of Music is the battle that all musicians have to fight against elusive opponents such as nervousness, self-doubt and fear of failure. Using the world-famous Inner Game principles, developed by bestselling author Timothy Gallwey, acclaimed musician Barry Green explains the basic principles of 'natural learning' and shows how you can apply them to reach a new level of musical application and performance. In precise, easy to understand language, Green and Gallwey explain how natural skills - such as awareness, trust and willpower - can be nurtured and enhanced. Through a…
It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan.
The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced that it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run…
After dabbling in music in my youth, I returned to playing roots music over fifteen years ago. I’ve joined music circles, jammed, made new friends, and learned a lot. My husband Gene and I have recorded three albums and played at bars, festivals, weddings, and listening rooms. Professionally, I’ve spent years as a writing teacher and writer, and I also teach at an annual folk music camp. I wanted to share the joys of music with others, so I talked with dozens of musicians, dug down to find rare resources, and pulled it together into Making Music for Life to make it easier for others to pursue their own musical journey.
This is the best book I’ve seen on understanding music in a practical, accessible way, with an accompanying website full of free support materials such as audio files, music scores, and a huge variety of songs across genres and instruments. It’s aimed at those who play by ear, back-porch pickers, semi-pros, and pros. I’ve tried learning theory in many ways, from college classes to online courses, but I found the approach of this book the best, and I imagine learning from it for years to come.
After dabbling in music in my youth, I returned to playing roots music over fifteen years ago. I’ve joined music circles, jammed, made new friends, and learned a lot. My husband Gene and I have recorded three albums and played at bars, festivals, weddings, and listening rooms. Professionally, I’ve spent years as a writing teacher and writer, and I also teach at an annual folk music camp. I wanted to share the joys of music with others, so I talked with dozens of musicians, dug down to find rare resources, and pulled it together into Making Music for Life to make it easier for others to pursue their own musical journey.
Madeline Bruser is a professional musician and teacher focused on teaching dedicated music students of all ages. She brings her own meditation practice and fresh insights into improving music practice through mindfulness, attention to the sounds and sensations one experiences while practicing or performing, and increased awareness of the joys of music. Although I haven’t attended music school or spent a career as a professional musician, I still picked up useful tools and insights that have improved my practice time. If you’re finding practice to be boring, painful, or unproductive, this book can help you reorient your approach and savor music more fully.
An illustrated guide for the amateur and professional musician that teaches us how to transform practicing from an often laborious activity into an exhilarating and rewarding experience
Foreword by Yehudi Menuhin • “Give this book to any musician you love and to any person who loves what music does for them and for the world.”—Richard Stoltzman, clarinetist
In The Art of Practicing, acclaimed pianist and teacher Madeline Bruser combines physiological and meditative principles to help musicians release physical and mental tension and unleash their innate musical talent. She offers practical techniques for cultivating free and natural movement, a keen enjoyment…
The Duke's Christmas Redemption
by
Arietta Richmond,
A Duke who has rejected love, a Lady who dreams of a love match, an arranged marriage, a house full of secrets, a most unneighborly neighbor, a plot to destroy reputations, an unexpected love that redeems it all.
Lady Charlotte Wyndham, given in an arranged marriage to a man she…
After dabbling in music in my youth, I returned to playing roots music over fifteen years ago. I’ve joined music circles, jammed, made new friends, and learned a lot. My husband Gene and I have recorded three albums and played at bars, festivals, weddings, and listening rooms. Professionally, I’ve spent years as a writing teacher and writer, and I also teach at an annual folk music camp. I wanted to share the joys of music with others, so I talked with dozens of musicians, dug down to find rare resources, and pulled it together into Making Music for Life to make it easier for others to pursue their own musical journey.
This book comprehensively addresses a wide range of topics geared toward teen music students, from the foundations of practicing and understanding theory to working with a teacher and parents, playing in an orchestra, or planning a music career. Although some of the topics are useful for any musician (such as practice ideas and improving one’s musicality), this book is best for guiding adolescents on a musical path.
In her follow-up to Making Music and Enriching Lives: A Guide for All Music Teachers, Bonnie Blanchard offers students a set of tools for their musical lives that will help them stay engaged, even during the challenging times in their musical development. Blanchard discusses issues such as finding an instructor, selecting the right instrument, and choosing a college or conservatory. The book includes lessons on music theory and history as well as a guide to finding additional materials in print and online. Blanchard's strategies for making practice productive and preparing for auditions are useful tips students can return to again…
I am an author who believes stories must first entertain and thrill if they are ever to instill something powerful and unforgettable. While I would love to sit here and compile books that laud the values I believe in, that’s just not how it works. Action is the best way to convey theme – and these examples celebrate the storytelling techniques I stand by. I love ass-kickers, in literature and in life. And I hope one day to be remembered as one of them.
This author has a talent for using just a hint of magic to flirt with the reader in an otherwise rural, modern, realistic environment. Okay, okay, there may not be machine guns of ass-kicking in this novel, but there is an ass-kicking female lead who renders an Oscar-worthy performance of compelling the story forward. If you want a feisty book with a little less guts spilled (maybe…), this is my recommendation. Although I read this book long ago, I’m always drawn back into it the second I reopen to page one, like a tsunami of nostalgia wrapped in a sheet of music. Maybe on a pillow of bear fur. (Seriously, just read it).
Dani’s met two new friends this summer: bad boy Eli, and a big black bear. She doesn’t know which one is more dangerous….
Dani Moser is a fifteen-year-old girl who dreams of being a blues guitarist and singer like her hero, Janis Joplin. When her dad takes Dani and her annoying little brother to his hometown for the summer—a tiny little town in the Arkansas Ozarks—she thinks she’s in for the most boring summer of her life.
She didn’t expect she would meet a small-town bad boy named Eli, and join his bluegrass band. She didn’t expect she’d get in…
I’ve been a full-time writer since 1994 and have so far published twenty-seven books, three of them with gay themes: My Father’s Scar, a gay coming-of-age novel and two about LGBTQ+ issues: Top 250 LGTBQ Books for Teens and The Heart Has Its Reasons, a history of queer literature. I’ve been interested in this literature since I was a gay teen myself, because there were no YA books with queer characters then. I missed seeing my face in the pages of a good book and so I promised myself that when I became an adult. I would make sure there was an ample assortment for today’s queer kids. And, guess what? I’ve kept my promise!
Weary of people asking him what his plans for the future are, eighteen-year-old Dutch teen Tycho decides to travel from his Holland home to America to work at a camp for international kids. Along the way, he meets Oliver, who’s from Norway, and is also going to work at the camp. The two quickly become fast friends and then something more. When their love relationship is discovered, they’re expelled from the camp, and the two fly back to Norway where Tycho will stay with Oliver while the boy’s mother is gone. No, there are no wild parties, just a lovely examination of an emerging relationship that is challenged by Oliver’s keeping a closely guarded secret. If this sounds dull, trust me, it isn’t! Find out why I’m so crazy about this book by reading it. Tell them Michael sent you...
Tycho Zeling is drifting through his life. Everything in it - school, friends, girls, plans for the future - just kind of ... happens. Like a movie he presses play on, but doesn't direct.
So Tycho decides to break away from everything. He flies to America to spend his summer as a counselor at a summer camp, for international kids. It is there that Oliver walks in, another counselor, from Norway.
And it is there that Tycho feels his life stop, and begin again, finally, as his. The Days of Bluegrass Love was originally published in the Netherlands in 1999.…
A fake date, romance, and a conniving co-worker you'd love to shut down. Fun summer reading!
Liza loves helping people and creating designer shoes that feel as good as they look. Financially overextended and recovering from a divorce, her last-ditch opportunity to pitch her firm for investment falls flat. Then…
I describe myself as equal parts Deadhead and student of the Bible. I have been active in a Presbyterian church for twenty years, which, being adjacent to a seminary, takes a very thorough approach to Bible study. We were deep into the Book of Acts during the Fare Thee Well events (2015), where I was re-acquainted with the intensity of the Deadheads’ devotion and their unfailingly positive spirit. My good wife, new to the scene, commented on how nice everyone was, that no one present was a stranger to any other. It occurred to me that these would all make good church members if only someone would reach out.
I love the thematic organization of this collection of interview excerpts.
This is a great concept for pulling together the varying recollections of each of the different participants in the same events and time periods. The editors did a masterful job of collecting material from a variety of sources and putting them side-by-side, allowing a fuller understanding to be gained than would be had by reading one interview at a time.
Among the gems is Garcia owning the identity of a Deadhead for himself when he said that yes, there was, in fact, a Deadhead who had been to every Grateful Dead concert: him.
In This Is All a Dream We Dreamed, two of the most well-respected chroniclers of the Dead, Blair Jackson and David Gans, reveal the band's story through the words of its members and their creative collaborators, and a number of diverse fans, stitching together a multitude of voices into a seamless oral tapestry. Woven into this musical saga is an examination of the subculture that developed into its own economy, touching fans from all walks of life, from penniless hippies to celebrities, and at least one U.S. vice president. The book traces the band's evolution from its folk/bluegrass beginnings through…
I spent 34 years writing for daily papers, most of them at the News & Observer in Raleigh, North Carolina. I’ve also freelanced for numerous magazines, primarily about music, while hosting a podcast and writing the occasional book. Through it all I’ve had a particular fascination for the music business and its peculiar ways, especially record companies. The industry’s darker side was the subject of my first book way back in 2000, the novel Off The Record, which was a notebook dump of thinly fictionalized war stories I’d accumulated over the years. The record business is the subject of my latest book, too, although it’s a much more positive story.
A century ago, the record industry sent representatives all over the country to do field recordings of vernacular artists playing folk, blues, and early country for “hillbilly” and “race” records (the sort that Rounder would start putting out in the 1970s).
One of these scouts was Ralph Peer from the Victor Talking Machine Company, for which he oversaw 1927’s legendary “Bristol Sessions.” It was the first time that Hall of Fame titans the Carter Family and Jimmie Rodgers recorded, generally cited as the beginning of the country music industry.
As explained in Barry Mazor’s excellent biography, Peer went on to become one of the giants of the recording and publishing industry, laying the groundwork that pretty much every record label including Rounder has followed since.
This is the first biography of Ralph Peer, the revolutionary A&R man and music publisher who pioneered the recording, marketing, and publishing of blues, jazz, country, gospel, and Latin music, and this book book tracks his role in such breakthrough events as the recording of Mamie Smith’s “Crazy Blues,” the first country recording sessions with Fiddlin’ John Carson, his discovery of Jimmie Rodgers and the Carter Family, the popularizing of Latin American music during World War II, and the postwar transformation of music on the airwaves that set the stage for the dominance of R&B,…
As the Director of the Center for Texas Music History at Texas State University, I’m excited to stay on top of all that’s being done in the field of Texas Music and let me assure you that it is a great way to spend one’s days. Texas music and culture reflect the state’s diverse and contested past, and every month, it seems that there is not only a new artist appearing on the stage to sing her or his truth but a writer helping us to understand how those truths fit into the larger narratives of Texas history.
If the Armadillo World Headquarters is one central node of countercultural country music in Texas, Willie Nelson’s Fourth of July Picnics was the other. Where the Armadillo closed down in 1980, though, Willie’s picnics persist as an annual institution to this day. Author Dave Thomas has extensively researched the phenomenon and crafts its half-century history well.
The resulting volume is a riveting account that uses the sun-baked Texas ritual as a launching pad for stories encompassing all of America. A newspaper journalist, Thomas has an eye for detail and an ear for turns of phrase that kept me turning the pages long after I should have turned out the lights. If you ever wanted to read about a sort of country music, Woodstock Groundhog Day, this is that book.
In 1973, a forty-year-old country musician named Willie Nelson, inspired by a failed music festival the year before, decided he was going to hold his own party. He would stage it in the same remote and rocky field where the previous festival had withered. And he’d do it in July: not the hottest part of the Central Texas summer, but “damn sure close enough,” according to music journalist Dave Dalton Thomas. As unlikely as it seemed in 1973, Willie kept the event going, minus a year off here and there, for half a century.
“Rowdy” Randy Cox, a woman staring down the barrel of retirement, is a curmudgeonly blue-collar butch lesbian who has been single for twenty years and is trying to date again.
At the end of a long, exhausting shift, Randy finds her supervisor, Bryant, pinned and near death at the warehouse…
If you regard science fiction, fantasy, and horror as throwaway literature, think again. It is within such tales that the contest between good and evil is given center stage, wherein heroic acts are celebrated, and virtue discussed in all its many permutations. I would call speculative fiction a worthy successor to the medieval morality play, a dramatic form that used allegorical characters to teach moral lessons. To wit—stories are an instrument of culture, a way to promote common values and an important activity for any civilization that intends to stick around. You won’t find an abundance of this vibe in ‘serious’ fiction—and when you do, it’s not as much fun.
A short story compilation, within which the title ‘Uncle Einar’ made such an impression that I still, to this day, remember what it was about, who wrote it, and when I read it. I found it on my dad’s nightstand 65 years ago. That’s how much I liked it. Although the collection falls mostly into the fantasy genre, the title Uncle Einar is something of a crossover (Mutants!) and heartwarming to boot.
Many of these stories were first published in the pulp magazine Weird Tales, but keep in mind we’re talking about the 1940s and 50s. They called it ‘macabre fiction’. These days, we call it YA.
But this is, first and foremost, a work of literature, a timeless classic upon which the author made a splendid reputation, replete with lyrical prose, imaginative concepts, surprise endings, and persuasive dialogue. Also, an example of Magical Realism, a literary approach I…
The October Country is Ray Bradbury’s own netherworld of the soul, inhabited by the horrors and demons that lurk within all of us. Renowned for his multi-million-copy bestseller, Fahrenheit 451, and hailed by Harper’s magazine as “the finest living writer of fantastic fiction,” Ray Bradbury proves here that he is America’s master of the short story.
This classic collection features:
The Emissary: The faithful dog was the sick boy’s only connection with the world outside—and beyond . . . The Small Assassin: A fine, healthy baby boy was the new mother’s dream come true—or her worst nightmare . . .…
