Music is a great gift to give this Christmas so we put together a list of some which are available in the United Kingdom. They may be available in your country, if when you read this you are elsewhere in the world, but you will need to establish that before you can buy.

I have chosen music gadgets assuming that just about everyone these days will possess a PC with a USB connection. However, the second beauty of these USB devices is their ease of installation. Also, if you decide you want to use them after you have alerady started your PC they will usually be recognised as soon as you connect them

Roll-Up USB Piano

The Roll-Up USB Piano, is one of my favourites. It is a rubber mat with a four-octave keyboard moulded into its surface. Plug it into a USB port and you can make beautiful music with the software with it. It is not just a piano either. A range of polyphonic instruments is available, and there is also a metronome to help you practice.

A few years ago all instruments of this type, albeit often using special additional boards which needed to be set-up inside your PC, supported the MIDI system, in which a host of tunes have been set up, by hobby and casual players. Many of those that might receive this player as a gift may indeed already have their own MIDI collection. The Roll-Up Piano doesn’t support MIDI, or it could have been useful for those with an existing computer music setup, who wish to replace old favourites and add their own accompaniments.

Also, roll-up and easy to put away it may be, but it isn’t the easiest thing in the world to play as if you don’t use enough finger power as you play the notes don’t register at all.

Nevertheless, for knocking out an occasional tune, and for a bit of a sing-song on Boxing day it is a cheap and cheerful present selling at around ?30 (about $60).

USB Electric Guitar

If rock and roll is your thing, the Behringer iAxe 393 is a real electric guitar that connects directly to your PC via USB.

Bundled with it is a free version of Native Instruments’ Guitar Combos. What is that I hear you ask? Well the software simulates a wide range of amplifier sounds.

There is immediate enjoyment to be had from a quick jam trying out all the different sounds, but again in a similar way to the USB piano the iAxe didn’t in the end strike me as being a serious musical instrument.

If you were hoping that the included software would act as a sequencer plug-in, then you will be disappointed and there’s no simple way to hear yourself playing through your PC’s speakers, the audio output signal has to be routed via a non-standard audio output at that is fixed onto the guitar itself.

Now, a further point to make is that the guitar itself isn’t of very high quality. For the price at around ?100 (about $200), you could hardly expect anything of real musical quality though.

In common with many budget Stratocaster copies, it does also suffer from pickup hum, and the machine heads have a spongy, imprecise action.

I don’t think that its a bad deal at the price though - and since the iAxe has a standard quarter-inch jack in addition to the USB port, you can always plug it into an amp and rock out for real.

USB Guitar USB Connector

Of course, if you’re a keen guitarist, you probably already own a high-quality instrument. In that case, you might be interested in Behringer’s USB Guitar Connector. This neat little box turns any electric guitar into a USB device, and as for the guitar it comes with a free version of Guitar Combos.

The Guitar Connector shares the iAxe’s software limitations, so don’t expect to drop it into an existing recording setup. It only costs ?50, so you’ll have money left to buy the full version of Guitar Combos that interfaces with a sequencer or software that works with a 32-bit ASIO stream.

USB Virtual Drum Kit

To complete yourself an USB band, you could buy yet another USB based gadget. That’s the Ion VirtualDrumX, a system of six velocity-sensitive pads and two pedals that trigger a kit’s worth of drum sounds on your PC, at about ?130 inc. VAT (about $260).

There is bundled software supplied out of the box with provision for 233 different percussive sounds, plus a drumming game which should help you improve your skills.

The musicians who read this will want to know whether the VirtualDrumX works best as a standalone device. No, unfortunately you cannot use this device as a MIDI trigger, which will disappoint many.

Please also do be aware that the six identical pads which are supplied in the kit can’t reflect the action of a real drum kit. In truth you’ll be applying the same action if you’re splashing a cymbal or pounding on a low torn.

Again, these are gadgets to which will really only be able to provide amusement and a taste of the real-thing. But, possibly rather better than the predecessors in this review, this USB Drum Kit gives a good introduction to drumming.

Buying this technology and gadgets for Christmas is cheaper than investing in real skins, and since all the sounds are generated on your PC, you can put on a pair of headphones and not worry about disturbing the family while they sleep off their Christmas lunch.

“Can I Learn To Have Perfect Pitch?”

After a bit more research, I discovered that there are actually Courses that claim they will teach you how to develop Perfect Pitch. I even found a site that reviewed the most well-known courses,  ReviewsNest,  and they recommend 2 that are available:

1) The Perfect Pitch Super Course by David Lucas Burge,

Until recently the best course around, but lost its title to Pure Pitch. Good teaching, effective and until recently the only course worth its salt, but also burdened by many drawbacks: Very abstract method makes for inconsistent results, takes very long to master, a lot of the course is unrelated, no help line for students, and a very steep price.
 

2) The Pure Pitch Method by Ryan Cameron

A true revelation: The Best Perfect Pitch & Relative Pitch course available anywhere. Unique approach makes course very effective. Very straightforward, provides very consistent results. Fast and easy to use. Add in a very low price, and it is easy to see why we chose this as our hands down winner. There’s simply no contest.

So there you have it. If you don’t have PP, but you’d like to pursue the talent, buy one of the above courses and Go For It!

absolute pitch , David Burge , ear learning , General , perfect pitch , perfect pitch course , pitch courses , Reviews , Ryan Cameron

This post is a bit “technical”, but very interesting.  If you wade through it, though, there’s some fun at the end.

Wikipedia: Absolute pitch, or perfect pitch, is “the ability to identify the frequency or musical name of a specific tone, or, conversely, the ability to reproduce a frequency, frequency level, or musical pitch without comparing the tone with any objective reference tone, i.e., without using relative pitch.”

Naming/labeling of notes need not be verbal. AP can also be demonstrated by other codes such as auditory imagery or sensorimotor responses such as reproducing a tone on an instrument. Therefore if a musician is from an aural tradition, unfamiliar with musical notation they can still show AP if allowed to reproduce a sounded note. (see Jimi Hendrix in last post)

Possessors of absolute pitch exhibit the ability in varying degrees. Generally, absolute pitch implies some or all of the following abilities:

• Identify and name individual pitches (e.g. A, B, C#) played on various instruments
• Name the key of a given piece of tonal music
• Identify and name all the tones of a given chord or other tonal mass
• Sing a given pitch without an external reference
• Name the pitches of common everyday noises such as car horns

Individuals may possess both absolute pitch and relative pitch ability in varying degrees.

Both relative and absolute pitch work together in actual musical listening and practice, although individuals exhibit preferred strategies in using each skill.

The distinction between the abilities to name the pitch of a note without reference to another note, and to sing a named note without reference to a previously sounded note, has long been acknowledged.

Dr. Robert Zatorre’s research results support that absolute pitch possessors have a number of different encoding strategies that may be used concurrently, for example verbal labeling of tones. Absolute pitch possessors are able to match pitches of tones to some fixed internal scale allowing then to give the corresponding label of the tone. However, they can also effect the match without recourse to the verbal label and can make use of what they know about the pitch of the tone, provided that the tone matches their individual internalized template.

ENOUGH!   Let’s have some fun.   Do you have Perfect Pitch?

You can find out right now by clicking HERE and testing your ability online. Don’t worry. No one has to know how well you do.

Don’t touch that dial!  In my next post, I have a BIG SURPRISE…

absolute pitch , General , musical notation , perfect pitch , tones

A few days ago, myself and a couple friends were gabbing,
and we heard a siren. Jokingly, someone asked what note it was.
Well, none of us could do anything more than make a ballpark
guess. At that point, the discussion turned to the subject of “perfect pitch”.

Naturally, I was reminded of a story I heard when I was working
at Caribou Ranch. So I told them my story -

I think it was Bruce Botnick who told this story, but I’m not
absolutely sure. It came up when we were overdubbing vocals. It
reminded him of when he was overdubbing  Art Garfunkel, Everyone knew that Art was incredibly sensitive to pitch, and probably had “perfect pitch”. So, the producer and engineer decided to play a prank on him. He was listening to himself in the headphones and “doubling” his vocal.The engineer routed his first vocal through a digital device that allowed.him to slightly “de-tune” the track. In other words, it was “flat” to the basic tracks. Art would match his voice to the original, but then he listened to the playback, he was always out of tune. They all acted like they didn’t hear anything wrong, and Art went crazy. He even threatened to quit singing forever. They finally told him the truth just as he was walking out of the studio!

After that, someone looked it up in the dictionary, and here’s what Merriam-Webster says, “absolute pitch, the ability to recognize or sing a given isolated note called also perfect pitch”

The scientist in me had to know more, so I turned to the internet.

I had the priviledge of working with Carl Wilson, so I was especially fascinated to see this;

Carl Wilson - Both Carl and Brian [Wilson] had perfect pitch, even though Brian was deaf in one ear.

Jimi Hendrix - When he first started learning guitar he couldn’t afford a tuning fork, so he went to the local music store, ran his fingers over the open strings, then went home and tuned up. Because the guitar has 4ths in its intervals between strings, which are much less ‘friendly’ than the violin’s 5ths, only someone with perfect pitch could have done this.
- Although Hendrix never learned to read written music, early in his career as a sideman he could learn a new band’s entire repertoire in an hour or two by just hearing the songs once. Again, this would be beyond someone without PP.

Don’t touch that dial!

Stay tuned for more exciting and incredible info. My next post will reveal more fascinating results of my Internet research . PLUS, learn how YOU can develop Perfect Pitch yourself!

To be continued …

General

Lauren Frost  just released her 1st CD, “ Words for the Birds “,  on August 25, 2008.  Lauren is a Chicago singer/songwriter that I’ve followed for a couple years now. Her style is a little difficult to pin point, but if you like jazz, folk, pop, softer rock, or just good female singers, I think you’ll find something to like.

She and her friend Matt Scutt wrote the songs together, and gathered some of Chicago’s finest musicians to record her album. The band is known as Blue Lou, and if you hurry you may be able to catch them at a local club. She also plays what she calls her Acoustic gigs with fellow guitar player, Matt Scutt and Ashton Likes.

You can preview her music on her MySpace at  www.myspace.com/laurenfrost
Or, you can go directly to her new blog  http://laurenfrost.blogspot.com/ and buy the CD.  You will be able to hear a few snippets of her music there, too.

I realize I’ve dedicated a post to plugging one musician, but I have a special interest in Lauren. Be that as it may, I welcome any of you to send me links to your websites, videos, and blogs so that I can hear your music and promote your music, too.

Blue Lou , Chicago , Lauren Frost , Matt Scutt , Reviews , words for the birds