Tag: guitarist

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Digital Recording

Logic Pro X:
What’s New for Guitarists & Bassists?

Inside Logic Pro XAs promised: an overview of Apple’s new Logic X Pro, with an emphasis on what’s new and cool for guitarists and bassists. Lots of movies and audio!

It’s here.

This is an exciting post for me, and not just because I get a desperately needed break from Klons and Screamers. I’m thrilled to bits about Logic Pro X and MainStage 3, though I’m still wrapping me head around them. (Yeah, I worked as a developer for both products, but I didn’t get a proper program-wide view until last week’s release.)

Also, it’s my first story for Premier Guitar, whose staff I’ve just joined as a senior editor. I’m stoked because it reunites me with PG editor Shawn Hammond and senior editor Andy Ellis, both of whom I remember fondly from my Guitar Player magazine days.

There’s much talent and coolness on the staff. I’m a happy little guitar nerd. Plus, the schedule is loose enough that I can still record, perform, and continue to work with audio/software clients.

What does the gig mean for this blog? Good things. I have no plans for a major course change — there are too many things I can only cover on a non-commercial site, including some of the topics closest to my heart. Meanwhile, working with PG will keep me more up-to-date on new music, new gear, and scurrilous guitar community gossip. In some cases, though, I may link to a PG article I’ve written rather than duplicate the work here. Today, for example. 🙂

Categories
Gigs guitar Music

The Jon Herington Interview

Soloist, Sideman & Steely Dan’s Guitarist of Choice

One unexpected pleasure of my recent Marianne Faithful mini-tour was getting to hear guitarist Jon Herington at the Kate Wolf Music Festival.

Jon Herington with his Gibson ES-336. [Photo: Tony Kukulich.]
Jon Herington with his Gibson ES-336. [Photo: Tony Kukulich.]

Since 1999, Herington has been best known to audiences as Steely Dan’s touring and recording guitarist. He also performs with The Dukes of September Rhythm Review, an all-star band featuring Donald Fagen, Michael McDonald, and Boz Scaggs. And when he’s home in New York, he sings and plays with his trio, the Jon Herington Band, whose material blend bluesy raunch with sly, jazz-informed harmonies in a way that Steely Dan fans are likely to love. (Their latest release is Time on My Hands.) He’s also worked with many other jazz and pop luminaries (partial discography here).

Angel-voiced Madeleine Peyroux was onstage when out van pulled up at the festival. She was performing a set of intimate chamber jazz, complete with strings and a whisper-quiet rhythm section. We couldn’t see the band, but man, could we hear them! When the guitarist took flight with a ravishingly lyrical slide solo — in standard tuning, no less — my bandmate Rob Burger and I turned to each other. “Who is that?” I mouthed. More lovely guitar work wafted from the stage: a fluent bop solo. Sublimely understated rhythm guitar work straight out of a 1940s session. “Seriously,” I muttered. “Who is that?”

It was Jon, of course. As he left the stage, I plied him with as many questions as the quick set change permitted. How did he get those tones? How did he wring such a great slide sound from that Gibson ES-336 using conventional tuning and a standard setup? I was also curious about the demands of the Steely Dan gig, and not merely the challenge of performing a vast catalog of complex guitar parts for the notoriously demanding duo of Walter Becker and Donald Fagen. How, I wondered, would a player approach those oh-so-varied riffs and solos? How would a guitarist honor those beloved solos without making them sound canned?

I didn’t have time to ask half those questions. But Jon, a charming, articulate fellow, agreed to an email interrogation upon his return home, even though he’s busy with Steely Dan rehearsals in advance of the band’s summer tour.

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Categories
Music

Tonefiend Book Week 2013
Thursday: Musical Biographies

Monday: Theory and Technique
Tuesday: Gear
Wednesday: Repairs and DIY
Thursday: Biography
Friday: Fiction

Tonefiend Book Week is simple: I discuss a few titles I’ve found particularly enlightening, useful, or entertaining, and then you jump in and do the same. I’ve organized the days of this week by subject matter. Today’s topics are musical biographies and autobiographies.

Classic rock fans have been rewarded with many cool autobiographies in recent years: Keith Richards’ Life, Patti Smith’s Just Kids, Bob Dylan’s Chronicles, Neil Young’s Waging Heavy Peace, and Pete Townshend’s Who Am I: A Memoir, to name a few. I’ve read Richards and Smith, and I plan to read the others. Any thoughts about those and similar titles?

And then there are the great jazz autobiographies, such as Miles Davis’s Miles and Duke Ellington’s Music is My Mistress. Despite their alleged omissions and inaccuracies, both are epic accounts of epic lives dedicated to epic music. (So which is better: a lively, lying-through-the-teeth autobiography, or a dry but truthful biography?)

But my favorite musical autobiography is Hector Berlioz’s Mémoires, first issued in 1865.

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Hector Berlioz: total punk!

This, admittedly, isn’t a book for all musicians, or even most musicians. It concerns the explosive classical music scene of 19th-century Europe. If that topic holds no interest, the Mémoires probably won’t either.

But consider: Berlioz (1803-1869) is, along with Debussy, France’s greatest composer. He was a founder of Romanticism, and the first composer to fuse literature and instrumental music on a grand scale. He helped create the modern concept of orchestration and wrote the first orchestration manual. And of all the great composers, Berlioz is hands-down the best writer. He is arrogant, irreverent, sarcastic, and blisteringly funny. If you enjoy, say, the acidic humor of Mark Twain’s essays, you’ll dig Berlioz’s voice.

And like Twain, Berlioz played guitar. (More on that in a bit.)

The Mémoires drip attitude from page 1:

Needless to say, I was brought up in the Catholic faith. This charming religion (so attractive since it gave up burning people) was for seven whole years the joy of my life, and although we have long since fallen out, I have always kept the most tender memories of it.

Berlioz's music was often less than subtle. Here's how one cartoonist depicted it.
Berlioz’s music was often less than subtle. Here’s one contemporary caricature.

…and it never lets up. We meet the era’s greatest composers and performers and learn what it was like to be a professional musician in an era before recorded music. Concerts were longer. Audiences were more passionate. Wars were waged in the music journals. If you think going on tour today is demanding, imagine it in an era of unpaved roads and horse-drawn carriages.

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Thursday: Musical Biographies”
Categories
guitar Music

The Best Music Notation Software for Guitarists?

Since New Year resolutions expire at midnight, January 7th, I’m racing to realize my goal of finally becoming fluent with music notation software before the sands run out.

A new way to feign productivity in cafes!

I’d like to share some initial impressions about Notion. This isn’t a full-fledged product review — just a few thoughts about a half-dozen features I dig. (Most also apply to Notion’s sister app, Progression, which compiles all of Notion’s fretted-instrument tools, but omits the orchestral stuff. If you only plan to notate for guitar, the lower-priced Progression is probably all you need.)

1. Appropriate complexity. Two programs, Sibelius and Finale, dominate the music notation field. Both are powerful, deep programs. Most notation pros use them because they’re packed with features essential to “music engraving” (the archaic and pretentious term for the process of preparing music for publication).

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