John Perry to perform at SJSU as Young Pianists’ Beethoven Competition opener

Mercury News reports:

New Age Piano and Improvisation

There are so many areas in life where one must do things right. Thankfully, art is an area where great discoveries are made by making mistakes!Take improvisation for example. We sit at our piano or keyboard without any thought of what is to come. Our fingers touch a certain chord that calls to us and we are gone. We are transported into a nonverbal world where anything is possible.

Surprises happily come our way as we let go and observe how the music is created before us. And we are always amazed that the “best” music happens when we do not care if it is good or bad.

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Piano Wizard versus Piano Hero

We’ve already covered the Piano Wizard software, and now Pianologist has written a comparison of Piano Wizard and Piano Hero.
What’s interesting is that it introduces Piano Wizard PREMIER, a more expensive package that allows unlimited download and learning of music in MIDI file format.

If you have any experience of either piece of software, you can leave your comments there.

Michel Legrand does jazz: interview with Associated Press

The Associated Press caught up with Michel Legrand, interviewed between sets during a six-night run at Birdland jazz club celebrating his 75th birthday.

He talks about improvisation, not taking things too seriously, and the marking of his 75th birthday by leading a jazz trio.

The gig was also a chance to rekindle the flames of his first passion — jazz. Legrand was a teenage prodigy studying classical piano and composition at the Paris Conservatory when he attended trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie’s 1947 concert there.

“Bebop — I didn’t know what it was about. It was a jazz style that I had never heard. It was a revolution to me because during the war, the occupation … the Germans forbid to have any jazz, so we didn’t hear anything. … I listened to Dizzy very carefully and then the next day I bought all the possible 78 records that I could find and it changed my life. …

“Jazz is one of the most important disciplines in music of the 20th century. … The musicians, composers or whoever who don’t play jazz, I pity them,” he said.

Young pianist with big dreams, practice time cut due to symptoms of tendinitis

The Federal Way Mirror reports on 16-year-old Rebecca Smith who has been playing the piano so much that she is displaying signs of tendinitis.

So Smith cut her practice time from four hours to two hours each day.

Although her practice time has gotten smaller, Smith’s dreams are only getting bigger. She hopes to someday reach fame as a concert pianist.

All About Jazz interviews French pianist Giullaume de Chassy

All About Jazz has interviewed Guillaume de Chassy.

February 2007, Paris: Pianist Guillaume de Chassy has just recorded his first solo piano album and he is performing an entirely solo set at the Archipel theater to celebrate its release. If he’s nervous, it doesn’t show; he jokes easily with the appreciative crowd, leading them through the by-ways of the musical journey that led him to this stage. The easy-going affability is deceptive; when he begins to play, de Chassy is all concentration.

I met with de Chassy a couple of weeks before the Archipel date at his home in a quiet suburb south of Paris. The French pianist and composer, in addition to talking about the new record, waxed eloquently and enthusiastically on subjects ranging from the genius of the composers of the Great American—and the Great French—Songbooks, to the enduring influence of Ravel in jazz, to the struggle between the harmony and dissonance in the arts generally, a kind of dialectical battle Thelonious Monk resolved in his “Ugly Beauty.”

VirSyn releases Poseidon 1.1 virtual synthesizer

Gear Junkies reports that VirSyn has released Poseidon version 1.1, fixing various bugs and adding a key trigger modes for envelopes: normal, reset and single, and 64 new presets.

Correcting permissions on Mac OS X

Analog Industries sets out very clearly how to repair permissions in Mac OS X.

That doesn’t sound like it has any relevance to music or synthesisers, but they note that “A side effect of a customer’s permissions being screwed is that Audio Damage plugins can’t read their copy protection files, and thus won’t work.”

It also covers some interesting anomalies with Logic.

If you’re a Mac user not familiar with permissions (believe me, you need to be) head over and take a look.

What’s the best Wurlitzer modelling VSTi?

Analog Industries asks what the best Wurli Model is.

The electric piano is more or less alone amongst electro-mechanical instruments inasmuch as it is relatively easily and accurately modeled. What is your favorite Wurli modeling VSTi? I’d be okay with a sample set as well, as long as it was Halion, or came with a player.

Head over and leave your comments.

LennarDigital Releases Version 1.21 of Sylenth1 VSTi Synthesizer

Harmony Central reports that LennarDigital has released version 1.21 of its Sylenth1 VSTi synthesizer.

Changes are:

• MIDI Learn functionality for all knobs and controls
• Improved pitch modulation
• Improved LFO frequency modulation and anti-aliasing
• Correct implementation of MIDI CC’s 64 (hold pedal) and 123 (all notes off)
• Fixed arpeggiator note limit
• Fixed filter initialisation bug
• 260 new presets

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