Digital Music Doctor has released a new video training course: Garageband 3 - Know it All!
It covers the major aspects of audio and MIDI recording, editing, and mixing using Garageband 3.
The Indianapolis Star has an interesting article about Superior Court Judge Mark Stoner’s love of the piano, and how it helped him to supplement his income through law school and as a young lawyer.
He keeps a practice piano in his office, next to his judicial chambers. It includes a synthesiser, four-track recorder, and a harpsichord.
According to the Mozart effect, classical music training boosts young people’s IQs. Perhaps as an extension of that theory, Judge Stoner finds he does better on the bench with the help of some music.
“The piano was a present to myself when I came on the bench,” he said. “It gives me a chance for something to do and relax when a jury is deliberating, or it gives me some relief if I get mad at the lawyers.”
Read the full article: Judge also enjoys sitting on piano bench
Midisoft Corp have announced the release of MIDI Mate, a new compact USB-based MIDI interface compatible for both Windows (and presumably, Linux) PCs, and Macs.
It’s a tiny 1×1 (1 in, 1 out, 16 channel) interface accepting MIDI cables, designed to be portable for travelling musicians.
It’s been designed after surveying musicians, who said what they needed the most was a compact interface with extra cable length, no MIDI delay, and a durable construction.
On June 22nd, some of the world’s most renowned synthesists will honour Bob Moog at the third annual Moogfest
Names include Keith Emerson, Jan Hammer, The Mahavishnu Project, The School of Rock, DJ Logic, Roger O’Donnell (The Cure) and Jordan Rudess (Dream Theatre).
Moog Music will present a lifetime achievement award to an artist who is recognized as having expressed their unique artistry through their Moog instrument.
Visit the official website: Moogfest
Tom Hespos has written an interesting article entitled Low Barriers To Entry Fuel Citizen Publishing in which he mentions Apple’s contribution to consumer music generation by Garageband.
An application called GarageBand typically comes along with the purchase of a new Apple Mac. A deceptively simple application, GarageBand doesn’t come with a manual to explain how to use it. For many, the application is intuitive and easy to use. And the guy who wrote the unofficial manual for the application describes GarageBand as “unfair” in terms of what it is able to do, as compared to what the equipment professional recording engineers can do. Home users can easily create professional-sounding recordings, and folks like me who spent tens of thousands on their way to this point in technological development are kicking themselves.
I don’t mean to give Apple all the credit for ushering in revolutions in content production. I’m oversimplifying for the sake of illustration here. What’s important is that not only did we go through the desktop publishing era in the area of printed materials, but we’re also going through the desktop publishing era in audio recording and production.
Read the full article: Low Barriers To Entry Fuel Citizen Publishing
EMI Classics has signed 25-year-old American pianist Jonathan Biss to a two-year exclusive contract, the company announced.
His first CD under the contract, an all-Schumann recital consisting of the Fantasie in C, Arabeske in C, and Kreisleriana, will be released in the U.S. in January 2007. EMI released Biss’s recording debut, which featured Beethoven and Schumann, on its “Debut” Series in April 2004.
Biss is a third generation musician in a family that includes his cellist grandmother Raya Garbousova, for whom Samuel Barber composed his Cello Concerto, and his parents, violinist Miriam Fried and violist and violinist Paul Biss. Biss began studying piano at age six; he continued at Indiana University with Evelyne Brancart and at the Curtis Institute with Leon Fleisher.
Read the full article: EMI Classics Signs Pianist Jonathan Biss
“The Piano Student of Mrs McAlfrey”, created by Kalamazoo pianist and arranger Rich Ridenour, is a new child-friendly musical whose primary message is that to get from “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” to George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue”, and beyond, you have to practice, practice, practice.
In the one-hour program, geared for children ages 5 to 12, the piano student (Ridenour) loves baseball and sports. But then he discovers that playing the piano can be just as much fun as hitting a home run with the bases loaded.
“Our goal is to turn kids on to playing the piano and expose them to the different levels of learning,” Ridenour said. Youngsters who attend the program will get a head start on stardom by receiving a free starter packet of piano music.
Read the full article: Show aims to encourage young music students
Dave Smith is an American audio engineer who arguably played as large a part as Bob Moog in the development of the modern synthesizer. Smith’s Sequential Circuits created many revered synths, including the Prophet 5 (above right), the first microprocessor-based synth. Smith also proposed the MIDI standard in 1981, which has been incorporated into nearly every synth in the last 25 years.
No Island Media, a digital media production company specializing in short-form reality programmes for and about creative professionals, plans to produce a documentary about Dave Smith and tutorials for the PolyEvolver keyboard.
Read the full article: New Documentary, Podcast, to Feature Synth Pioneer Dave Smith
Podcasting News reports that Soviet synthesizers, such as the Aelita, Polivoks, Altair-231, Faemi-1M, Alisa-1387, Maestro, and Ritm-2, are now available as an Akai sample CD-ROM.
The AKAI Soviet Synths Sample CD-ROM represents a collection of sounds that have crossed no-man’s land from the former Soviet Union. Chock full of analog synthesizer samples - fat bass lines, warm pads, aggressive razor leads, smooth classic waveforms, space FX, sounds of noises and machines, percussion, original real time phrases and much more…Thanks to unique architecture and powerful resonant filters, Soviet-made synthesizers have inimitable color in their sound; you get a lot of cool stuff for creating killer patches!
Arvinder Kaur, New Delhi: Bollywood music composers have long been fascinated by piano music. But now a Franco American composer is combining piano with ghatam and tabla to make what she calls “niche new age music for Hindi films”.
“In the Hindi movies, there is a strong attraction for Piano… Whether it is the old movies of the ’60s or the recent classics like Parineeta. A R Rahman has used it very beautifully in Yuva… All this shows that there is lot of scope for experimentation with the piano,” says Ariane Gray Hubert, a Franco-American concernt pianist, singer and composer.
Read the full article: Piano, ghatam, tabla - three to tango for Bollywood music
