Geoff Countryman and the Mojo.
If you’ve seen the live performances of Spark of Being recently, you’ve heard Geoff Countryman with the band, tweaking his new instrument, the Mojo. He’s agreed to post about the idea and the...
View ArticlePro Tools 9 to launch
I have Pro Tools. But truth be told, I’ve never dropped down the dough for the 002-3 needed to run the software. I even sold my mBox a couple years ago. Since, I’ve just relied on the generosity of my...
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The Beatles On iTunes
I was looking around the Apple site for a refurbished iMac yesterday and found the iTunes announcement page. I was curious as to the “Big News.” But this morning, I’m a little let down. First, I’m a...
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musings on nancarrow
Authored by Curtis Macdonald: After a long hiatus, I’ve delved into more of Conlon Nancarrow‘s work for player piano. Inspired by an excerpt from Study No. 33, I’ve programmed a drum set improvisation...
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sampling the harpsichord
Image of the Harpsichord Mechanism Often the music left on the cutting room floor can become the seeds for future projects. A lot of time was spent searching for exotic sounds while in the process of...
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The Greenleaf Cloud Player
We’ve been hard at work on a new way for our community to access our catalog of music. It’s all done, and we’re adopting the buzz term of the year for this delivery system: the Greenleaf Cloud Player....
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Why Spotify is the best, and the worst.
Spotify raises some serious issues for artists and independent labels these days. Jim Tuerk, who works with us here at Greenleaf Music, has done a lot of thinking (and a lot of listening) around...
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Music Morphing
Looking forward to Cheltenham Festival in May. Aside from playing a set with the Quintet plus vocalist Heather Masse, I’ll be part of a panel with Dave Stapleton and others called “Setting Up Your Own...
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Why we’re using Bandcamp
Bandcamp is a microsite storefront used by a lot of independent musicians to sell their music. They offer downloads in almost any format you can think of in a clean shopping cart, embeddable player...
View ArticleThree-Strikes Anti-Piracy Law
Following file-sharing legislation gives me a headache. From TorrentFreak: In an attempt to reduce piracy, the French have passed a new law requiring Internet service providers to cut off Internet...
View ArticleReverbNation: Sponsored Songs Program
I just caught wind of this thanks to Andrew Durkin. From Hypebot: ReverbNation today announced that about 1000 of its almost 400,000 artist members will be eligible to participate in a new revenue...
View ArticleOnline Sheet Music
Greenleaf has been offering sheet music with our recordings for awhile and the soon to be released Spirit Moves is no exception. There’s a good article about artists and online sheet music sales at...
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Lituus: Lost and Found
Scientists have recreated a long lost relative of the trumpet. From Pallab Ghosh of BBC News: New software has enabled researchers to recreate a long forgotten musical instrument called the Lituus. The...
View ArticleMusic Business Roundup
As reported at Howard Mandel’s Jazz Beyond Jazz blog, Jazz Times is rumored to be folding. HM: “…it’s laid off employees, notified writers of waits for May payments, not shipped its June issue to the...
View ArticleJazz: ‘High Speed And Broadband Ready’
Dave first contribution to NPR’s A Blog Supreme was published this morning. Below is an excerpt. And here is a direct link to his post. Jazz: ‘High Speed And Broadband Ready’ Last week I played one...
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Flutes Offer Clues to Stone-Age Music
From the Times. At least 35,000 years ago, in the depths of the last ice age, the sound of music filled a cave in what is now southwestern Germany, the same place and time early Homo sapiens were also...
View ArticleNiches Brew: Musicians Creating a Way Forward
This is part of the series Jazz in the Digital Age at NPR’s A Blog Supreme. Niches Brew: Musicians Creating a Way Forward More and more folks in the music industry are singing the blues these days. A...
View ArticleBeck’s Latest
Beck has been doing a lot lately. Mostly with his website actually. If you haven’t seen any of his new features, you should check it out. There’s the Record Club feature that has been updated...
View ArticleNew digital formats: CMX and Soundparts
Always interested in new formats around here. CMX was just announced and it looks pretty cool to me, though I haven’t seen any details on sound quality and the like. Here’s what “a label insider” told...
View ArticleMicro-philanthropy
From the NY Times: A Few Dollars at a Time, Patrons Support Artists on the Web. Kickstarter is a funding platform for artists, designers, filmmakers, musicians, journalists, inventors, explorers… DIY...
View ArticleDithering
A newish series of posts from Sasha Frere-Jones at the New Yorker called Dithering hit last week. The introductory post points to a Pitchfork article I hadn’t yet seen titled The Social History of the...
View ArticleFluke: Play FLAC in iTunes
I don’t know how this escaped me for so long, but I just discovered a plugin for Mac OS X that allows iTunes to read and play FLAC files. It’s call Fluke. Very easy to install and use. And it’s free. I...
View ArticleSpeaking Piano
A short break from shipping out the first wave of preorders… Kudos to my buddy Patrick’s feed for that and all the other great posts.
View ArticleFLAC: What it is. Why you want it. How to use it.
We want you to know about FLAC files because it’s a relatively new way of downloading excellent sounding music. Sounds better than MP3, sounds as good as a CD, uses no packaging or shipping products,...
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Money Vid + Miles Phones
After a short tour out East and back, I’m back in the office working away. It was a great trip, but good to be home and away from rest stops and fast food. A few things that were sent to me over the...
View ArticleSkratchbox
Never ceases to amaze me what creative people can do with bare essentials and contact microphones… While watching that, all I wanted to do was run the sound into a Kaos Pad and maybe some delay and get...
View ArticleAre you ready to meet the grandfather of the synthesizer?
Berna vintage electronic studio from Tobor Experiment on Vimeo. Berna 1.0 (MAC OSX) Vintage Electronic Studio Between the 1950s and the mid 1960s, long before Robert Moog and Wendy Carlos injected...
View ArticleNewport Archives
I just got wind of Wolfgangs Vault opening the flood gates of archived material dating back to the second Newport Festival via Ben Ratliff’s article at the Times. “…posting free streams of a handful of...
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Stanford Mobile Phone Orchestra
The Times gives front page coverage: Ge Wang, the assistant professor of music who leads the two-year-old Stanford group, says the iPhone may be the first instrument — electronic or acoustic — that...
View ArticleSpin
This will make Jim happy: Vinyl Records and Turntables Are Gaining Sales from the Times. The bins above the boxes hold new records — freshly pressed albums of classic rock as well as vinyl versions of...
View ArticleOld-industry bootleggers complain about sagging sales
In a classic case of irony sent on by Greenleaf commenter Mike Grimaldi, “Scorpio” talks about the golden days of smash hit bootlegs and how the Internet has ruined his business. From NY Mag: The music...
View ArticleEarly Bird Special
Lot o’ guitar noise happening on my speakers as of late. This fit right in. Early Bird Special: Old and Busted: Songbirds. New Hotness: Avant-noise birds. Thanks Graham.
View ArticleChime
I subscribe to a few tech blog feeds and a lot of my friends I’m linked to via Google Reader have similar interests. There’s an endless supply new devices, apps, and games announced almost daily. Such...
View ArticleA New Listening Project
I have a new listening project. It’s a pretty mammoth undertaking. As you can assume from my job and past posts, I am an avid listener of music. I love vinyl. I love CDs. I love digital. All means to...
View ArticleSpotlight on Stanford Lively Arts
There’s a great feature on Stanford Lively Arts director Jenny Bilfield posted yesterday at the MetroActive site. An excerpt from the story of how Reich’s Double Sextet came to be: Upon hanging up the...
View ArticleSampletoy
Again with a techy post for those of us musician iPhone users… Sampletoy looks much like the Korg Kaos pad, a really cool tool for any instrument. Gonna be downloading this one soon. From...
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Discovery and Deletion: Alphabetical Listening, Pt 2
Last month I started a listening project in which I vowed to listen to my whole iTunes library in alphabetical order sorted by songs. Last week, I updated and said I had stopped due to the strains in...
View ArticleThis Is Beautiful
As blogged at more than 95 theses. PRODUCED AND MANAGED BY: Scott Haines COMPOSED AND CONDUCTED BY: Eric Whitacre Representing 12 Countries: Austria, Argentina, Canada, Germany, Ireland, New Zealand,...
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You Built What?!
One of the coolest things about electronics is that you can make pretty much anything electronic. With MIDI, synths, triggering, software, etc the possibilities are endless. Case and point. The...
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Writing on the road
I played a one-off in Iowa City this past week. We’ve always had a good turnout at this specific club so we decided to bring a lite horn section with us to kind of cement us in there. Funny how adding...
View ArticleElectribe for iPads
The iPad is all the rage at the moment. I have to say, as cool as they look, I’m going to stick with my iPhone for the moment. There’s an interesting perspective on this technology over at Boing Boing...
View ArticleThe Onion: Dylan Goes Electronica
One of the better Onion articles I’ve seen in awhile. Couldn’t resist reposting… Rock Fans Outraged As Bob Dylan Goes Electronica July 12, 2010 | ISSUE 46•28 NEWPORT, RI—Audience members at the Newport...
View ArticleSound Yeah
I still haven’t had the drive to go pick up that new iPad or the new iPhone. But more and more apps like this keep coming out making the case that, instead of a new guitar or pedal, I should hunker...
View ArticlePlaylist: Shazaming, Volume 1
It’s no secret that I’m an iPhone user. I post about cool new apps as much as I think people are interested. I do find that most apps that I download just sit there after the week-or-so honeymoon...
View Articlevia ABS: The New Sounds Of Trumpet
ABS just posted a feature on the trumpet titled Miles Beyond: The New Sounds Of Trumpet. Of course, we here at Greenleaf are fans of the instrument. And there are some great tunes streaming from Forbes...
View ArticleTristan Perich’s 1-Bit Symphony
One of the great things about the music industry right now is that there is no shortage of specialty packages being produced in small quantities and in high quality. Dave just pointed me to a great...
View ArticleMind-Controlled Theremin
Leave it the Apples In Stereo’s Robert Schneider to invent the mind-controlled theremin. via Pitchfork: The Teletron combines a vintage Moog with a Mattel toy called the Mindflex. Quoth Schneider:...
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Spark of Being and the Mojo
When Dave came to me about making Spark of Being happen live (and knowing that DJ Olive was on sabbatical) I was presented with quite a predicament. Olive’s sounds are inseparable from the film and...
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Bandcamp interviews Jason Moran
We’re big fans of Bandcamp because they offer a great product that enables us to present our entire catalogue to you in a very convenient way. And we appreciate pianist Jason Moran‘s insights in his...
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