Music and Musical Gear

Apparently interactive guitar training is ‘a thing’, as evidenced by the number of iOS apps designed around teaching you the guitar as a game, and now projects like Tabber that seek to ease your way into learning guitar by putting everything you need right under your fingers. According to the Kickstarter page: Tabber is an open-source LED guitar teacher. Tabber creates a whole new field of visual learning for your guitar. We put the notes that you need to play, when you need to play them right on the neck of the guitar. Our LED light sleeve can be placed…

If you are a fan of rock music from the 70s or 80s, the name Joe Walsh is immediately familiar – his time with the James Gang and the Eagles as well as his solo career produced a number of hits. His work as a sideman cemented him as a legend on the guitar. He is the force behind hits like James Gang’s ‘Funk #49’ (trust me, you know it), Eagle’s ‘Life in the Fast Lane’ and ‘In the City’, and his own ‘Rocky Mountain Way’ and ‘Life’s Been Good’ amongst many others. Walsh has a knack for delivering sardonic…

When I was first learning to play guitar and bass, picking up songs meant rewinding a tape over and over again or manually repositioning the needle. Then you would have to pick out the part you were learning in a typically heavily layered production. With the digital age you can at least manipulate the playback to only hear the sections you want and repeat at will … but the rest gets tricky. Enter Jammit. Jammit is a service that provides you with everything you need to learn a song – sheet music with full professional transcriptions, tablature as well as…

With a ‘Best New Artist’ Grammy and the immensely critically and commercially successful (by jazz standards) ‘Chamber Music Society’ recording behind her, Esperanza Spalding faced the daunting task of producing a follow up. When I heard last year that the title would be ‘Radio Music Society’, I knew that she was shifting her focus from the ‘chamber jazz’ feel of much of her last outing to something more funky and pop-oriented. Of course, that direction can be a dangerous path – you can succeed, but you can just as easily alienate existing fans without making new ones. Fortunately, based on…

While the collaborative recording Tithra didn’t quite make my ‘tops of 2011’ list, Vijay Iyer’s Historyicity remains one of the best recordings of the last five years and a personal favorite. So when I heard that Vijay Iyer’s trio was releasing a new album in early 2012 I got excited … and when I discovered that NPR was hosting the full record for streaming I was REALLY excited. And after listening … I am ecstatic!

Electronic music can get rather ‘spacey’ or ‘sci-fi’ at times, but this takes it to new levels! Electronic Encounters – The Special Edition is a compilation of electronica tracks inspired by the classic film, Close Encounters Of The Third Kind, and the collection is available for FREE! Head here to check out the song ‘Believe’ by Logan 5: Here is the synopsis of the inspiration: Back in June 2001, I went searching on the internet for anything relating to Close Encounters of the Third Kind. What little I did find was not very impressive. It was then that I decided…

One of the first things most kids looking to pick up the guitar do is imitate the lines from a popular rock or pop song. Rock music is rife with simple hooks that are guitar-centric and easy to play (Smoke on the Water, Baba O’Reilly, and so on). But beyond a single line is a fully composed song – and after learning the line you will find you want more! Alfred Music has just released a two-volume set of classic rock songs from the 1950s through the 2000s! The first volume looks at the 50s-70s, and the second volume looks…