Category: News

Moving From Slash To WordPress (DONE)

Posted on By ericdano No Comments on Moving From Slash To WordPress (DONE)

Ok, after a LOT of work on my end, 98% of the stories and files have been moved to WordPress. They have all been put into 4 categories, and tagged. Though, the tagging might need to be revistited in the future.

Things not moved are the user ids from the old slash site. Journals have not been moved either. Polls and the comments in them are one of the things that still need to be moved, and will be done so by the end of the weekend. The other thing that has not been moved yet is the player setup database I had. Not sure how I’m going to do that one at the moment…….I might need to learn a little PHP to do that.

There might be some links in stories that do not work. If anyone see these, please shoot me an email and a story link. These are kind of hard to find and fix…….

UPDATED 10/6/07 11:50PM by E: Ok, it’s done. The Slash site is offically gone. Perl has been removed from the Apache webserver. Memories of Slashcode start to fade…..

News

Record Companies Finally Win One

Posted on By ericdano No Comments on Record Companies Finally Win One

After all the lawsuits they have started, they finally won one.

In a major win for record companies seeking to establish precedent for prosecuting those who trade copyrighted material on the Internet, a federal jury awarded six firms $222,000 in damages from a Minnesota woman who shared music online. Jammie Thomas, 30, was ordered to pay $9,250 for each of 24 songs that were part of the case. The complaint alleged that she had shared 1,702 copyright-violating songs online. The Associated Press quotes Richard Gabriel, lead attorney for the music companies: “This does send a message, I hope, that downloading and distributing our recordings is not OK.”

What does this mean? Good question…….

News

Tags and Categories

Posted on By ericdano No Comments on Tags and Categories

Upgrading to WordPress 2.3 was painless. However, they did change a number of things. Categories and Tags. Kind of confusing, but here is a quote to better explain it:

So categories can be tags but tags cannot be categories. Categories are like the huge signs you see on aisles in supermarkets – “Food”, “Hygiene”, “Frozen” etc, they guide you to sections where you can find what you are looking for. Tags are like the labels on the products themselves.

So, in an effort to clean up my categories, I’ve been tagging. Though, it is, like moving over the old Slash content, going to take some time.

News

Changed Themes

Posted on By ericdano No Comments on Changed Themes

Yeah, things look different. WordPress allows you to really mess with the look of a site really, really easily. So, we are trying this one out……

I think it is more of what I want it to look like……

UPDATE: 09/23/07 4:30 PM by E: Added an Archives page

UPDATE: 09/24/07 1:50 PM by E: Moved the Submit Article to the menu

UPDATE: 09/24/07 9:20 PM by E: Upgraded to WordPress 2.3. Woot!

UPDATE: 09/25/07 12:35 AM by E: Tags……I’m not quite sure what to make of them yet……

News

Korg Sells Its 20 Millionth Tuner

Posted on By ericdano No Comments on Korg Sells Its 20 Millionth Tuner

From Korg:

We recently achieved a milestone — over 20 million tuners sold worldwide. To mark the occasion, we have increased the warranty on all of our tuners and metronomes sold to three years. Now you can stay perfectly in tune with the latest in Korg tuner technology, backed by the high quality of these products plus years of guaranteed performance

I’ve never owned a Korg tuner. I do have a Korg M1 though…..

News

Joe Zawinul Dies at 75

Posted on By ericdano 1 Comment on Joe Zawinul Dies at 75

&uotFew of the major US networks picked up on this,

Zawinul died early Tuesday, a spokeswoman for Vienna’s Wilhelmina Clinic said, without giving details. He had been hospitalized since last month and suffered from a rare form of skin cancer, said Risa Zincke, his manager, according to the Austria Press Agency.

Some articles about his death are here, here, here and here.

Weather report was one of the first jazz/fusion groups I was exposed to (Tom Scott and the L.A. Express was the other). Sad to see another great pass on.

News

PG Music JazzU

Posted on By ericdano No Comments on PG Music JazzU

PG Music has a new product out, JazzU

JazzU offers all students of Jazz — players, teachers, arrangers, and Jazz lovers – an invaluable computer-based resource for the study of Jazz music with top instructors and players. JazzU faculty members are professionals whose credentials embrace both formal study and a wealth of experience as performers on the bandstand, the concert stage, and in the recording studio. For the student, JazzU offers the insights of top professional musicians and teachers who combine an appreciation of the rich Jazz tradition with the ability to play and teach in all styles and genres – Traditional, Dixieland, Swing, Bebop, Latin, Modern, Fusion, and beyond.

For $50, it sounds like a good deal. The only thing that it lacks, it seems, is a way to evaluate how you played them. Programs like Teach Me Piano do this, and they are brutal. But it is an effective way to get better.

News

The Dust Has Settled…..Sorta

Posted on By ericdano No Comments on The Dust Has Settled…..Sorta

Looks like things have settled down after the transition from Slash to WordPress. First, on the right you’ll see the Be Active header. Here you can write articles, questions, interesting things you saw on the net or heard about. Second, there are still about 300+ stories that have not been migrated from Slash to WordPress. It probably will be a couple of weeks until everything appears again.

News

Ralph Morgan Dies

Posted on By ericdano No Comments on Ralph Morgan Dies

I saw this on the Klarinet list

“I just received a note from a repairman friend which said that Ralph Morgan passed away on August 23rd. Ralph worked at Selmer for many decades and was brilliant at mouthpiece design and instrument acoustics. He retired many years ago and concentrated on just mouthpieces.

As a maker, I just wish folks like him left behind research notes for the rest of us to learn from!

Dave

Dr. David McClune
University Professor of Music
Director of Bands/Woodwinds
Union University-1862
1050 Union University Drive
Jackson, TN 38305

Office-731-661-5294
dmcclune@uu.edu
www.mcclunemouthpiece.com

News

New Site

Posted on By ericdano 11 Comments on New Site

Welcome to the new Site. Most all of the stories and comments transfered over. The ones that have not should be migrated over in the next week or two.

I think there might be some problems with the Login thing. Can someone check it out and post about it?

Fixed the Download problem I think……maybe……

Also fixed a cache problem. I think it works better now…..now if I could only get the old slash site up to continue to move stories and files over…….

Update 8/29/07, well, there still are about 500 some stories that need to be sifted through. It is long, and boring, and long and boring……but it is going. Hopefully some of the other patterns and pdfs will be up soon.

Update 8/31/07. Still have something like 500 stories/articles to sift through. Erg…..Hopefully sped things up here with some caching and some MySQL tuning.

News

Finale Productivity

Posted on By ericdano No Comments on Finale Productivity

When the author of the Finale Productivity package died last year, it was a shock. Bill was a great guy to email back and forth with, and I’m sorry I didn’t save every email we exchanged. He was very insightful about how things should look, and how to be clear on with music notation. Bill developed templates, fonts, and processes for Finale and sold them to people who wanted to make their music “engraver quality”. One of the last projects he completed was a Articulations font which addressed the LACK of articulations available in a traditional (ie: Finale’s Maestro) font. Bill’s articulations font looks great with Maestro, and has a complete set of articulations that one would need for any modern music notation (scoops, bends, falls). It looks great.

Then Bill left us, and it seemed his invaluable package of fonts, templates, insights, and processes would be lost.

Luckily, the rights to sell it were bought by NPC Imaging and is available here. I think Bill would be very happy to see that his efforts are living on. And I hope there will be continued work on the package in the future.

Articles, News

Three Michael Brecker Things

Posted on By ericdano 2 Comments on Three Michael Brecker Things

In a previous story, I noted that Virtual Instruments Magazine was coming out with an article about Michael Brecker’s EWI/Logic environment. That article is now out in the June/July 07 issue. It is very insightful in how Michael Brecker approached technology and how he was able to take two 4 foot racks of gear and put it all on a Apple Powerbook. I almost want to get Apple’s Logic program and try it. Wonder if you can do that with Digital Performer…

iBrecker has a link to a video of interviews with the players from Michael Brecker’s last album (Herbie Hancock, etc). Sadly, no interviews with him, but you get to hear him playing, see studio shots, and even a little bit of him tinkering with his tenor between takes (looks like he had a full on repair case with him).

Update: 06/09 02:01 GMT by E :A intrepid reader, Dave Kiffer, from Alaska, informed me that Downbeat has an electronic readers poll. Go vote for Michael now! (Also updated the title of this article to reflect the three items)

News

New Michael Brecker Album

Posted on By ericdano No Comments on New Michael Brecker Album

iBrecker.com has a link to a video teaser of an upcoming new album from Michael Brecker. Pilgrimage can also be pre-ordered via Amazon.com as well. Herbie Hancock, Brad Mehldau, Pat Metheny, Jack DeJohnette, and John Patitucci. 30 second clips of all the tracks are available on the Amazon link.

Album is scheduled to be released on May 22nd. For all you Brecker fans, this is a must have.

News

Michael Brecker Memorial

Posted on By ericdano 1 Comment on Michael Brecker Memorial

From a NYTimes article

"The memorial program for the saxophonist Michael Brecker that filled Town Hall on Tuesday night kept landing on the theme of generosity. Mr. Brecker died of leukemia on Jan. 13 at 57. During his illness he enlisted family members and friends in sending out a call for bone-marrow donors — not just for himself — that resulted in tens of thousands of donor registrations. His friends in jazz and pop music all implied that this wasn’t just an isolated case of conscientiousness."

Some interesting things mentioned are that Michael did drugs in the 70s (probably with 90% of the population as well), as well as some of the stories such as:

"Randy Brecker told a similar story, about one of the hundreds of recording sessions at which he had been hired to work alongside his brother. Michael, he said, came to work straight from the airport after a long flight, not having had time to read the music. He was asked by the producer to build a solo through a long two-chord vamp. One could see where this was going: Michael’s solo was of disturbingly high quality, and Randy was asked to take it from there."

For more Brecker stuff, check out Michael Brecker.com and a new fan site (which was supposed to be a Michael Brecker interactively supported site), iBrecker. iBrecker also has some more info about the Memorial Service.

News