I have come to realize that a healthy lust for classic microphones is something to be proud of. It shows an appreciation for the quality of a time gone by. It indicates a romantic desire to hold a beautiful sound in one’s hand. It is one of the affinities that separates men from apes. When… Read more »
Posts Categorized: Music
The Many Mysteries of Rudy Van Gelder
Rudy Van Gelder is considered to be the vital ‘fifth Beetle’ on a zillion of the best jazz records ever made. Though he considers himself strictly a recording engineer, the Van Gelder sound is as signature as any great musician’s. Have you ever mucked about trying to get his sound or even kinda sorta his… Read more »
Nudge – a seriously fun browser synth
The subversive geniuses at Hobnox have just released one of the most musical browser based synths I have ever played. Nudge enables you to step-enter 8 sounds into a looping 4/4 grid. The grid is pentatonic instead of full chromatic but there is still a surprising amount of creative flexibility. It is as fun to… Read more »
The Stark Reality and Hoagy Carmichael
Before American child rearing became neurotic and consumerist there was a time when we produced some really sophisticated, whimsical children’s television. Hoagy Carmichael’s Music Shop is one of these strange and charming experiments. Hoagy Carmichael shares the music with the excellent funk band The Stark Reality and there is some seriously trippy animated musical notation… Read more »
The Cigar Box Synth
Back when I was a wee lad my Dad used to bring me empty cigar boxes to play with. I had dozens of them. Some were converted into garages for matchbox cars, some became building materials, others were used to store priceless assets like string and wires. When I was about the same wee age,… Read more »
Bossa for a Blue Monday
I found a very good podcast of vinyl rips of out of print 60s bossa nova. There are some gems here but even when I am not blown away by a particular song, I love the way this stuff was recorded.
Don’t Forget Octaves
In the last couple of years I have managed to achieve a noticeable improvement in my overall piano technique by focusing on scale and arpeggio excersizes. One piece of sloppiness remains – octaves. I am often sloppy in RH and worse in LH and I have difficulty doing accurate boogie woogie LH broken octaves. I… Read more »
My Favorite Lush Lifes
Anyone who knows me well knows that this is one of my favorite standards. I have been working on it since I was about the same age as Billy Strayhorn when he first started writing it – 16. It is a very subtle and difficult to play really well. I think I can finally do… Read more »
The desert grew quiet last night
The brilliant and prolific Maurice Jarre passed away on Sunday. He wrote and recorded the entire score to Lawrence of Arabia in an astonishing 6 weeks – in reverse order. He achieved this by sleeping for 10 minutes every three hours for days at a time. One has to wonder if the crazed schedule and… Read more »
An Afternoon with Blossom
I’ve been listening to a lot of Blossom Dearie since learning of her death. What a loss. I had the good fortune to do a recording with her a few years back. I was doing the sound and incidental music for a Children’s TV pilot for my friends Bob and Anniken. They had managed to… Read more »
