Author: ericdano

Polymath, musician, awesome.

Joe Zawinul Dies at 75

Posted on By ericdano 1 Comment on Joe Zawinul Dies at 75

&uotFew of the major US networks picked up on this,

Zawinul died early Tuesday, a spokeswoman for Vienna’s Wilhelmina Clinic said, without giving details. He had been hospitalized since last month and suffered from a rare form of skin cancer, said Risa Zincke, his manager, according to the Austria Press Agency.

Some articles about his death are here, here, here and here.

Weather report was one of the first jazz/fusion groups I was exposed to (Tom Scott and the L.A. Express was the other). Sad to see another great pass on.

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PG Music JazzU

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PG Music has a new product out, JazzU

JazzU offers all students of Jazz — players, teachers, arrangers, and Jazz lovers – an invaluable computer-based resource for the study of Jazz music with top instructors and players. JazzU faculty members are professionals whose credentials embrace both formal study and a wealth of experience as performers on the bandstand, the concert stage, and in the recording studio. For the student, JazzU offers the insights of top professional musicians and teachers who combine an appreciation of the rich Jazz tradition with the ability to play and teach in all styles and genres – Traditional, Dixieland, Swing, Bebop, Latin, Modern, Fusion, and beyond.

For $50, it sounds like a good deal. The only thing that it lacks, it seems, is a way to evaluate how you played them. Programs like Teach Me Piano do this, and they are brutal. But it is an effective way to get better.

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Apple Logic Studio

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Today, Apple announced it’s Logic Studio. Not only did they pack a ton of features into an already feature rich product, they dropped the price to $499. Amazing. There are new features such as mainstage, five Apple Jam Packs, more software instruments, and thousands of other sounds. Plus, you get Soundtrack 2, which is an excellent sound editor (at least that is what I hear from my Final Cut nerd friends).

I think I might have found where that $100 Apple Store credit is going now….Wonder what the next version of Digital Performer is going to do to match this….

UPDATE: 09/12/07 by E: A couple of other sites have some first impressions about Logic Studio.

Will post more links as I find them.

Articles

Interactive Video Tutorials

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Sometimes, you need to get help with stuff. Mostly, it seems nowadays people need help with tech stuff. Finale, Sibelius, Protools, Digital Performer, etc. What if you could, for a small fee, have access to an expert guiding you through these and other programs? You can. HowAudio.Com offers a growing number of online tutorials. They have a woodwind section, a Protools section, a Digital Performer section, and more. There are some samples that you can view to get a taste of what the tutorials are like. $19.99 a month for all of the tutorials. Interesting stuff!

Articles

The Dust Has Settled…..Sorta

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Looks like things have settled down after the transition from Slash to WordPress. First, on the right you’ll see the Be Active header. Here you can write articles, questions, interesting things you saw on the net or heard about. Second, there are still about 300+ stories that have not been migrated from Slash to WordPress. It probably will be a couple of weeks until everything appears again.

News

Yamaha’s Tenori

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Yamaha has a new thing out, called the Tenori

Media artist Toshio Iwai and Yamaha have collaborated to design a new digital musical instrument for the 21st century, TENORI-ON. A 16×16 matrix of LED switches allows everyone to play music intuitively, creating a “visible music” interface.

Check out a video of it

Create Digital Music also has an article about it.

Articles, Videos

The Sordid Tale Of Guardala

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It is sad that one of the great makers of mouthpieces and horns has messed up everything. From a Newsday Article:

“David Guardala is sort of the Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde of the saxophone world, according to federal prosecutors and some of those he is accused of swindling.

As of yesterday, Guardala was in a Frankfurt, Germany, jail fighting extradition to Long Island to face 12 counts of fraud. The charges were in an indictment unsealed yesterday in U.S. District Court in Central Islip.”

There is a little history in the article as well. He was the maker of Mouthpieces in the 80s and part of the 90s. His line of Saxophones was great (I used to own an Alto, serial number 766). Dave, what happened?

Articles

SmartMusic 10.1

Posted on By ericdano 14 Comments on SmartMusic 10.1

One of my favorite whipping boys is SmartMusic. This program could be so great, and yet, MakeMusic seems not to want to put that little extra polish on it. Case in point, the latest “update” to SmartMusic is a large download, some 95 Megabytes. Took some time to download. Here is what is listed as being “new”

  • Compatibility with SmartMusic accompaniments created in Finale® 2008.
  • Support for Windows Vista.
  • Improved Clarinet assessment.

I emailed MakeMusic’s tech support about the first thing a while ago, when Finale 2008 came out. Never heard back. Figures. Well, at least they didn’t wait nearly a year to update SmartMusic to read the SmartMusic files generated from the latest version of Finale (last time, it was August 2006 when Finale 2007 came out, and not until April 2007 when SmartMusic could read the SmartMusic files generated by Finale 2007).

Ok, new stuff.

Read More “SmartMusic 10.1” »

Reviews

Vade-Mecum of The Oboist

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There are a number of books out there that are for Oboe that have been adapted for Saxophone. Ferling’s, and Rossari’s books would be two examples. Another great book to check out is “Vade-Mecum of The Oboist” by Albert J. Andraud. The 200 page, over sized book contains 230 selected studies (some from Ferling) and Orchestral excerpts to hone your skills. Though it is for the Oboe, it works great on saxophone. This book does not pull any punches. It starts hard and keeps it there.

For those looking for some technique etudes, this book will not disappoint. 9/10 (1 point deducted for the oversize of the book which I don’t particularly care for).

Reviews

Roland KC 550

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Roland KC 550I recently bought a Roland KC 550. It is a keyboard amp, but you can use it for many other things. I bought it for some gigs this summer. It has an XLR microphone input, plus 3 additional inputs. Easily enough to share with a keyboard player, your EWI and your Sax mic. We touched on the subject of amplification way back (not sure if I agree with my opinions from then, oh well).

Sound. It has a nice, smooth sound, and a real nice low end. Two of these together would make a nice little PA system. One makes for a killer amp for those gigs where no one wants to setup and run a PA system. The KC550 has tons of output. I don’t think I ever got past about 4 on it. It never cut out or distorted on any gigs.

Size. Well,

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Reviews

Making Reeds

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Ok, are you sitting. Yes? Ok. I play oboe.

Take a deep breath

It’s not as bad as everyone says. In fact, it is a beautiful instrument, and great classical works composed for it. The only issue I have with playing Oboe is reeds.

Right now, I’m using reeds made by the Alan Double Reed company. I really like the Medium Hard Concert reeds they make. But, to truly know the instrument, I decided this summer to learn how to make an oboe reed. I purchased a reed making kit that included some gouged and shaped cane. I also was armed with a copy of “The Art Of Oboe Playing” which has a great guide to reed making guide.

Long story short, I still don’t know how to make an oboe reed. I have yet to make it past the binding the reed to the staple part. Erg. If/When I get past that, then we come into the whole scraping/shaping thing. Maybe I need a good video of the whole process….

Single reed players have it good, but, are there any people out there that actually make their own saxophone reeds? I know that I have, in the past, shaved and trimmed some reeds to make them play better. But to construct a playable reed from a blank? Is it worth it?

Articles

Articles From The Past

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In moving this site to WordPress, and transferring all the old articles, I get to read some of my old posts. I think this one really touched me today, and made me remember what a great guy Jon was.

Jon Van Wie cancer.

Jon Van Wie loses his fight

I traded some emails with him, and he took a vintage Meyer mouthpiece I got off Ebay, and made it great.

Articles

Ralph Morgan Dies

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I saw this on the Klarinet list

“I just received a note from a repairman friend which said that Ralph Morgan passed away on August 23rd. Ralph worked at Selmer for many decades and was brilliant at mouthpiece design and instrument acoustics. He retired many years ago and concentrated on just mouthpieces.

As a maker, I just wish folks like him left behind research notes for the rest of us to learn from!

Dave

Dr. David McClune
University Professor of Music
Director of Bands/Woodwinds
Union University-1862
1050 Union University Drive
Jackson, TN 38305

Office-731-661-5294
dmcclune@uu.edu
www.mcclunemouthpiece.com

News

New Site

Posted on By ericdano 11 Comments on New Site

Welcome to the new Site. Most all of the stories and comments transfered over. The ones that have not should be migrated over in the next week or two.

I think there might be some problems with the Login thing. Can someone check it out and post about it?

Fixed the Download problem I think……maybe……

Also fixed a cache problem. I think it works better now…..now if I could only get the old slash site up to continue to move stories and files over…….

Update 8/29/07, well, there still are about 500 some stories that need to be sifted through. It is long, and boring, and long and boring……but it is going. Hopefully some of the other patterns and pdfs will be up soon.

Update 8/31/07. Still have something like 500 stories/articles to sift through. Erg…..Hopefully sped things up here with some caching and some MySQL tuning.

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