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Usher was in tears after losing two awards at the American Music Awards to Justin Bieber, including favorite entertainer of the year, the top AMA honor.
But Usher wasn't upset about his loss — far from it. Instead, he was welling with pride over the success of his young protege, Justin Bieber, who was the night's biggest winner with four awards and the youngest performer ever to capture the entertainer award.
"To see Justin take the award — having received that award before — it was like an out of body experience, you understand?" Usher said backstage. "It was emotional. I don't cry that often, but I did. Hopefully it gives an indication of how hard we worked to build a career that hopefully will flourish and blossom over the years."
Bieber, who is signed to Usher's label, had a perfect debut at the American Music Awards, winning all four awards he was nominated for: entertainer of the year, breakthrough artist of the year, favorite pop/rock male and favorite pop/rock album for "My World 2.0."
Bieber's debut album is one of the year's top-sellers, with almost two million sold, and he's got a new CD, "My Worlds Acoustic," out this week at Walmart. His ascension marks a phenomenal rise since first garnering attention via homemade videos on YouTube about three years ago.
"This means the world to me," said Bieber after winning breakthrough artist. "I come from the smallest town in the world, of like 30,000 people; I never thought this was possible."
Bieber bested mentor Usher and Eminem for two of his wins. Eminem, whose "Recovery" was a critical and commercial triumph, was nominated for five awards on the evening, tying him with Lady Antebellum, who also had a breakthrough year with their near triple-platinum album "Need You Now."
Neither were the night's big winners, but they came away from the night with something: Eminem got two awards, while the country trio won favorite country band, duo or group.
"Thanks for inviting us to the party," said Lady A's Charles Kelley after the win.
Other winners included Black Eyed Peas and Taylor Swift. But Sunday's ceremony at the Nokia Theatre in Los Angeles was as much a showcase for acts with new albums as it was a celebration of the biggest achievers of 2010. While some of the night's winners will likely be nominees when next week's Grammys are announced, the American Music Awards aren't so much a predictor of the Grammys is it is a party for the industry's mainstream acts.
Rihanna, with her hair dyed a ruby red, gave the show a colorful and sexy start, performing a medley of songs from her just released album "Loud," including the No. 1 hit "What's My Name," wearing a bustier and what seemed like a scarf wrapped around her backside.
"This is amazing!" said an exuberant Rihanna, who danced onstage later to receive her award — favorite soul/R&B female.
The Black Eyed Peas, winners for favorite pop/rock band, gave a levitating performance, singing from boxes atop the stage during part of their performance of their new single, "The Time." Kid Rock gave a stirring, acoustic performance of "Times Like These," his song lifting up his hometown of Detroit during its recent economic struggles, from his new CD, "Born Free."
A pregnant Pink was among the evening's performance highlights. Unlike recent performances marked by a high-wire act, she stayed close to the ground to perform her latest song, "Raise Your Glass," with a tightly choreographed, high-energy dance number.
Swift, last year's artist of the year, took home favorite country female. Sporting sleek blonde hair instead of her usual cascading curls, Swift said simply: "I just want to thank the fans."
Swift later performed her new single "Back to December," a song she also performed on the CMA Awards earlier in the month, but mixed things up by incorporating some of OneRepublic's "Apologize."
Ke$ha, perhaps trying to make up for the absent Lady Gaga, had the night's most bizarre performance: She performed her heavily Auto-Tuned hit "Take It Off" looking like something out of space, with beams of light for eyes and sporting a motorcycle helmet. She then stripped down to a mirrored outfit, segueing into the next song with a pack of male dancers dressed like her, complete with blond wigs and fishnet stockings. (AP)
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To those who may play instruments but never really focused on learning music theory, your hesitation is warranted. The standard method of teaching theory includes all sorts of redundancies and complications that reduce it to a hard-to-apply series of terms and classifications. That being said, theory is still incredibly useful and rewarding if understood. So how do you go about learning it in a simpler and more utilitarian way?
The key is to focus on intervals, and you can find many free music lessons online that will lay them out for you. And understand that when I say focus on intervals, I mean learning their names as well as learning their sounds backwards and forwards. A true understanding of theory means not disconnecting it from sound at any point, but this is hard to do when introduced to scales and other large collections of intervals at once.
You cannot understand how a scale works in theory or in sound until you understand intervals in theory and sound. Scales, chords, and everything else are just collections of intervals; they are not really anything different, and if you know all of the intervals, you know all possible scales.
So to get a very solid knowledge of the intervals you will need to spend a lot of time with them one by one. The best way to do this is to play them on the instrument of your choice, and also sing them. Start with the root to minor second interval and play it in every possible way on your instrument, and then sing it in every different key.
After you’ve got it down a little bit, test yourself by playing a root and singing the minor second. Do whatever exercises you can think of, and after you have the interval mastered, move on to the next one. Just make sure that you practice the root up to the interval sound, and the root down to the interval sound.
When you feel like you have a handle on the single intervals, start combining them into triads and other three note collections and repeat the process. Gradually move up to full scales and you will find that your knowledge of theory and of your particular instrument is on a level that you never could have imagined.
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Composing music on the guitar is something that every composer should become familiar with. In particular, the guitar offers a new perspective on how notes relate and work together compared to that of the piano; the instrument most composers work with. Although the piano is without a doubt the most powerful instrument for music composition, knowing how to compose music on the guitar is a valuable skill as well, and those interested in becoming as knowledgeable about music as possible should study guitar composition in addition to any other instruments.
The reason that most composers focus on the piano is clear; you can play ten or even more notes at once, you can play multiple parts at once with relative ease, and you have a very wide tonal range of multiple octaves. These facts make it easy to experiment with a full arrangement of sounds, where on other instruments you may only be able to play one melody line at a time.
Composers used the piano because it could give them a complete picture of their compositions in a way that no other instrument could. The guitar cannot get quite as much into the realms of playability, but it does offer a few advantages that piano composers are unable to access.
One of the most significant of these is the fact that you can move chord shapes around with great ease on the guitar. A major chord for example can be slid up and down the fretboard without needing to take white notes and black notes into account. On a piano, you can certainly move major chords around, but you have to adjust them for the white and black key differences.
This lack of effort required for moving chord shapes around on the guitar can allow you to use more of those types of chord motions in your compositions. They are a technique not used often by piano players because of the instrumental differences and the general music tradition, which doesn’t often move the same types of chords around a lot.
In addition to these chordal motion differences, the guitar allows you to use alternate techniques such as string bends, legato playing, sliding, and strumming; all of which the piano cannot duplicate. These techniques can help you shape compositions that will greatly differ from the usual piano pieces, and with most other composers using the piano, this can help set you apart.
The guitar simply offers you a different look at the arrangement of musical notes, and this can help you tap into new kinds of melody and harmony. In theory, the more instruments you are familiar with, the more varied your compositions can be, and the more adept you will be at writing for other instruments, so it is a good idea to start learning them. With this in mind, the guitar, and its ability to play both chords and melody, is probably the first place to start.
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Teaching group music lessons is a much different activity than normal private lessons. While the end goal is the same, groups require more planning and compromise, and will take some thought and adaptation to get through. Any music teacher who is taking on group lessons for the first time may find them more of a challenge in certain ways, but with the right planning and attitude, they can be successfully managed and quite rewarding in the end.
Most of the issues with teaching a lesson to multiple people arise from the fact that there are different skill levels to deal with. Whether you found the students by getting your name on a music teacher listing, or you work at a music store, your groups will have people of different talents and abilities, and this can be tough to navigate.
What may be easy for someone in the group may be impossible for another, and on top of this, what interests someone in the group may be boring to another. So how do you reconcile these differences? Well, to start out, it’s important to realize that you can’t do it completely.
What you can do is build the right amount of compromise and flexibility into your lesson plans so that everyone gets something out of their time. For example, if you want your students to play a short chord progression in unison, allow the ones incapable of playing chords to just play the bass note. It’s important to just get everyone playing something musical, so they get a taste for it and are motivated to practice.
If you can, it helps to get the students playing music that they like, but this may not always be possible in a class. One strategy that might work is to play a different style each lesson, and you can also try to choose generic pieces that should appeal to just about anyone in the class, no matter their age or tastes.
Something else that can make the lessons fun and interesting is to have a contest between the students to see who can memorize a melody or the notes of the guitar strings. Have a simple reward and get a good natured competition going that will drive the student to practice more and get them enjoying themselves during the lesson.
It may be hard at first to get a group of different students learning the same material, but once you get used to it and find out what works, it can be very fun to teach many new students who may become great musicians some day.
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This Legacy Edition of Couldn't Stand The Weather commemorates the 20th anniversary of Stevie Ray Vaughan's premature death.
It's an expanded version of the 1984 album, the second of four the great Texan axeman and his backing rhythm section Double Trouble made that decade, which did so much to revitalize rhythm and blues together with the work of Robert Cray and Jeff Healey.
Their first album, Texas Flood, released the previous year, was the biggest-selling blues album for 20 years, and this one did even better. Couldn't Stand The Weather reached out further to mainstream rock audiences who admired what Vaughan could do with his Fender Stratocaster, and while his vocal range may have been relatively limited, he certainly knew how to put a song's lyrics across.
As always, there is excellent support from Tommy Shannon on bass and Chris Layton on drums, who provide a solid springboard from which to launch Vaughan's guitar fireworks. And although his technical ability to produce a wide variety of effects was phenomenal it always served the music.
This Legacy Edition contains two CDs (with extensive liner notes): the first disc features the original album's eight tracks plus 11 outtakes from the recording sessions of that time; the second showcases a concert the band gave in Montreal just three months after the album's release.
However, the album itself was first remastered in 1999, with four of these outtakes added then, while four of the other outtakes had already been included on the posthumous 1991 compilation album The Sky Is Crying, so only three outtakes here are previously unreleased. And though the recording of the concert is a new release, it does overlap heavily in terms of material with other live albums already available. Nonetheless, if hardcore Vaughan fans won't get too much extra value from this repackaging, this is still a terrific introduction for newcomers.
It's true that Couldn't Stand The Weather does not really break any new ground after the debut album, with only four songs by Vaughan (including two instrumentals), plus four covers. But even if the songwriting does not progress, with the band on top of their game it goes down a storm.
The title track (recorded in front of a live audience) is one of Vaughan's best compositions, with a funkier sound than usual. Voodoo Child (Slight Return) is an impressive account of the rock classic by Jimi Hendrix (one of Vaughan's big heroes and influences), as he stakes his claim to be considered one of the great man's successors.
Tin Pan Alley (aka Roughest Place In Town), the longest track at over nine minutes, is a slow, smouldering blues number, which proves to any doubters that Vaughan's could play guitar with considerable delicacy and depth of feeling as well as blistering power and virtuosic technique. And the jazz instrumental Stang's Swang adds welcome variety.
The additional tracks include previously unreleased versions of the wonderfully soulful cover of the Elmore James ballad The Sky Is Crying, the James-influenced Boot Hill and an alternate take on Stang's Swang minus tenor sax. There's also Vaughan playing slide guitar for a change on Give Me Back My Wig, a breathless account of the pioneering blues-rock guitarist Lonnie Mack's instrumental Wham! and the Grammy Award-winning instrumental cover of Hendrix's Little Wing.
On disc two all except the opening track of Couldn't Stand The Weather are put through their paces in a live arena showing Vaughan could well and truly deliver the goods at the sharp end without any studio trickery. It also features five tracks from Texas Flood, including storming opener rock instrumental Testify, the beautifully gentle, free-form Lenny and probably Vaughan's best-known song Pride And Joy bringing the gig to a rousing climax.
It's bitterly ironic that, having kicked his potentially lethal drink and drug habits, Vaughan should be killed in a helicopter accident aged only 35, but his outstanding musical legacy lives on. (Neil Dowden)
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Usher was in tears after losing two awards at the American Music Awards to Justin Bieber, including favorite entertainer of the year, the top AMA honor.
