Category: Articles

You know it…the metallic ball grille…..it’s legendary ability to be abused and still sound great. A mic that many of us have used for saxophone and countless vocalists use. The Shure SM58 (which is basically a SM57 with a different grille). It is celebrating its 50th birthday. Some interesting links about the history of the mic can be found below.

10 Things You Might Not Know About the SM58
Shure’s SM58 Anniversary site

I’m a little confused and slightly worried about the Roland product marketing for the Aerophone AE-10.

The absolute best video on the Roland site is this one. It sounds great, and Roland should do more of these.

But on the Roland site, they have this chump…who sounds terrible.

Come on Roland. You need to refocus now. Ditch the chump, and put more Alistair videos up for promoting the instrument. Videos I see of Alistair playing the AE-10 sound great. Fire everyone else and make him your guy associated with this instrument.

Roland has introduced a new Digital Wind Instrument. Awesome!

All the saxophone sounds you need in one instrument

Nothing beats the sound of your favorite acoustic sax, but sometimes its tone might not be quite right for the job at hand. Whatever scenario you’re playing in, the Roland Aerophone AE-10 has the onboard digital sax sounds you need. Choose from alto, tenor, soprano, and baritone sax types that all respond just like their acoustic counterparts to your playing dynamics and articulation, thanks to Roland’s advanced SuperNATURAL modeling technology. Alongside individual sounds, you can pull off a seamless performance with the Full Range feature, automatically switching between sax types by key range.

The NYT had an article about Steve Coleman:

“On Tuesday, to celebrate his 60th birthday, he begins a monthlong residency at Stone, in Manhattan’s East Village, playing almost every night with his longstanding quintet, Five Elements. It’s a throwback to a much earlier era, when the likes of John Coltrane or Thelonious Monk took over the stage at clubs like the Five Spot or the Half Note for a month or more to work out their next new things.”

There are several things wrong here. First, that Steve is turning 60. He doesn’t look or sound 60. Second is that New York doesn’t do things like that anymore. They don’t let a creative genius come out, play, and work out something new. There are TONS of great musicians in New York….why not rotate in people for a month at a time. Who wouldn’t go see Tom Harrell, Joe Lovano, or people we’ve never heard of play there, and work out arrangements and sounds? It could be a huge draw.

Personally, if Yoshi’s or some place did that I’d would go. Right now, Yoshi’s likes to over charge for their food and then ream you some more for drinks on top of the ticket price to see an act there. No thanks.

No sure how I missed this, but this is GENIUS. Jon Benjamin is best known for his voice work on Archer and Bob’s Burgers.

Lots of saxophonists use or have used effects boxes with their saxophone. Some my favorite recordings of the Brecker Brothers from the 70s where he uses and octavider and an envelope filter for those sounds hear on the recordings.

More modern saxophonists, like Jeff Coffin, are using a Q-Tron and a Line 6 M Series Effects pedal. Q-Tron gives you a great funky sound, and the Line 6 gives you a ton of options.

Dean Mongerio has a pretty sweet pedal setup I covered before. It is worth checking out.

But what else do people use? I see a lot of people using vocal effects pedals like the Boss VE-20, and TC-Helicon pedals. But there are tons of other pedals as well.

My current setup is a Q-Tron like Jeff Coffin, and a Eventide MixingLink which I love. The MixingLink allows we to blend the Q-Tron with my sax sound, and I can bypass the Q-Tron all together. That is helpful as my Q-Tron has no Redlight to tell me it is currently engaged. I am looking to add some sort of Harmonizer. If I had the $$$ I would get the Eventide Pitchfactor or a Eventide H9. Though the Boss VE-20 looks interesting…..

What effects pedals are you guys using?

Amazing…

Here is one of the themes from Pokemon Go. The Map/Walking theme.

  Pokemon Go Walking Theme for Eb Instruments (65.1 KiB, 18 hits)
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  Pokemon Go Walking Theme for Bb Instruments (62.9 KiB, 13 hits)
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forScore, for iOS, announced a new version of their amazing music software for iPads. Some notable new features.

• Crop – Taking pictures with an iPad can be cumbersome, and getting perfectly aligned photos of pieces of paper is nearly impossible. That’s why we added a crop tool to forScore’s Darkroom. It lets you re-frame your photo after the fact to cut out everything except the page.
• Enhance – Framing is just one part of it, though. For the best results, you also need to account for lighting and other factors that can turn your perfectly legible sheet music into a muddy mess.
• De-skew – PDF files are ubiquitous, flexible, and well-supported across platforms. They can also vary wildly in quality, from pristine, digitally-created masters to terrible, crooked scans. We’ve received a lot of requests over the years to add a way to fix these files, and now we have.
• Setlists – For many users, setlists are the real workhorse of forScore. They’re flexible and essential to a lot of people, but they can also start to get out of hand if you create a lot of them. Some people upload and archive their setlists in the cloud, but with forScore 10 we set out to design a better way for people to organize and archive their setlists.

Some of these, like De-skew, should be done when you make the PDF using something like Adobe Acrobat. But I guess if you are taking pictures or perhaps scanning directly to the iPad, that is not an option.

I use forScore a little. The bulk of my gigging iPad usage is on my iPad 1 (original iPad) using unRealBook.

Being a woodwind player is a pain. You generally have a ton of horns to take to a gig, plus you need to bring stands. And this becomes a BIG problem when you start bringing a Baritone to gigs.

My current stand for Bari is a Hercules stand. It nice, but it’s big. It doesn’t fit in the smallish bag I have for the other stands I bring. Not that I’m complaining. I want a stand that is sturdy…..but I would also like one that fits in a proper bag.

I came across this stand by Woodwind Designs. Whoa. Carbon Fiber stand, and it will fold up and go inside the bell? W…T….really? I’m starting to save my shekels for this.

Check it out.

Good video