Our first website at www.CreativeMusicWorks.com is still standing today, a humble hand-coded website setting forth basic principles of music composition, and self-teaching of music. We called it "Improvising HowTo," in homage to words of the French coder who taught us to code our 3-column website in HTML.
Our goal was to foster self-teaching of music. But we found we needed a commercial purpose to build our music business. When the ability to slow down music digitally, without changing pitch, came into our field of view, in about 2008, we started MusicStudioStore.com.
Our idea linking our websites is that self-teaching of music is very much assisted by being able to both read sheet music and hear a performance of that music at the same time.
Many musicians will recall that, before recordings were able to be slowed down digitally, musicians could use the tape recorder to select a comfortable tempo; but that caused the music's pitch to change. If one tried to use sheet music to play along, a musician would have to transpose to match the slowed down recording's new pitch. It was therefore very difficult to really play along with a professional recording, which almost always would be too fast to allow a student to play along.
The playing field changed for amateur musicians when digital technology made it possible to alter tempo without changing pitch, and in some cases, to alter pitch without changing tempo, when the recording's pitch was slightly different from that of the instrument being played, or when a different pitch was needed for a vocal range.
Thanks to digital technology, we now have recording companies which record music at different tempi, and different pitches, so that a musician can select a preferred speed or vocal range. Other recording companies provide software on their recordings, allowing the music's tempo, or sometimes pitch, to be altered, when played on a computer.
Our favorite method of altering pitch or tempo of any recording is the TASCAM Trainer, an invention by TASCAM from about 2005. You will find information about the TASCAM Trainer on our website.
Since starting MusicStudioStore.com, which offers recording and sheet music for play-along and sing-along, we have also started GoKaraokeMachine.com, a site for vocalists who prefer to read lyrics on a monitor, as opposed to reading sheet music. But we think there is much to be said for using the vocal TASCAM Trainer, so that vocalists may access music types not often available for karaoke machines, and may also read sheet music.
Because we wanted to know how to alter pitch and tempo ourselves, we also started www.WhatIsAudacity.net, to discuss a free "open source" audio editor which allows anyone interested in audio editing to experiment with pitch and tempo alteration, and digital music recording.
If you've read this whole "About Us" story, we would consider you a kindred spirit. We suggest you bookmark this website, and let your friends and family know that several small-amount gift certificates from our site can be added together to make larger purchases, to benefit your musical endeavors.
Renee Leech, MusicStudioStore.com Founder