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I wish I was this passionate about anything. It makes me want to learn classical piano.

I have been needing a new keyboard for a little while now. I have a cheap one that I bought 10 years back or so that did the job when I bought it, but I haven’t been thrilled to use it lately. Some of the sounds are OK, but being 10 years old, everything is out of date. I started looking at different keyboards and started to think of the sounds that I wanted in one. I was looking for something with good pianos, electric pianos and string sounds. Most current keyboards have really good sounds, in fact, in a blind taste test I’ll bet that most people wouldn’t be able to tell which one was the authentic instrument and which one was the digital keyboard in a recording, especially after you set it back in the mix. This all plays in my favor because there is a huge selection of great sounding digital keyboards that incorporate sample and synthesis technologies to create huge sound libraries available at your finger tips. Unfortunately for me, I have been going through one of my phases where I feel that music is losing its soul to technology. I already use a digital multi-track recorder that allows me to be way too lazy and cheat way too much when I record. This is part of the reason I went out and bought me a brand new (30 year old) Wurlitzer 214.

This is a classic electric piano that actually gets its sound from a piano hammer striking metal reeds. Now some might argue that this sounds better than the sampled version of it. Maybe…but I don’t know if the care and maintenance of this vintage instrument can justify what you gain in tone, and it is a very noise instrument compared to its sampler based great grand child, but I do know that it sounds great and it sure is inspiring to play. It may be a one trick pony that costs a lot to maintain, but most people don’t buy and keep ponies for the multitude of tricks that they can do; people just love them for what they are. Besides, there is just something that is cool about owning a piece of music history. Unfortunately, I have just taken it in to be serviced, get the action set up and make sure that everything is grounded properly so I don’t kill myself playing it. I won’t see it for 2 weeks.

OK, I love a vintage instrument as much as the next guy. The craftsman ship and history in old instruments is awesome. But I don’t quite get Fender’s big marketing push. They have almost as many reissue guitars as they do current models and their new thing is the “Road Worn” instrument line in which a guitar maker (notice how I said guitar maker and not luthier) goes through great pains to make it look like your brand new guitar is a vintage instrument that has been played for many years, and they charge more for it. Come on people, buy a nice guitar and try to keep it nice. If it gets dinged, scratched, worn and dented…so what. You bought it to play it. You don’t need to go out of your way to try and keep it looking pretty and you don’t need to go out of your way to try and make it look worn.

Here is a novel concept; instead of spending time and money to build and market a road worn guitar why not just dedicate that effort and money into making better guitars. Then you wouldn’t have to sell relics and reissues because your current line would be up to par. Sure, I would like to own a 50s or 60s fender Strat but would I pay an extra 500 bucks for a Made in Mexico Strat that some has taken a random orbit sander to? Come on people.

In the 1800’s there was a bastardization of craft or artisan trades. This is where America as an emerging industrial society stopped the master/apprentice relationship and created a paradigm where no one person knows how to create a product. In the 1800s, to improve efficiency, industrialization and corporations brought about assembly lines so artisans started to disappear. No one person knew how to create a pair of shoes or sew a shirt. Assembly workers just learned their one piece of the puzzle.

Well it looks like technology is doing the same thing, but moving from artisan to the arts. Microsoft has the next step to formulatizing music so we can make cookie cutter songs. They released a new product in which you sing to a drum track and it will create a song for you in what ever style you choose. It probably uses some sort of pitch detector to tell what notes you are singing and runs that through a whole bunch of pre-programmed music theory and creates a song in the style that you had specified.

Now I am torn on this one because on the one hand I love new technology and new, outside the box applications of technology but on the other hand I feel that things like this, as they improve and get better and better, might kill some of the magic in art. I used to record everything on to a reel to reel 8 track analog recorder which kept me honest as a musician. You had to know how to play and you had to be rehearsed enough to do a take without punching in a lot. Now there are so many tricks to recording digitally that your musicianship is an afterthought. Computers are great for songwriters because they allow one person to track many different instruments and they allow mediocre musicians, like me, to get by because we can record take after take after take a piece the best ones together. But when you start taking it to the next level and have a computer write the music for a track that you sing, you start to get detached from the art. It is a self perpetuating spiral downward in which you dummy down musicianship because all of your music theory is created by a computer programmer rather than a musician and you lose the sole of the art form. The thing that really suffers is the live performances. It is becoming increasingly more difficult for us to play live shows that sound as full as the recordings.

Do I think that Songsmith will replace the musician? No…but I do think it opens a door that I would rather keep shut. The sound quality and music theory of this app are very remidial, but the principles of the application are pretty straight forward and it is just a matter of time before they improve the sound so that it sounds more realistic and the “musicianship” is a lot better. It may some day be a quaint memory of days when people wrote songs.

Technology is a great tool and will help reduce work and effort for a lot of tasks, but I think there are still things that you need to work hard for. So go out and learn to play an instrument, join a band and make some art…and learn something along the way.

This is part of what is wrong with our American Idol society. Most Americans don’t know what they like unless someone tells them they like it. You see this with every fad and every trend and it is why original fans of an obscure musical act will stop liking them as soon as the band starts to have mainstream success.

The Washington Post did an experiment to see how many people would stop and watch a world class violinist if he were dressed as a street musician playing in a busy downtown plaza. You can read the full story here with video clips.

It turns out, not many. Joshua Bell gave an “impromptu” performance in the L’Enfant Plaza in Washington DC for over 1000 passers by. There were no crowds, very few people stopped to listen and he made under $40 in tips.

The thing that is really funny is that I am sure that there were people that passed him by for a free concert who are willing to pay upwards of $200 to watch Joshua Bell play with the best orchestras in the world because in that environment they feel comfortable “enjoying” it because if they pay that much it must be good…Right? I am sure that if everyone knew that they were watching a renowned violinist that was among the best classical musicians in America they would have stopped and formed a crowd.

After watching the video Bell said that there are six moments in the video that he finds particularly painful to relive: ‘”The awkward times,” he calls them. It’s what happens right after each piece ends: nothing. The music stops. The same people who hadn’t noticed him playing don’t notice that he has finished. No applause, no acknowledgment. So Bell just saws out a small, nervous chord — the embarrassed musician’s equivalent of, “Er, okay, moving right along . . .” — and begins the next piece.’

The moral of the story is the next time you see a musician, an artist, a poet…, take note and enjoy the art, even if Simon, Randy and Paula didn’t have anything to do with it. And if it really moves you…try applauding, an angel might get their wings or something.

Now I have seen the likes of KT Tunstall and Jon Brion do this, but I just came across a youtube clip of Theresa Andersson doing everything by herself. Very inspiring…I need to practice more.

I love how companies are now spending huge budgets on viral marketing. Check out this JC Penney ad that was forwarded to me by my mom. Hilarious ad and my mom forwarded it to me.

I don’t get the whole rock band/guitar hero thing…So I understand that it might be a fun thing to do in the comfort of your own home with a group of close friends, but when I don’t know who I feel more embarrassed for in this new show by MTV, MTV (whos closest thing to real music is a Rock Band game show), the participants or the audience.First of all, come on, if you are going to go this far you might as well learn how to play a real instrument.

Didn’t South Park do an episode about this?

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