Category: News

Bill Trimble Dies

May 31, 2010June 13, 2010 ericdano No Comments

I’m really late in finding out about this, but Bay Area saxophonist William Trimble died on February 22nd after having a heart attack the day before. Bill was the saxophone teacher for the first 3 years of my schooling at Cal State Hayward. Thought I never really got along with him he did enlighten me on a lot of classical saxophone literature and techniques.

I have mixed feelings about him. On one hand, he was an amazing saxophonist in his genre. On the other hand, he treated CSUH saxophone students as second rate, generally missing half of the lessons we were supposed to get each quarter and not making them up. That eventually lead a bulk of the students to take our grieves to the department chair and us getting a saxophone teacher who would actually show up when we had lessons scheduled (Dann Zinn). Or show up for our recitals. Not that I hold a grudge, in fact, it was a good thing, as it lead me to talk more clarinet lessons and flute lessons. So, it all worked out. And it worked out for him too. He liked San Jose State better (closer to Aptos).

Regardless, he was taken too early. My best wishes to him and his family.

News

Band-in-a-Box 2010 for Windows

December 8, 2009 ericdano No Comments

PGMusic announced today that they are out with the latest, greatest version of BinaB for Windows (no new Mac version yet). Nothing really “whoa” in this version, other than if you upgrade from the previous version you can get ALL the RealTracks. Some of the highlights of the update I found interesting are:

Plug-in mode….generate tracks and drag and drop them into your DAW like Sonar, FL-Studio, and ProTools. Kinda cool.
3x faster generating RealTracks and freezing of tracks (so they don’t have to be generated again)….finally!
RealTracks support Shots, Holds and Pushes….finally
Double time/Half Time support for RealTracks
999 undo levels

Best deal for previous owners is the $139 USB hard drive “UltraPlusPAK” or the “EverythingPAK”. You really don’t want to download it. I did…it was painful. Band-in-a-Box is a great program, on any platform for people wanting to practice changes, songs, or even use it for composition. I couldn’t count the times I’ve used BinaB generated drum and bass parts (and sometimes piano) for arrangements…..

Santa says go get it!

News

Eigenharp Alpha

October 9, 2009October 9, 2009 ericdano No Comments

I’m not really sure what to make of this. The Eigenharp Alpha.

“A professional level instrument which allows the musician to play and improvise using a limitless range of sounds with virtuoso skill. The unique design of the keys makes this the most expressive electronic musical instrument ever made. The Alpha can play and record loops, change scale and key, transpose, alter tempo, program beats, create arrangements, switch and layer multiple sounds, all while the musician is performing live on stage.
Available in a variety of finishes, it has 120 highly sensitive keys, 12 percussion keys, 2 strip controllers, a breath pipe and numerous pedal inputs. This gives almost endless possibilities for flexible keyboard layouts, fast instrument switching and expressive musical control. The comprehensive software system provides a wealth of musical performance features, including playback of its own native instruments, many common software plugins, soundfonts or midi instruments.

If you go to their YouTube page, they have some sort of private demo. On the one hand, it looks kinda cool with the sliding and stuff. But why add a breath thing to it? Why not just make the touch surface sensitive to how you touch it? And do we really want lame-o drum and bass lines like that? Really?

For 4K pounds ($7,000 US?) I’d expect something a little more cooler in the sounds department. It seems like this is a swiss-army knife of musical instruments. I mean, in the private demo, they had someone play GUITAR with them. Seriously? You mean this thing can’t do strumming like a guitar? Why not?

Interesting idea, but doomed to failure. They also have plans for a smaller version.

Create Digital Music has a link here and here for more information.

Articles, News

Digidesign Announces……..what?

July 1, 2009 ericdano No Comments

Avid/Digidesign put this up:

“Apple has announced that they will begin shipping the new Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard 64-bit operating system in September 2009. Avid is working closely with Apple to deliver compatible, high-quality versions of Pro Tools® as soon as possible. Please check back periodically for updates on Avid’s Snow Leopard support status.”

For the record, when 10.5 (Leopard) came out, it took Digidesign about 8 months to get out ProTools “certified” for it. Though it sorta worked. However, I’m a little concerned with Digidesign, as they have had a lot of key people leave recently.

In other news, I’d imagine the Logic will work right from the get go. And it will be amazing (and updated). MOTU’s Digital Performer will probably work within the first week if not the same day. Digi is always the last one to the party…..

News

ASCAP Wants To Be Paid When Your Phone Rings

June 21, 2009 ericdano No Comments

First, they went after the Girl Scouts to have them PAY for singing songs around a campfire. Now, ASCAP wants you to PAY for a public performance of a ring tone. Yes……my mind too hit the brick wall and splattered upon reading this too. Have we become THAT concerned with money? I think it is fair game to require people who are MAKING money performing an ASCAP song to be required to share some of the revenues. But Girl Scouts? Cell Phone “performances”? Seriously?

News

HELL HAS FROZEN OVER – Band In A Box 2009 for MAC?!?!

May 30, 2009June 1, 2009 ericdano 4 Comments

I could NOT believe my eyes this morning. Band in a Box 2009 is FINALLY out for Macintosh. After being behind 7 versions (2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2007.5, 2008, 2009), PG Music has LEAP FROGGED the Mac version to the latest Windows version.

Amazing. And to get it all up to date on a Mac is $159?!?! Say what? No…….really? I get ALL the features of the PC version? Even the “Direct-to-Disk” Audio Rendering? YES, you do Virginia.

So…….one of the most valuable teaching/learning Jazz/music software programs is now fully available on the Mac. GET IT NOW!

UPDATE: The download version is HUGE. Like, not quite as bad as downloading ProTools 8, but close. On first glance, it seems there are still things missing in the Mac version. There is no ear trainer (which is a cool feature), No Piano Roll window (edit: oops, it is in there, just not out in the open), practice window and the Soundtrack thing. These seem to be missing. Maybe in a maintenance version?

UPDATE: Ok, it is WAY BIGGER THAN PROTOOLS 8 WAS. Seriously, I have downloaded 10 gigs so far, and I’m on RealTracks 11-12, which is 3.2 Gigs (downloading). I still have 10 more parts to download……probably another 20 gigs?? Yikes!!!

News

Finale 2010

May 29, 2009June 14, 2009 ericdano No Comments

Not to be outdone by Sibelius, MakeMusic announced Finale 2010. Actually, lets reword that. Failing to incorporate any of the ideas presented in Sibelius 5, and failing to come up with anything new and interesting, MakeMusic announced Finale 2010.

Ok, so, what is new for the $99.95 pre-order price? Not much at all. They finally changed the way chords work in program. I can’t tell you when they last mucked with that, probably 10 years or more. It is not a revolutionary feature, but more of a “duh….it needed to be fixed” feature. Since the inception of the program you could not have chords in an empty measure. Now, Finale 2010 has a new “feature” that can do this. Blah Blah Blah.

What else? Well, you get a new font, more Garritan sounds, perhaps a working Aria player, hopefully fixed Percussion notation, Automatic Rehearsal Marks, and measure number controls. That last one really should be a “feature” but should have been fixed in Finale 2007. It is kind of like the version of Finale where they listed that Copyright symbol as a Feature. Those people from the middle states have humor don’t they?

In all, for $100……..worth it? The last version of Finale I updated to was 2007. It sort works on my 10.5 equipped Macs. Finale 2008 and 2009 TOGETHER had some interesting features I could have used, but not really. 2010 though……I dunno. I suppose two page editing, a better cursor, dynamic placement that is better, and chords that are better are noteworthy features to update to. Though MakeMusic wants $170 to upgrade me. Ha! Looks like Finale 2007 will be getting more use from me.

News

Sibelius 6

May 19, 2009 ericdano No Comments

Sibelius 6 has just been announced. I’m not seeing much that makes me go “whoa” like when they put in Parts and Score linking. The noteworthy features I saw are:

Magnetic Layout
Version Comments
ReWire support
Store (though don’t they need to police it for copyright infringement?)

They also seem to have snagged some of Finale’s “features” like Sing in Music, Slurs, chords, putting dynamics in based on how hard you played. Go check it out.

News

Possible Downtime?

April 8, 2009April 10, 2009 ericdano No Comments

This site, and my others (jazz-flute, jazz-clarinet, jazz-oboe, etc), will probably be down sometime over the weekend. Basically, this is due to be deciding to retire my huge old Dual Pentium III server with a smaller, more efficient Atom powered computer. I’m not anticipating any problems but……you never know. I think it will be rather painless and hopefully things will be faster and better on the Atom powered computer (MSI Wind PC to be specific).

For the geeks and nerds out there, I’m probably going to put Ubuntu Server 8.1 on it. The current server is running FreeBSD. That might maybe be a possibility as well. I just need PHP5, Apache 2.2, and MySQL on it. We’ll see what happens. The only real issue I think will be exporting the databases, though, since I moved everything to WordPress, that should be simple. It will be interesting to see exactly how much quieter (the current beast is really loud) and faster it will be. The only thing is that I’ll be losing the RAID backup that I have on the current system. Not that it really has ever failed, once in almost 10 years. That is pretty damn good. At some point, the new Atom server will get a SSD (Solid State Disk) so it will be totally efficient and pretty much silent. Well, hopefully.

UpdateComputer comes tomorrow sometime. I am going to put Ubuntu Server 8.1 on it. I don’t think it will be an issue at all moving stuff over. Just tar it, ftp it to the new computer, untar, etc, etc. Reading up on it, the Atom computer should make a ton faster than the dual pentium III 450s I have.

Articles, News

Louie Bellson Dies at 84

February 16, 2009 ericdano No Comments

Sad news today:
Louie Bellson, a jazz drummer and bandleader who combined remarkable instrumental virtuosity with far-ranging compositional skills, has died. He was 84.

According to his wife Francine, Bellson died Saturday at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles of complications of Parkinson’s disease following a broken hip in November.

Got to play with him a bunch of times while in College as he was living in San Jose at the time (I think). He looked frail back then, but as soon as he sat down at the drums he was like a little kid…….and was simply amazing.

News

Gerry Niewood Dies In Plane Crash

February 14, 2009March 15, 2009 ericdano No Comments

Lohud reports:
“Rochester native Gerry Niewood, whose jazz saxophone was a familiar sound for four decades in venues ranging from the downtown Rochester Shakespeare Lounge to “Saturday Night Live,” was among the victims of Thursday night’s Continental Airlines crash.

Niewood, who was 65, was on his way to Buffalo to play in last night’s Chuck Mangione concert at Kleinhans Music Hall. The two had known each other since childhood, both growing up in the Clinton and Joseph avenues area.”

AllaboutJazz and MSNBC also have stories on this as well.

Damn tragic story.

News

Interesting Music Stand

February 3, 2009February 3, 2009 ericdano No Comments

Barry Wood has finally put up his NAMM 09 Oddities page. There was this interesting item.
pageturner-d
The QiVinci s is modelled on the classic music stand and was conceived especially with performing and learning string- and wind-musicians in mind.
With QiVinci s, the musician can dedicate his full concentration to the music, rather than interrupting the flow of his performance at the end of every page. By means of a foot switch, the pages are turned automatically, silently and inconspicuously. Whether learning or in the midst of a concert performance, the QiVinci s provides musicians with an elegant, stress-free way of playing from one page to the next. QiVinci s not only opens a new repertoire to the concert musician, it also accelerates the practice process for the music student.

Who said paper is dead?

News

Looking For A WordPress Theme

December 23, 2008 ericdano No Comments

This site is currently using a crappy WordPress theme that I don’t particularly care for anymore. I am looking into Carrington Theme as soon as they have support for WordPress 2.7 nested comments. However, I thought I’d post this up to see if anyone has any other ideas for a theme. It does need to have support for a banner ad though.

I was also thinking perhaps of doing something similar to my personal site, where I took the Deskmess theme and tweaked it a little. Or maybe the Japan Style one and tweak it a little. These themes need to really support 2.7 better (nested comments, etc) before I do that though.

Ideas?

News

Pro Tools 8 Released

December 17, 2008 ericdano No Comments

protools_50667 Keeping its promise to ship Pro Tools 8 in December, Digidesign announced that Pro Tools 8 is shipping. However, it is just DOWNLOADABLE right now. This is what you get (if you have M-Powered Pro Tools)

Pro Tools Installer 3994.84 MB
Big Fish Dance DJ Loops 1229.6 MB
Big Fish Hip Hop Loops 1267.08 MB
Big Fish Jazz Loops 516.01 MB
Big Fish Pop Rock Loops 1094.18 MB
Big Fish R&B Funk Loops 1226.28 MB
Big Fish Rock Hard Loops 371.43 MB
Big Fish World Loops 399.43 MB
FXpansion BFD 962.27 MB
Torq LE 234.52 MB
Melodyne Essential 28.7 MB

A good 11+ gigabytes to download :-(. Thanks Digidesign. You should at least have taken $20 or so off the price.

News