Archive for March, 2009

All Of Me

If you don’t practice for a day you know the difference, two days and your friends know the difference, three days and everyone knows the difference!

While you are sleeping the competition is practicing!

Set aside time each day with clearly defined objectives and protect the time slot.

Make practice fun!

There is a great deal of excitement over using new multimedia technologies. I recently embarked on a journey to get setup to be able to create podcasts and vidcasts.

I own a software company and our primary computers are Windows based however we have started to write Apple iPhone applications so I had to purchase a Mac computer. Since it is for software development – I just needed the least  expensive Mac. I ended up purchasing a Mac Mini for about $600 plus tax.  I am using the free LogMeIn software from my PC to remotely acces the Mac mini and share the Macs desktop ( this way I didn’t need to purchase an additional monitor, keyboard and mouse ).  I purchased a Samson G Track USB Microphone and Audio Interface. The microphone plugs in to a USB port on the Mac mini. I am using a $20 headphone that plugs into the Samson microphone. The Samson microphone cost about $129 plus shipping. I purchased a Canon FS100 video camera with a 16GB flash memory card ( priced at under $400). I purchased a $30 tripod for the video camera. I am using the iMovie and Garageband software that is included at no extra cost with the Mac Mini.

Mac mini           $600

Video Camera $400

Microphone     $129

Tripod                $ 30

Headphone      $ 20

Including tax and shipping my setup cost less than $1300.

This is amazing because only a few years ago a setup with similar capabilitiezs would have cost tens of thousands of dollars.

I will be writing posts in the near furture to recommend YouTube training videos.

An important part of learning the jazz language is transcribing the music of those that have gone before us as well as those that are still with us. It is important to not only figure out the notes and rhythms but to also to figure out the articulations, pitch bends and other nuances.

We happen to be fortunate to live in an age of technology that provides us with wonderful tools to simplify the transcription process. In the past, transcribers would slow down the speed of phonographs in order to determine the notes. Although this would slow down the music – the pitch would also be lowered and in many cases the music would be “muddy” and difficult to “play along with”.

I have evaluated several different transcription software packages and prefer Transcribe!

Transcribe is available from the following URL:

http://www.seventhstring.com/

The software runs on mac, PC and Linux.

Do you use any transcribing software? If yes, what are you using?

Wikopedia defines a contrafact as follows:

“A contrafact is a new musical composition built out of an already existing one, most of a new melody overlaid on a familiar harmonic structure. As a compositional device, it was of particular importance in the 1930s/1940s development of bop, since it allowed jazz musicians to create new pieces for performance and recording on which they could immediately improvise, without having to seek permission or pay publisher fees for copyrighted materials (while melodies can be copyrighted, the underlying harmonic structure cannot be).”

The song “Donna Lee”  is a contrafact of  “Back Home in Indiana”.

We will be using contrafacts to communicate and illustrate various jazz aids.

C Blues