Free Digital Sheet Music

This is way cool. Cliff Bolling is going through his entire collection of rare 78 records and putting them online. The recordings are done with no enhancement. But what a treasure trove of sounds. I’ve started trawling through it and found some great Hawaiian stuff. I see some country and blues artists there as well. [...]

Tune Buster is a free keyboard synthesizer for OS X, and can turn your musical USB keyboard into a complete instrument. Tune Buster is easy to use and no configuration is needed, just start the program, plug in a keyboard and play.

Different sounds can be selected by clicking the desired instrument in the popup menu. Use the arrow keys or the mouse scroll button if you have one to speed up the selection process.

Tune Buster can be made invisible by closing the main window, and the keyboard will still play.

I came across an article in The New Republic that attempts to assess the legacy of Led Zeppelin. There are some intriguing points but David Browne fails miserably in that he all but excludes John Paul Jones as being part of the group. It seems that Zep’s musical muscle was built entirely by Plant, Page and [...]

Over the weekend I came across two interesting acts. The first is Mikelango and The Black Sea Gentlemen. I kept hearing their song A Formidable Marinade on ABC radio over the weekend. Catchy, humourously macabre Eastern European folky stuff. Check out the tunes on their myspace page. The other artist is Australian guitarist Penny Ikinger. She [...]

My obsession with Hawaiian sounds still smoulders but I’ve veered off (or got back on track) to John Fahey for a while. The main reason I’ve been learning Leo Kottke’s arrangement of Jesu and mucking about, started exploring the middle section with a little chromaticism. So I decided to listen to Fahey for some ideas [...]

HELLO. YOU MAY BE WONDERING WHY I’M WRITING IN ALL CAPS. BLOODY ANNOYING ISN’T IT? READING THE TEXT IS TIRING AND BY NOW YOU ARE THINKING I’M GOING TO ANOTHER BLOG. BUT HANG ABOUT AS THERE IS A POINT. IMAGINE IF LISTENING TO MUSIC WAS LIKE HAVING TO READ EVERYTHING IN CAPS?

Sadly an era is about to end as it seems that the humble cassette tape is headed the way of the dodo. Today’s iPodded whippersnappers may not realize but for those of a certain age, we did not have the internet or mp3 players to share music. It was via cassette tapes. There were tapes [...]

Billy Thorpe has died of a heart attack at the age of 60. Thorpie was the one that paved the way through the beer barns that allowed AC/DC, The Angels, Midnight Oil and others to thrive in the 70s and 80s. While the early 70s saw Thorpie develop a harder sound, his 60s output was [...]

That is the question after Grandmaster Flash and The Furious Five were named in the next group of inductees into the Rock’n'Roll Hall of Fame. And the answer is why not? As rock’n'roll formed from a melange of styles, rap has been an influence on rock. The Chilli Peppers, Faith No More and Rage Against [...]

As an unreconstructed antediluvian rock’n'rolla who revels in the disgusting stink of an electric guitar, the music of the late James Brown was always utterly captivating and exciting. I may not be able to bust any type of move on a dance floor but the funky rhythms always found a way to my toes if [...]