When I was growing up, I had musical tastes decidedly out of step with my peers. I went through a year or two of listening to nothing but The Beatles, then only gospel music for a while, and loved to blast early Andrew Lloyd Weber (on vinyl) and the Star Wars soundtrack (a much-loved gift [...]
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Posted 17 March 2011
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Family
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This past Friday, I got to be a part of my Mom’s wedding. It was a remarkable and beautiful occasion — beautiful for most of the usual reasons: two people pledging themselves to love and care for each other until their bodies fail them in the task, a community of loving and supportive friends, and [...]
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Posted 30 January 2011
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Family
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One of the reasons I enjoy my good friend Barry Brake so much is his penchant for wandering off into what one of his friends calls “Barryland”, a mental space characterized by enthusiasm for and serious contemplation of things that most people would gloss over. He recently recorded what may be the first rendering of [...]
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Posted 14 December 2010
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Kathy and I attended the Pat Metheny show in Austin last night. We’d never gotten to see him before, and were familiar with very little of his music, but I was crazy to see this show once Barry Brake brought it to our attention. Why? The Orchestrion! What is the Orchestrion? It’s a huge assemblage [...]
Now that I’ve found and started to get the hang of MuseScore, I’m catching up on a bit of music stuff that’s been lurking at the back of my to-do list for a while. Next up is Will o’ the Wisp, a little Irish Jig I wrote a couple of years back. It’s a trifle, [...]
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Posted 01 February 2010
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And while I’m rambling on about music software, this is the coolest thing I’ve seen in a long while: VoiceBand is software for the iPhone that lets you do multi-track recording using your voice as a controller for various instruments. Very clever indeed.
My excellent friend Jason Young is deep into the part of his year where he writes and transcribes hundreds of pages of sheet music for Baylor University’s annual Sing event. Since he recently harassed me for not having posted anything to the weblog lately, I thought I’d take a stab at pretending to be him [...]
This morning while walking the kids to school, I had Simon & Garfunkel’s “Only Living Boy in New York” running through my head and, since I have no filter between them, out of my mouth. As I reached for the low note at the end of a phrase, it occurred to me that the range [...]
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Posted 27 October 2009
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Games
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A couple weeks ago, Kathy and I went up to Baylor University in Waco for their annual Sing event, a four-hour long song and dance revue. The show was, as always, terrific. The best part for me, however, is the post-performance debrief with my friends Jason Young and Barry Brake, who are integral parts of [...]
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Posted 28 February 2009
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Friends
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The Patio Boys, the band with which I’ve been playing for several years, has gone on hiatus for the moment, leaving a big eighth-note shaped hole in my life. I have, however, been sitting in on an Irish Session at a nearby coffee shop for a couple of months, which has led to an invitation [...]
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Posted 18 February 2009
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