Music Widget

Daisy Rock Guitars will be unveiling their hand-crafted, American-made Rock Candy “Pink Label” guitar at the 2007 Winter NAMM show.

Designed by Tish Ciravolo, Ron Manus, and built by master craftsman and world-renowned guitar luthier John Carruthers, the Rock Candy Pink Label Guitar is the first U.S.A.-made model to be released by Daisy Rock Guitars, the original “Girl-Guitar” company. This top-of-the-line, professional quality instrument features an ultra lightweight mahogany body, and a 24¾” scale bolt-on slim-profile mahogany neck with 22 medium frets, a rosewood fingerboard, and star inlays. The slimmer neck and lightweight design makes the guitar easier and more comfortable for girls to play.

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I’ve just read about Chord Pickout PC software that claims to be able to extract chords from an MP3 or WAV audio file of a song, using artificial intelligence.

It comes as an EXE file (so it’s PC only unless you have PC emulation on your Mac):

“All you have to do is to load a media file (wav or mp3) and click a button. Chord Pickout will transcribe the music and write down the recognized chords. The process is fully automated.

The best in Chord Pickout is that it has been designed with the ordinary user in mind, the one who doesn’t have perfect pitch and wants to play popular songs. With a little music knowledge and this program, you can easily figure out any song. Chord Pickout lets you recognize chords, write them down, edit chords and lyrics added and also print them.”

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Getting children interested in producing and interacting with music from a young age is a great aim, and Leapfrog are helping parents do just that with some of their Learn & Groove range of toys for babies, toddlers and children.

The Learn & Groove Alphabet Drum is aimed at aimed at 6-36 month old babies/toddlers.

Each tap introduces baby to the alphabet in both English and Spanish, which helps promote an understanding of the building blocks of language. Music Play mode lets baby explore and create music, which encourages creative interaction and open-ended play. Engaging music and interactive play modes encourage baby to tap, crawl and dance, which helps develop gross motor skills.

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Getting children interested in producing and interacting with music from a young age is a great aim, and Leapfrog are helping parents do just that with some of their Learn & Groove range of toys for babies, toddlers and children.

The Learn & Groove Counting Maracas are aimed at aimed at 6-36 month old babies/toddlers.

The Music Play mode lets baby explore and create music, encouraging creative interaction and open-ended play. Each shake introduces baby to counting 1-10 in both English and Spanish, which helps promote an understanding of number order. Activities introduce the colors red, orange, yellow, green, blue and purple, also in both English and Spanish.

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Getting children interested in producing and interacting with music from a young age is a great aim, and Leapfrog are helping parents do just that with some of their Learn & Groove range of toys for babies, toddlers and children.

The Learn & Groove Musical Table is aimed at 6-36 month old babies/toddlers and helps to keep them entertained with 15 musical activities in both English and Spanish.

Colourful, interactive learning stations introduce early reading, math and language development skills through fun and engaging activities. Flip the centre page to Music mode and your baby will move and groove to more than 40 songs and melodies, including nursery rhymes, real instrument sounds and upbeat dance tunes.

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When i saw the picture and started reading the press release, I got quite excited about this new paperless sheet music DVD system. It looked as if it could solve some of the problems I’d been having, particularly in a performance setting, either with not having quality paper copies of all the music I use, or else having so much paper it just gets in the way.

Take a look at the picture and I think you’ll agree it looks pretty cool:

The only downside is that none of that equipment is part of the deal. What this system offers is authored DVDs of sheet music that you use with a standard DVD player and your TV. Great for instruments that can be easily moved, but what if your acoustic piano isn’t in front of the telly?

It’s supposed to eliminate the need to manually turn pages because it does it for you. That’s fine, except I was hoping that there would be some foot switch that could do it on command. No, instead, I think the FAQ sums it up best:

6. The page turns too fast.

Speed up your Tempo.

7. The page turns too slow.

Slow down your tempo.

You see what this is? It’s really just a video of music with virtual page turns! Now, I’m sure there are situations where this would be useful, but what if you play a song a couple of bpm (beats per minute) too fast or slow? You’ll get out of sync with the DVD.

It could work quite well on a laptop computer with a DVD player, but the problem still remains - the musician has no control over the speed of the song display.

There are other solutions that give the user more control, and whilst this seems like an admirable attempt at bringing music display into the 21st century, it sounds too limiting to be of use to most musicians.

I love the concept but I don’t think this solution will cut it. Take a look, though, as it might be for you.

Paperless Sheet Music web site