Archive for the ‘Music’ Category

Mixcraft 4 allows you to record and mix like the best producers and DJs at just a fraction of the price. Remix songs, record your band, create MIDI compositions or make your own backing tracks or songs with our built in sound library and virtual instruments. Focus on your creativity and not on technical details! Cut, paste, edit and shape your sounds the way you want! Use built in effects like reverb, flanger or EQ or install a variety of DirectX or VST effects to add tremelo, distortion, chorus or even remove the vocals from a song! This flexible software can be used in many ways, from recording your first solo album, remixing a song mash-up, pod-casting, editing commercials or even making a production for your daughter’s dance or gymnastic recital! You can even export your mix to MP3, WMA, OGG or WAV, or simply burn it on a CD!

Features include:

• Clear, colorful, and intelligently designed interface to streamline your work.
• Custom loop library includes hundreds of royalty-free sounds in dozens of musical styles. (Works with Acid(tm) and Apple Garage Band(tm) loops.)
• Record multiple MIDI and audio tracks simultaneously.
• Piano roll to view and edit MIDI.
• Includes a General MIDI library, sampled grand pianos, Hammond B-3(tm) emulator, MiniMoog(tm) emulator and a polyphonic synthesizer.
• Create mega presets that layer and split multiple virtual synthesizers and effects.
• Add unlimited VST(tm) and DirectX(tm) effects. (Includes 18 high quality effects.)
• Mix down to MP3, WAV and other audio file types.
• Burn CDs of your mix with just one click.

You can get it HERE at the Acoustica Website

You can get it HERE at the Acoustica Website

Ok so I haven’t been this excited over an album coming out in a very very long time.

I’ll post a link to the podcast on the podcast page, or you can watch episodes of the 12 days of ChickenFoot here.

The boys talk about all the songs on the CD and how they came about. There is a snippet of each song at the end of each bit.

By all accounts the CD goes on sale tomorrow, June 5th 2009, and for a few days you can get it cheap at Amazon MP3.

Buy and Download Chickenfoot Now!

visit chickenfoot.us for more info

There are times I wish I had certain affiliate programs. Guitar World is one of those.

One of THE guitarist albumns of all time would have to be Jimi Hendrix Electric Ladyland. A bunch of well known songs that all folks should have under their fingers.

I am incredibly time poor right now, but if I had the time I would love this set of tutorials to spend some quality time with.

If I could sell it to you kind folks, I would love to do that also. But here is a little youtube vid from Guitar World showing what’s in the pack. I think from memory of my last issue of GW it’s about $30, a bargain if you ask me.

Enjoy.

Shane

OK so the band’s name may not end up being chickenfoot but there certainly could be worse names.

The new “super group” made up of Sammy Hagar, Joe Satriani, Chad Smith and Michael Anthony certainly have all the makings of a rocking band.

I for one am really looking forward to hearing the album when it comes out in a few months.

Rock On!

Shane

Being a Dad is time consuming and while I love it, there are times I day dream about being a teenager again. Back then I could sit for hours and just noodle away on my guitar and dream of being a rock star.

Well the rock star thing didn’t happen. I did have a wonderful four years of jumping up on stage at a local blues Jam in Sydney once a week. It was a lot of fun and I made some great mates through that pub.

Being single for most of that time, you don’t get a lot of women at blues joints, I had time to practice and get a little better at playing guitar. While I’ll never be a Steve Vai or Stevie Ray Vaughan, I would like to get a few songs under my fingers to the point that I’ll never forget them. The long layoffs I seem to have as life gets in the way tends to end up with a lot of songs just falling out of my head. The nice thing about the blues jam is that with a quick chat before each song you can fake it enough even if you don’t know it.

So I find myself once again with the urge to learn a few songs and get back into the swing of things. I’ll try to jot down some notes as I go along as I’m sure there are other time poor Dad’s out there that would like to progress in music, while trying to maximize their available time.

This time around I’m focusing on Jimi Hendrix, Stevie Ray Vaughan and Joe Satriani. One of the reasons for those three besides that I love their music is that they have a common thread running through them. One that leads from Jimi Hendrix. He was a huge influence to Stevie Ray and continues to be a huge influence on Satch even today.

To aid me in getting the songs down I have a few tools at hand. Back when I had a Mac, I used and loved Garageband. It’s almost enough to get me to buy another Mac, but that has to wait for now. In the mean time I found a great program called Mixcraft that seems almost as good, if not better than Garageband. It runs on Windows of course and lets you lay down loops to play over. You can check out Mixcraft HERE.

There are a bunch of backing tracks available on the internet and what programs like Garageband and Mixcraft let you do is import the track and then record yourself playing along with them. At the start this is quite painful as you find out the bits that aren’t so good. However if you persevere with it, you’ll start to pick out the bits that are good. By getting that positive reinforcement, and I’ll admit sometimes it’s hard to focus on the positive. You’ll get to the stage where you’ll have some stuff to be proud of.

If you get real creative you can cut bits of different solos together like the pro’s do and splice yourself together an awesome solo. Of course I’d never do that and all my stuff is done in one take.

I can’t stress enough how FUN it is to play with other musicians. The reality is that if you aren’t in school anymore and have one of JOB things, it’s hard to find the time or other musicians to play with. If you have an open mic/ Jam in your area, I highly recommend you make the time to attend. You don’t have to play at first, just check it out and meet a few of the regulars.

Failing finding real life folks to play with having something like Mixcraft to play over and with will enhance your enjoyment of music immensely. Band in a Box is another program that I recommend. It lets you setup in any key you like an setup a chord progression and style of music to play over. It’s a fair bit simpler than Mixcraft and will get you up and running faster. The quality of the sound will depend on your sound card and the midi sound sets that you have.

I’m very much looking forward to carving out some time in my busy schedule to learn some new tracks and revisit some old ones. After all, I need to be able to play to some degree when the kids are old enough to want to learn …. right?

Ciao

Shane