Piano and Synth Blog

Yamaha has unveiled their latest digital grand piano in a new contemporary design.

The Nocturne Grand N100 in attractive black finish has speakers tucked conveniently into the rear cabinet and pedal frame, a slim look top-to-bottom, and a tasteful soft-glow blue-lit control surface.

“This strikingly visual instrument will undoubtedly expand the digital piano market to customers with a more contemporary taste in design,” says Dane Madsen, marketing manager, Yamaha Digital Pianos. “The Nocturne provides the experience of Yamaha’s century-old acoustic piano craftsmanship in what is truly a modern piano.”

It features everything you’d expect from a Yamaha digital piano:

• 88 Graded Hammer Effect, weighted-action keys;
• 64 notes of polyphony;
• 10 of Yamaha’s best keyboard voices (including Grand Piano, Electronic Piano, Pipe Organ, and Strings)
• Spacious digital reverb;

The Nocturne Grand N100 should be available from Yamaha dealers now.

April 29th marks the 107th anniversary of Edward Kennedy Ellington’s birth and in May he will have been gone for 32 years. Yet we have still not come to terms with the magnitude of Duke’s legacy not only to 20th Century music but to the very idea of jazz itself. Too many take reductionist approaches to Ellington, ones that emphasize one or another aspect of his accomplishments without considering the totality. They fall into such traps as “the Duke’s instrument was his orchestra” or “Ellington reached his creative peak in the late ‘30s and early ‘40s” or “the Ellington band was in decline in the years before the Newport Jazz Festival in 1956”. What these statements ignore are such important facts as Ellington’s towering importance as a jazz pianist, his singular achievement of meeting a payroll 52 weeks a year for over four decades and his incredible fecundity as a composer in the last decades of his life, most significantly after the death of his musical alter ego Billy Strayhorn

Read: Duke Ellington: The Piano Player, The Treasury Shows, The Complete Gus Wildi Recordings

Last year, Robert Rich, musician and composer with over two dozen albums, had an accident that severed the ulnar artery and several tendons in his wrist.

In an interview with SFGate.com, he talks about his music, how he works around the new limitations his injury forced upon him, his joy of life and of music, his musical influences (including Indonesian music), his synthesizers, family, and much more.

An interesting read: Plugged in to the Joy of Ambient Music

Dancetech have made an exclusive half-hour video preview of the new Liquidmix from Focusrite.

Liquidmix is a piece of hardware and associated synchronised software plugin that emulates a number of classic compressors and EQs using “impulse response handling”

It’s a big download but worth watching if you’re interested in this kind of sound production technology.

Visit the Dancetech site to read more and download the video.

Apparently, Kelly Osbourne has a tattoo of a synthesizer on her arm.

Trent, who originally commented: “Kelly Osbourne has an awesome new tattoo of a sweet (fictional?) synth with X-Y, 2 wheel mods, 5-band EQ, 3-octave keyboard, and…a spectrograph??? Can’t decide if this makes me want to puke or give her a high-five.”

MusicThing says: “hat kind of fool would put mod wheels way over on the right hand side?”

Exactly.

RoombaMidi is a Mac OS X application that turns the iRobot Roomba vacuum cleaner into a musical instrument - complete with flashing lights and spinning.

Before you ask why, watch the video… then ask why…

It’s a lot of fun, though, and allows the vacuum cleaner to be controlled from top-end apps like Ableton Live and Logic.

Plus - get this - you can control up to 16 of the little chaps, one per MIDI channel. Jazzy… your own orchestra.

More description etc. via Axehole’s site.

Want to see a near-legendary synthesist in action?

DVDBorn has posted a video of Vangelis improvising in his Paris studio, from around 1993.

If you don’t speak French, you might struggle with some of the interview, but there’s plenty of music to keep you entertained. Sound is a little ropey as it’s sourced from a VHS video, but it’s still worth checking out.

MultiControlFeatures

• Easy to choose any general Human Interface Device (HID)
• Automatically detects buttons, sliders, etc in use
• Automatic scaling to 0.-1. (OSC) or 0-127 (MIDI)
• Easy to choose desired output scaling
• Optional data smoothing
• Can output data using either Open Sound Control (OSC) or MIDI
• Store presets to xml-files

It’s only available as a Mac download at present. Could be fun to play around with. I don’t know how it interfaces with other applications.

If you want some quick primers on basic music theory and piano playing, head over to the one-minute mini-lessons where you’ll find quick guides on:

• Key of the song
• Blues Form
• Classical vs Pop piano lessons
• Practice regimen
• Playing chords
• Blues scale
• Tuning
• Chord inversions
• Christmas songs
• Playing by ear

They’re not exhaustive guides but quite useful springboards for developing your own piano playing.

Purists may try to keep classical and jazz music separate, but composer-pianist Joel Martin thinks differently.

“To me it’s all just music and I don’t see them as that different,” he said. “I don’t know why we have to create these divisions and categories.”

Martin is an award-winning concert and jazz pianist. The idea of his show “Jazzical” came when he realised that he would start playing jazz riffs whilst rehearsing classical music.

“All those old composers would constantly improvise on their works when they played them,” he said. “It’s just a continuation of making music. We can only imagine what some Bach or Beethoven pieces would sound like if jazz and African rhythms had been introduced to Europe back in the 1600s.”

He has been a soloist with the New York Philharmonic, Philadelphia Orchestra, and Delaware Symphony.

“My mind set is to think of what would interest a 12-year-old,” he said. “If you don’t get his attention in two or three minutes, you’ve lost him. So I pick song-oriented pieces.”

Read the full article: For composer-pianist, ‘It’s all just music’