dizzyobrian.org Alternatives in Music

The Podcast Streaming Widget

admin — Sat, 19 Jul 2008 06:41:26 +0000

My friend Fritz turned me on to a really cool widget. You can see it about two thirds of the way down on the sidebar. It streams podcasts. When you go to the website to get the widget, you can modify it to have any podcasts you want in it. Fritz said he googled and searched for a solid day to find one so that he could have other podcasts on his blog.

I have the New Music Radio podcast loaded up in mine. It takes a little while to ‘buffer,’ but then it’s good to go.

Judith Owen

admin — Sun, 08 Jun 2008 04:17:11 +0000

Judith Owen has just released her new album Mopping Up Karma. Creatures of Habit is featured on New Music Radio

and Fritz has an interview with Judith posted in podcast on the radio blog.

Judith tells a rather fascinating story behind Mopping Up Karma which had its inception on Capital Records. She tells of how she had to rescue this project and give it a home on a new label and digital downloads. It’s the story of the gross mis-management that has been going on with the major labels.

Two Octave Blues Scale

admin — Thu, 15 May 2008 06:48:06 +0000

Here is a two octave blues scale in TABS. Most books have a major pentatonic scale pattern in more than one octave, but the blues scale is very handy for playing lots of cool jams. The blues scale is based on the minor pentatonic scale with a ‘flated fifth’ added. In this TABS, the red fret numbers are where you would shift up always with the first finger. The blue numbers are for going down and the blue 8 is a second finger.

Recording Audio with the E-MU Soundcard

admin — Tue, 13 May 2008 05:30:20 +0000

A YouTube member requested this short tutorial;

Since Day 1

admin — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 06:20:29 +0000

I was talking with a young pianist the other day about composers like Paganini and Chopin, who tended to specialize on a particular instrument. Paganini was the business model for this era of composers and he took violin technique ‘where no man has gone before.’ He also wrote mostly violin pieces. No symphonies, not much chamber music; I can only think of a duet for violinand guitar.
Ditto for Chopin, only for piano. I can only think of a ‘cello sonata and the rest was piano music,solo piano pieces long and short and piano concertos.
I ventured my theory that this was due, in part, to the fact that the music business had already become extremely formatted.
That is to say that, very much like today, you had to fit a specific profile to get your music played by symphonies and published. I daresay that the orchestras had already built their top forty lists (same as classical music stations today), and to go around to them and say ‘hey, you wanna play my new symphony?’ was to beg the question of just who one was and were you dead yet? Still alive? Well. you can’t be very famous, then.
So these composers took matters into their own hands and became self-starters,self promoters; musician/promoters. Who would play these wonderful violin and piano pieces? Why they would. Music written specifically for them, which others would not be able to play for a bit, anyway.
Take Franz Schubert, for example. The man got not a single thing published in his lifetime.
No ’symphonic societies’ would play his symphonies. Here was a great composer but, since he was a bit of a throwback to the classical age, i think he didn’t fit the profile.
Musicians need to learn from history and see how many self starters there were and there were very many, if you look. Telemann engraved his entire Tafelmusik into pewter himself to publish it and get subscribers. (Oh Lord!)
It is not enough to be a musician. You must be a musician/promoter.

Smoke on the Water

admin — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 04:28:07 +0000

Nothing like those classic rock songs…

BandPump

admin — Mon, 04 Feb 2008 07:09:24 +0000

I found a cool new music social networking site called BandPump. I think it will be big. It has all the necessary ingredients; You can set-up a profile and link to your website and, of course, you can upload some of your tunes. You also get points for being active and referring others.

Fritz Kundler’s New Music Release

admin — Mon, 04 Feb 2008 07:02:22 +0000

My good friend Fritz Kundler, DJ for New Music Radio brings another new music release and interview with rocker Vince Falzone. He has posted the interview to be listened to on New Music Release Online and, as always, this new music release can be heard on the broadcast. You can count on Fritz and New Music Radio to bring you a great new music release.

The E-MU 0202|USB external sound card and bundled software

admin — Sat, 29 Dec 2007 06:34:02 +0000

I’ve recently been playing around with a new toy. It’s the E-MU 0202|USB external sound card. That is not a picture of it, up there, I just thought the picture was pretty cool.

The sound card itself is a little grey box with knobs, of course. It doesn’t look nearly as cool. The really interesting thing about this sound card, though, is the bundled software that comes with it.

One of the programs is the Proteus VX. This program is a collective bunch of presets that are virtual instruments. If you haven’t experienced virtual instruments, they are likely to blow your socks off, as they are so much more real than anything you can get from a sound card alone, using midi.

The other programs that come with are the next really cool thing about this whole set-up. You get Cubase LE and Sonar LE among others and you can route the virtual instruments into the tracks on Cubase or Sonar. Proteus is multitimbral, meaning you can play up to 16 channels of instruments at the same time. Personally I have been getting Sonar to perform the best so far.

Somewhere on this blog is a video showing the basic set-up procedure and you can also go to www.dizzyobrian.com and go to Video Tutorials. You could read the start-up guides that come with the programs. (There’s a thought!)

The Proteus won’t work or even install without the soundcard, which can be a little bit of a bitch to do. You absolutely need to remove any existing sound cards first. After this one installs, you can actually put the other sound cards back in and use two sound cards on your PC. Recording, however, is with one or the other obviously, which is not a problem with the sounds on Proteus anf if your PC is pretty fast.

If you are serious about doing some recording with it, you may want to uninstall some stuff you aren’t using especially all those fun little gadgets that run in your tray like google spyware saver that use up a lot of your ROM. It’s also a good idea to go to the E-MU website and download the driver that’s signed for your windows system and get the latest version of DirectX, the one for professional use.

The Radiohead alternative music business model

admin — Sun, 14 Oct 2007 03:56:19 +0000

Alternative rock music group Radiohead has released their new album online, allowing fans to pay what they will. The album is getting good reviews and the only reported hitch was a server breakdown. Like we couldn’t see that coming. Radiohead has reported an average price of ten dollars being paid which is really great. it seems radiohead may have indeed found a working alternative music business model.