Category: Articles

Apple Launches Ping

Posted on By ericdano No Comments on Apple Launches Ping

Well, seems like the new version of iTunes has some social functions now. Though Ping is newly born, some people, like eternal Apple hater Peter Kirn seem to have already written it off. That is a huge mistake. Kirn also has said that the iPad is a failure as well. Heck, he thinks that because Apple has not allowed Flash on the iPhone/iPad….that the iPad isn’t OPEN SOURCE and it’s not a Mac. Seems to really have hurt the iPad sales…..NOT. Ok, so lets put away Kirn’s ramblings and assumptions….he sometimes publishes things worth reading when he isn’t pushing his Open Source dementia upon us.

Ping. I think it is very interesting. A highly focused Social integration about something we all have in common. Much better than Facebook. Geeze, Facebook recommends friends who I have NOTHING in common with…..or friends of friends which it assumes will be friends of mine. I think not. Ping on the other hand, narrows its focus to what types of music you like. Though it only lets you select THREE Genres of music, I expect that at some point it will have some sort of Genius type feature which will scan your library and recommend things from that. Genius in iTunes works fairly well……..not 100% but it comes up with some interesting stuff sometimes. What if Genius and Ping worked together, so Genius started looking at what your Friends are listening to, and perhaps recommending stuff based on that? And vice versa? Ping is now in existence, and I think we will be seeing this shortly. I’d expect by December we will have gone through a couple of iTunes versions, probably up to 10.5. Anyone remember how the App store or the iPhone OS started? Apple tip toes at first……so expect things to get interesting soon.

Ping displays on your profile Albums that you Like, Rate, Review or Purchase. Now, iTunes won’t let you review an Album unless you buy it. However, you can Rate, Like and Post it. Rating an album, even though you didn’t buy it from iTunes, shows up on your Ping profile. Liking an Album does as well, and Posting it lets you put a message about the Album, like “Get the track Doctor Sax off this…..Michael Brecker tears it up!”.

The problem is that there is way to Ping things that are not in iTunes. So that bootleg recording of Brecker Brothers or that hot Japanese Fusion band……if they are NOT in iTunes, then you can’t Ping them. Nor can you ping just individual songs off Albums. Nor do your Ratings of Songs that are in your iTunes Library show up on Ping. Now, I think these will be showing up in Ping real soon. It makes a LOT of sense to do this (if the user wants to).

In all, Ping isn’t Facebook. I think that is a GOOD thing. Facebook is just stupid now……news outlets, companies, everyone is using it. And the result is that you end up not caring about what your “friends” are doing. Or you just end up playing the games there. I think what Apple is trying to do with Ping is, like it has done before, narrow it’s focus on something and make it amazing. I think Apple can and will be doing some interesting/amazing stuff with Ping shortly.

I have to wonder though…..in a long term game plan, what if Apple has been watching Facebook, and sees some things that it thinks it can do better, and puts that into it’s Mobileme? I mean, I think me.com could be an amazing Social site that, if it took the good parts of Facebook, and tied it into iOS, GameCenter and me.com……that would be pretty interesting….

Anyhow, if you are on Ping, follow me

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Leon Breeden Dies

Posted on By ericdano No Comments on Leon Breeden Dies

Sad news

“Leon Breeden, the longtime director of jazz studies at the University of North Texas, who half a century ago transformed the program from a clandestine enterprise into the international Mecca for jazz training it remains today, died on Wednesday in Dallas. He was 88.”

My college band got to do a concert with North Texas State’s One O’Clock band (well after Mr. Breeden left). We were rehearsed and sounded good playing Thad Jones arrangements. They came in and sightread all the tunes we had prepared and sounded better. Damn.

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Modified EWI

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Got an old EWI? Yes? Then check this out:

“The META-EWI is a modified EWI (Akai’s Electric Wind Instrument) to which was added a whole new set of controllers based on sensor technologies, specifically eight continuous controllers and 16 digital switches. These clearly succeed at stretching the expressiveness and the range of musical gestures found on the original instrument allowing the musician to have a more complete and far reaching control of a great variety of meaningful musical parameters.”

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Band-in-a-Box 2010.5 – Mac

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PGMusic just released Band In A Box 2010.5 for the Mac. Improvements? Yes, several. Here are a few that I think are noteworthy:

  • Styles can now be made that are set to use Half-Time and Double-Time RealTracks. For example, you can make a Jazz Ballad style (tempo 65) that uses a Sax Soloist at tempo 140 (playing double time).
  • For RealTracks, many Jazz comping styles now play triads (instead of 7ths) when simple triads are entered, instead of “jazzing them up” to 7ths chords (e.g. Guitar: Freddie, Wes Piano: Some Jazz. All Stride, Rehearsal). If you prefer this “the old way”, where triads are automatically “jazzed up” when comping using Jazz RealTracks, then you can set the Prefs-Realtracks settings option to force 7ths for triads.

Plus, you get a bunch more RealTracks. One of the Paks comes with some B3, and other has some excellent Jazz Guitar.

Is it worth the money? Yes, I think so. It is a great tool for musicians who want to practice 50 choruses of soloing…..at whatever speed……in whatever style……in whatever key. Or perhaps you’ve like to figure out some chords for a song you were working on? Done. BinaB can help you there. Or maybe figure out what chords were played in a song? Yep, it can help you there too. So many uses for this program…..it should really be a REQUIREMENT for a Musician to own it.

UPDATE: A few of the RealTrack Saxophone tracks are Eric Marienthal. How cool is that???

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The Search for Nirvana – A Perfect Mouthpiece!

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Dave Liebman has an article up by Tom Alexander (with Dave Liebman) about searching for the perfect mouthpiece. On a cursory reading of this, one might take away that Links are the key to unlock your inner saxophone Budda. However, I think the point of the article is that one should pick something not to open, not too closed, not to dark and not too bright. Akin to Goldilocks and her porridge.

I think they sorta missed the point about “vintage”. Most all those guys were playing on rather new horns in that time period. Coleman Hawkins wasn’t playing on a 1910’s tenor when he was dishing out Body and Soul in 1939? Coltrane’s horn before he died was a Mark VI serial number 125571, dated 1965. Not the horn he used to record Giant Steps (whatever happened to that horn?). Most of these guys had new or new-ish horns. Not “vintage” in their day. Who’s to say that if Yamaha had been making instruments when Coltrane was alive that Coltrane wouldn’t have played one? And mouthpieces…..were there that many choices back then? I mean, nowadays we have hundreds of people and companies making and modifying mouthpieces. Back in the 1960s? I dunno, but I’d be surprised if the number was a two digit number. And earlier…..I’d be surprised if it was more than a couple.

Point is I guess, get something that is good, but not so wide open that you can park a truck in it, and not something so small that you’d have to find the opening with an electron microscope. Stick with it. Learn it. And having a good horn will help (Mark VI optional).

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MusicReader For iPad

Posted on By ericdano No Comments on MusicReader For iPad

There are lots of very interesting Apps coming out for the iPad. One that has come out for musicians is MusicReader for the iPad. While the iPad App is free, the software to get files into the program costs anywhere from $59 to $99. Outrageous? Damn right. Seriously, this is highway robbery. A more reasonable solution would be maybe to charge $4.99 for the program and give the converter program out for free. But $59? You have to be kidding.

I’d stick to GoodReader, which is $.99 and request that the author of this GREAT program to add annotations, which would basically do what MusicReader does. I have scanned in or printed to PDF a number of things and you can read them easily in the GoodReader. For $0.99 rather than nearly $60…..

Articles, Reviews

The Real Book Play-Along – Volume 1

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Hal Leonard is selling a CD set of backgrounds to ALL the songs in the Real Book Vol. 1. For about $100, you get 12 CDs of piano, bass and drums background that range in time from about 2 1/2 minutes to 6. Depends on the song. A couple of songs, like Wave, have guitar on them….sorta….it almost sounds like a synth patch. Or it was added as an afterthought. Some of the tracks could have been better with just guitar, bass and drums (like wave or Summer Samba). A couple of songs they took the piano out and replaced it with an electric keyboard type sound (like Sugar) which isn’t bad, but it isn’t as good as, say, a good B3 type of sound.

Is it worth the $100? Yes. Originally I thought this would be sort of a lame package, or something that wouldn’t really add anything to the songs one might already have the Aebersold versions of. Or maybe that my favorite program, Band in a Box could do what this offers and more. The backgrounds on these discs are accurate playings of the songs found in the Real Book that Hal Leonard publishes (or if you still have the “illegal” version that used to float around until Hal Leonard picked it up). The guys on the discs will give you whats on the page. I suppose that Band in a Box could do that too with some work, but it still couldn’t capture the drum hits on songs like Some Skunk Funk.

9/10. It’s a little costly, some of the songs aren’t as long as I would have liked, and I wish there was more variety than 90% if the tracks being Piano, Bass and Drums, but it still offers a lot of songs (240 according to my iTunes playlist after I imported all of them) to practice with.

Articles, Reviews

Saitara Software AC-7 Pro Control Surface for iPad

Posted on By ericdano No Comments on Saitara Software AC-7 Pro Control Surface for iPad

Yes, the iPad is out. Yes, it is amazing. No, it is not simply a bigger iTouch or an iPhone without the phone part. If you haven’t been able to try one, then go to a store and try it. You will be hooked. There are a few music apps out, like Magic Piano which is neat-o to show your friends, but really has no practical use in my opinion.

However, there are a few functional apps in the store, and one that I’m growing fond of is the AC-7 Pro Control Surface for the iPad ($9.99). It turns your iPad into a virtual fader board and DAW controller for Logic, Digital Performer, and Pro Tools. It does this “magic” by utilizing your WiFi network to connect to your Mac using an open source program called DSMI to connect to the app and translate its messages to midi. You then go and configure your DAW to receive the midi stream from DSMI as a Mackie Control. And it works….mostly.

I say mostly because, well, there are issues. First off, using your general wifi network (ie the network that your mac, iphone, ipad, internet connection is on) it seems to work most of the time, but it will lose connection every now and then. Usually when you really need it. General consensus seems to be that on an busy network, if there is a packet that gets dropped, DSMI and the app don’t retransmit it. Or something to that effect, resulting in programs like Pro Tools complaining about the HUD connection or worse, messing up the position of the fades, which could be bad.

If you have a Mac that has built in WiFi, you can create a private wifi network, and put the iPad on it, and then the App works flawlessly (at least for me). But if you have a MacPro that doesn’t have its own wifi transmitter, well, you are going to have to suffer for a while. To get dynamic track names, you also need to use a freeware program called midipipe.

So, it is a start. I think really what needs to be done is a custom app on the Mac side that connects properly with the iPad app and won’t drop packets and drops the need for midipipe. If you can get through the setup, it is a very slick app. The Pro Tools support is basic, but the support for Digital Performer and Logic is pretty darn complete. And it can only get better with updates which will hopefully add more Pro Tools support. It’s bleeding edge, but workable. It is really nice now to not have to be tied to the computer to control Pro Tools. If you have an iPad, or an iPhone/iTouch (there is a smaller version for iPhone/iTouch), and work with DAWs a lot, check this app out.

8/10 (2 points deducted because there is no unified mac app for it…..you have to run 2 programs, and the configuration is not totally apparent).

Some guys demo of it.

Why this guy is wearing a Microcrap shirt I don’t know……(Update: He works for Microcrap….I can hear the chairs being thrown by Steve Ballmer now….)

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