maxBreakwell.com

…to any­one who vis­ited my site over the past cou­ple weeks. I was hacked and I wasn’t able to get around to fix­ing the sit­u­a­tion and set­ting up a new site until yesterday.

Everything should be fine now as far as I can tell. Google has taken down their mal­ware warn­ing on my site too. Things have been extra­or­di­nar­ily busy in my per­sonal life recently, but you can expect some new posts and projects to be com­ing out over the next cou­ple weeks.

Please Stay Tuned,

Max

FYI

In the process of updat­ing some things on my site today I unknow­ingly erased the down­loads data­base. It’s prob­a­bly going to take me sev­eral hours to maybe a day before every­thing is re-uploaded and work­ing prop­erly. I apol­o­gize to any­one who is try­ing to down­load something.

Come back real soon and I should have things all sorted out.

Thanks,

Max

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

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.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (ver­sion 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the lat­est ver­sion here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

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.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (ver­sion 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the lat­est ver­sion here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

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

So, this is my first attempt at mak­ing any kind of web­site for myself. I hope that you enjoy. Please let me know if you have any issues with the func­tion­al­ity of the site, and feel free to leave com­ments about whatever.