Category: Articles

Band in a Box 2014 for Windows

Posted on By ericdano No Comments on Band in a Box 2014 for Windows

PG Music has been hard at work, and released Band in a Box 2014 for Windows yesterday. Notable features include:

  • 28 New Jazz Realtracks including tracks by Ron Carter, Kenny Barron, Lewis Nash, Gary Smulyan, Pat Martino and Phil Woods
  • 32 Country Realtracks (as you can see, I don’t care about those)
  • 41 Pop/Rock RealTracks including New Orleans Boogle styles, Horn Sections, and 70s grooves
  • 54 new MIDI SuperTracks (quite honestly, just started using these a lot and they are pretty cool)

One thing PG Music did was “overhaul” the interface. It’s really hard to tell exactly what they mean by this, as there are no screen shots I can find. Sort of looks Microsoft Office like I would say in it’s use of ribbon like things. They eem to have put a tab thing in the upper right where you can easily switch to the mixer and some other views (like Piano to see what notes are being played). A lot of this new UI stuff seems to come at the cost of seeing the actual chords on the screen. I hope there is a way to toggle back some of those Microsoft Office like ribbons. And then there is the “handwritten font” thing. I’m not a fan of that faux handwritten stuff anymore. It’s too 1990s for me.

So, should this be on your late Chanukah/Christmas list? Absolutely. Anyone who plays music should have this program. Are you working on solo changes? Working out a new chord progression for a song? Just want to explore what Giant Steps would sound like as a Country Bluegrass song? Then get this program. It’s a tool that you will use countless times.

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PageFlip Firefly Kickerstarter

Posted on By ericdano No Comments on PageFlip Firefly Kickerstarter

On Kickerstarter, there is an interesting kickerstarter for a new wireless/wired page turning pedal, the PageFlip Firefly. Looks like a great way to get one for cheap (probably like $20 off). They don’t ship until Feb 2014 though.

I don’t have any experience with using these on an iPad, but I have been using a “classic” X-Keys pedal for about 6 years for my dual monitor teaching setup. It works great.

Articles

‘Saxophone Lung’

Posted on By ericdano No Comments on ‘Saxophone Lung’

From an article in the Huffington Post:

A case study presented at the annual meeting of the American College of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology shows that it’s possible to develop allergic pulmonary disease, known as “Saxophone Lung,” in response to the mold that collects over time in woodwind instruments. Saxophone Lung is really a type of hypersensitivity pneumonitis, which is the inflammation of the lung tissue, according to the Mayo Clinic.

So, clean your horns out every now and then guys!

Articles, News

Finale 2014

Posted on By ericdano No Comments on Finale 2014

There are two BIG players in the music notation field. Sibelius and Finale. The future of Sibelius is sort of up in the air as they sacked their great development team due to Avid, the parent company, having issues (they also sold off the M-Audio line of products at the same time). Meanwhile, MakeMusic got bought and the new owners pledged to continue making Finale, but not at it’s regular yearly update cycle.

So we went about 2 years with Finale 2012. It works, but it has issues like all software. Now, they have just released Finale 2014. It is REALLY hard to tell what the new stuff is or why you should update to it. Luckily, Jari Williamsson has an excellent review of what is new. I’ll bullet point what I think are interesting features and list some big reasons NOT to update.

New and Interesting Features:

  • Export To Finale 2012 and new File Format (which shouldn’t change in future versions of Finale)
  • Keyless Scores and Instruments
  • Anchored Hairpins and Measure-attached Smartshapes

Those are basically the new/interesting things in Finale 2014. It’s easy to do a keyless score now, and when you do crescendos and stuff, it will smartly adjust the size of them. Finally. And the stupid program can finally….or Finale…..no no, finally…..save to older versions and future versions of Finale won’t have to convert files to the “new” format every time they are opened.

Yes, there are some other “new” features. Supposedly it’s all Cocoa on the Mac, meaning the UI looks more Mac-like now. Supposedly, didn’t really notice when I was using the demo. New sound engine and playback and more Garritan sounds. Ok……now anyone that uses Finale for playback….really? I mean, it’s NEVER worked well for me, and the playback is Cheezy at best. The Garritan sounds, while very great sounding in 2001, are not really that great sounding now. Plus, Finale isn’t 64bit, so you can’t really load up a huge sample orchestra in Finale and have it play.

Oh, and Notemover is back. What? Don’t remember when Finale had Notemover? They killed it off a few versions ago and replaced it with this “universal selector” thing, which I think was actually the way to go (though it has some issues in how it works). Well, Notemover is back…..

Ok, so, what is the BIG issue with Finale 2014 that will prevent me from upgrading. TGTools does not work with it. What is TGTools? It’s a plugin that allows all sorts of things to be done in Finale, and I find it essential in using Finale. For teaching I use the Add Pitch Names tool ALL THE TIME, and I use various alignment tools, and Custom Chord Styles for doing / chords in Finale (like doing a F7/C chord). I have no clue if the author is going to update it or not, as he never “officially” updated it for any version of Finale past 2010 (2011, 2012 worked with it). MakeMusic also seems to have bought or obtained parts of TGTools and has been including them in Finale for a few versions (2009 or 2008 was the first?). But unless this tool is updated, I will have to stick to Finale 2012.

So, what is the verdict? I still think Finale is better than Sibelius. It has way more flexibility in how it works, and you can get your scores to look however you want. And the company seems to be moving forward and has modernized Finale (on the Apple side). I’m not really sure what “new” notation features can be added that people really would go “oooo, now that is a great idea”. I mean, it is sort of like Snow Leopard (Mac OS X 10.6). They had Leopard (Mac OS X 10.5) (or rather Finale 2012). It worked great, had a few issues, but generally worked great. What to do next, lets gut a bunch of it and modernize it. Exactly what Apple did with 10.6. Not a lot of new features, but improvements and forward thinking changes (like a stable file format). It’s not fully 64bit….yet, but it’s moving that direction. It still needs a LOT of improvements in the audio playback department, and MakeMusic needs to start moving it towards more DAW-ish like playback.

So….if you are just getting into the notation game, and have to choose between Sibelius and Finale, it’s really close. It has been for a while. They both basically do the same thing, just Finale gives you 10 ways to do it, and Sibelius gives you 4 ways but really wants you to use what it thinks is best. Until Avid shows some commitment to Sibelius, I would say that it is going to languish. It supposedly has issues on the latest Mac OS X (10.9), as does all of Avid’s stuff. Avid has NEVER been known to be fast/timely/quick/responsive to updating their products. As a former ProTools user who waited 8 months for Avid to “certify” ProTools on a new Mac OS (which came with the Mac, and I had no choice but to use), I know Avid. That being said, I’d run away from Sibelius. What if you get a new Windows 8.1 or MacBook Pro, and Sibelius just stops working? And Avid says “it isn’t certified yet”. End of story until it is “certified”. I’ve never had issues with MakeMusic software not working. Every OS it just runs, even Finale 2008 still runs on my Mac. Amazing.

I’d go Finale. It seems to be moving forward, and it pretty much has all the features you could ever want in a notation package.

Articles, Reviews

The Value Of Entering Online Contests

Posted on By ericdano No Comments on The Value Of Entering Online Contests

So, you have all seen these “Enter to win a free” whatever contests right? About 6 years ago, I won a contest. Pretty cool huh? So since then, I’ve been entering contests. I sadly haven’t won like the Sweetwater Mic contest, nor any of those contests where you get a Presonus Studio Live (totally want one of those, or a Mackie 1640 Onyx).

But I did win another contest.

This contest I got a bunch of software gear, most of which is useful to me. Here is the booty:

Big Fish Audio – Detroit Soul
Big Fish Audio – Electri6ity
Big Fish Audio – MOJO Horn Section
Big Fish Audio – Studio Kit Builder
Big Fish Audio – RiG Urban Workstation
Big Fish Audio – NFR: SWAGG
Big Fish Audio – Zen
Big Fish Audio – Hard Rock: Decade Of Distortion
Big Fish Audio – Guitar Soundscapes
Big Fish Audio – Off The Hook Legacy
Big Fish Audio – Rock Cinema
Big Fish Audio – Fury: Modern Indie and Pop Rock
Big Fish Audio – Epic Drums II
Big Fish Audio – Acoustic Indie Pop

The MOJO Horn section is actually pretty awesome. Already using it with Finale to do mockups of scores I’m working on. The Electri6ity thing is amazing as well. Sounds like a real guitar. Playing EWI through it is pretty sweet. I haven’t quite finished downloading all the other stuff (there is like 120 gigs of stuff to download…..though I thought I got a hard drive with the stuff….oh well). I haven’t really been too into the loop thing, but I was thinking about doing stuff sorta like a cross between Brecker Brothers and Big Gigantic, or doing stuff in that vein for students and myself to practice with. Should be interesting.

Moral of this story…….enter those contests (as long as its from a place you have heard of, like a big company, magazine, etc). You just might win something.

Articles, News

A Sharp Look At Spotify, Streaming Music and Musicians

Posted on By ericdano No Comments on A Sharp Look At Spotify, Streaming Music and Musicians

The Hypebot had a link and analysis of an article David Byrne wrote for The Guardian. It is depressing, and really makes me apathetic to the whole “piracy” question. Spotify is obviously NOT paying artists, but rather the “middle man”.

“The amounts these services pay per stream is miniscule…The major record labels usually siphon off most of this income, and then they dribble about 15-20% of what’s left down to their artists. Indie labels are often a lot fairer – sometimes sharing the income 50/50.”

It’s laughable how much these streaming services pay artists. (They DON’T PAY…..One Million Pandora Plays = $16.89)

I think a better model is needed. I think Apple’s new iTunes Radio is a step in the right direction. If you hear something, you can buy it right there. Boom. And way more profit comes from the SALE of music rather than the streaming of it. I imagine that the labels are still raping artists on iTunes Radio, but for people who have put their own music on there, the chance of getting purchases off of people using iTunes Radio seems quite a bit more likely than off of Pandora or Spotify.

Do we really need these middle men anymore??

Articles

Is Music The Key To Success?

Posted on By ericdano No Comments on Is Music The Key To Success?

This is a great article from Joanne Lipman in the New York Times:

Multiple studies link music study to academic achievement. But what is it about serious music training that seems to correlate with outsize success in other fields?

The connection isn’t a coincidence. I know because I asked. I put the question to top-flight professionals in industries from tech to finance to media, all of whom had serious (if often little-known) past lives as musicians. Almost all made a connection between their music training and their professional achievements.

The phenomenon extends beyond the math-music association. Strikingly, many high achievers told me music opened up the pathways to creative thinking. And their experiences suggest that music training sharpens other qualities: Collaboration. The ability to listen. A way of thinking that weaves together disparate ideas. The power to focus on the present and the future simultaneously.

Personally, I think the WORST thing I see are these kids who spend 6 days a week, 4+ hours a day on SPORTS. Fucking SPORTS. All year round. I’m not against sports, I played Soccer for 8+ years as a kid, but I remember practices being 2 times a week, and a game on Saturday (or Sunday). No “conditioning” after practice. No DAILY practices.

I think it is the worst thing for kids, all this emphasis on sports.

Articles

Best Manager for PDFs…..and Stuff

Posted on By ericdano No Comments on Best Manager for PDFs…..and Stuff

I have a LOT of music, digital music. I recently pretty much completed scanning all my physical books into PDF. It has been worth it. I can now have them on my iPad, or if I want to copy a page for a student, it is there. Or email a page to them. Boom, its right there.

However, managing PDFs is a real problem now. iTunes absolutely SUCKS at managing PDFs and EPUB books. It throws everything into iTunes Music/Books and then maybe if there is an author (with ePUBs) it will put it into a folder with the author’s name (I generally tag all the say saxophone book PDFs as “Saxophone Books” in the Album Artist field). It generally has resulted in a HUGE MESS to manage. Plus, they are all stored on my Synology unit.

I finally found something that will not only manage my PDFs and ePubs, but also Movies. iDocument 2.

Now, I had been using iDocument (1.0), for a while. It sorta worked for me. It provided a iTunes like interface to view my PDFs. It worked alright, but the new version is heads and tails better. First, it does ePubs and Movies. And it will “Index” the folder if you want, meaning it won’t try to grab all these things and stick them into a library format (most all these “manager programs” want to do that). AND it will automatically reindex when it reopens. Pretty cool.

You can tag items in iDocument, or do searches, including searches of searchable PDFs (so like the word “Coltrane” that appears IN a PDF as well as the title). Searchable PDFs on a REMOTE drive. That is something nothing else seems to do (other than DevonThink Pro, but the indexing in that program is GOD AWFUL SLOW). Huge win. You can also set up Filters, so if you want to just find the “Aebersold” books you have, you can have a little hot link to them.

Two issues with the program. 1, it doesn’t currently do the covers of ePub books, and 2. I wish there was a way to have the program send stuff to your iPad or iPhone (I hate using iTunes for that).

Great program though. If you are having Media management issues (too many Movies, or PDFs, or whatever) and don’t want to use iTunes, OR have them stored on something other than your Mac (like a NAS, or removable HD), then look into this program, $30 well spent.

Articles

How To Use Your Time On The Internet Efficiently – The Art Of RSS

Posted on By ericdano 2 Comments on How To Use Your Time On The Internet Efficiently – The Art Of RSS

We live in a connected age. Duh. There are TONS of websites that have interesting stuff, plus there is YouTube. You could spend ALL DAY just surfing the net and taking in tons of interesting things. And a TON of stuff you could care less about. How do you filter out the stuff and get back to doing something productive?

Enter RSS feeds. I bemoaned the closing of Google Reader a few months ago. What a HUGE time saver that Google service was. Anyhow, RSS is a way to get titles and short parts of stories from Websites. Google had been running the biggest free service for people to subscribe to RSS feeds, but shut it down. There have been a number of startups and existing services that have filled the void such as Feedly, Feedbin and NewsBlur. There are PLENTY of other services that do RSS, or you could do it yourself using a program on your computer. A service is nicer though as it will go out at intervals and check sites for you and keep track of what you read (be it on your iPhone, or iPad, or Mac, or whatever). Of the named services, I have used Feedly and NewsBlur. I am currently exclusively using NewsBlur.

Why NewsBlur? Because it has a history (i.e. it was alive years before Google Reader decided to close), is run by ONE person, and I’m 99.9% my information about what I subscribe to is NOT going to be sold to advertisers nor will I see Ads from NewsBlur. NewsBlur is also really fast. Feedly is everyone’s usual choice, but they are a BIG corporation now, and have venture money sponsoring them. At some point they will have to show a profit….so I’m a little “meh” about them. Though a lot of my favorite RSS reading programs work with Feedly (Reeder on Mac and iOS). I have found a great replacement with ReadKit on Mac. On iOS, I haven’t yet….still using the sucky free client that NewsBlur has.

Ok, so, once you decided on how you are going to get RSS feeds, now how do you gather feeds? Most sites offer a little RSS icon that you can click to get a feed. For example, say you want to monitor Musician’s Friend Stupid Deal Of the Day site. Down at the bottom is a STAY CONNECTED thing with some logos for RSS, Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook. Click the RSS one, and then copy that into you RSS thing. Boom. Done.

Another example, say you wanted to keep up to date with “Best.Saxophone.Website.Ever.” (sorta dubious, but lets agree for the sake of argument). Load that page, and see sort of in the middle there? There is the RSS thing. Though NewsBlur, if you just give it http://www.bestsaxophonewebsiteever.com it figures it out (since other people are subscribed to it).

Another example? Sax for some reason you wanted to keep up to date with “http://forum.saxontheweb.net/”. You hope someday there will be a post there that actually makes sense and is worthwhile (it HAS happened before so….it might again). So you go to the website, and click the activity link, and stick that into you RSS (http://forum.saxontheweb.net/activity.php). Boom. Done.

Another? Here is a cool one. Say you have a BUNCH of YouTube subscriptions. But you SELDOM go to YouTube (Doctor said you can’t….part of your anti-addiction thing). What if someone posts a video that you’d totally be into? Well, you can put that into your RSS. How? Add this “http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/base/users/MYUSERNAME/newsubscriptionvideos” and replace MYUSERNAME with whatever your YouTube username is. Boom. You can now see what YouTube videos are new for you WITHOUT having to load up YouTube.

There is a LOT more you can do too, like monitor Craigslist for things, follow “legit” news sites, etc. It is REALLY RARE to find a site that doesn’t support RSS feeds. So, give it a try.

Here are a few sites I have in my NewsBlur Music folder:
Ableton Live On Reddit
Saxophonics on Reddit
Best.Saxophone.Website.Ever
Bret Pimentel
David Valdez
Sam Newsome’s Soprano Talk
Jazz Advice
Bobby Stern
The Bulletproof Musician

Just a handfull of the sites I follow (912 sites according to NewsBlur). Got any you follow? Post it!

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iTunes Radio

Posted on By ericdano No Comments on iTunes Radio

Today, Apple released a BUNCH of stuff, including iTunes 11.1 with iTunes Radio. Now, a lot of you will say “big deal, we have had Spotify and Pandora for years. And that is true, these have been around for years……

But sit down Johnny. Have a juice box. iTunes Radio actually is good. I’ve NEVER liked Pandora’s “jazz” selection. Spending a few hours this morning with iTunes Radio’s stations, there are tons of jazz stations. And they play good stuff. AND it is brain dead simple to buy the song, or even tell it that you LIKE stuff like what is playing. AND there is a great little history thing that tells you what you’ve listened to (completely listened to, which I think should be changed to have everything you’ve listened to and the percentage of the song you listened to…..so maybe you can go back and listen again).

The cost of this? FREE…..plus an occasional ad. Though if you subscribe to iTunes Match ($24 a year) there are NO ads.

Oh, and the Radio stations sync to ALL your Apple Devices (iOS 7 needs to be on them). So if you have 3 Macs, and 3 iOS 7 devices, whatever stations you add show up on them. Pretty cool.

So go download the new iTunes, and try the Radio. It’s really good.

Articles, Reviews

Recording a Gig

Posted on By ericdano No Comments on Recording a Gig

This last weekend I recorded a gig. Multitrack. 16 channels. Into a MacBook Pro. With Logic Pro X. All tracks at 96khz. It was an interesting learning experience.

The equipment used was a Mackie Onyx 1620i mixer (firewire enabled), and an old Presonus. The Presonus was basically being used for the preamps and each one of those was being lined into the Mackie mixer. We tested this several weeks ago, and it seemed to work just fine. On the gig, the Presonus didn’t sound all that great. Not sure why, perhaps I didn’t have the gains up enough, or what. There was too much going on and I didn’t check every little thing. Luckily we were just using the Presonus for the drum set, and it did get the snare, kick, and two toms fairly well. The floor tom, for whatever reason, sounded like crap. Not sure if the mic was crapping out (Audix drumset mics, fairly new), or bad cable or connector or placement. It was rattling and picked up more hihat than floor tom. Basically that track was lost. Luckily the overhead mic, my trusty Rode NT4 did a most excellent job capturing the drum set.

The piano player brought his set of Audix SCX25A piano mics. They sounded fabulous. The bass player had a line out of his amp, and I also placed one of my AKG C414s in front of his bass to get the plucking sound. I was pretty happy with that. For trumpet, since I was running out of mics, we used a Sennheiser 421 on trumpet. On woodwinds, we used my other AKG C414 (the EB version, the other 414 is a ULS).

Setting up was fairly easy, but I ran into a couple of problems. First, not enough cables. I thought I had brought enough XLR cables, but when I was unpacking, there were not enough. Well, there were cables, but I generally needed LONGER ones than I thought I would have. That is a problem I didn’t expect and whenever I record in this setup again, I hope to bring longer cables. It was also one of the reasons I used the NT4 for a drum overhead rather than my “plan two” (which is a simple stereo recording using my Marantz recorder incase shit happens with the computer setup). I didn’t have enough cables to do two drum overheads.

Recording into Logic Pro X was easy. In fact, that was the only thing I didn’t seem to have to worry about. I had planned out a great strategy ahead of time. I bought a 120 gig SSD external drive for the Macbook Pro, and used that to record all the audio too. Worked absolutely flawlessly. The Mackie was connected to the firewire and the SSD was on the USB. No glitches, nada. Flawless. $140 well spent.

There was a LOT of bleed across almost all the mics. Not really a bad thing, as I don’t really need to use any reverb plugins at the moment (still in the process of tweaking things)

Here is a track that I mixed down. Enjoy.

Articles

Perfect Reed?…..Hardly

Posted on By ericdano No Comments on Perfect Reed?…..Hardly

USA 325Checking my daily email, I received this

“Pays for itself in reeds saved and lasts forever
-Get a new dynamic and smashing sound
– Make extremely accurate adjustments
-No guessing where to shave
-Stop throwing reeds
The Perfect Reed kit is a new ground breaking method to condition your reeds to a professional level.
White-curvatures reveal exactly where adjustments are required. Make extremely accurate corrections.
Reed fibers are relaxed to give a precise and simultaneous contact with the left-right rails and tip.
Don’t work for your instrument – Make it work for you – Freeing you to express your talent.
There are four mouthpiece profiles for alto, tenor, soprano and baritone. Work’s for all tip openings.
Your lower registers will have a powerful and dynamic clarity with strong mid and upper tones.”

Then the eyes rolled back into my head. It’s a white piece of plastic and a razor blade….for $30. It’s not even a reed knife. It’s a razor blade. What happens when that “reed knife” gets dull?

Ok, if you really WANT to mess with a reed with a knife, get a Oboe or Bassoon Reed knife. Then get a flat surface. I personally wouldn’t use white as it is harder to see thickness of the wood. Get something dark, or black to work on. Then google or youtube the innumerable articles and videos on how to modify reeds. Your real investment is a good knife, but you need the right sort of knife rather than the wrong sort of knife (these are for pulling off a lot of wood. You won’t need this).

Skip this “product” people.

Articles, Reviews