A Fun Musical Ride from Ireland

My friend Daragh from Cork recently spun a tasty set that I have listened to 3 times now. Daragh has a visual artist’s sense of sonic texture and is fearless about allowing a song out of its genre box to make new trouble. Check it out here.

Cat Samples – Soundiron’s Snack library

Want to sneak some  subtle feline-ness into a mix? Here are some free cat samples to get started. It is amazing what you can do with a vocal cat if you can get her into a studio.  

A Labor Day Tribute to Records Made by Sidemen

The “sideman” is not a member of the band. He is the faceless hired gun who willingly accepts the lesser piece of the action despite often making a vital contribution the sound. Some great musicians ultimately emerged from these behind-the-scene roles to become stars in their own right but many more did not. This is […]

Get rid of multitasking if you want to not suck

I have come to the conclusion after years of multitask creep that it is not working for me. Yes, I can bang though a tons of low-level tasks while responding to emails, reminders, meeting requests, tweets, IMs and physical interruptions but I have found it increasingly impossible to concentrate on doing the more creative work […]

On Jazz Piano Solo

Nate Chinen recently wrote an article on NYTimes.com that is one of the best surveys of solo jazz piano I have read. I have been checking out pretty much everyone mentioned in this piece lately in an attempt to improve my solo playing.  Three lesser known solo piano albums I also really like are: Phineas […]

Sonny Stitt, WordPress 3.3 and Getting out of the Way

Jazz Wax just posted a timely piece on Sonny Stitt on his interesting use of the experimental Varitone or Electric Sax. The goal of this 1965 instrument was to integrate the organic reed vibration sound generation process and electric manipulation and amplification of the sound. The instrument would provide a suite of on-board tools and […]

The Tyranny of the Extroverts

An old essay called The Tyranny of the Extroverts resurfaced in my feed reader the other day. It got me thinking about some of the talented and shy developers and musicians I have had the privilege to work with over the years. These are the kind of people who trouble getting past an HR interview […]

Alpha Music

The music that you hear when you are growing up can form the foundation of your sonic aesthetic. I am often relieved that my parents had eclectic taste and exposed me to some of the music I still enjoy today. I came cross Funk For First-Time Fathers recently and thought that this kid was pretty […]

Digging jsfx

Building an HTML5 browser based game or synth? Need some fresh sounds for those nav mouseovers on your step uncle’s used car site? This is the JavaScript library for you. (Requires browser WAV support) There is  definitely something useful here. I am going to mess around with this more.

RIP Fran Landesman

Fran Landesman wrote the lyrics to one of my favorite “50s era” standards – Spring Can Really Hang You Up The Most.  Her evocative lyrics were inspired by passages in The Waste Land by T.S Eliot. APRIL is the cruelest month, breeding Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing Memory and desire, stirring Dull roots with spring […]

« Previous PageNext Page »