What is the Book of Song?

In late 2008 I was getting tired of lugging around the thick three ring binder that held all the songs my little troupe of folk musicians had learned up to that point. Over time the lyrics to the songs we did, complete with chords and sometimes with some of the history behind the tunes had been stuck into a binder. The separate sheets had ended up in plastic sheet protectors, and I’d gone so far as to create a table of contents page just so I could actually find a specific song in what had become a huge tome of tunes. This meant I had to pencil in page numbers on each page and keep the pages in order in the binder. The book had grown to several hundreds of pages thick and was ornamented here and there with artwork I (and others) had drawn, it included some sheet music for melody lines to the less well known songs or instrumental pieces which were included in haphazard fashion but the thing was growing too darn heavy, and keeping up with the Table of Contents was a pain. We each had our own books that had grown in similar fashion so we wouldn’t have to look on with each other when we got together. The different books might have notes specific to the part we played, sometimes things were crossed out or alternate keys were scribbled in. It was hard to mark up the sheets since they were in sheet protectors – if something changed you had to take them out first which was a pain. I decided that I’d compile and lay out a complete “Book of Song” with all our notes which we could print using an online print service (I’m a fan of lulu.com) so we could each have a nice professional looking bound copy. This would also serve as a sort of “yearbook” marking all the tunes we knew to that point. Its now many years later and the time has come to make a new Book with tunes learned since the last volume was created and this time I wanted to do it all with free software if I could. This is the story of how I created these two song books. Warning: this is a LONG post.

Read the rest of this entry »

Last year I posted here about why its not really possible to get a guitar in tune. I heard from a friend today about tru-temperment fret boards which may actually make it possible! Some anecdotal posts in guitar forums indicate that you can play barre chords all the way up the neck with one of these and remain perfectly in tune.

In (somewhat related) readings during lunch today I also found this site and I remembered another conversation with some friends recently about the difference between a 440Hz A and 442Hz A. Can you hear the difference between 440Hz and 442Hz?
http://www.tedrounds.com/mp3_files/A440.mp3
http://www.tedrounds.com/mp3_files/A442.mp3

Even if you can’t discriminate the difference between them when playing them one after another, if you play them simultaneously you’ll notice the interference pattern (listen for a waa waa waa sound). This is another way I was taught to tune an electric guitar – while playing a harmonic note on the 12th fret of the lower string, play a harmonic on the 5th fret of the higher string and listen for the interference pattern and tune until the waa waa slows down and disappears. (I’m not at a guitar right now and while my fingers would remember the right frets, my mind doesn’t so if thats not right please correct).

I’ve been looking into getting a new amp to replace the old Peavey Backstage Plus that I’ve been “making do” with for almost 20 years. The old 35W Peavey looks like a 1987 model. I got it from my brother for pretty cheap sometime around then, and a few years back I replaced the original speaker with a 9″ Pyle Driver, but it worked well for a looong time. Recently I’ve been getting some buzzing sounds from it and the knobs need a serious dose of tuna-lube, and I decided it was finally time to retire it.

The hunt
I started looking for amps a couple months back and got some really good information from my buddy Todd of the Trespassengers and I immediately ignored it all. Well, that’s not true, as you’ll see. One of the things he suggested was that I look at the Mackie SRM450s which I did.
Read the rest of this entry »

I caught a Stevie Ray video clip from Austin City Limits tonight on Google Video which got me thinking about when I saw him play live. It’s been so long now that frankly, I was starting to think I had imagined it. After all, I don’t seem to have a ticket stub from the show (I recently scanned a bunch that I had found in an old shoe box) and I was starting to think that my memory of him doing a gig in the SUNY Oneonta gym (I went to Oneonta for two years before transferring) was wrong – why would he play in a stinky college gymnasium in a tiny state school in upstate NY? I have journals from all the way back to 1980 – so I started looking for an entry to settle the matter.
Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve made it a point since last year to visit the Web Gallery of Art at least once a week and discover something new by digging into it’s vast archive of paintings. Images are hosted on servers at the Research Institute for Particle and Nuclear Physics of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. I’ve been concentrating on images of musicians, downloading my favorites and adding the associated text. It’s been a great source of new desktop wallpapers at work, too!

3521