Pat Metheny Plays Girl From Ipanema

Sort of.

It's in there, and you can hear it, but he plays around with it quite a bit. It's still pretty but he makes it sound a little ominous as well.

Just him and a baritone guitar.



Here he is talking about his new record "What's It All About". The entire album is all other peoples tunes - Carly Simon, Beatles, Jobim - and just him and the baritone guitar and that nutty Picasso guitar contraption he plays sometimes. It looks like he is going to tour as a duo with Larry Grenadier on bass for this record so that will be a pretty amazing show if you can catch just the two of them together.

Ben Allison on NPR

Great to see bass players getting some love!

I have Ben's record with "Dragzilla" on it..I forget the name of it, but it is a great record. Check out the interview and some of his other tunes on this NPR interview.

http://www.npr.org/2011/06/11/137108909/ben-allison-personal-and-unpredictable?ps=mh_frhdl1

Herbie Hancock Using 4-Note Patterns

Remember when I said that guys really do play like this, just the good ones don't make it sound like they are playing like this?

Well, here is a transcription done by Ed Saindon and Gustavo Agatiello, two professors at Berklee and they analyze a Herbie Hancock piano solo from 1968. They made some notations on the solo transcription and everywhere they write "4NG" that means "4 Note Groupings".

Like the kind the Transmogrifier makes.

Just saying.

http://allthingsvibraphone.blogspot.com/2011/03/herbie-hancock.html

And here is another article that describes a way to use four note groups consisting of a triad plus one chromatic passing tone. So for C maj something like C,E,G and B, or C,E,G and Eb. Make some of those for different types of triads, you will hear some familiar licks I bet.

http://allthingsvibraphone.blogspot.com/2011/03/hello-guys-heres-link-to-two-articles.html

They run an excellent blog and there are a lot of other really good articles there on improvisation and plenty of things that apply to any instrument, so check it out.

Victor Runs His Rig Down

Now he could be playing a cigar box with rubber bands and it would still groove, but here is Victor Wooten running down his current rig, bass, amp and effects.

Transmogrifier 2.0 Released

Much to the chagrin of *ahem* certain people, version 2.0 of the Bergonzifying Transmogrifier has been released!

http://bassoridiculoso.net16.net/

New features include:

• Adds Treble Clef output with piano sound
• Adds support for patterns of 8th and 16th notes (in addition to the original quarters.)

Transmogrifier offline...

I guess part of having a free hosting account is that the people who run it can decide to take your server offline for 18 hours if they want...

So the Transmogrifier has been offline since yesterday at some point with a cryptic "This server is under maintenance" error message. Gee, thanks 000Webhost.com.

I get that I am not giving you money, but this is a really dirty way to entice someone to upgrade to paying, buy just taking their pages offline for a day at random.

So check back later for the new version of the Transmogrifier...I will post an explanation of the new features as soon as it it back online.

Fleas says new RHCP CD "I'm With You" set for August 30th

That's what he twitted.

Brian Beller Live Tonight On The Internet

Brian Beller's gig at the Baked Potato in L.A. is going to be broadcast tonight via the Internet. You can check it out here:

http://www.GuitarTV.com

The stream goes live at 9:30 PM PST, you can see what that means for you here:

http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/