Things We Do
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From desk to couch to piano a tablet works well. I use the 12.9 inch iPad. It has enough real estate for split screen work and most importantly it’s a good size for viewing scores from the piano bench.
A stylus is handy for making notes, marking up a score or quickly scribbling ideas on music paper.
A music notation app doesn’t need to be complicated. I use ‘Notion’ by PreSonus. It works very well and has a nice interface for searching titles and getting back to your most recent work. All the music on this website was made with Notion.
My repository for absolutely everything is the “Goodnotes” app. I have separate notebooks for completed scores, practice and transcription schedules, analysis and works in progress. You can easily drop screen shots into the app, convert them to PDFs and print them.
An Industry Transformed
Tape
When World War II ended in 1945 the Allies acquired a well guarded German invention that would transform the music industry: Magnetic Tape technology. Sounds captured on tape could easily be edited, combined and manipulated. The sound quality was excellent and composers and engineers could record much longer, more complex pieces of music.
Vinyl
Before the War, flat disc records were made using a natural resin called shellac. These records were noisy, brittle and breakable. They were meant to be played at 78 rpm. A 10 inch disc could hold about 3 minutes of music per side. During the War, supplies of shellac dried up and records began to be pressed on vinyl.
In 1948 Columbia Records released the first long-play micro groove, 33 1/3 rpm record with 23 minutes of music on each side! This 12 inch format would soon become the industry standard.
This period of sophisticated Analog technology was finally eclipsed in the 1970s by Digital Sound Encoding which would transform the industry once again.
1959
For some reason, 1959 was the year that the Jazz world exploded, sending out a galaxy of fruitful and exciting satellites. Each of these new worlds would become populated with talented practitioners and dedicated fans. Oh, and by the way, the ‘Beatles’ became a group in 1960.
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David Sharp
In 1975, I was a young man living on the west coast of British Columbia, Canada, playing piano and teaching at the Conservatory of Music. As a matter of course, we went to Jazz concerts almost every weekend. Only in retrospect did we realize how lucky we were to witness the winding down of a Golden Age of Jazz. We literally sat at the feet of some of the greatest musicians of the genre – Count Basie, Oscar Peterson, Bill Evans, Charles Mingus, Freddie Hubbard, McCoy Tyner, Pharoah Sanders, Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, Steve Lacy, Anthony Braxton and many others.
JazzforPiano.com grew out of the time we spent listening to these Jazz giants, both live and on vinyl. Now, some 45 years later, this music has proven to stand the test of time. But really, in the end, these are just…
‘Things We Like’
Songs to build a solo on.
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