General Saxophone related articles, opinions, questions, etc, etc
One of my favorite songs. So simple….so great.
Yellow by Coldplay for Eb Instruments (103.1 KiB, 0 hits)
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Yellow by Coldplay for Bb Instruments (103.6 KiB, 0 hits)
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Nice little song.
Hold On by Chord Overstreet for Eb Instruments (95.7 KiB, 1 hits)
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Hold On by Chord Overstreet for Bb Instruments (94.6 KiB, 2 hits)
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Covid-19 lockdown has lead to some experimentation. And some rethinking of what I wanted the pedal board to be able to do.
First, when doing gigs, sometimes you get a venue where they insist on doing their own sound. Fine. But then they have a “board” which has 16 inputs. And the keyboard player needs stereo input. And so does the guitarist. And the singer’s multi-effects pedal is stereo. And so…..there are now no inputs left. So the EWI you brought along can’t be used.
OR the venue has a “sound guy” who’s really just there for the free drinks and the people. The “sound guy” is not going to be adjusting any volumes. Well, depends if he has a drink or not.
And….what if you want to run the EWI through an effects chain? And the sax? Can you do both at the same time?
Pedalboard 1.0 attempted to address this by using the Eventide MixingLink. However, I could never get the volumes of the two inputs to be close to the same. Generally, the sax mic was a lot louder than the EWI. Even with the MXR MicroAmp on it, it was sort of hit and miss.
Pedalboard 2.0 didn’t really fix the problem of the EWI, and introduced a POG, and a Pageturner.
Pedalboard 3 ushered in a smaller board, and me giving up on trying to get the EWI on the effects chain. Pedalboard 3.1 had some changes. I dumped the POG, added a reverb, and made an Arduino page turner. The EWI was still not included.
Which now brings us to Pedalboard 4.0……
If you can forgive the Youtube videos they have up of a guy clearly in need of some serious Jonathan Van Ness intervention, a company called Vindor has a intriguing, reasonably priced wind controller that is actually shipping. I believe they had a version 1 of this but I never heard of it.
Anyhow, it features:
I haven’t been “regular” on the sheet of the week stuff for a while. Professional career both music and education have been in the way. Though that has NOT meant that I haven’t been doing songs. Far from it. It means I have not had the time nor motivation to make some of the songs “publishable” enough for me to put up. A lot of them just are the melodies with no lyrics. Some have a couple notation things that need fixing. Etc.
Anyhow, here is another one by Imagine Dragons. Enjoy.
Natural by Imagine Dragons for Eb Instruments (106.3 KiB, 4 hits)
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Natural by Imagine Dragons for Bb Instruments (109.2 KiB, 1 hits)
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One of the MOST important things to do is backup your music files. It doesn’t matter if you use Finale, Sibelius, Musescore, or whatever. You need to back it up. And sometimes, you need to just backup the whole folder just to have a copy “just in case”.
I’ve been using a script on my Mac to do this. It makes an archive, using Keka, and puts it in a path where it gets Synced to Google Drive. And it will also go through and delete archives older than 100 days. I generally also move things to another folder on Google drive to have a monthly archive of stuff as well.
Anyhow, the script is this. It is triggered by crontab.
#!/bin/bash
cd /Volumes/mygoogledrive/Documents\ Archive/Finale\ Archives/
/Applications/Keka.app/Contents/Resources/keka7z a -t7z -r -m0=lzma2 -mx=9 -mfb=64 -md=32m -ms=on FinaleArchive-$(date '+%Y-%m-%d').7z /Volumes/mygoogledrive/FinaleDocs/
find /Volumes/mygoogledrive/Documents\ Archive/Finale\ Archives/ -type f -name '*.7z' -mtime +100 -delete
UPDATE: Did a little tweaking, moved to using ExpanDrive, and the original script was not working right. Here is the updated one.
#!/bin/bash
ArchiveName=FinaleArchive-$(date '+%Y-%m-%d').7z
/Applications/Keka.app/Contents/Resources/keka7z a -t7z -r -m0=lzma2 -mx=9 -mfb=64 -md=32m -ms=on $ArchiveName /Volumes/GoogleDrive/FinaleDocs/*
mv $ArchiveName /Volumes/GoogleDrive/Documents\ Archive/Finale\ Archives/
find /Volumes/GoogleDrive/Documents\ Archive/Finale\ Archives/ -type f -name '*.7z' -mtime +100 -deleteSince I pay for a google business account, I was using Google Filestream. But this will also work with Google Backup and Sync. Or things like InSync or ExpanDrive (highly recommended). Keep in mind if you use Backup and Sync, or InSync, the archives stay on your computer. Using ExpanDrive or Filestream puts them into a temp space while it gets uploaded to Google. But you can adapt the basic idea to whatever online storage thingy you have. OneDrive, Dropbox, etc.
BUT PLEASE BACKUP. There is NOTHING worse than losing something you have spent hours on. Time Machine, Backblaze, whatever. But do something.
Gearing up for new gigs and learning new songs…….here is a great song by Camila Cabello.
Real Friends by Camila Cabello for Eb Instruments (143.0 KiB, 2 hits)
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Real Friends by Camila Cabello for Bb Instruments (149.5 KiB, 2 hits)
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There is a lot of development using various powerful, low-cost sensors, computers, etc, to augment a musical performance. The idea of taking brain waves and maybe having it start triggering something is very interesting.
Ok, admit it. You like this song.
Dance Monkey by Tones and I for Eb Instruments (150.1 KiB, 4 hits)
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Dance Monkey by Tones and I for Bb Instruments (149.4 KiB, 2 hits)
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Bret Pimentel has a great article about using an EWI as “silent” practice tool for saxophone, clarinet, or other woodwinds.
I agree with his view point.
Fun little song by a group called Voicetone.
Nothing Stopping Me by Voicetone for Eb Instruments (138.3 KiB, 4 hits)
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Nothing Stopping Me by Voicetone for Bb Instruments (133.9 KiB, 1 hits)
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Following up from the last post, another company to watch is Berglund Instruments. They currently make an EVI (Electric Valve Instrument) that looks and sounds great. If you follow their instagram account, it seems they are working on a EWI version. And I want one. Seriously. I’ve contacted them.
Emeo Music dropped another video of their forthcoming “digital practice horn for saxophone players”. I’m a little confused as to why it is marketed as this. While it does seem to have a rather cool looking body with fully articulating saxophone keys, it doesn’t have a mouthpiece. In fact, it just seems to be some tube you blow into. Which is fine, but…..is that really a “practice horn” then?
I think the better play is to market this as a higher end wind controller with a more “realistic” feel.
We had some downtime yesterday. The computer that has been running the sites, while working fine, was on a dead end path. It was running Ubuntu 18.04 that was 32bit. There is no real upgrade path from there, and moving to 64bit Ubuntu 20.04 proved to be a couple hour endeavor yesterday.
Anyhow, it seems most everything is working fine right now. There are still a couple of backend things that I need to sort out, but the web part seems fine now.