Recently we had the pleasure of visiting a few of our teachers backstage during a tour their respective groups were doing together. Eric Marienthal and John Patitucci are original members of the Chick Corea Electric Band, and they were doing a US tour with Bela Fleck & The Flecktones, of which Howard Levy is an original lineup member on harmonica and piano.

The two powerhouse virtuoso bands were performing at the Green Music Center at Sonoma State University, which isn't not too far away from the ArtistWorks headquaters so we brought some cameras out to record some great musical discussion backstage. This is the first time we've had these three amazing musicians in a discussion panel candidly talking about touring together and being a touring musician in general. The cameras rolled for well over an hour and in that time they shared tour stories including highlights, tips for people getting into that world, horror stories and much more. 

Update: All parts of this discussion series are now available. Check it out in the +Music section! 

In case you haven’t noticed, there’s a new feature around town: Messaging. This comes as a special request from our online students to add more community features so we hope you enjoy communicating with each other! Messaging is going to open the doors for new conversations and connections with like minded ArtistWorks musicians around the world. Talk about the lessons, talk about the music, talk about whatever you want!

Please note: this is a still a “beta” version of Messaging. 

We’ll be rolling out another version with added features soon, but let us know how you like this one first. Please send any feedback or questions to our Customer Service Team and be sure to tell us your Operating System and browser please. You can also email any feedback to info@artistworks.com. Have fun!

How to Send a Message:

On the Dashboard and Community below the Shout area you can now see who’s online.

Click on the green Chat button next to someone’s name to send them a message. You can have multiple one to one Messages at the same time, and you can always minimize the windows if you just want to focus on one at a time.

You’ll see if you have any new messages near the top of the page with a little number telling you many unread there are. If you’d rather not be visible for other students to contact you, just choose the Invisible feature by clicking the Settings icon and choosing Privacy.

Now see who’s online and give Messaging a try!

We all play music, but not everyone understands the science behind it. With music theory, musicians have a shared language to discuss and articulate ideas with other musicians. Unfortunately, not everyone learned this in school growing up (it'd be nice). Even if you do seek it out later in life, it can be hard to find a qualified music theory teacher willing to dispense all this knowledge on you (especially for free).

Lucky for anyone learning online at ArtistWorks, we've already done the work for you. We found a verifiable expert, Mr. Jonathan Coopersmith, and got him to record a whole series of music theory lessons for everyone here.

He boiled it all down to the main ingredients and has it broken up into 2 main categories: Basic Music Theory and Advanced Music Theory. Did we mention you already have access to all this in the Learn area? Read on to take the tour! 

Have you been looping lately?

Looping is a powerful feature on our video player you may not even be aware of until this moment. On all the videos in the Learn area you’ll see an icon that looks like the letter “i” in a circle (it’s next to button for tagging). Click on it to initiate your Looping Control Panel:

Let’s say you’re watching a video and your teacher plays something interesting, but moves on before you have chance to figure out what it was. Just Loop it up!