Part II of our roundup of gear, guitar and music blogs. We read ‘em, so you don’t have to. Design Workshop blog features some beautiful luthier work including a $28,000 one-of-a-kind. Carl Verhayen’s blog, and The Guitar Channel for prog rock fans. Read more…
Browsing Category Digital Music
0 Guitar Magazines Roundup February 2012
I know it is time to review February guitar mags when I buy the first few March titles on the newsstand. I’m starting to track seven titles: Guitar Player, Guitar & Bass, Guitarist, Guitar World, Guitar Techniques, Total Guitar, Premier Guitar. Month after month they crank out tons of editorial and gobs of glossy ads to salivate over. That being said, not every issue every month is necessarily worth reviewing, so I’ll pick out the highlights and try to leave out the dross.
Here’s this month’s roundups of what’s interesting in the world of electric guitars, acoustic guitars, and gear via guitar magazines from the U.S. and across the pond.
This venerable U.S. title is 45 years old this month, happy birthday Guitar Player! “Riffin’ since 1967,” says the cover tag line.
Knaggs Guitars
- In-depth interview with ‘Prince of Prog’ John Petrucci of Dream Theater
- 10 Things You Gotta Do to Play Like – Warren Haynes (monthly feature)
- Roundup of 16 new Distortion, Fuzz and Overdrive Pedals
- Gear review of boutique luthier Knaggs guitars
- Gear review of Taylor SolidBody Configurer (you pick the build specs!)
This U.K. title is one of my faves. Consistently solid art direction helps, I always appreciate the clean and appealing covers often with great ‘hero’ shots. This month’s cover a shot if indie rocker Johhny Marr and his new signature Fender Jaguar. Other highlights include:
Johnny Marr Signature Fender Jaguar
- Inside story behind the Johnny Marr signature Fender Jaguar
- Profile of guitar great Charlie Christian with video lessons
- Five Steps To… Brian May (with tab and audio)
- Online “Vault” with gear and guitar demos, lessons and more
This U.S. guitar magazine is not as easy to find on the newsstand, but I do like it quite a bit. This month, I did not get the print edition yet, so I went online and discovered, to my enjoyment, that they offer the issue free via a free app for my iPad.
Premier Guitar's iPad app
Developed with Texterity, this app marries the crisp display of each page with added links to the Web and Facebook, coupled with search, bookmarking, easy emailing and sharing of content. This was revelatory because to date the guitar magazine apps have been less than useful, mainly pdfs of the pages that look pretty on the iPad screen. The bookmarking feature came in handy, allowing me to virtually dog ear interesting content.
- Opening Notes, monthly feature with great full-page photos
- Monthly articles from renowned teacher, player, shredder, rocker, Paul Gilbert – who delivers incredibly well-written screeds, for a musician
- Informative piece on using a virtual drummer for recording
- Columnist gives Squier Tele the cigar-box treatment
Squier Tele Cigar-Box Guitar Mod
- Two pages of Web exclusives, each linked to interactive content
- Monthly feature on boutique luthiers and their custom guitars
Last month I neglected to mention this U.K. title, which lays claim to be ‘Europe’s best-selling guitar magazine.” It is a good mag, comes from Future Publishing also responsible for Guitar Techniques and the aforementioned Guitarist magazines. You get accurate tab, backing tracks lessons, and good editorial all in one package. And every month they have guest lessons from three of my all-time favorite guitarists: Steve Lukather, Matt Schofield, and Warren Haynes.
Noel Gallagher
This month, I liked the interview with Noel Gallagher, post-Oasis. Worth it for this quote alone. Gallager mentions a solo at the end of Stop The Clocks, off his new album High Flying Birds, calls it “…the mad f***ing Jeff Beck stuff.” Gallagher notes that his guitar tech, Paul Stacey plays that solo; and is asked how come he played it and not you? “‘Cos I can’t play like that! F***ing hell, I can barely play like Peter Green, let alone f***cking Jeff Beck!” A very quotable, guy, Mr. Noel Gallagher.
0 Monday Music Musings from Around the Web
Monday, Monday… Here are some blogs that had interesting posts the past few days.
From Hypebot: Indie label launches new music subscription model. Interesting idea from Stones Throw Records, you pay $10 per month and get all their music, from all their signed artists. Details from the label here.
From GuitarNoize: Gibson unveils metal Les Paul Studio at NAMM 2012, even has a Floyd Rose Trem, sacrilegious!
From Jason Shadrick, associate editor of Premier Guitar magazine: His fave 2011 picks of the PG gear video rig rundowns, where artists and their techs show their gear and give a rundown of information.
From TrueFire: What’s Your Blues Nickname? Great idea, a nickname tool using your initials. I’m Brown Hips Rivers!
From the iHeartGuitarBlog: Blogger gets his own Taylor solid body using the solidbody configurator. Neat idea, like picking your own BMW car, you can configure all the mods on your Taylor solidbody and print out the specs and image. Here’s my purple one. LOL.
0 Paste mPlayer digital mag integrates music with reviews
Very interesting. Surfing the music blogs today, I came across and an ad for something called Paste Magazine, unbeknownst to me a leading print mag, award-winning, that went all digital after eight years of publication. Clicking took me to a subscription form, and since I’m in an exploratory mood, I pop for $2.99 per month. Here’s what I got.
It feels like an indie mag, as expected, and has columns, features, music reviews and film reviews. All presented digitally, and with a player running across the top above the content, so when you look at a music review, a song starts playing in their media player. Each song is downloadable, and you receive seven free MP3s every week, making the $2.99 worthwhile.
Home page for digimag Paste
Paste is also a web mag, and they are touting the Paste mPlayer as “the next evolution of music magazines.” Have we heard that before? Regardless of marketing, it felt like a nive evolutionary step, and I loved being able to hear a song from the CD reviewed. There seemed to be a mix of indie music featured, all very palatable when I clicked around to listen and read.
Paste mPlayer CD review
One review was of Gabriela y Rodriguez’s new album, and I thoroughly enjoyed listening to them, and now may consider buying the tune (the whole song plays, so better than iTunes preview).
All in all, a very nice digital experience. Well-written, nicely presented. Music player works well, and video via YouTube opens into same player window.
One comment, it is impossible to find out much about the Paste staff or brand from within the mPlayer, unfortunately you have to go to website to see that info. And even then I still do not know who is the editor, and would have to click over to another site to find owner.
0 Blogging the Blogs »» January 20, 2012
Two helpful posts from blogger @hishamdahoud on Hypebot, the first an overview of the 2011 State of Online Music from NextBigSound:
… the numbers are quite staggering: 64 billion new plays, 16 billion profile views, and 3.5 billion new fan connections. Metrics include data taken from SoundCloud, Twitter, Vevo, Facebook, YouTube, MySpace, and Wikipedia.
Dahoud points out Soundcloud having the largest growth; noted the indie artists ranking on Soundcloud versus the big pop artists on the other services; and pointed out each service had it’s own most active day of the week. All from the same infographic.
The other post from Dahoud is about an interesting new web tool for artists:
Artist Growth, a sophisticated set of cloud-based artist management tools that also utilizes specialized apps for mobile devices, has officially launched. Created by Nashville based musicians turned entrepreneurs Matt Urmy and Jonathan Sexton, Artist Growth’s proprietary technology integrates finances, calendars, inventory, contacts, social media and mentoring resources within a single cloud-interface.
This certainly sounds like a tool that indie artists will want to use. There’s a video demo at the bottom of the post here.
Eye candy from NAMM 2012 via GuitarNoize a great indie guitar blog. Link to GuitarNoize post.
This new G5-VG Stratocaster comes with built in COSM effects from Roland. Awesome! I use the Roland Micro BR-80 which is sweet and has the same built in guitar efx, very effextive. LOL. Seriously, at the flip of a rotary dial near the tone pots, you can get these sounds: strat, tele, humbucker, acoustic, 12-string, sitar, drop D tuning, and on and on. The demo is incredible, must see for guitar fans.
The fluid and tasteful Alex Hutchings demos the G5-VG here.
Love to try this one, see what the acoustic or 12-string sounds feel like coming out of the axe.
0 Myxer Social Radio gets press (guess it launched already)
My Matt Schofield Myxer music room
Myxer is a mobile content and technology startup mostly known for free mobile downloads such as ringtones. A few months ago, they launched a free music radio player with tight Facebook integration called Myxer Social Radio. Got some press today from Billboard.biz. I’d heard of it through friends who know the founder, but did not realize this product has launched. Interesting to see how they fit in versus, as Billboard notes, Spotify, Pandora and Last.FM, each of those occupying slightly different segments.
Upon trial, I created a music “room” for my fave blues guitarist, Matt Schofield, it found his music which Spotify did not. Other Myxer users can listen in here. J’Approve!
0 Sharing Music Services Emerging on Mobile Platform
Met some entrepreneurs the other week, they were looking to launch a sharing and music player app based on a successful Android app they launched that is garnering users and downloads. We were talking about how it might be hard to grab the play list from someone’s mobile iTunes. This article from Hypebot leads me to believe this has been solved to some degree (though without the player, obviously).
Screen shot of SoundShare app
“SoundShare is free iOS app that helps music fans share what they’re listening to. Once you launch SoundShare, you can set it to keep track of every song you listen to in the iPod app on your iPhone/iPod Touch. These songs are shared with your SoundShare network. Founder Matt Abras describes the app as “something like what Ping should have been or Instagram meets music.” In fact, the app borrowed a lot of design inspiration from Instagram.”
Screen shot of SoundTracking app
The author is an entrepreneur and creator of two websites offering website creation and social updating services, OneSheet and ArtistData, goes on to mention one other service on the iOs platform, Soundtracking, which associates pictures or locations with your playlist. With Spotify invading your Facebook timeline, expect numerous social sharing services to pop up.
Interested? Soundshare and Soundtracking are free in the app store.
0 Coldplay’s New Record: 500,000 iTunes Downloads
Billboard breaks news on Coldplay’s digital strategy paying off for them with a new iTunes record, 500,000 downloads in one week. Sweet. Their strategy, according to this reporter is stage-managed to drive physical and digital sales:
Coldplay's digital strategy pays off with sales of new release.
“Coldplay’s decision to bypass subscription services appears to be part of a purpose-driven approach to digital marketing. Rather than using free audio and video streams in the hope they will lead to album sales, the band is more forcefully encouraging listeners to purchase downloads or CDs. And by keeping the album away from on-demand services, Coldplay is ensuring fans will buy (or find other ways to obtain the music) rather than listen for free.”
(Full article here.) This makes sense to my ears, and in the case of a huge band like Coldplay seems to be rather an easy decision. Now if you are an unknown artist or band, I can see Spotify and other streaming services and possibly one way to get noticed. Can we think of any smaller acts that have similar digital strategies?
0 Pete Townshend: iTunes is a Digital Vampire
Here’s an interesting read. Legendary Who bassist Pete Townshend gave the inaugural BBC 6 Music John Peel Lecture just the other day and called iTunes a “digital vampire.” It’s an interesting lecture to read (The Guardian kindly posted it here), and Mr. Townshend has distinct opinions:
“Now is there really any good reason why, just because iTunes exists in the wild west internet land of FaceBook and Twitter, it can’t provide some aspect of these services to the artists whose work it bleeds like a digital vampire Northern Rock for its enormous commission?”
Thus the eye-catching headline used all over the web and here too (well, it worked, yes?).
Is iTunes a Digital Vampire?
PT takes iTunes to task for not acting more like a label and offering A&R and marketing services to musicians selected by Apple. Certainly, it’s tempting to take Apple to task, but as others have pointed out, iTunes is a retailer, and hard to see how the old school record stores are very different in this case. Here are two good reaction pieces to Townshend’s screed:
The Guardian’s response points out that the iTunes 30% commission is no different than music retailers, and that some streaming servies, such as Grooveshark are worse for copyright; and…
Mark Mulligan at Music Industry Blog points out the retailer comparison and some other good points, here.
My feelings are less specific and pointed, I’ve expanded my music library intensely since the advent of iTunes, and personally, pay for all music I own. Really. So, no, iTunes is no digital vampire, but it is a challenging world for musicians and artists despite that fact.
Interested to hear or read other viewpoints.