Author Archives: BettyW

Cover Arrangements: Don’t Reinvent the Wheel

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If you are a musician who is hired for weddings and other events you are probably asked to cover popular songs. Many of these are so ubiquitous that charts for them are readily available in “Real Books” and “Best of the Decade” collections.

But your customers have a wide range of musical tastes. While you may charge extra for obtaining the sheet music for their request, sometimes it is either not readily available or you need it arranged for a particular combination of instruments (e.g., string quartet, violin and guitar, etc).

If your usual method of arranging a pop song is to play the mp3 or YouTube video over and over while you attempt to transcribe what’s being played, here are a couple of helpful hints:

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Seeing a Landmark If You Are Not There

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Most people know that Google Maps includes Street View – they have vehicles mounted with cameras that cruise the streets taking photos every few feet. That’s a LOT of territory to cover, so at this point a portion of these images are likely to be several years old. But unless there has been major reconstruction in an area these photos are still a good way to actually see what a location looks like before you drive there.

Last week I used this feature to find something a friend mentioned in her blog, but regretted that at the time she had not taken a photo to post. Continue reading →

Friday Faves 8/31/12

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Some items that drew my attention this week:

If you are a bicycle commuter you may have wished for a way to charge your mobile devices on the go like your hydrocarbon-burning peers – now you can, with the Ecoxgear Ecoxpower Pedal Powered Headlight + GPS/Mobile Device Charger:

 

Besides being an awesome musician with his band The Army of Broken Toys, Walter Sickert is a perhaps even more amazing artist. Check out this time-lapse video demonstrating some of the things he does to create one of his art pieces:

 

My friends Michael J. Epstein and Sophia Cacciola’s Kickstarter project has (as of today) 12 days to make another $5,700 to their minimum goal. You should donate at least a dollar  even if you don’t care for horror movies for no other reason than they are making sure to personally thank every single donor at any level, plus communicate constantly about how it’s going and what they are learning about Kickstarter in the process:

 

Somewhere in the Boston subway system this weekend look for me busking with geek guitarist extraordinaire Matthew Lister. We’ll be covering tunes like this:

Clean Up Your Old Web Presence

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While Googling recently to find performance samples for a gig application I came across something unexpected: a hit for the Sonicbids.com profile page of a former band. This surprised me because when I left the band I had turned over all of its digital assets (domain name, website, Sonicbids account, MySpace, Facebook, CD Baby, etc) to the band leader after removing my payment information from any which charged fees – and as far as I knew that person had not renewed any service that was not free.

Given that this transition had occurred a couple of years ago, I was concerned that perhaps I had not successfully removed my payment information from that Sonicbids account – I could see that it had not been updated since my last visit so I knew that the band was not currently using it. Searching my email archive I came up with the old user name and password, and logged in.

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