Today we lost a jazz lion, Freddie Hubbard. I’ve spent countless hours digesting his music and transcribing his solos so his death deeply touches me. His art was a major influence on my jazz vocabulary. If you don’t own Speak No Evil, you’re missing out.

I took one of my handwritten transcriptions and put it in the Logic Studio score editor this afternoon to give you a taste of his genius. I hope you enjoy it.

Original Recording:

Download the transcription: Fee-Fi-Fo-Fum by Freddie Hubbard

The New York Times posted a beautiful sound collage featuring some of the musicians we lost in 2008. Just added to the list, Freddie Hubbard.

I’m not sure of the original source, but I just found these handwritten notes by Thelonious Monk in the Delicious popular feed posted by thescotter. Awesome stuff!

I have a very special holiday gift for you. Logic Studio Training is dropping the usual price of its membership from $19.95 a month to a single low payment of $19.95 for a lifetime membership! I wish I could say this price will last forever, but I can’t. So it’s important that you act now. If you have any questions, let me know in the comments.

I want to thank you for all your support and I wish you the happiest of holidays and the absolute best in 2009!

Join Logic Studio Training Today!

Chris Brogan’s article, How Alltop Powers Bloggers, has a tip to get more traffic by getting added to an Alltop topic. Go here to sign up. Maybe if enough of us submit the topic, independentmusicians, it will be recognized.

Here’s a pair of scripts to simplify posting videos to YouTube. If you’re a Mac user and post to YouTube regularly like me, you might find these time-saving scripts useful.

Calling all musicians: Join YouTube’s Symphony Orchestra. YouTube is offering musicians around the globe the opportunity to join a symphony orchestra via video through the world’s first collaborative online orchestra.

Google Friend Connect is now available and you might want to get your Google profile tidied up. You can connect to me on my sidebar.

Delicious Has A Brand New Audio Player For MP3 Bookmarks so now you should bookmark all your MP3s using delicious.

I’m accepting and sharing MP3s using SoundCloud. Anything you want me to hear? I can’t promise to comment or anything but I love to listen to new music.

Send me your track

On the music licensing front:
Songcatalog connects publishers, labels, independent artists and producers with companies looking to license music for commercial use.

WacBiz could use a website usability makeover and some proofreading, but it might be an avenue for licensing opportunities.

Rumblefish just joined YouTube. Submit you music here and you could get a piece of the action. They also place music in film, TV, video games, advertising and marketing campaigns, podcasts, video blogs, background usage, and more.

And when you need a music business contract…

Getting into the holiday spirit with Christmas Time Is Here from A Charlie Brown Christmas. Music by Vince Guaraldi.

Watch on YouTube, Vimeo, Viddler, or Google Video.

Their minds seem like clean slates upon which we can write.
—Dr. Cyril J. C. Kennedy and Dr. David Anchel on the benefits of electroshock therapy, 1948

I had just one goal—to stay alive until the next day…But it wasn’t just to survive, but to survive as me.
—Mario Villani, survivor of four years in Argentina’s torture camps

From The Shock Doctrine.

I wrote this for my nephew who is due to be born in 15 days.

Sorry.

I’ve been investing the majority of my time these days into developing Logic Studio Training. It’s a membership site devoted to helping you become a master Logic Studio user.

If you make music with Logic Studio, you’ll be interested in a tutorial I just published showing you a cool time-saving trick for your Logic Studio Templates.

Right now, we’ll give you a 7-day trial for only $1, but it will be ending this week. So if you are interested in mastering Logic Studio, you should take advantage of this time-sensitive offer now.

Let me know if you have any questions.

TextMate is my second favorite app right behind Logic Studio. I’ve written about my TextMate love affair a lot.

In this tutorial, I wanted to share how I use TextMate to write and analyze lyrics, including tips for finding the perfect rhyme and spotlighting important ideas.

Watch on Viddler, Vimeo, or YouTube.

You may also be interested in a previous tutorial on finding lyrics for your MP3s.

If I could surrender and fall into the emptiness.

This is what a lot of nervous energy sounds like two days before the election.

Watch on Vimeo, Viddler, or YouTube.

The Sermon is a blues written and recorded in 1957 by jazz legend, Jimmy Smith. I haven’t learned the complete melody yet but I thought I would take a stab at playing it from memory. After all, it’s just an F blues.

Watch on Vimeo, Viddler, or YouTube.

“… It is only the chance for us to make that change.”

This is your victory.

And I know you didn’t do this just to win an election. And I know you didn’t do it for me.

You did it because you understand the enormity of the task that lies ahead. For even as we celebrate tonight, we know the challenges that tomorrow will bring are the greatest of our lifetime — two wars, a planet in peril, the worst financial crisis in a century.

Even as we stand here tonight, we know there are brave Americans waking up in the deserts of Iraq and the mountains of Afghanistan to risk their lives for us.

There are mothers and fathers who will lie awake after the children fall asleep and wonder how they’ll make the mortgage or pay their doctors’ bills or save enough for their child’s college education.

There’s new energy to harness, new jobs to be created, new schools to build, and threats to meet, alliances to repair.

The road ahead will be long. Our climb will be steep. We may not get there in one year or even in one term. But, America, I have never been more hopeful than I am tonight that we will get there.

I promise you, we as a people will get there.

There will be setbacks and false starts. There are many who won’t agree with every decision or policy I make as president. And we know the government can’t solve every problem.

But I will always be honest with you about the challenges we face. I will listen to you, especially when we disagree. And, above all, I will ask you to join in the work of remaking this nation, the only way it’s been done in America for 221 years — block by block, brick by brick, calloused hand by calloused hand.

The New York Times has a great interactive video and transcript of Obama’s victory speech

These are defining moments for America. We hardly seem very United these days. What’s been interesting for me is to see how these two very different campaigns choose to deliver their messages in the closing hours.

Marketers know that emotions make the sale. Good copywriters carefully choose a core buying emotion to pull at the prospect’s strings.

For McCain, that core emotion has been greed. McCain promises you will “keep what’s yours” and warns you of an impending socialist agenda. Greed and fear.

Obama, on the other hand, has continued to use the core emotion that put him in the world spotlight, hope.

I know I’m being marketed to. And I have no illusions that Obama will be our faultless savior. Well, maybe I have some illusion he will be.

But I do admire someone who takes the risky approach of appealing to higher ideals of hope, altruism, and thoughtfulness. I can get behind that marketing campaign wholeheartedly. And Obama is the only candidate who has a clearly articulated Plan for the Arts and Culture.

In Boulder, I used to the ride the bus to my job every morning with an older gentlemen named Charles. I would sit across from him at the front of the bus and he would tell captivating stories about the things he’d seen in the past. He was always upbeat and set the tone for my day.

I tell you this because I was happy to see his story go viral in a video yesterday. It turns out that he won a raffle to meet Barack Obama at a rally in Denver. It really couldn’t have happened to a better man.

Jazz is a music of integrity, and it teaches us to listen.
-Wynton Marsalis

A late night interpretation of John Coltrane’s Equinox performed on my new Nord C1.

Some people will tell you the world is coming to an end. Some people will say you create reality so turn off the news and think nothing but good thoughts.

I’m here to tell you to be optimistic, but be very concerned.

The state of the economy is turbulent and severe. The shock and awe campaign has already begun. Ignore it and suffer the consequences.

But you can do something about it. You can educate yourself and speak out. You can blog, podcast, digg articles, discuss it, and put some effort into understanding the world in which we live.

You can also take a look at your own life and see if you need to make any changes.

I’m becoming more aware of my brainwashed consumption. I’m trying to understand my own fear. I’m taking a radical look at my life.

I know that I need to contribute more value to the world. I need less pseudo-zen detachment and more Zen embodiment. I have to kick my fears in the balls.

I realize that most of my readers are musicians so I won’t leave you hanging on apocalyptic thread. There’s great news for us!

To the people of the Great Depression, music was a “welcome respite from their daily hardships.”

I traveled with Harry Reser and his Cliquot Club Eskimos back in l936 through the mid-West on a series of one nighters only, the whole summer literally. And it was very hot and destructive, it was just terrible … and people were poor, they had no money, the Depression was on…. I turned around to Harry one time, I said, “Harry, why do, where do people get the money to come hear us?” ‘Cause we, you know we had people come hear us. He says, “You know, Jer, they save their pennies for the weekend so they can get … some beer and go out and pay whatever it costs to go to a dance with their wives or girlfriends, have a ball, forget about their trouble and then … after it’s all over, start all over again, get that money back.

We can contribute and prosper.

I’ve been extremely light on the blogging front lately, but I have big plans to breathe new life into this site. I’ll be shifting gears as I reexamine my time, attention, and creative work.

In the mean time, here’s a few links I’ve been meaning to share.

New Brain Machine Improves Musical Creativity. Any tool that can help me clear the way for great music to happen is a friend of mine.

Cosmovox is an iPhone app, a music theory-infused theremin.

Korg is coming out with some really sweet compact USB-MIDI controllers. I’ll be first in line for the nanoKEY.

From Digg: Study: Musicians Use Both Sides Of Brain More Than Others. My favorite comment: “they can force their brains to do unnatural things in the pursuit of ass. hats off to all of you!”

Have a great weekend.