maxBreakwell.com

Most of the emphasis in reviews of Amp Sim apps these days seems to focus on tone, and the application’s ability to achieve, with flawless accuracy, the nuances of the classic gear we all love.

This obsession with perfect tone in software is a bit misguided at times. With the $60 I spent on AmpliTube for iPhone and iRig, I was mostly interested in a practice solution that didn’t disturb my neighbors, or wake up my girlfriend late at night.

I got exactly that, and the tone was pretty decent considering that I was playing my Gibson ES-135 into my phone.

In addition to being able to upload your own songs and loops, one extraordinary feature that caught my eye was the SpeedTrainer slider. This allows you to slow down the tempo without changing the pitch of whatever song you are working on, perfect for uploading and practicing with Aebersold tracks.

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Tags: aebersold, amp sim, amplitube, guitar, iphone, ipod touch, irig, practice, tempo

…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.

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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

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.