Category: Uncategorized

DronePlayer got some love recently. The audio engine got an update and I worked on the synthesizer patches – smoothing them out and generally improving them. Also, included some bug fixes reported by our users. Thank you!

So, please update your DP and start droning!

DronePlayer on the iPhone and iPad App Store

I’m excited to get the Android version of Intervallic at feature parity with the iOS version. While it’s nice to view the intervals in standard music notation, I’m more excited about using this staff view component in the other Android apps.

Please tell a friend or leave a review on the Play Store, if you can. It really helps. Your support is very much appreciated!

Another app to make your practicing more fun! This time for wood-shedding your scales.

I start every practice session with scales. Done right, it is the perfect warmup and a great way to stay in shape. I find scale practice to be a nice combination of habit and challenge. The habit part is great for quickly getting into the “zone.” Play a few scales, feel the instrument, breathe…it’s an excellent way to get into the frame of mind and spirit. I like to keep things fresh by keeping it challenging. I have a few favorite exercises (scales in thirds, varying root movements, varying scale types, varying tempi, etc) that awaken my brain and keep my fingers challenged.

This new app is designed to help you learn, study and assimilate scales. It was developed to help musicians of any level maximize their practicing. You can start simple with a single scale, at a slow tempo. And incrementally complicate the settings until you are blowing through many different kinds of scales, in all keys, at challenging tempo.

While practicing scales, you can adjust tempo and transposition. Clicking the settings button (gear icon in the upper right) lets you select the kinds of scales and the type of exercise to work with. If you select multiple scale types, the app will generate the exercise with random scale types following the kind of chord progression you chose.

While practicing, your trusty scale assistant quietly tracks your progress. You can view the practice log to see which exercises you’ve been using and how your tempo progress has been evolving.

Happy Practicing!

Up until right now, I’ve been rather quiet about all my ventures. I have tended to talk to music people about music, software people about s0ftware but rarely crossed those paths. In my life, those paths converge and diverge on a daily basis. So why not write about it? It could be interesting to those with similar goals or lives. And I can’t really predict what you, dear reader, may want to read about.

So, here it comes…an all-out blog about music and software projects, thoughts on the process and how to live whilst doing all that!

Ho hum. Backup? What, me worry?

The challenge we all face is that the computer hard drive is the most unreliable piece of hardware there is. Sure, SSDs are about to change that but still there is a gamble with storing your precious music in digital form. Heck, there’s a gamble when storing in any medium: paper, CD, DVD or a hard drive.

The best advice I can offer is to have multiple copies of your scores, parts and audio. Not so many that you can’t find stuff when you need it! But it makes sense to have at least the working copies on your work computer, backed up to an external hard drive and also backed up securely on the Internet.

There are many Internet-based services for managing backups. You could quickly search and find a very long list of services. They all have their features and benefits. I strongly encourage you to use something to backup your work.

The risk of losing everything in the event of some natural disaster or even theft greatly outweighs any perceived risk of storing your work on the Internet. Do your homework and make sure that your backup provider is secure and reliable.

At copyist.io we strongly believe that a sound backup is just the beginning. At this point in time, it’s the bare minimum. That’s why we built a very solid foundation for your files. And then took it to the next level by adding convenience and automation features on top of that. Our basic guiding principle is one of figuring out how we can automate as much of the production process as possible. We try to eliminate redundant effort and minimize extra work.

This is exciting! Copyist.io is launching soon! Please visit us at https://copyist.io to check out the latest developments!

I started this project because I was frustrated with the existing ways to share music (primarily PDFs) with musicians. Previously, it’s been a chaotic, manual chore to deal with e-mail attachment, Dropbox and FTP-like services.

It was bad enough just dealing with my own music and the revolving cast of musicians for each gig or session. But add to that, the flow of incoming music for the other projects I’m involved in…  Well, it was always a struggle to find, organize and remember to bring music along to gigs.

Why? In this modern day of technology overload, surely there’s a better way. Well…ahem…I think I’ve built it! 🙂

Copyist.io is a secure web site (built with the latest/greatest security tools) where we can save off-site copies of our precious scores, parts and demo audio. 

That by itself is a great thing – a backup service that gives you peace of mind that you’ll always have access to your works. But it also organizes and understands the relationships between scores and parts.

And copyist.io also makes it easy to share music with others. It automates e-mail notifications and provides iOS and Android apps so musicians can simply synchronize their music onto their mobile devices.

That last bit might be worth repeating: musicians can simply use our app (on iPhones, iPads or Android devices) and they’re ready for the gig!

That’s just the beginning. I have many more automation features under active development and we look forward to sharing details about those in the near future!

Great! I look forward to serving you!

Thanks,
Tom

Trumpeter David Cooper’s blog is really great. Even I, a lowly saxophonist, have enjoyed browsing his musings about trumpet and music. He recently wrote an article about how to approach odd-meter tunes. Since he played on my CD Carswell, he was kind enough to include some propers about that. You can read it here: http://www.allthingstrumpet.com/learning/technique/odd-meter-improv/.

I feel compelled to defend myself and this whole odd-meter “trend” in jazz. I’ve heard a lot of older cats, especially teachers, complaining that today’s students only want to play in odd meters. Basically, they’re saying that the young players aren’t interested in swinging or paying their dues.

I can respect that point of view. We all need to study the tradition. I certainly spent a long time living within the foundations of music by Bird, Diz, Monk, J.J., Sonny, Coltrane, etc.

For me, Carswell and other tunes on that recording are all about “escaping the bonds of Bebop” – specifically, trying to move beyond the musical language from that time.

When I got the gig with J.J. I quickly discovered that no matter how much I might study the Bebop tradition I would never play with the depth that people from that era do. That music evolved within their experience. We, as improvising musicians, must find the music of our time. For me, that’s what this is about.