Jazz-Sax, all things Jazz and Sax
Ok, I think this is the FINAL version of this. Last updated in 2005, this version took out some stuff I had in there, and put in some stuff I have been practicing lately (triad things). 32 Pages of Saxophone goodness.
It is FREE and available here
Zinn Practice Regimen For Saxophone 2009 version (1.8 MiB, 815 hits)
You do not have permission to download this file. Go register first.
Plus you can buy a copy for about $13 if you want something already bound and what not. Expect an update to the II-V patterns soon…..it is gonna be HUGE.
Oh, and that is a Conn-O-Sax on the cover. Why? I dunno, it looks cool….thats why!
Washington, D.C. (CNN)
In light of the recent downturn in the American economy, the nation’s jazz musicians have joined the long line of lobby groups looking to Washington for support as the economy slides into a deepening recession.
The jazz industry is asking Washington for a bailout package and major subsidies on par with that of the auto sector. As such, jazz musicians also want access to credit and tax breaks to stimulate investment and help the development of new recording and performance opportunities.
“This recession has really got me dragged, ya dig?” says Luther Hip Bones Jones III, a New York City saxophonist and a cornerstone of the little known Wall Street Avant-Garde jazz scene.
“I mean, now that gigs arent a flowin’ like they used, I actually have to get up before noon and find a way to make some coin!”
Similarly, Jones associate Willie Fat Cheeks Hughes comments that with the economy in near chaos, the demand for his jazz bagpipe skills has waned considerably. Hughes also comments that with a sluggish economic situation, he will soon have to find another girlfriend or else face certain homelessness.
While this crisis has been brewing for some time, a recent spike in the number of trombonists delivering pizzas in New Yorks Greenwich Village has recently brought this dire situation to the publics attention.
Last week, however, jazz advocate Wynton Marsalis met with President George W. Bush and the White House economic team to discuss the worsening situation for America’s jazz artists and a possible stimulus package.
Marsalis was quoted as saying: “I think its important for the government to understand that our musical recession has actually been worsening since the demise of New Yorks 52nd Street scene in the early 50s and thanks to the racket these kids call Hip Hop. They really should have seen this coming. Since Miles went electric, its all been down hill.” As Marsalis continued, “I think that a strong monetary stimulus package and a mandatory listening of Duke Ellington records should encourage a healthy economic recovery.”
President Bush responded to these comments by replying that: Mr. Margolis has a very good point here. “The country will be in dire straights if we lose our jazzy beats. I mean, personally, I always enjoy a little Kenny G in the evening while I try to woo the First Lady.”
Bush also commented that a global consensus on the state of the jazz economy will have to be reached. The way things stand, America’s jazz artists just can’t compete with the lower paid jazz artists currently flooding the market from China.
In related news: America’s Blues musicians report an increase in depressing lyrics. “[It] indicates a reflection of the times.” claims one downtrodden guitarist whose wife recently left him and whose dog has died.
This site is currently using a crappy WordPress theme that I don’t particularly care for anymore. I am looking into Carrington Theme as soon as they have support for WordPress 2.7 nested comments. However, I thought I’d post this up to see if anyone has any other ideas for a theme. It does need to have support for a banner ad though.
I was also thinking perhaps of doing something similar to my personal site, where I took the Deskmess theme and tweaked it a little. Or maybe the Japan Style one and tweak it a little. These themes need to really support 2.7 better (nested comments, etc) before I do that though.
Ideas?
Two quick updates. For all you Akai EWI 4000 owners, Akai released new firmware for it. Version 2.4 is out. Not a lot of differences according to the readme other than Oboe and Flute fingerings.
TGTools, the essential plugin for Finale users finally received an update to work with Finale 2009. Version 2.5 doesn’t seem to have any new features, but all the existing features of TGTools finally work correctly with Finale 2009.
Happy times.
Douglas Adam’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, the thing to have as a towel.
“A towel, it says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have. Partly it has great practical value – you can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble-sanded beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapours; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a mini raft down the slow heavy river Moth; wet it for use in hand-to- hand-combat; wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes or to avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (a mindboggingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can’t see it, it can’t see you – daft as a bush, but very ravenous); you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough.
More importantly, a towel has immense psychological value. For some reason, if a strag (strag: non-hitch hiker) discovers that a hitch hiker has his towel with him, he will automatically assume that he is also in possession of a toothbrush, face flannel, soap, tin of biscuits, flask, compass, map, ball of string, gnat spray, wet weather gear, space suit etc., etc. Furthermore, the strag will then happily lend the hitch hiker any of these or a dozen other items that the hitch hiker might accidentally have “lost”. What the strag will think is that any man who can hitch the length and breadth of the galaxy, rough it, slum it, struggle against terrible odds, win through, and still knows where his towel is is clearly a man to be reckoned with.”
However, I think the Shure 58 might now rank higher than the Towel. This is NOT for the faint of heart.
Keeping its promise to ship Pro Tools 8 in December, Digidesign announced that Pro Tools 8 is shipping. However, it is just DOWNLOADABLE right now. This is what you get (if you have M-Powered Pro Tools)
Pro Tools Installer 3994.84 MB
Big Fish Dance DJ Loops 1229.6 MB
Big Fish Hip Hop Loops 1267.08 MB
Big Fish Jazz Loops 516.01 MB
Big Fish Pop Rock Loops 1094.18 MB
Big Fish R&B Funk Loops 1226.28 MB
Big Fish Rock Hard Loops 371.43 MB
Big Fish World Loops 399.43 MB
FXpansion BFD 962.27 MB
Torq LE 234.52 MB
Melodyne Essential 28.7 MB
A good 11+ gigabytes to download :-(. Thanks Digidesign. You should at least have taken $20 or so off the price.
I just would die of laughter if I actually met someone who wore this.
Seriously……..gay………
I’ll admit I am an unabashed Apple fan. I do use a PC for menial tasks like generating Band in a Box backgrounds, or to download some Bittorrent stuff. Anyhow, when the iPhone came out, I got one within the first week. It has been amazing. Then they opened up the OS on the iPhone (and iPod Touch) to developers……which has lead to something like 10,000 applications, of which about 40 some (mostly free) have found a home on my iPhone.
Enter JAM. Jam is a very interesting product from some blokes down under. Think Aebersold, but better. You buy JAM for $9.99, and you get 5 “Cassettes” (I guess CDs haven’t made it down under yet?). Each Cassette has an interface something like this
You can control the volume of each instrument, or mute it. Or mute multiple tracks. The tracks are played by real musicians (no Band in a Box here), just like most all of the Aebersold volumes.
Is this a perfect application? It is close. One thing it really needs is a slider to let you fast forward or rewind the song. Also, pitch shifting, speeding up or down, and looping would be nice. There is no reason why it couldn’t do it, as the iPhone/iTouch can run some pretty impressive games.
The Developers who were kind enough to send me a free be of the program said that they are working on some (or perhaps all) of these for a future update. That would be great. I’d also like to see them add the ability to make your own tracks and have them be able to be loaded into the program (like an Open Jam or something).
If you have an iPhone or iPod Touch, and want some new backgrounds to practice with, JAM is something to look at. 8/10 (2 points deducted for no ability to rewind or fast forward the songs or even pausing them…..which is kind of important).
From the UK (those crazy Brits)
The Beatles once penned the song “I am the Walrus” but now this whiskered marine mammal has proved that the animal kingdom can blow its own trumpet.
Under the direction of her trainer, Sara the Walrus grips the brass instrument between her flippers and blasts out a note.
Wetsuit-clad Russian trainer Sergiy has also taught her to strike a nonchalant pose, leaning on a work top with one flipper under her chin and looking bored.
Sara’s skills at mimicking humans extend to dressing up as a railway platform conductor and blowing a whistle.
Man, it really sounds like Ornette Coleman or something doesn’t it?
Now it seems the world of advertising of products has now reached youtube. Saxgourmet (love em or hate em) has a fuzzy video up pawning his products on the net.
Personally, I hate youtube videos like this. A thought out script, and perhaps high quality still pictures of the mouthpieces with a well written dialogue would have been better than this. Or naked women……..or clothed women……..
I came across this today.
Minneapolis – November 24, 2008 – MakeMusic Inc. (Nasdaq: MMUS), a world leader in music notation and education software, today announced that John Paulson has resigned from his positions as co-chief executive officer and director. Mr. Paulson will serve as a consultant for the company for a transitional period. The board of directors would like to thank Mr. Paulson for his service to the company: As the founder of MakeMusic, Mr. Paulson’s commitment, dedication and entrepreneurial spirit were instrumental in helping MakeMusic achieve its status as a leader in its field.
Is this hopefully a good turn for the makers of Finale and SmartMusic? I hope so. Finale has been a mess since Finale 2007. They added Linked Parts, then did nothing. They have been adding fluff to Finale, and focusing on SmartMusic, which is a similar disaster. There is a lot of potential in both products, but there is a disconnect and how they work together (basically……..not really well).
Hopefully 2009 will be the year they get their act together……or someone creates a way for Sibelius to read Finale 2009 and previous version files……without any conversions.
So, I had my bi-monthly jazz band rehearsal last night. I came to find out that the Bass player and one of the trumpet players decided to quit do to some huff about the Bass player. Long story short, the bass player plays electric bass, and basically, she was loud most all the time. Like boom boom boom loud. I forget exactly what tune we were doing, but we were trying to get a less boomy sound from her, like more mids than bass. To get the boom out. Anyhow, she got totally offended and quit. Whatever. This is just the setup for this post.
The trumpet player. Ok, he is a retired teacher. That is all fine. However, he always has to say this or that about how a tune should be played. Ok, fine, that is all good. It is good to know how Band X did it on recording Y 50,000 years ago. A good band will take that information and maybe use it or consider it while playing. But I personally don’t think that is the point of playing. You are supposed to bring your own take to the song, be it bad or good.
Now, I’ve been trying to bring in different music for the band to play. Like I found this great arrangement of Crescent City Stomp by Kris Berg, and Greensleeves by Greg Yasinitsky. Anyhow, I found out he quit not only to back his bass player friend, but also that he was offended to play such music. WTF? Huh? So is there some sort of standard that he breaks playing these? I mean, he ain’t exactly the world’s hottest player. Most of the time he was back there putzing around and missing notes on charts. I wasn’t expecting to play the tunes every rehearsal, but there is only so many times you can play Shiny Stockings, or Cherokee before you want to gouge your eyes out. Change is a good thing and new is sometimes good. Heck, a lot of the band members liked the variation, especially the rhythm section. Is there some sort of legal statute that was broken when playing these? Heck, we have played (and he has soloed on) a couple of really bad arrangements of tunes (Moondance comes to mind).
I find it rather interesting that when he brought in tunes, they all pretty much sounded the same. About the same level, a good middle school or high school could pull off (something he didn’t like about the charts I was bringing in). Arrangements off obscure albums with bands that no one knows. Charts that you’d play and wish you could have that 4 minutes back because it was just like the last one. Or you now know why no one ever plays that chart.
I didn’t like those charts, nor the times when he ran the band and we basically were forced to suffer a rehearsal with him running it. But I didn’t quit over it. Music is music, and I have an open mind to at least playing something a couple of time, if I like it, great, if not, someone else might like it. It is a group thing, not “we are playing all my tunes like it or not”.
Well, whatever. Seems he wants to ride his high horse to wherever it takes him. Good luck with that. We will continue to play a variety of music without him. In fact, the subs last night sounded a lot better than him. And boy, we played a lot more tunes without him asking obvious questions on the form, articulation, or why something was written this way or that. Must be a teacher complex thing.
I will miss the bass player though…..oh well, you have to do what you feel is right.
While surfing the net, I came across the strange instrument called the Conn-O-Sax. There is one on Ebay right now that can be bought for the princely sum of $100,000 (I kid NOT).
Conn made these to spur sales that had been slumpin. Seems they made them from 1915 to 1925, and they believed it was going to be the next big thing. They do have almost a 3 octave range (A to G), and the tone I’d describe as a really mellow soprano in quality to something like a Paul Desmond sound. Sadly, it seems that only about 20 of these instruments exist now.
If you want check out some audio clips (or buy a CD), Rob Verdi has an excellent album out that he did exclusively on the Conn-O-Sax. And it sounds great!!
Below are the images off the Ebay auction because I though this instrument was extremely interesting.
Sometimes, you need a video to show the obvious. This is one such video. Perhaps another such video will show that you shouldn’t maybe run over the neck of your saxophone with a car and expect it to sound the same?
Another obvious video is this one, playing slow to play fast. On this one, why film it outside with car noise and stuff?
You gotta love this YouTube-ish era we are in……..where people put up videos and you have to ask………why?