- Stephen Mazzoni, President
I knew that in many ways, I was uniquely qualified to build MAJA. Why? Because I was fortunate enough to possess the multidisciplinary expertise - in software development, music theory and practical musicianship, and mathematics/statistics - to pull it off. In addition, as a private music tutor (of 6+ years) for many developing musicians in my local area, I recognized a real need - a demand if you will - among ALL of my students. And looking back to the days when I took private lessons, in my view it is apt to say that this need existed then as well.
But the really interesting thing about this "need" or "demand" for a tool that enhances musical creativity is that it is ongoing. You never outgrow it as a musician. Indeed, the practicing musician, whether a hobbyist or professional, is always trying to generate refreshingly new ideas - for both composition and improvisation.
And isn't sounding "fresh" the very essence of musical creativity? Isn't that what it's all about? Avoiding the use of hackneyed, overused riffs or chords. Trying to find "different" scales, chords, sounds, ...whatever it takes. And isn't it the ability to do this one of the key things that sets a great musician apart from a common one? Or that catchy song apart from the hundreds of others filling up radio time? After all, most people agree that a truly brilliant performer engages his/her audience by doing something "different" often enough to keep them awake (but not too often or they'll be bored!).
So it's a catch-22. And this is more complicated by the fact that the attention span of an audience - their tolerance to dissonance and unpredictability in the music/performance - is largely a function of their level of musical development and education. An audience of musicians, for example, will usually be much more attentive and more tolerant to dissonance and unpredictability in the music than an audience of non-musicians.
For all of the above reasons, musical performance (soloing/improvisation in particular) is a delicate balancing act, and most people agree that it takes experience to get it right consistently for each specific audience. Most people also agree that it takes a career (30-40 years) of devoted practice and discipline to achieve this overall level of general musicality and knowledge. As it happens, the music software market is superb at getting musicians from novice level to intermediate level, but very poor (until now) at getting musicians from intermediate level to advanced level.
That is exactly where MAJA comes in! The idea here - the vision - is a music software product that fills this "void" - targeted squarely at intermediate level musicians as a minimum competency level.
Back in 1998, the ideas hadn't quite taken form yet. But even so, I knew what I wanted the product to be and what I did not want it to be. I did not want to attempt in any way to duplicate or compete with already existing, off-the-shelf, music software. I did want it to different - VERY DIFFERENT.
And different it is! MAJA is completely unprecedented. There is NOTHING even remotely like it.
What makes MAJA so unique and so powerful it that makes no attempt whatsoever to "dumn itself down" the level of a novice user. Quite the opposite. MAJA was designed for intermediate level musicians, with the expectation that novice level users will need to "read-up" and educate themselves to meet the minimum competency level. This was a design decision and is probably the main reason why MAJA is so powerful.
If you're using MAJA, then you know what the heck you're doing (or you see the value in getting there and have the discipline to do so), and there are several written tutorials in MAJA to bring novice users up to speed quickly.
