In honour of the fact that James Robertson is joining Christine and me on Monday, I’ve written out Tell Old Uncle Jimmy, which is our shortest song, and also the closest we get to bedroom soul. You can listen Christine and I play it here.
Here’s the pdf: Tell Old Uncle Jimmy.
Monday we’re probably going to play some Elvis!
In trying to learn more Processing, I wrote a script that draws lines, based on the content of an image. Here’s Robert Frank’s New Orleans Trolley in 10,000,000 lines:
I just got my copy of this Monday night and I’ve been listening to it pretty steadily since.
I feel lucky to be playing with Christine, and honoured to be on this record, working with such amazing musicians. Once again, Christine’s crafted a really beautiful collection of songs.
The release concert is Sunday night (Nov 21) at the Tranzac. Elvis Bossa Nova plays the first set, and Robert Cruickshank plays Etch-a-sketch!
“Everyone should save. Just saying.”
– Mathieu Bellemare, in Music Technologies class this morning
What follows is thoughts spilling out of my head, prompted by several conversations I’ve had with students over the past week. If it sounds scattered, incomplete or just dumb, well, you’ve been warned.
In my life as a college teacher, I spend most of my time teaching “Music Technologies” classes. The content of the courses is mostly up to me, which is both great fun and a real challenge. This term I’m teaching a basic course in GarageBand and a more advanced Ableton Live class. We also cover notation software (Sibelius) in a different semester. One of the big challenges in these courses is trying to help the students develop some literacy in “Music Technologies” rather than just facility with a few specific programs.
While this really comes down to a problem of general musical literacy and musicianship, facility with the programs is a big issue, and wrapped up in it is another issue: piano playing. The problem is that the most obvious and natural method of getting notes into any mainstream sequencing program is to play them on a MIDI keyboard. If you’re a piano player. I’m lucky to be one of those, but many of my students are not. As the keyboard has effectively become the only metaphor for notation in mainstream music software, this can create a serious bottleneck in the creative process, if the goal is (as it is here) to make music with a computer.
So, no matter how well I teach the software itself, a lot of people still get hung up at, “What if I don’t play piano?” I’ve been thinking about these questions a lot, and I’ve got some thoughts; some are more technical, less conceptual and possibly less helpful suggestions, and some are less tied to procedure and have more to do with how you approach making music.
It’s been a while since I put up a lead sheet, but Sheridan just upgraded me to Sibelius 6 and this was good opportunity to try it out and get back on the horse. Wow – Sib 6 has some great improvements. It’s a lot smarter about automatically moving things out of each others’ way, and it’s great at guessing chords without needing a drop down menu.
Here’s the Deborahs (Roger Travassos, Paul Mathew, Chris Banks and me) playing Inor Man:
And here’s the chart: Inor Man (pdf).