When it’s cold and dark outside, that’s the perfect time to get a nice fire going in the fire place, to enjoy your favorite beverage and to listen to some great music. Unwind from a stress-full day and chill. But not because of the temperatures. 😉

After my article on how I re-learned to enjoy music with my own personal music ritual, I’ve received a few e-mails asking me about the music I listen to and if I could recommend some special winter music albums.

In the eastern part of Austria, where I live, there’s currently no snow to be seen and the temperatures are unusually mild. Nevertheless, I want to present you 10 albums that I like to listen to on winter evenings – mild or cold. They are predominantly acoustic, very atmospheric recordings with sparse instrumentation and a somewhat melancholy feel to them.

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Take some lessons with any decent, competent music teacher and you’ll very likely get the following advice:

• practice (you know it doesn’t work without it)
• train your ears
  (if you haven’t already, definitely try the functional ear training method)
• repeatedly listen to great music
• transcribe as much as possible
• imitate and absorb the greats
• increase your musical vocabulary

And eventually as a result you’ll start to spit out original music. Excellent advice – I totally support it and urge my students all the time to do the same.

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