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It’s a shame when life gets in the way of your blog­ging. This has been the case with me ever since the hol­i­days, but I’ll be back soon with some projects and inter­est­ing ideas to share.

In the mean­time, I highly rec­om­mend lis­ten­ing to 23 Standards by Anthony Braxton. The entire album is amaz­ing, but as a gui­tarist I was imme­di­ately impressed with the per­for­mance of Kevin O’Neil. His sense of tim­ing and phras­ing is com­pletely orig­i­nal, entirely dif­fer­ent from the funk sen­si­bil­i­ties of my old favorites such as Grant Green or Melvin Sparks. Rather than con­strain­ing his impro­vi­sa­tions to the “in the pocket” feel that most gui­tar play­ers stick to, he man­ages to push, pull, and destroy the groove more like an avant-guard tenor sax player.

He also shreds with incred­i­ble speed and per­sis­tence through­out the entire range of the gui­tar. I have this image in my mind of him hav­ing to buy a new gui­tar every few years or so after wear­ing down the fret­board on the one he cur­rently owns. It’s prob­a­bly not true, but his play­ing sounds that sick.

Give it a lis­ten until you hear from me next. You won’t be disappointed.

Tags: anthony braxton, Grant Green, guitar, Jazz, kevin o'neil, melvin sparks, standards

Ardour is a very inex­pen­sive open source DAW soft­ware that runs on Mac OS and Linux though the use of the Jack Audio Connections Kit. It is essen­tially free, how­ever a small dona­tion will give Mac users the abil­ity to save AU set­tings with a project. In addi­tion to it being open source, many of its func­tions can also be con­trolled through OSC.

Considering the high price tag on most DAW soft­ware I was a lit­tle skep­ti­cal of the sta­bil­ity and use­ful­ness of some­thing that was basi­cally being given away for free. No rewire sup­port and its depen­dency on Jack also made me won­der if it was worth the time exploring.

After using Ardour for a few weeks I have to say I was wrong to ever doubt it. I have found it to be a very sta­ble pro­gram that is fully capa­ble for most appli­ca­tions, and the use of Jack to route audio has worked flaw­lessly on my MacBook Pro so far. In fact, being free from the con­straints of what is rewire-able has actu­ally opened up some cre­ative pos­si­bil­i­ties that I though wouldn’t have been pos­si­ble before. (more…)

A com­bi­na­tion of being on vaca­tion, and hav­ing the graph­ics card in my 15.4″ MacBook PRO Laptop Computer fail shortly after I returned, pro­vided an unin­ten­tional oppor­tu­nity to get to know my iPod Touch a lit­tle better.

Jasuto gave me plenty to keep me busy while my com­puter was at the shop. I really enjoy hav­ing so much mod­u­lar synth power on a hand­held device, and I found it’s usage to be fairly intuitive.

Have a look at some more detailed tuto­ri­als and descrip­tions of Jasuto’s fea­tures at the app’s web­page.

Here are a few exmaples of what I could do with Jasuto after a few days of experimentation.

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Tags: DSP, iphone, ipod touch, jasuto, modular, modular synthesizer, plugin, samples, sound, synthesizer, vst

An assort­ment of ran­dom gui­tar sam­ples, mostly of the funk vari­ety, for use with Beatmaker on your iPhone. I wouldn’t rec­om­mend try­ing to make a song with these sam­ples alone, although some can be used together, most of them are at dif­fer­ent tem­pos, and in dif­fer­ent keys; as well as being mixed differently.

I just wanted to offer up some gui­tar sam­ples to the BeatMaker com­mu­nity. The process actu­ally took much longer than I thought. Honestly, I think some of the sam­ples are a bit rough around the edges, but what­ever, they are free for non-commercial use, so slice’em up and have fun!

Here are a few exam­ples of what you get when you down­load the kit. Also, I have included a small .txt file that gives the bpm for each sam­ple to save you some trouble.

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Tags: BeatMaker, free, funk, funky, guitar, Jazz, Jazzy, Kit, samples

Recently I sat down to do some­thing I haven’t done in a long time. Make a MixTape for a friend. After hear­ing No Room For Squares by Hank Mobley, my friend admit­ted that she was much more knowl­edge­able on the sub­ject of vocal jazz as opposed to instru­men­tal jazz. So, I offered to make her a MixTape of some songs that she might like.

These are the tracks that I decided on. By no means is this a list of tracks I feel to be the most impor­tant or most influ­en­tial in the jazz genre, but rather a com­pi­la­tion of tracks that I enjoy or find unique for a par­tic­u­lar rea­son. Please feel free to leave com­ments on any of the tracks that I men­tion, or ones that you feel should have been included.

The Real McBop Live at the Blue Note by Arturo Sandoval

• Recorded June 10 – 11, 2004 at the Blue Note, NY
  Arturo Sandoval (Trumpet)
  Dennis Marks (Bass)
  Felipe Lamoglia (Saxophone)
  Rene Toledo (Guitar)
  Tomas Cruz (Percussion)
  Alexis Arce (Drums)
  Phil Magallanes (Piano)

This album includes a DVD of the per­for­mance as well as the CD ver­sion. Well worth the money, espe­cially since halfway through the per­for­mance Arturo plays an imag­i­nary Acoustic Bass and does some extended vocal solos that are bet­ter appre­ci­ated seen than just heard. The DVD also includes some inter­views with Arturo Sandoval as an added bonus. The open­ing track, The Real McBop, is a fast Bebop tune pushed along by Afro-Cuban rhythms. I love this sound, and clearly nobody is doing it bet­ter these days than Arturo Sandoval.

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Tags: album reviews, Alice Coletrane, Arturo Sandoval, Charles Mingus, Elvin Jones, Grant Green, Horace Silver, Irakere, Jazz, jazz music, Joey DeFrancesco, KCSM, Larry Young, MixTape, music reviews, Woody Shaw, yusef lateef

This Beatmaker Kit is my attempt at putting together a Lo-Fi col­lec­tion of junky sound­bits for rough noisy beats.

Most of the sounds I used for this kit are from a col­lec­tion of field record­ings that I did years ago on a hand-held tape recorder. My goal with this col­lec­tion was to cre­ate an appeal­ing Lo-Fi kit from what essen­tially was, just some mod­er­ately inter­est­ing record­ings with low qual­ity sound.

I also added a few home­made sam­ples that I recorded directly into my com­puter as well. Have a lis­ten to what I did with it and down­load the Kit if you like.

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Junky Kit Download Link

Get Beatmaker Here

Tags: agogo, BeatMaker, bell, cuica, guiro, Lo-Fi, percussion, samples, surdo, tamborim, triangle, wooden flute

I’ve been hav­ing entirely too much fun with this awe­some iPhone/iPod Touch appli­ca­tion by Intua. I put off buy­ing BeatMaker for a long time because of the 19.99 price tag. When there are so many good music appli­ca­tions for much less, why bother, right?

The rea­son I both­ered was that you can upload cus­tom sounds. I searched and searched for a cheaper appli­ca­tion that has this same func­tion­al­ity, but in the end I just gave up and dished out the 20 bucks — it was totally worth it!

I don’t really want to make this a review since there have already been plenty of great reviews on BeatMaker, (you can find a very thor­ough review here) but I do want to show some of what I have been doing with it.

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After play­ing around, mak­ing beats on the train like the one above, and learn­ing the ins and outs of this app, I finally got around to cre­at­ing my own kit. I used a col­lec­tion of sam­ples that I down­loaded from freesound.org, (attri­bu­tion page included in down­load) and I also made some sam­ples using my key­board and guitar.

I wanted to have an amount of vari­ety with each sam­ple that I cre­ated. The C7_Rhodes, Organ&GuitarVamp, and OrganBass sam­ples are prob­a­bly all best used after slic­ing down the audio file to a spe­cific sec­tion that you want to use. This isn’t a prob­lem because you can crop down any audio file within BeatMaker eas­ily. Here is a lit­tle beat I cre­ated with my cus­tom set.

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Tags: BeatMaker, berimbau, drum kit, electric organ, free, guitar, Intua, iphone, ipod touch, rhodes, samples

This is an early rough draft of a com­po­si­tion I started work­ing on recently. It uti­lizes the Max/Msp patch that I wrote about in my first post on Midi Generating LFOs. At the end of that ear­lier post I listed four things that I wanted to work on for the next step in this project. I haven’t done any of it. Except to sync up the LFOs in my patch to a musi­cal com­po­si­tion. So far the piece has an elec­tronic drum track, key­board, and the Max/Msp patch — as well as a hand­ful of other effects. Hope you like it!

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Tags: composition, delay, keyboard, LFO, MIDI, Music, reverb, synthesizer