我的結他雜記：Acoustic Blues - Rock Me Babe

In the mood of learning more blues, especially after watching James Cotton last night. Here is the tab. Also found a few links ([1], [2]) for slide guitar instructions

Grisha Goryachev and Jérôme Mouffe

There were 2 concerts I'd like to go to in SF at the same time last Sat. SFJAZZ had a salute to jazz harmonica master Toots Thielman while Omni Foundation had a classical/flamenco guitar one. I am a big fan of the 2 instruments and 3 styles. They are not performed very often, even in a big city like SF. Traditionally, singing and dancing were both way more important than guitar playing in flamenco performances until several great guitar virtuosos raised the bar during last century. Since then a lot of guitarists have incorporated some elements of flamenco, i.e., the so-called "Nuevo Flamenco" style. I enjoy this style a lot too and have seen key players like Ottmar Liebert, Jesse Cook, Strunz and Farah played live but this was the first time I got a chance to see traditional flamenco guitar performance so I chose it over the SFJAZZ one.

The concert began with Grisha Goryachev and Jérôme Mouffe playing several duets, including an arrangement of a piece by Falla. Then Mouffe played several classical solo pieces to conclude the first half. The 2nd half featured Grisha Goryachev playing flamenco pieces by Paco de Lucia and Sabicas (he had recorded a CD of the latter's work) I enjoyed both halves a lot. It's about elegance and emotions. Another thing I like was that they didn't just "rehash" the typical guitar repetoire but try arrangements that you don't hear often.

BTW, the SFJAZZ concert was actually in the same building, Herbst Theatre. Originally the concert featured Toots Thielman himself but he was sick. That's why it became a salute concert. Hope he get well soon!

我的結他雜記：reuse 5 major scale fingerings for harmonic minor

The 5 shapes taught by Jimmy Bruno have been very valuable to my playing of not just major scale but also arppegios (major 7, minor 7, dom 7, min7b5 ) Even for minor (aeolian) scale,  it's just the matter of finding the relative major. However, playing mixolydian b9 b13 scale (or 5th mode of harmonic minor ), it requires more thinking. For example, to play the scale over G7b9b13, consider we are raising the 7th (Bb to B) of the C minor scale, which has Eb major as its relative.  So,  with G as the root,  it's basically playing the major scale 2 whole step down but start with G and raise the b3 to 3rd (i.e. Bb to B)

我的結他雜記：swinging 8th notes in jazz

When I started the Berklee jazz class, the first forum post by our instructor was about how to swing 8th notes. Actually, the first thing he mentioned was how NOT to swing 8th notes. The common way of treating them like tripplets with the middle missing usually ended up with choppy sounding dotted 8th plus 16th note, which is OK for other styles but not jazz. For jazz, the 8th note should be played evenly (same duration) Here's another good explanation I found on the web. His suggestion is the same as our instructor: it's better to play even 8th note slightly behind the beat (i.e., the 1 & 2 & 3 & 4 &) even if it is not the ideal or "perfect" swing. It works out great for me because of my inability to stay ON the beat. I mean, I'm usually behind anyway. Our instructor thought I did that intentionally and liked it!

Also check out what renowned jazz saxophonist David Liebman said about the same topic.

我的結他雜記: Berklee Jazz 101

在Berklee今個學期終於上期待已久的主修課堂:爵士結他101。短短一個月(即四堂)所教的內容可謂十分緊湊，目標就是在chord progression伴奏下，彈單音solo lines。第一堂練chord tones( root, 3rd, 7th)，要彈不是最低那個八度，主要練第五把DGBE 弦上的音。接著三堂分別是練maj 7, min 7, dom 7的arpeggios, approach 。其實和Jimmy Bruno 教的差不多，只不過用較多的樂理名詞概念來解釋，亦提供大量練習曲，包括比較『抽象』純為練熟chord tones/ approach notes 的，也有一些jazzy licks可『即抄即用』的;這些都是Bruno 所無的。當然，Bruno的宗旨是no nonsense, 所以樂理名詞可免則免了。至於範例，Bruno 的網站包括學生上載彈奏及他回應的短片（我只用過他的舊教學網，不知新的是否如此），跟片學彈是學習過程一部份，只是沒有譜可跟而已，其實也是練聽力的好機會。

目前最大的難題倒是和跟Bruno 學時一樣，就是未能把這些chord tones/ approach notes 組成jazzy 樂句。問過Berklee 的老師，他說是沒有公式可跟的，他能教的只是『工具』，必須練熟這些工具，熟到即可應用，再加上多聽多抄(transcribe)，累積咁上下經驗，才能即興solo。以前Bruno 也只是叫我多點跟片學彈 。總括他們所言就是:前路漫漫，連Berklee 也無必『掂』秘技可授，實在有點沮喪，恐怕彈爵士此夢難圓。

無論如何，今日我在Berklee勉強能跟得上進度，當年跟Bruno學的5 shapes 居功至偉。5 shapes 其實就是由CAGED 五個open chord 衍生出的五個major scale fingering patterns 。從中可以『抽出』I ii V chord ( maj 7, min 7, dom 7 )的arpeggio fingerings，在結他頸上任何一處都可彈以上任何一種arppegio，並即知對應的major scale，再由此可彈major scale 的modes 。(雖然Bruno 不主張從scale/mode 的角度思考，他教的是考慮ii-V-I整個progression的pitch collection，正正就是shape之中每一粒音）

其實Berklee和Bruno教的很多殊途同歸，例如：
1) Berklee教maj 7或min 7 chord tone可從scale中下一個（較高）音去approach。Bruno教solo時可以由低至高彈arpeggio，然後由高至低彈scale；其實這樣彈的話正包含這些scale approach tone。
2）Berklee教dom 7 arpeggio的b7音，可從root去approach；Bruno也教dom 7 arpeggio可從whole step之上去approach，b7上一個whole step正是root!（不過Berklee有教dom 7 arpeggio的3，不宜用scale tone去approach）
3）Berklee教min 7 chord伴奏時，可彈低whole step之maj 7 arpeggio來solo，就是dorian sound。這個maj 7 arpeggio正是該min 7 chord的b7, 9, 11, 13音。Bruno一直教I ii V任何一個arpeggio都和整個progression夾，無需刻意I arpeggio配對I chord，也是這個道理。

上過這些課，想起十二年前買Herb Ellis《All the shapes you are 》一書，教的其實也是這些道理：練熟ii-V-I progression的arpeggios及scale tones，聽熟他示範配合數十個chords的licks。書中介紹了多個fingerings，他稱之為major scales, minor scales及dominant scales，其實和Bruno教的fingerings同出一轍。不過名字就有少少誤導：他的minor scale fingerings其實是dorian mode而非minor scale一般指的aeolian mode（他用minor一詞是指配合ii min 7 chord吧）；而dominant scales當然就是mixolydian mode。Ellis的建議是認熟每一個fingering對應的chord形（他也叫這做shape，但此shape不同Bruno教的5 shapes），solo時多用chord tones及approach notes。和Berklee及Bruno教的都是同一回事。唉，如果十二年前有人解釋給我聽就好了！不過其實我在08年分別請教過一位結他老師（爵士非其專長）及網上論壇，結果還是靠自己搞清楚。現在我用這本書的CD來練transcription，畢竟特地為教學示範而彈的lines比較易聽易明。

我的結他雜記: Samson Go Mic

It's a tiny USB condenser mic. I bought one since my new guitar doesn't have a pickup. When I use it with Audacity for recording purpose, I could hear the background track from the headphone out of the mic. Nice!

我的結他雜記: 買了好結他

Even though I planned to save enough money for an expensive archtop, I couldn't resist the temptation to buy a Godin 5th Avenue when it was on sale (~$450) during Thanksgiving. It's an acoustic guitar without pickup and tone control. The guitar actually sounded ideal for acoustic blues, which I'm learning a bit. 

我的結他雜記: 要買好結他

欲望真的停不了，不過想法有點改變。那是因為一張舊照片，當中有一支是向（有錢）同學借來的結他，起碼廿年歷史，上拍賣網找找，估計值US$1000有多，相信除通脹後這支結他多少也升了值。對我的啟發是，還是多儲點錢買支好少少的結他，至低限度也保值，說不定還會升值！

目前目標是老字號中檔貨色like a Gibson ES-137:
http://www2.gibson.com/Products/Electric-Guitars/ES/Gibson-Custom/ES-137-Classic.aspx

$2000 for a big brand name. It's 1 pound lighter than a Les Paul too. It's comfortable to hold (I mean the body is not huge) and the neck is comfortable to press. I also like the jazzy sound from the neck pickup. And it's not heavy. Very practical. Just wish it's more "pretty" You know, those big hollow-body archtop with tail piece look classier.

The Fender Japan Telecaster Thinline is another of my target:
http://www.fenderjapan.co.jp/tn72g-ftmh.html
Gold pickguard on white body with f-hole. Not cheesy but classy!

我的結他雜記: 購買結他欲望停不了

I found out my Steinberger Spirit got some buzz when I played barre chord for the Berklee assignments. I'm not sure if I'm pressing the fretboard with the right pressure. I think it has more to do with the low E and A strings. In fact, even if I play single notes on these 2 strings, I need to be careful. Cannot press too hard and pick too hard or it will buzz. Fortunately, the buzz is not that noticeable when I record my playing for homeworks using the Korg Pandora. I like the Pandora a lot BTW. 

Anyway, seems like I have an excuse to buy a new guitar. Looked at these 2:

http://jazztimes.com/articles/15300-peavey-jf-1-exp-guitar

http://www.musicradar.com/gear/all/guitars/electric/6-string-semi-acoustic/5th-avenue-cw-kingpin-295806/review

The former is about $350 after tax while the latter is about $1000. Basically, they model after Gibson ES-335 and ES-125.

ES-335 is played by both jazz, blues or even rock guitarist. According to that review, it's good with distortion. Feedback is not a problem.

ES-125 looks more like a jazz guitar. 

好想買支正宗jazz archtop，但人生好似又點都要買支ES335 style既結他，果支Peavey係cheap野，可以慳d錢。

About buying guitar, I think if I ever visit Japan, I'll check out those vintage (70s) Japanese copy of American guitar. Ibanez and Tokai copied quite a bit of Gibson, including ES335 and ES175 back then and they were of high quality. 聽講東京御茶之水有好多二手樂器店：
http://blog.sina.com.cn/s/blog_645e03fb0100gxxw.html

To fly the guitar back home, this might be useful:

http://paulblow.tripod.com/fly_with_guitar.html

 

我的結他雜記: Dorian and Mixolydian

These are 2 very common scales (actually modes) mentioned in jazz tutorials.

There are 7 modes from a major scale. Let's say C major:

C Ionian mode (same as C major scale): C D E F G A B

D Dorian mode: D E F G A B C

G Mixolydian mode: G A B C D E F

The most common jazz chord progression is ii-V-I. So, in C major, they are

C maj 7

D min 7

G dom 7

I was often taught to improvise by playing C major (or Ionian) notes over the Cmaj7 chord

D Dorian over Dmin7 and G Mixolydian over G7.

But I was also taught to look at ii-V-I progression and the key it belongs to as a whole. Just play notes from C major over all 3. In fact, D Dorian has the same notes as C major. G Mixolydian too.

Yet another thing I learned is that playing D Dorian doesn't require learning another fingering. Just use C major fingering but start on the 2nd note instead. To play G Mixolydian, starts on the 5th note. 

On the other hand, Berklee DOES teach different fingering for Dorian and Mixolydian. To play a C Dorian, you simply change 1 of the 5 C Major fingering by lowering the 3rd and 7th. And A Mixolydian is almost the same as A Major except you lower the 7th

Back to the topic of playing jazzy, there are a few things:

1) plays 7th chord. So, if you see a I chord, play maj7 instead of maj. Play min7 for a ii chord and dominant 7th for a V chord.

2) solo over the chord tones including the 7th and sometimes plays half step below or above these chord tones.

3) swing the 1/8 notes.

4) Use our old friend the minor pentatonic scale (and blues scale). It could be played over many chord types:

http://www.jazzguitar.be/major_guitar_chords.html

http://www.jazzguitar.be/minor_guitar_chords.html

This is Your Brain on Music

想讀這本書已有一段日子，當初在Ferry Building的書店看到，就覺得人腦如何處理音樂是一個複雜而有趣的題材，不過之後一直沒有去找來看，直至兩個月前到圖書館才借下來。一讀就讀了兩個月，畢竟該書性質上接近普及科學讀物多於消閒小品，不是太容易消化。作者Dan Levitin的背景也值得一提，現時他是在大學從事神經科學研究的教授，以前他卻是一位音樂人兼錄音師！
本書前半部主要介紹音樂理論及其物理性質，後半部才是「戲肉」。首先，學玩音樂究竟先天（遺傳）影響有多大？其實本書也沒有肯定的答案，簡單來說是有；但後天亦當然重要，據研究要成為專家，一萬小時的練習少不了。這個一萬小時法則不只限於音樂，其他範疇如象棋也適用。俗語有云：台上一分鐘，台下十年功；可見中國人一向就有這個看法。
作者又提到，學音樂需要腦神經作出新的連接，在廿歲左右這個過程會大幅轉緩。音樂討論區常常有人發帖問成年人能否由零開始學音樂，很少回覆會大潑冷水，不過發帖人總要有心理準備學得慢及難學得好吧。幸好這幾代受過現代教育的人，多多少少在學校上過幾年音樂科，總不至於由零開始。
最後一章是全書高潮：探討玩音樂的能力在遺傳優勢的關係，即是影響音樂玩得好的基因是否較大機會被遺傳。再換一個角度看，就是音樂玩得好會否幫助吸引異性與之交配，你說這個是不是很重要？記得友人「神醫」曾撰文介紹美女的遺傳學理論，指出男人之所以熱切追求具備某些特徵的女性（即公認的美女），全因為那些特徵（例如對稱的面孔，豐滿的臀部）顯示該女性身體健康，繁殖下一代的能力强，因此是「播種」的理想對象！這本書的作者認為女性喜歡玩音樂的男性也是類似，除了引用達爾文支持的見解，也列出多個原因：自古以來音樂和舞蹈有密切關係，同樣需要節奏感强，而古人的舞步往往反映狩獵等求存技能的動作。至於較為近代的情況，是玩音樂屬有閒（錢及時間）階級的玩意，當然亦是女性「接種」的理想對象。我想補充一點個人見解：古人玩音樂往往自製樂器，亦突顯靈活的頭腦及雙手。該書還引用以下研究：給在排卵期（易受孕）的女性選擇以下兩種男士之一：音樂能力高但由於運氣差而貧窮者，及音樂能力低但由於運氣好而富有者；她們傾向前者，和在排卵期以外明顯不同。這個夠說服力吧！

我的結他雜記: Berklee Scale/Chord 101

顧家輝伍樂誠陳輝揚係Berklee College of Music讀過。我將會成為佢地校友，sort of。Berklee's online college is offering 爵士結他證書課程，共五個courses，盛惠~US$6400。雖然超貴（五個course合共60星期教學，人地大師網上 教jazz guitar都係US$60三個月咋）但係人生苦短，仲有命都係唔好咁計較，同埋我覺得人地鼎鼎大名，編製出黎既課程同練習方法點都有番咁上下卦。It teaches by showing class materials (words, pre-recorded video/audio and some flash animation) on their website and organized their contents lesson-by-lesson, also grading weekly assignments. The only interactive part is online chat session. 最緊要係，俾左咁多錢，會有心機做佢既練習，就算幾悶都會。其實除番即係一個星期每科一百美金，揾有料結他導師單對單教一個鐘都唔平得幾多。學音樂除非自學否則都係高消費喇。 

咁今個學期我學緊Chord 101同Scale 101。前者教major/minor/sus/aug/dim/dominant 7th等等triad同chord，仲有inversion，以前我買既書都有講，不過一直無心機記同練。我一向無乜掃chord，轉chord甚慢，做功課逼住死練，都有幫助既。今次真係學到野，佢有解釋barre chord點解係咁㩒，而家識得以前彈jazz tab死練果d chord其實係乜chord(dominant 9th, min7b5等等)。

Scale 101對我黎講易dd，因為都係教5隻major scale fingering，同以前練既大同小異；major scale(5 different fingerings)同minor pentatonic(2 fingerings)彈左咁多年，總算有d底。其餘果d major pentatonic, minor blues, dorian, mixolydian, harmonic minor, melodic minor，真係記到儍，唯有當防止老人痴呆囉。以前聽人講彈jazz improvisation，要12個key既以上任何一個scale，可以在條頸任何一處開始彈（仲要識得由中間既音開始，唔係次次都root）呢個境界就係呢個班既目標。我諗都急唔黎，希望日子有功啦。

每個星期每堂要做兩份功課，即係錄音上載俾老師評核。功課多數係跟tab彈，死練都OK，我會好似得個樣既歌星咁逐段錄，剪接技巧已經純熟。而且instructor俾分幾鬆手， 過關唔成問題。so far轉chord唔夠快，彈單音唔夠legato，後者正在努力改善，基本上都係左手手指唔好咁快攞起，但變左甩少少beat(墮後)，不過d同學話墮 後少少好過d音斷下斷下喎。

睇番同班同學，自我介紹有 website有錄左佢地彈既野，彈結他既水平已經好高，真係professional，我諗佢地係想補番d theory，同埋follow下個structure，第時開班授徒可以參考添！

我的結他雜記: Korg Pandora

I've bought the Pandora Mini. The amp modelling effect on the Pandora Mini was just ok. When I listened to it through headphone directly or thru my bass amp, it sounded kinda jazzy. But when I recorded it, it sounded kinda crappy (especially on chords) I actually used that external USB soundcard for recording since the Mini doesn't do it. I'm thinking about returning it and buy the "regular" Pandora instead. The regular Pandora is a USB soundcard itself and has more backing rhythms, also the ability to "cancel" the bass track for practicing bass.

我的結他雜記: Jimmy Bruno and Robert Conti

講返練野，舊年在網上學，跟呢位大師：
http://www.jimmybruno.com/school.php
http://jbguitarworkshop.com/sampleLessons.cfm

佢已經將彈jazz guitar簡化左好多，入門教major scale同arpeggio，就可以即興solo，我都係覺得太難。即興彈得好唔似jazz。

今個月轉左軚跟呢位（DVD）：
http://www.robertconti.com/free-jazz-guitar-video-lessons
佢仲簡單，寫晒TAB出黎，拍埋DVD教你逐個bar彈，好似小學生咁教。佢既理念就係，學即興之前唔好諗太多，尤其係理論。乜都係假，不如彈下人地即興果時彈既lines，做個基礎將來有得抄。本來我好抗拒咁學，但諗下諗下我都覺得有道理，最繄要係啱我程度。好似讀熟唐詩三百首卦。其實d單音唔係太難㩒，但係夾啱拍子都唔易。聽住background
track rhythm guitar黎夾，成日都會甩到唔知去左邊。

我的結他雜記: Fender Mustang II amp

上個星期去朋友屋企，帶埋支Steinberger去玩佢個新amp，係Fender Mustang II，以前未見過，賣點係平得黎(US$200)都有40W仲有amp modelling（已內置八款，可經電腦下載更多）

果個metal同90年代(grunge) models都幾啱，不過我玩jazz，重點係試佢Fender Deluxe model，d聲又幾夠jazz味。

Mark Feldman and jazz violin

Saw John Abercrombie at Yoshi's earlier this week and was very impressed by his violinist Mark Feldman. Here is his website:
http://www.markfeldmanviolin.com/enter.htm

Too bad he didn't mention what violin he plays.

His myspace page has some audio and video as well:
http://www.myspace.com/markfeldmanviolin

Definitely has classical background. Seems like that's the norm for jazz violinists.
On the other hand, jazz guitarist with classical background seems to be minority. My guitar teacher, Jimmy Bruno, does have classical training. He got some ideas about practicing from Wohlfahrt!

我的結他雜記: Danelectro N10 HoneyTone

結果都係忍唔住買左隻Danelectro N10 HoneyTone, a battery powered mini-amp黎玩，扭下幾個掣都可以校出多隻唔同聲，由jazz到metal都有。

我的結他雜記: Pocket Pod and amp

關於PocketPod的amp modelling，我又要呻笨，剛才睇manual，話其中一個掣上下按可以選擇不同amp及cabinet，包括著名jazz amp:
Fender Twin Reverb及Roland JC120。通利果位姐姐又無專業知識，攪到我白費減價好機會。

而家把心一橫，睇緊Digitech RP255（見Insomnia位仁兄用digitech，對呢個牌子重拾信心），呢部都有以上兩amp
model。仲有得踩wah wah及轉preset既腳掣（雖然無乜用），在美國只比pocket
pod貴少許，I'm still not sure...... one thing I really like about Pocket Pod is that I could use battery with it. The Digitech uses AC power only.

最新體會：舊年買左個 external sound card，係EMU 0404 USB，本來係用黎聽歌（好似比內置sound card好聽同推headphone好力水d）

但佢跟埋幾套software，其中兩套係Cubase LE同Amplitude。當時我裝落部舊電腦，發覺彈左一陣先有聲出，唔掂。

尋日想bid部Pocket Pod，又唔記得左落bid，結果俾人平買左，心有不甘，再裝過Cubase LE同Amplitude落部新電腦，都係彈左一陣先有聲出，原來device setup可以改用ASIO for EMU 0404 USB，就可以即彈即出聲，有十幾個amp model/preset可以玩，其中一個彈jazz好掂，其實都係clean聲，校到Bass勁多，treble勁少。

諗諗下，其實只要個amp跟住咁樣調校，根本乜model都唔重要。我個100W bass amp，試左用黎彈jazz都OK，果d amp modeller同multi effect對我可能真係無乜用。

我的結他雜記: Guitar strings

How often are we supposed to change strings on guitar? I was told every 30 hours of playing. I seldom change unless it's broken (usually the high E)

I almost stopped playing my Steinberger Spirit after I've bought that Ibanez Acoustic. Maybe I should change the string on my Spirit then I have motivation to play it again. It's common for jazz guitarist to play 013 strings! The heaviest double-ball strings I could find is 011. However, I might stick with the same gauge. Lots of people says that if you switch gauge, the neck will get different string tension and will change the intonation and need to adjust trust rod or the bridge. Sounds too troublesome for me.

我的結他雜記: Alternative instrument

I bought a Hohner. Not a guitar, but a harmonica.

Hohner is actually very famous as a harmonica manufacturer. It's a good brand for harmonica.

Man, it's not easy to play though. One basic technique is bending. Like bending in guitar. (the term is actually borrowed from guitar) On a basic 10 hole harmonica, it doesn't have all notes on it (for example, no B-flat on a C major harmonica) so you have to bend. And bending is HARD! I haven't figured that out yet. :(

The reason I'm trying harmonica is that there is some pain in my ring finger. I guess I'm too old to start playing jazz guitar because jazz uses "big" chords that requires stretching my fingers very wide. I'm really afraid that I might have to stop playing guitar and bass forever. I'm looking at alternatives but nothing is comparable to guitar!

我的結他雜記: chord-melody, practice, bass amp, nylon

Tried following this lesson. The song it taught is the most popular jazz standard called "Autumn Leaves" and Download #3 on that page is the TAB. If you don't bother to follow the lesson, just play the TAB. This style is called "chord melody", i.e., the guitar plays both the chord and the melody so other instrument is not necessary. I consider this the 最高境界 of jazz guitar.

In addition to "Autumn Leaves", I have learned a few more chord melody tunes, like "Stella by Starlight" and "Norwegian Wood." Saw a kid played "Yesterday" on YouTube. He told me his arrangement came from the same book that I got my version of "Norwegian wood!" So I started playing that. It will be quite a while until I could play as fast as he does.

I have always had some free time at night. I don't spend all of it on guitar though. I'm rather lazy. Usually it's just 30-40 minutes. Half spent on theory (like playing ii-V-I in different keys and arpeggio of those chords) Half spent on songs.

Years ago we tried to figure out what blues scale and the flatted 5th were. Now I play more jazz and they don't seem to be essential to playing jazz. On the other hand, adding the 7th (and higher, e.g. 9th, 13th) to chords really make songs sound jazzy. As far as scale is concerned, major scale works very well. Even pentatonic works. And blue scale is just one of the scale that works.

I bought a cheap bass amp when I was trying to start a new rock/metal band a few years ago. I really regretted that purchase because even though it was a 120W amp, I could barely hear it when playing in a practice space roughly as big as the "big room" in President studio! I expected a 120W to sound loud enough but this one didn't. Beware of the brand Behringer. I bet a Hartke 120W sound louder. Besides, I was never able to get a band started and used it 3 times only. However, I learned that some bass amp could actually be used as guitar amp and sounds pretty good with guitar. (The most famous one is Fender Bassman) Some people used bass amp same as mine for jazz! I plugged my Spirit into it and it indeed sounds not bad. The emphasis on the bass makes the sound very warm. Good for jazz.

I listened to more and more classical guitar these days. And some classical masters also play flamenco. I'm buying a cheap classical nylon string guitar. I played my teacher's and really like the sound. Very acoustic, warm, jazzy. Also, there is more separation between strings on a classical guitar so hopefully it helps me fingering those difficult chord (right now my fingers are too close and muting the next string!) The action is usually very high though so barre chord will be more difficult. In any case, I want to try something different. Nylon string feels very different from steel too.

In the 80s and 90s, Japanese made a lot of high quality copies of American guitar (Fender, Gibson) Should be able to find some good stuff in Tokyo. On the other hand, a brand new "real" Gibson Les Paul is ~US$2500, which costs less than a trip to Japan!

我的結他雜記: Steinberger, SG, Pignose Amp, jazz scales/chords

I plugged my Steinberger Spirit into my Pignose amp. Then connect the preamp out to the computer for recording two tunes I posted on MySpace: All the things you are and Seven Come Eleven. I like the sound of this setup. I read that the amp makes the most difference in the sound for jazz. The guitar itself is not as important.
I got the TAB from books and magazines. Wasn't able to improvise. If you analyze the melody lines, there's actually a lot of major scales and mixolydian. Also there are some common licks. Finally they make some big "jumps" from high to low and back to high (高音跳去低音，低音跳去高音)
以下六線譜為例：

--------------------
-8---6---4-----3----
--------------------
---8---6---5-3------
--------------------
--------------------

仲有d常見lick:
-----------4-----
---------4-------
-------5---------
-----6-----------
-----------------
-----------------

至於chord方面，都係7th chord, 例如major 7, minor 7 同dominant 7，掃出來好jazzy
其實我在香港果支Epiphone SG比較多metal友用，好少jazz友彈SG，不過SG個pickup P-90就有經典jazz友用係其他結他。Jazz友多數彈大支厚身面拱出來果款。I'm tempted to buy an archtop jazz guitar someday. Not now of course. Maybe after the recession is over (10 years later?) Google過先知Les Paul有f-hole果支已經停左產。好少有。記得包以正好似有彈Steinberger。

Artist: Nightrage

Album: Sweet Vengeance

Just heard this band from Last.fm. What a pleasant surprise! Found out it featured an All-Star lineup with Gus G from Firewind and Tomas Lindberg from At the Gates (on this album.) I saw Firewind at Arch Enemy's concert a few months ago and Gus G's guitar playing really impressed me. This guy could shred. The most surprising thing is that he's a power metal guy but this band plays melodic death!

Show: Gigantour

Bands: High On Fire, Job for a Cowboy, Children of Bodom, In Flames, Megadeth
Venue: SJSU, SJ

No disrespect to Megadeth, the pioneer of thrash metal, but I gotta admit I would not have gone to the concert if COB is not on the bill.


In Flames is a big incentive too.

Show: Arch Enemy

Venue: Slim's, SF

Arch Enemy headlined the Tyranny and Bloodshred tour. Dark Tranquillity, Divine Heresy, and Firewind were the supporting acts.

Video: So What

Artist: Miles Davis



For those who think jazz only has a niche market, please explain why the above video has almost a million hits? Granted, it's from the all-time #1 jazz album "Kind of Blue" (not the all-time #1 track though. That would be "Take Five" by Dave Brubeck)

Artist: Fueled By Fire

MySpace Link

Thrash is back! At least according to Village Voice. That's good news to me since I have always missed the gold old days of headbanging to Metallica and Testament! Fueled By Fire is supposed to be one of the flagship band of this comeback. ("Thrash is back" is the name of their song)

Opinion: "Health" of Subscription music service

While researching my previous blog posts regarding Rhapsody and Yahoo Music, I was curious about what players are in the market and who has the biggest market share. The result? It is kind of "scary" to a fan of the subscription model like myself: According to its financial material, Napster had 830,000 paid subscribers world wide and claimed to be the No. 1 player. Consider the subscription model has been here since 2001 and the No.1 player hasn't even break the million subscriber mark. This model doesn't look too promising, does it? Maybe I'm really the minority and the naysayers are right (for the wrong reasons maybe. The arguments from the latter link were not logical at all! For example, the author thinks listeners want to listen to the hits of the moment. I quote: "Tunes are addictive for a while and then discarded. " Isn't this perfect for a subscription model where you could always listen to the latest hits without buying more and more?)

Another way of gauging the health of this market is looking at how the major players are doing: the major players one year ago are: AOL, Napster, Rhapsody, Virgin and Yahoo. Now the music services of AOL and Virgin were both acquired by Napster but we have 2 more new players: MTV's Urge and Microsoft's Zune Marketplace. I guess we will just have to wait and see.

Service: Yahoo Music Unlimited to go

If you've read my previous post, you know I have switched to Yahoo Music Unlimited to go from Real Rhapsody. Price-wise there is no comparison: the recently raised yearly rate for Rhapsody is $119.88. How much does Yahoo cost yearly? $71.88!!! And if you pay with MasterCard, you get the 2nd year free! So I do myself a favor and "upgrade" to the "to go" version, which is $143.88 (for 2 years since I took advantage of the MC deal) and it is still cheaper than Rhapsody!

So what do I have to "give up" by switching? 2 Million songs. (According to Rhapsody, their catalog has 4 mil while Yahoo claim they have 2 mil) Though what really matter the most to me is the loss in classical music. A significant portion of the comprehensive catalog of the budget classical label, Naxos, is available on Rhapsody but not on Yahoo. Don't get me wrong: You could still find a lot of classical music on Yahoo. In fact, I bet the "Top 40" major classical works are there. However, the selection is just too "limited" for serious classical music fan.

What other complaints do I have? Buggy software! Although Real is not known for writing solid software (maybe Listen.com did a real good job and the core was retained?), the Rhapsody client is far more stable and responsive than Yahoo's Music Jukebox (YMJ) during my 2 years stint with them. In contrast, YMJ crashes often and has some weird bugs (e.g. sometimes after playing the 1st song on the playlist, it appeared to move on to the next but actually repeated the 1st one) And when it behaves normally, it feels very sluggish : slow to display contents (e.g. contents on portable devices, artist/album/playlist pages) BTW, unlike Rhapsody, it does not support Windows 2000. (It used to. I wonder why it does not anymore)

The user experience for transferring songs also leaves a lot to be desired. First of all, just like Napster, it is a very slow process, probably due to the overhead of handling DRM. For example, transferring ~720Mb (~100 songs) of music to my Samsung Yepp player took almost an hour! So this is more suitable to be performed in "batch" mode (i.e. before I go to bed!) However, the software is not really well suited to run in this mode either. Let's say I dragged a list of 100 songs to a portable player, the following happens:
Phase 1: it will try to download the 100 songs from its server to my PC
Phase 2: it will try to copy the songs from my PC to the portable.
During Phase 1, if it encounters a previously downloaded song, it will pop up a message and ask if I want to re-download. It will sit there and do nothing until I respond! (What it should have done is comparing the checksum of the local and remote file to determine whether re-downloading is necessary!)
Before Phase 2 begins, if it encouters any error during Phase 1, it will pop up a message saying there were errors. Again, it will not do anything until I acknowledge!

Nevertheless, besides being less expensive, it does have its virtues:
1) higher bit rate: I believe Rhapsody serves music at 160kbps while Yahoo does 192! (I will have to perform some serious A/B testing to tell if the higher bit rate translates to higher sound quality though)
2) better recommendations: I praised Napster for this. Yahoo is also superior to Rhapsody in this regard. My rating of artists/songs/albums/genres affects Yahoo's recommendation. And I could break it down by genre so I could build playlist that have exactly the right balance of different genres. (I know this is weird but sometimes I do insist on 40% jazz, 40% classical and 20% metal!) Unfortunately, Yahoo did not take it to the next level, i.e., utilizing recommendation to enhance portable music experience. What it should have done is supporting smart playlists determined by genre or similar artists, when the songs were played last time and the total size. And it should allow "real" sychronization of such playlists to portables(i.e., keep songs on the player and in the playlist, remove the rest and finally add missing ones) The current so-called sychronization barks when there is not enough space on the player. Also, I couldn't rate music on my portable and "feed" the ratings back to YMJ. I guess it is challenging to support such feature across many players from different manufacturers, unlike Apple only needs to deal with iPods (and iPhones now)

Finally, even though it does not show on Yahoo's compatibility list, I am able to transfer and listen on my Dell Axim x30 (running Windows Mobile 2003 SE) The transfer speed is even worse than my Yepp though. (It probably has to do with Axim's SD card hardware) What a pleasant surprise!

Service: Goodbye Rhapsody. Hello Yahoo Music

I've been a subscriber of Real Rhapsody ever since I started this blog but all good things come to an end. It's time for me to cancel my subscription. There was only one reason: rate hike. I have been paying the quarterly rate of $24.95 and now Real has raised it to $34.99.

And the cancellation experience was not without pain: I had to call them (couldn't do this online) and was put on hold for 20 mins until I was able to talk to a customer service rep, who kept trying to convince me to stay with reasons like it is the first time in six years that they have increased the price of Rhapsody (which I don't really care) I had to be very firm about the cancellation to finally get it cancelled. And I will check my credit card bill very carefully for sure.

Stay tuned for my review of Yahoo Music Unlimited!

Service: Rhapsody - What have they added in the past 2 years?

I'm sure they have added a lot of new albums, i.e, those release during the past 2 years. How about old stuff? Let's compare my sampling of what is available on Rhapsody and what is not by using mostly nonmainstream artists/albums from my first review :

Punk: Now become Available	Punk: Still Unavailable
Minor Threat, Punk Goes Metal
Jazz: Now become Available	Jazz: Still Unavailable
David Murray (2 albums only)	Maria Schneider
Metal: Now become Available	Metal: Still Unavailable
Shadows Fall (1 old album only) Smashing Pumpkins	Tool, John 5, Exodus, Impaled, Metal Massacre
Classic rock: Now become Available	Classic rock: Still Unavailable
	Led Zeppelin, Beatles

Decent improvement. Agreed?

Album: Strange As Angels - A Tribute to The Cure

I always want to cover The Cure's tunes with my band but it never happened so I have to listened to others' cover versions. As a metal fan, I found Chimaira's rendition of Fascination Street indeed fascinating. This album is another interesting one and they all play in the punk/post-punk style.

Show: The Haunted/Dark Tranquillity

Venue: The Slim's, San Francisco

This was the first metal show I went to since 2001 (the last one was Pantera's Reinventing the Steel tour, with Morbid Angel and Static-X as supporting acts)

To be honest, I'm not familiar with these 2 bands at all. I learned about them from my new bandmates and we're covering their songs.

Dark Tanquillity is one of the best representatives of the "Gothenburg sound", i.e., the melodic death metal from Scandinavia. Their music striked the right balance between power and complexity, which was showcased perfectly in this show. What interested me the most was the vocalist looked and sounded very polite, which I totally didn't expect listening to his vocal. He kept asking if the crowd would mind hearing songs from their new albums. Of course I didn't mind since the new songs were pretty good. Another interesting thing was he joked about whoever have listened to those songs prior to the show gotta be pirate. However, he didn't show strong objection at all. I guess it's because Sweden is one of the more liberal place as far as P2P is concerned. Also, the band makes most money from touring. P2P is more of a problem for the record company.

Finally, a few words about the headliner, The Haunted: I didn't have too high an expectation about them since some of their songs I listened before sound kinda pop-ish or "soft" (more clean vocal, more metalcore-like than melo. death) And they indeed played a few "soft" ones at the show. However, the rest are better than I expected. The vocalist, Peter Dolving, shared some of his strong feelings against right-wing Christian and wars during the show. Check out his blog.

Album: This Is Metal's Most Covered Moments Of The '80s

Artist: Testament & Jake E. Lee
Track: Seek And Destroy (Rhapsody Link)

As I huge fan of Testament, I tend to think that I've heard of every song they played, but obviously not this one, which I discovered today! There are 3 reasons for me to like this song:
1) It's by Testament!
2) It's from the early days of Metallica, which did not suck (yet)
3) Jake E. Lee played guitar on this. He was Ozzy Osbourne's former guitarist. Typical 80's guitar hero style!


Artist: Ratt, Gilby Clarke and L.A. Guns
Track: Sweet Child O' Mine (Rhapsody Link)

This is another interesting track, with former members of Guns N' Roses covering GNR's most famous song.

Opinion: Can I find music I like on radio anymore?

Inspired by the story about WBEZ dropping jazz, I'm curious if I could still find music I like on air anymore. Turns out it is not that bad here in SF Bay Area.

On FM 90.5 KSJS, down in San Jose, there is a metal show "The Splatter Platter", from Tuesdays 10am-2pm. Check out its playlist. Very heavy stuff.

And FM 91.5 KKUP plays some blues and jazz. (Interesting story: a friend's friend played on this station during the blues marathon and that's how I knew about the station. The other day I was looking for it again but forgot the frequency and accidentally tuned into the above metal show on 90.5!)

And finally, in search of the great and probably non-existent jazz podcast that's supposed to displace jazz radio all over the country, I found Redjazz. The interesting thing is that it is broadcasted over the air on AM 1550 KYCY, the so-called "Open Source Radio."

As good as it is, there's no way it could replace the 24/7 jazz offerred by the local radio station KCSM. Here is the deal: if you could find me a daily podcast with 2 solid hours of jazz and classical music, I'll stop argue with you that jazz and classical are hogging public radio and should be taken off air.

Service: Jazz Radio on WBEZ

From this article:
"A Station Research Group multiyear study from 1999 through 2004 showed that of public radio's primary formats, jazz stations had the lowest average loyalty and lowest average time spent listening. The same study showed that the most dramatic audience growth came from all-news stations."

So, Chicago's radio station WBEZ replacing jazz programming by news seems like a very logical choice. It's sad news to jazz lover like myself though.

The same article also mentioned that iPod's popularity is another contributing factor to this decision, i.e., people'd rather listen to jazz on their own iPod than to radio. I'm not too sure about this one though. I recall there's something hugely popular before iPod and it's called Walkman.

[Update: apparently a lot of people care and discussed this topic]

Podcast: The Roadhouse

The name of this podcast is probably inspired by the song "Roadhouse Blues" and it is indeed a podcast about blues music. I recommend it because it strikes a good balance between well-known and lesser-known artists.

Here are links to its website and its podcast feed in case you want to use it with a Podcast client.

Service: XM Liquid Metal is BACK!

This is kinda old news. XM has put Liquid Metal back on air last month after about a year of hiatus (it was available online only during that period.) Hurray! I guess XM heard too many metal fans bitched about it. Power to the people! (well, power to metal fans actually)

What does it mean to me since I wasn't a subscriber of XM? I am a Directv customer and Directv switched their music provider from Music Choice to XM last year. Music Choice has fairly decent metal programming. When I heard that Music Choice's Metal channel would be replaced by XM's Squizz channel. I thought WTF 'coz Squizz is more of an alt. rock station and that's when I realized Liquid Metal was canned.

Now I'm one happy Liquid Metal listener rocking to "Are You Dead Yet?" by Children of Bodom!

Service: My experience with Napster-To-Go, part 2

If we take the To-Go portion out of equation, how does Napster do in general?

Let me start with its weaknesses:
1) Poor selection compared to Rhapsody in the genres I like (jazz, blues, classical, metal) Lots of artists have none or only few songs available. For example, Jimmy Bruno and Jimmy Raney aren't exactly household names but they are well represented on Rhapsody, not on Napster though.

2) Poor user interface: it just ain't user friendly. For example, on some artist's page, the top pane (list of album) is too big and makes the bottom pane (list of song) too small. Users like me are more interested in the bottom pane, which allows me to pick songs to download. Another examples are cryptic radio station names like "Crossroads." You would never know if you're not a blues fan already. Doesn't it discourage users to explore music they are not familiar with?

3) Poor classification/information:
For example, "Top albums" of Blues are Confessions by Usher and #1 by Destiny's Child!
And there is no consistency: following a certain navigation path you may see John Coltrane filed under Blues. Everytime I click on Top Artists under Blues I see a different list. Sometimes the album has a "download album" link next to it but I found that even if it doesn't say so, songs from the album might still be available for download when I click the album to drill down.

Nevertheless, it does have some nice features:
1) its radio feature actually generates playlists instead of streaming. Why is this a good feature? It allows listener to keep a record of what has been played so that (s)he could download all or some of them in a shot later on.

2) In addition to the "radio station" Napster created for every user, you could build custom station based on all songs in your library or your current playlist. This is more flexible than the more common way of setting up custom station based on artists/genre.

3) This is just me being nostalgic: the download window really reminds me of the good old days of the original Napster :P

The verdict? I don't think I'd switch to Napster since it charges the same as Rhapsody (and more than Yahoo) I do hope Napster will improve 'coz more competition in the digital music business could only be a good thing for consumers like myself.

Service: My experience with Napster-To-Go, part 1

Almost a year after last time I wrote about Napster-To-Go, I finally get to try it out (free trial of course) with my newly acquired Sandisk Sansa m240, one of the cheapest PlaysForSure Subscription compatible player out there. (Sidenote: I bet a lot of people would be surprised that Sandisk is No.2 in US MP3 player market They did it by building solid and competitively priced products instead of hype. I think there's something to learn from their approach.)

Remember I wrote the service sounded exciting? I still agree with that, but the keyword is the quantifier: "theoretically." Practically speaking, I ran into these problems:
1) sometimes I got errors for no explanation, during downloading of songs to my computer or transferring to the player.
2) songs are transferred to the player very slowly, much slower than copying DRM-less MP3s using Windows Explorer. I bet the overhead for handling the DRM (digital right management, or copy protection in layperson's term) is pretty big.
3) the Napster client cannot tell what is loaded on my player consistently.

To summarize, this is the exact opposite of good end-to-end experience like what you get from iPod + iTunes I am not sure if these problems are Napster only or it is universal across all PlaysForSure Subscription services (i.e., Napster, Rhapsody and Yahoo Music Unlimited) since I haven't tried To-Go with others. (In other words, how much could they blame on Microsoft, the vendor of PlaysForSure DRM technology?) In any case, simply copying iTunes' look and feel into Napster most likely cannot make it happen.

In the next part of this series, I'll compare the non-To-Go portion of Napster with Rhapsody.

Artist: The Rolling Stones

When I told my dad the Super Bowl performance will be broadcasted with a delay just in case they need to edit out improper scenes, in light of the now infamous wardrobe malfunction fiasco back in 2004, my dad asked what improper thing the Stones could do? I said maybe Mick Jagger might drop his pants.

Well, it turned out the Stones' performance was indeed censored, not for Jagger's pants though. The word "come" in the line "you make a dead man come" from "Start Me Up" and the word "cocks" in their new song "Rough Justice" were silenced. No wonder Jagger's singing sounded so weird to me. I wouldn't believe Jagger would choke for such a high-profile performance especially given the amount of "practice" they got from their extensive touring schedule.

I think this is really lame but that's just another indicator that America is ruled by ultraconservatives. Their mind was stucked in 1967, when the Stones' lyric was censored on the Ed Sullivan shows back then.

Podcast: Metal Injection Guerilla Radio

IMO Metal Injection has become a force to be reckoned with in the area of metal media. Its Guerilla Radio is a group of podcasts that gear towards different sub-genre of metal. My favorites are the Entropy League and MSRCast, both of them are mentioned in this blog before and just recently joined force with Metal Injection.

In addition to these 2, Dead Zone is growing on me too. If there's a podcast episode that I wanna listen to over and over again, this one for melodic death metal gotta be it. Prior to this my only exposure to melodic death was pretty much limited to Children of Bodom. The bands on this podcast might not be as famous but are equally awesome. BTW, I think the term melodic death is kind of a misnomer. Death metal as it was played by its forefathers like Death and Obituary sounded quite melodic to me! In any case, the return to more emphasis on good guitar playing (especially solo!) is definitely a direction I'm glad to see.

Service: Cellphone music download

For those who think it's outrageous to pay $2.5 per track to download music to your cell phone from your carrier, you haven't seen nothing yet!

According to Next Magazine in Hong Kong, a Hong Kong 3G service provider, 3, is providing a music service that allows you to listen to music 10 hours per month for a promotional rate of $2.3 (~HK$18) Sound like a good deal huh? Here's the catch: each song you download costs $1.15 (~HK$9)!

This is what I call greediness with a capital G!

Interview: Rob Glaser of RealNetworks

Check out this interesting interview of Mr. Glaser by EnGadget. Not that I'm a big fan of Real (in fact, I think most people became haters of company X whenever they become a customer of X these days. And I'm a subscriber of Real Rhapsody) but I think he made some very good points about the current state of digital music market. His takes on the virtues and shortfalls of Apple's approach (with iPods and iTunes) are fairly accurate and impartial IMHO.

One key point he made is the need to have a "good end to end experience" from the music service provider all the way to the device, which Apple did very well with iPod + iTunes. Judging from all those complaints on their message board regarding the latest version of Rhapsody (3.1) not working properly, I think Real really needs to work hard in this department.

Finally, regarding the web interface (Rhapsody.com) that he plugged during the interview, I'm happy that I could finally listen to Rhapsody on my iBook without using it as a terminal to a PC. Check out a detailed review by the Digital Music Weblog. I came to a similar conclusion: this interface needs lots of improvements (IMHO not a version 1.0 product as Mr. Glaser touted) My particular gripes are:
1) There is no way to reorder tracks in the client's current playlist.
2) I cannot cue songs to the current playlist without the player switching to play the new songs.
3) Dunno if it's just my iBook: sometimes the player window opens but sits idle without playing anything I asked it to play.

In any case, Mr. Glaser is definitely correct that the subscription model is a sound one. Just check out the math: At my peak I used to buy 50 new CDs a year. It has gradually gone down to ~25 CDs. You know how much I buy this year? 0. I don't need new CDs anymore as I got my fix from Rhapsody, which I spend $100 for a year of subscription. For serious music fan like you (if you read this blog then your are) and me, subscription IS a good deal.

On a related note, the latest stat from music industry says sales of CD is down by 8% in the past year. (Well, in my case it is down by 100%) I bet they won't be able to make it up by just sitting there and sending out their army of lawyers. The days of CDs being cash cows are over. Wake up and embrace digital music! These guys could surely use some advices from Mr. Glaser.

Service: Rhapsody

While we're on the topic of RealNetworks, I've got some advices for Mr. Glaser too.

He mentioned the editorial on Rhapsody as a differentiating feature from his competitors in the subscription market. I beg to differ. Artist info (incl. bio/discography/influences/similar artists) is everywhere on the web (Google, Yahoo and Wikipedia) What Rhapsody really need is a better recommendation engine and better personalization. It is sitting on a "gold mine" of user preferences (forget about 1-5 star ratings of songs. If I listen to the same song over and over, 5 stars. If I skip the song 10 seconds into it, 0 star. It should be that simple. Also, asking me to click on other people's playlist is not good enough. Sometimes people prefer auto-pilot) If they use it for social networking/correlation, they'll have one awesome recommendation feature. It might be easier just go out and buy a last.fm/Audioscrobbler.

Service: last.fm

Speaking of last.fm, it is the only free online music streaming service that I'm satisfied with as far as classical music is concerned. You just need to open an acct (free), download its player, type in a composer's name, say Mahler, and you're going to hear a whole bunch of late 19th century/romantic music, including those from Mahler and similar composers. It figures out what to play using social networking/correlation.

Of course, it works with other music genres too.

Artist: Death (Remembering Chuck Schuldiner)

Can't believe it has been 4 years since Chuck passed away!

Norway's Imhotep magazine interviewed a few current metal musicians for their thoughts about Death.

Track: RIAA Phone Call

If you're a music fan, you probably know all the bad deeds done by RIAA and I don't need to elaborate. This is a hilarious song (link) Please also check out the prank they pulled on RIAA.

Podcast: more Metal

MSRCast
This is recommended by The Entropy League, which I menitoned last time. The list of bands look impressive, right? Contrary to what the name stands for, Mainstream Resistance, it actually features some mainstream (in the metal circle) bands, i.e., the ones you might hear on metal TV shows like Metal Asylum or Headbanger's Ball, but of course it still beats mainstream radio. (BTW, if you visit www.msrcast.com instead of the above link, it might appear they have 5 episodes and no more new ones but that's not the case. )

Curt Shaw's Metal Show
It features some awesome unsigned local bands that you might have never heard of elsewhere.

The Entropy League
Yes, I have already recommended them before. The above links to their latest episode, which I find extremely interesting, as it played all covers. You'll hear lots of old school metal (or non-metal) being reinterpreted by the new generation.

Podcast: Jazz, classical and more

In my previous post I've recommended a podcast for metal.

For jazz, I enjoyed Red Raspus Radio, mainly about the Seattle jazz scene. It's a pleasant surprise that they've got some really good musicians up there.

For classical, the king of budget recordings, Naxos, has done a great job in promoting classical music once again. Check out Naxos Classical Music Spotlight

You could find both of the above podcasts at Yahoo! Podcast as well as Apple's iTunes Podcast Directory if that's how you subscribe to podcasts.

While I'm on the topic of podcast, I gotta admit I have a tendency to downplay or underestimate the usefulness of new internet paradigm. I've done it to Webmail (when Hotmail first appeared) and I did it to podcast again :P I blame it on the ineffectiveness of Podcast client/directory in sorting out the good stuff from the massive sea of podcasts. A lot of clichés about podcast still applies: like many people are still over-using sound effects (we don't need that much ECHO-ECho-echo or left-to-right panning) and most still sound like the podcaster was rambling on and on to no one but himself (or herself) Anyway, podcasting is ideal for enthusiasts of non-mainstream interests (in the case of music: jazz, metal and classical) to "spread the gospel" since the narrow audience cannot justify the use of more expensive technologies.

That said, we still need better organization/classification of Podcast, i.e., the equivalent of what Yahoo did to the early days of WWW. Podcast Alley and Yahoo! Podcast are in the right direction but still have long ways to go. For example, when I use the keywords "jazz music," I'm still getting a ton of irrelevant links.

Finally, I should probably answer the 1st question newbies would ask: "How do you listen to Podcast?" The minimal requirement is a computer that connects to the internet, preferably with broadband. Most of the Podcasts I recommend links to their website, which further link to mp3 files. You could simply right-click on your browser, download the files and listen in your favourite MP3 player. Or you could "subscribe" to the podcast so that you'll get the latest episode when it is published through podcast client software of your choice. Personally, I've tried the open source Juice Receiver before (formerly known as iPodder. BTW, the name changed because Apple didn't like the iPod part in it. I wonder why Apple has to alienate people who makes their products more popular. Maybe it has to do with the fact that your trademark will be weaken if you don't actively defend it all the time?) and I use iTunes now, just because I have iTunes installed for sync-ing with iPod already. Not that I prefer proprietary software over open source ones. For iTunes, you either find the podcast in their directory and subscribe or open the .pcast file with it. For other clients, you could specify the URL of the RSS feed of the podcast.

Now you should start enjoying the shows I recommended!

Genre: Metal (State of Metal Pt III: MOL)

Talking about Metal On-Line here.

In the old days my preferred way to read about metal was USENET newsgroups. With the ever declining signal-to-noise ratio, it's of course no longer desirable. It's ironic that the fall of metal's popularity coincided with the rise of WWW. That explains why there wasn't many must-visit websites for metal fans in the 90s, at least that's my experience. A lot of metal sites were created by amateurs/fans/students who eventually quit maintaining the sites, with the exception of BNR Metal, which is still going strong and serves as one of my favorite metal encyclopedia (BTW, I know it's kinda surprising but Wikipedia is also a good source of metal band info.)

RSS
With a resurgence in its popularity and the advent of RSS (a mechanism that make updates to websites appear on subscribers' client software automatically,) I've finally got back in touch with the world of metal again. For example, Death Metal News on Topix.net provides RSS feed (if you don't wanna install any RSS client, you could always use my.yahoo.com) Most of their feeds come from Blabbermouth.net, a metal news site provided by one of the most prolific metal label, Roadrunner records. The nice thing about it is that it also covers bands other than their own!

Online radio
You won't hear a lot of 24x7 heavy metal only radio station on the air. There's none, even in a "metal-active" area like the San Francisco bay area. Fortunately, thanks to internet, now metal fans have many choices.

First of all, major internet radio providers like AOL Radio and Yahoo Music all have 1 or more metal channels. While Yahoo Music delivers higher quality sound, AOL provides more channels, each dedicated to a sub-genre like Death Metal, Black Metal, even one for "hair"/glam/pop metal bands of the 80s! You could skip to the next songs if you don't like the current one on Yahoo though. And Yahoo do have 2 sub-genre station: Emo and Metalcore, but they're available to subscriber of Launchcast Plus only (If you use SBC Yahoo DSL, it's free)

If you wanna listen to less mainstream produced metal radio, you could find plenty of them on ShoutCast under the metal genre, for example, ChroniX Aggression, BrainGell, The Edge.

Finally, this is not free, but XM subscribers could listen to XM's Liquid Metal channel online (in fact, it's only available online but not thru satellite anymore.)

Podcast
I consider Shoutcast as the first step in the direction of liberation of radio from corporate conglomerates, giving normal people like you and me power to broadcast. All you need is setting up your PC as a Shoutcast server and play some music (or talk non-stop like a "real DJ".) Of course, you still need a high bandwidth upstream internet connection. With Podcasting, even this requirement is gone. You record your show as MP3, write an RSS XML enclosure for it, then upload to your webhost and you're done! So it's not surprising to see that lots of "niche topics", including heavy metal, get healthy podcast coverage, since it's very low cost.

Unfortunately, the proliferation of podcasts made it difficult to pick out relevant ones, let alone good ones. Podcast directories help to a certain degree but it's still a lot of trial-and-error. Or you could rely on word-of-mouth, like my recommendation of The Entropy League. Also, don't miss the accompanying blog: Be Metal

Hope you enjoy this 3 part series about the current state of Metal!

[Update: I just heard Metallica's "Damage Case" played on Yahoo! LaunchCast Radio and they bleeped out the swearing by Hetfield. Lame Lame Lame. Thumbs down from me.]

Genre: Metal (State of Metal Pt II: MTV)

Well, that's Metal TV I'm talking about.

All metal fans from the 80's in the States should remember "Headbanger's Ball," the all metal video show aired on MTV every Saturday night. And of course they remembered when the show was cancelled: after grunge "took over the world" (Hey, even the VJ Ricki Rachtman played the videos of "Smell Like Teen Spirit" and "Alive" during the dying days of the show!)

For the longest time there were next to zero coverage of metal on TV, let alone shows dedicated to metal. But slowly metal found its way back to the spotlight. First, Uranium, a 30-minute metal show hosted by charismatic VJ Juliya, appeared on MuchMusic (now Fuse TV) channel. Fuse TV also has a daily metal show named "Metal Asylum." If there's anything MTV knows how to do well, it's jumping on bandwagon. They brought back "Headbanger's Ball" on MTV2 at Saturday night, started May 10 2003. Many saw that move symbolized that "metal is back," officially! In addition, MTV's sister channel VH1 Classic has Metal Mania, which focus on mostly 80s and early 90s "old school" stuff.

These shows have become one of my major source of discovering new metal acts. That's how I learned about exciting bands like Arch Enemy and Shadows Fall. What are my other sources? Stay tuned and read the next and final episode of this State of Metal series.

Genre: Metal (State of Metal Pt I: Trends and bands)

For those who said metal was dead: you couldn't be more wrong. Not only it's alive and kicking ass, I'd say it's healthier than ever. A lot of fans restarted listening again. That's what my bandmate in HK and I chatted about the other day. The first band I mentioned was of course System of a Down (see my previous post)

Other bands I wanna recommend are:
- Trivium: a promising young band with a sound that reminds me of the great tradition of 90's thrash metal, i.e., Metallica and Testament.
- Children of Bodom: they have been around but unlike most bands started around the same time, their guitarists know how to play the instrument. And their keyboard doesn't sound lame either.
- Lamb of God: arguably the "leader" of the current thrash/death metal generation.
- Arch Enemy: gotta root for a real metal band fronted by a lady (Angela Gossow)

As far as trends are concerned, metal is cyclical just like any other art form. Nu metal doesn't seem as popular lately. Linkin Park hasn't release any new stuff for some time. Even Limp Bizkit doesn't generate lots of headlines anymore. However, Korn
and Slipknot still have a heavy presence in my playlists. The former has released a greatest hits while the latter has a live double album. Both serve as good introductions to their best stuff.

On the other hand, lots of late 80 early 90 thrash/death metal bands are making comeback, like Obituary, Death Angel, Exodus, and Nuclear Assault. All of them haven't release any new stuff in years! Their new stuff may not be as good as their old one but I'd still be glad to listen to them.

Track: Hypnotize

Artist: System Of A Down

System of A Down is the type of band that gives music lovers like me reasons to listen to today's new music. It doesn't even matter if I like all of their music (see my previous post.)

For some reason I keep writing about music with political messages and it's another one of them: (copied from this link )
[Verse 1]
Why don't you ask the kids at Tiananmen Square
Was fashion the reason why they were there?
They disguise it, hypnotize it
Television made you buy it"

[Verse 2]
She's scared that I will take her away from there
Dreams that her country left with no one there
Mesmerize the simple minded
Propaganda leaves us blinded

[Chorus]
I'm just sitting in my car and waiting for my girl

While the verses are self-explanatory, the chorus is not as obvious. I googled a bit and found the band mentioned in an interview that it refers to a "common" person. I guess it means a person could be doing his everyday activities while ugly politics happen elsewhere. Whether one affect the other or not is up to your interpretation.

Talking about their political lyric, I must mentioned this from "B.Y.O.B":
"Why don't presidents fight the war?
Why do they always send the poor?"

Rhapsody Link

Album: Not in Our Name

Artist: Charlie Haden and Liberation Music Orchestra

This is the 2nd consecutive post about politics-inspired music. What a coincidence!

I wrote about Charlie Haden and Liberation Music Orchestra before and mentioned this band only releases new music during a Republican administration Well, they did it again. With songs named "This is Not America", "Blue Anthem"... you would easily know how much they approve of what George W. Bush have done (his so-called anti-terrorism policy and the war on Iraq.)

I'll refer you all to this excellent review of the album at AllAboutJazz: "The title 'Not In Our Name' comes from the window posters displayed by householders throughout Europe in protest at the US-led invasion and occupation of Iraq—Haden noticed the posters while on tour in '03."

Rhapsody Link

Track: Have a Nice Day

Artist: Bon Jovi
Album: Have a Nice Day

The song opens with "Why, you wanna tell me how to live my life?
Who are you to tell me if it's black or white?"

Who is Jon Bon Jovi so angry at? None other than our prez George W. Bush! It's not surprising that such lyric was inspired by George W.'s re-election last year.

To be honest, music-wise this is no "You Give Love a Bad Name" or "Livin' like a Prayer" but I always give credits to songs with messages. See how the song ends:
"When The world keeps trying, to drag me down,
I've gotta raise my hands, gonna stand my ground.
Well I say, Have A Nice Day."

We could all use more optimism here in the States after the recent disastrous events.

Rhapsody link

Playlist: The Jazz Side of George Benson

This is a playlist created by fellow Rhapsody listener Nick Dedina.

Most jazz fans have heard of jazz guitarist George Benson, who is famous for selling out to the pop crowd. However, I'm not sure most jazz fans have listen to his "pre-sold-out" works. I, for one, haven't. And I have been very curious.

Now mystery solved thanks to Nick. I guess it's not all bad for Benson to sell out. After all, he got compared to Wes Montgomery instead of being known as yet another very good jazz guitarist.

Rhapsody Link

Track: George Bush Doesn’t Care About Black People

Artist: The Legendary K.O.

The title says it all.

This is by now a famous quote from hip-hop artist Kanye West, expressing his view on the president's poor response to the disasters caused by Hurricane Katrina.

You could check out the lyric here

Free download link

Track: Condor Man

Artist: Akira Tana
Album: Moon over the world
Label/Catalog#: SONS OF SOUND/70018

This is one of those truly amazing musical moment: I was casually listening to the Jazz channel on Music Choice (the service bundled with Directv) and the familiar melody of a theme song from a Hong Kong kung fu TV series appeared which totally caught me off guard. I immediately paid closer attention and reconfirmed that I haven't mistaken. I was even more surprised when I saw the artist is a Japanese! Googled the name and found out he actually collaborated with Hong Kong jazz pianist Ted Lo so suddenly it all makes sense.

Ted is playing with words here: Condor Man in Chinese sounds the same as hero, which was part of the title of the kung fu series.

BTW, legendary Hong Kong singer/songwriter Sam Hui has made a parody cover version of this song. I'm actually more familiar with his version than the original. He sang about the heroics of winning the game of mahjong!

Album: The Gathering

Artist: Geri Allen

Personally I think Geri Allen's work as a leader deserves more praises and attentions than it does now. "The Life Of A Song" released last year was a great example. In fact it was my top jazz CD of 2004.

Her only album on Rhapsody is "The Gathering" from 1998, which was equally interesting. These 2 tracks (Rhapsody Link) are especially recommended as they feature Vernon Reid (ex-guitarist of hard rock band Living Colour)

Track: The Crunge

Artist: Joshua Redman Elastic Band
Album: Momentum

You might not find anything special about this track but there are 2 reasons I write about it: 1) it is a Led Zeppelin cover, 2) Flea from Red Hot Chilli Pepper plays bass on it. A lot of bass players, including myself, idolize Flea.

BTW, Joshua Redman's first Elastic band was an organ trio. This one is different: besides the trio, it also features additional musicians like guitarist Kurt Rosenwinkel, Peter Bernstein, vibist Stefon Harris, trumpeter Nicholas Payton, appearing on different tracks. (Flea also played on "Blowing Changes" and "Double Jeopardy") I think this all-star lineup is appealing enough to give it a listen!

Rhapsody Link

Track: Shoots and Ladders

Artist: Korn

This song's lyric comes from many well-known nursery rhymes, e.g. Mary has a little lamb, London Bridge, Ring around the rosie...

The last one is not well-known to me though 'coz I just learned it from my daughter's swimming class.

You might have read that "Ring around the rosie" is from the Europe Middle Age plague
era, i.e., many died of the "black death disease" transmitted by rats. Scary huh?

"Shoots and Ladders" is about the dark origin of nursery rhymes. I think they want to ridicule that we teach such creepy songs to kids.

However, the Urban Legend page disputed the association of "Ring around the rosy" with the plague though.

Rhapsody Link

Album: Frozen in Time

Track: Stand Alone
Artist: Obituary

"Frozen in Time" is indeed a well-suited title. Listening to this album will certainly reminds you of the glorious day of death metal, which was more than 10 years ago! In fact, this is the 1st studio album by Obituary since their last released 8 years ago. The track "Stand Alone" impressed me the most on this album in terms of guitar work. Of course I still miss the great guitar solo on "Cause of Death," Obituary's 2nd album, featuring James "the god of death metal guitar" Murphy.

Rhapsody Link

Book: Sonic Boom

Author: John Alderman
I've just finished reading Sonic Boom: Napster, MP3 and the new Pioneers of music It is about the history of digital music from its infancy in the early 90s to the explosion of popularity of MP3 in 2000. This book does a good job covering almost everything in that decade from the most well-known companies like MP3.com, Real Network, and of course Napster, to the lesser-known ones, like Liquid Audio, Listen.com, Internet Underground Music Archive, Riffage.com, Nullsoft (the maker of Winamp, which is certainly more famous than the company itself) It ends with the ruling on the Napster case, which effectively shutdown the 1st generation Peer-to-peer music file sharing service.

I consider myself a close follower of the development of digital music and thus have a pretty good idea about what these major players did. However, this book went into much deeper levels of details about the stories and people behind the companies. A very interesting read I must say.

After reading this book, which was published in 2001 (that's why I picked it up dirt cheap at a discount bookstore,) the first thing came to my mind was that it would have a very interesting sequel, with developments after 2001, covering Apple's iPod and iTunes Music Store, Rhapsody (a music streaming service offered by Listen.com and later sold to Real Networks along with the company), the 2nd incarnation of Napster (the name was bought by Roxio, which sold off its software business, best known for its CD-burning software, and renamed itself to Napster!) and the Grokster ruling (the highest-profile case against P2P company after Napster)

Readers of this book would all agree that there is no way record companies could turn back the clock and go against the digital music revolution. Looks like some record companies are slowly but finally getting it. Here is a sign: Warner Music developing e-label

Howto: Listen to Rhapsody offline

The heavily promoted method is: subscribe to Rhapsody-To-Go and buy a Microsoft PlaysForSure compatible portable player (most newer non-iPod are or will be after firmware upgrade)

The (almost) unpromoted method is: subscribe to Rhapsody Unlimited and buy a notebook that runs XP. I dunno how many people went this route but I did. (Hey, that's 50% of the reason I bought a new notebook!)

Here are the steps:
0) (if you haven't done this before) Choose Tools->Authorize Computer from your Rhapsody 3.0 client
1) Add your songs to your library
2) Go to "My Library" and choose songs to be downloaded, right click your mouse and choose "Download track"
3) Now you could listen to these downloaded tracks offline (and even online as you might prefer 160KBps WMA versus streaming compressed at 128KBps)

However, like most Windows/Real software, this process might not be as trouble free as you'd hope. For me my computer tripped at Step 0! Without that step, when I tried to play a downloaded song, it showed a yellow triangle next to it, moused over the yellow triangle it said "Helix error c00d0bbe." And choosing Tools->Authorize Computer simply did nothing and the computer remained unauthorized.

I figure it probably has something to do with Microsoft's DRM (digital right management) so I opened Windows Media Player 10. It's the first time I run it (See! setting up and running Rhapsody are so high priority for me!) so I went thru some setup and it seems to have downloaded some components over the internet. Looks like that's the missing piece that prevented me from authorizing the computer as I was able to complete Step 0 afterwards (The choice became "Deauthorize computer" afterwards)

BTW, I submitted this issue to Rhapsody's support 4 hours ago, before I figured this out myself. No response yet. Well, the Windows/Real combination is certainly not for the computer skill challenge crowd. My money advice to Microsoft and companies: if you want to beat your competition (you know who, the name of that company starts with an "A" >:) you gotta make things that work smoothly, for everyone, not something that requires 2 Computer Science degrees!

Service: AOL Radio

AOL has release a beta version of its portal today, which I've been waiting for since it's announcement a couple of months ago.

Urgh...... did I say I was looking forward to something from AOL? I'm not kidding. It's because AOL has partnered with XM to create their radio service and offering a few dozens channels free! Even though I didn't took the plunge to XM after a free trial (read my not-so-positive review here, I won't mind having it as a backup/alternative to Rhapsody (To Real: Rhapsody went down again last night! If it doesn't improve, I'm going to take my money elsewhere. You've got competitions!)

My first impression of AOL Radio is pretty good. All of my favorite genres (metal, jazz, blues, classical) are covered. In fact, AOL Radio has a good variety of channels dedicated to the sub-genres under each main genre. IMO, they are a grade above Yahoo's free LAUNCHCast Radio, which has less variety. (If you want more, you need to pay to listen to LAUNCHCast Plus, which still covers less than AOL's) You can't skip tracks on AOL Radio like you could with Yahoo though.

AOL: even though you're not getting a lot of love from the geek land. You do get some from Bigland. It's free! Enuff said.

Artist: 6

Album: 6
Track: Angel

Looks like using numbers as names has become a popular practice for metal musicians: the members in Slipknots are named by numbers. And Marilyn Manson's guitarist is John 5. Now we have a band named 6! It probably has something to do with reflecting the going-digital/people-losing-identity/faceless nature of the modern society.

Anyway, 6 is equally interesting music-wise: another good example of blending electronic and rock (think NIN.)

Rhapsody Link

Artist: Ones and Zeros

Rhapsody link: "1. Fascination Street (by the Cure) - Ones And Zeros"

This band got my attention because of this cover of my favourite song by The Cure. Their electronic hard rock rendition of Fascination Street is certainly interesting. I guess this review best describes their sound: it's like Alice in Chains meet Filters. So, you know whether it's your cup of tea, or not...

Artist: System of a Down

As my bandmate said, System of a Down is the type of band that you either like it or hate it, a lot!

It's because they have a very unique sound, as evident in their songs like "Chop Suey" and "B.Y.O.B.", which you might have heard on the radio.

If you like alt metal but hate them because of the above songs, you should check out "Suite-Pee" and "P.L.U.C.K" (Rhapsody Link)from their self-titled album. These sound more "conventional" alt metal (is this term an oxymoron?)

Track: Aisha

Artist: John Coltrane
Album: Ole Coltrane

Even though I'm a huge Coltrane fan, I gotta admit I still haven't listened to everything from his catalog as he had such a prolific career. That explains why I've not listened to this wonderful ballad before. It is certainly much less well-known than the other ballad named after a lady, Naima. (I was curious about who Aisha is. The only thing I was able to find out is this was a McCoy Tyner composition. If anyone knows more about Aisha, please update this post)

Another reason this album is so overlooked is that it was the last recording Coltrane did for Atlantic records (after Giant Step and My Favourite Thing) as he was moving to Impulse. It actually features an all-star lineup and deserved much better exposures. Here is a detailed review of the album.

Rhapsody Link

Artist: Stereomud

Track: Pain
Album: Perfect Self

I have not heard of this band before but this is one fine Alt Metal band! For some reason they're less well-known than the likes of Mudvayne and Staind. Yet another example to show that you need a lot of luck to succeed in this business.

I think bands like this must have benefited from recommendation engines of online music services like Rhapsody.

Rhapsody Link

Store: Yourmusic.com ($5.99 CD!)

Yourmusic.com sells you CD for $5.99 (free shipping too!) That's cheaper than most 2nd-hand CDs! What's the catch? Well, it sorts of work like a music club (e.g. BMG/Columbia House) yet better: You have to buy 1 every month but you get to choose the CD from their catalog for that monthly CD (unlike BMG/CH who choose for you, and charge you expensive shipping) Again, what's the catch? Well, I have to say the "catch" is that the selection is kinda limited. I "tested" it with the CDs I wrote about here and I was only able to find Bill Frissell With Dave Holland And Elvin Jones but no Matthew Shipp, no David S. Ware, no Shadows Fall, no Arch Enemy...... These are kinda not-so-mainstream anyway. I could easily find another dozen of CDs I would like to own.

Sounds tempting? (Hey, if I switch from Rhapsody to Yahoo Music, the extra few bucks I saved could be spent on this......)

Track: Part of the Queue

Artist: Oasis
Album: Don't Believe the Truth

Even though Oasis belongs to that group of bands I constantly criticize of ripping off old bands, for some reason I just like them. Their latest album doesn't seem to get as good reviews as they used to, and I tend to agree, but this is one of the better songs on the album. Ironically, I'm working on a queue processor right now! What a coincidence!

Rhapsody Link

Album: Dreamland

Rhapsody Link: "1. Hey Joe - Robert Plant
2. One More Cup Of Coffee - Robert Plant"

I am not sure how many classic rock fan has followed Robert Plant's career from the Led Zeppelin era to his solo days. I'm certainly not one of them. In fact, I just "discovered" this all-cover album after I read a review of his latest one, "Mighty Rearranger."

Although Plant's "One More Cup of Coffee" retained a lot of the arrangement from Bob Dylan's version, it sounded as if it could have been Plant's own song. That's surprising. On the other hand, this version of "Hey Joe" is definitely very different from Hendrix's. What is interesting is that Jimi's most well-known cover is probably Bob Dylan's "All Along the Watchtower" These three songs form a full circle, cover-to-covered!

Album: Coverkill

Rhapsody Link: "1. No Feelings - Overkill"

Metal "historian" would tell you thrash metal is heavily influenced by punk. You might not hear it immediately but you could definitely tell when Megadeth and Overkill were covering Sex Pistol's songs.

BTW, clever name of the album!

Album: Bill Frisell with Dave Holland and Elvin Jones

Rhapsody Link: "1. Outlaws - Bill Frisell"

Drummer Elvin Jones is best known for his polyrhythmic drum work as a member of John Coltrane Quartet. Bassist Dave Holland, well, is known for his versatility, well fit in small combo or big band or any setting you could think of. Guitarist Bill Frisell has a unique country/blues rooted sound. The three of them playing together? A lot of interesting chemistry is guaranteed.

Album: Quintessence Volume 2

Rhapsody Link: "1. We'll Be Together Again - The Stan Gets Quartet With Chet Baker"

If there is a "sound" that could make people "fall in love too easily" (pun intended,) it gotta be from Stan Getz's saxophone. Ballad like this is his forte.

Album: Crazy People Music

Rhapsody Link: "1. Spartacus - Branford Marsalis"

Maybe it's just me. I always feel that Branford is a bit undervalued as a Post-bop saxophonist. Probably he got "tainted" by his pop music side projects. :P I first listened to his album "Requiem" from 1999 and was very impressed but he has been playing awesome Post-bop way before that, for example, "Crazy People Music" was from 1990.

Album: Back From The Dead

Rhapsody link: "1. Bullituary - (remix) - Obituary"

Althought they're not the first band that do hip-hop/metal crossover, doing it in 1997 still shows Obituary was a band with vision. That's 7 years before Jay-Z/Linkin Park.