One music book to rule them all
I love music books. If I could play a tenth of the music in all the music books I have lying around I’d be some kind of piano hero. I had a piano tuner ask if I was a teacher. Nope. I just like the books. There’s a part of my brain that thinks that owning a book is like knowing a thing. That part of my brain is wrong.
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Tipitina and Me transcribed
This is probably some form of copyright infringement, but I have completed my transcription of Allen Toussaint’s Tipitina and Me, and since his publisher’s website clearly states they are not interested in publishing unsolicited transcriptions, I’m just going to give it away for free here.
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Tipitina and Me: transcribing in Logic with Melodyne
I have a great fondness for New Orleans style piano solo, and it’s a nut I’ve been trying to crack for some time. It sounds very relaxed and natural, and not nearly as daunting as popular 20th-century forms like stride and rag. But the relaxed feel is very deceptive.
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Save New Orleans: 5 years later
A few years back – well, just over 5 years as it turns out – I became a semi-regular Songfight contender, submitting five tunes in total of various degrees of quality. The mechanics of Songfight are pretty simple. Write and record a song based on a supplied title, upload it within a specified time period, and have your song voted and commented on by the forum community.
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Wait a minute, this still works
I mentioned a while back that I would touch on the subject of blind Apple adoration, and this post will make an honest man out of me. A few weeks back I picked up a 32GB iPhone 4. I took some time off work. I stood in line.
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New arrangements of old tunes
I was asked to perform at a friend’s wedding ceremony recently and given free reign over the music selection as long as I avoided all of the standard wedding tunes. And that’s exactly the kind of direction I like – “Whatever you want, as long as it’s appropriate and unexpected.”
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Lies teenagers believe
For probably about 25 years or so I have laboured under the false impression that the artist responsible for the hilarious and disturbing cover art on the Cramps compilation Bad Music for Bad People died of a heart attack at age 27. It’s an oddly believable story, but it’s completely untrue. The artist’s name is [...]
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Singing the praises of Moog
I didn’t mention in my previous post that my Etherwave was missing a part when I bought it. It wasn’t an essential, large, or expensive part – it was a compression nut that should have held the pitch antenna in place. Gravity does a fair job though, and as long as I wasn’t planning on [...]
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Moog Etherwave theremin
As I mentioned in the previous post, scanning the musical instruments classifieds on Craigslist is a mindless pastime of mine; I do it habitually and not quite obsessively. I’ve found some pretty good deals there over the years; the Motif ES 7 is probably the best example. I’ve also made some impulse purchases that I’ve [...]
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In praise of dead software, part 2
Read part one here. When I was thirteen or so I read the novelization of Close Encounters (because it was lying around the house and I was thirteen and bored, smartass). The chapter in which the big-ass modular synthesizer appeared opened with a statement somewhere along the lines of “There are few people in the [...]
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