Musicianship (was RE: I'm going to write an Anziowin/scanning interface for filePro...)

[Bruce Easton]

  Wow.  On this forum I never imagined I'd hear people talking about the 
brain, Coleman Hawkins, Pat Metheny, Pink Floyd, Debussy, synth 
patching, etc. in the same thread. :)  I fiddle around on a Trinity 
(predecessor to the Korg Triton), and elec. piano, which face away from 
the back of my home office workstation; and sometimes I go into 
Garageband, but I've not had much time to play with that recently.

But what a rich experience Bill describes below - sounds like he would 
have plenty of material for an interesting book.  I've just recently 
been reading about Coleman Hawkins.  What an exciting era (musically 
speaking).

Between these two threads, Bob's mention of some of his synth triggering 
and John's mention of Metheny and talk of how people hear things somehow 
reminded my brain of a video I saw recently on the Pat Metheny site 
where he discusses how he hears things and shows off this system where 
he has an extensive array of pneumatic and solenoid-controlled 
instruments that I think are mostly controlled from his guitar.  This is 
his Orchestrion project which is already one of his tours:

http://www.patmetheny.com/orchestrioninfo/
(link to video)

Bruce





On 9/19/10 3:41 PM, Bill Campbell wrote:
> On Sat, Sep 18, 2010, Fairlight wrote:
>> So anyone else here have a multitrack memory for music?...
> Not me.  My primary instrument was trumpet where I only had to
> deal with one note at a time (although playing things like Flight
> of the Bumblebee there were lots of notes to remember :-).
>
> When I taught myself to play guitar, it was the first time I had
> to learn chord structures and harmonies (playing solo trumpet I
> didn't have to worry about anything but the main line).
>
> When I was in high school, I thought of being a professional
> trumpet player, but figured for every Louie Armstrong, there were
> tens of thousands of unemployeed trumpeters.
>
> My last serious involvement in music was between 1966 and April
> 1968 when I was active in the Left Bank Jazz Society in
> Baltimore.  We would bring in musicians every Sunday afternoon to
> the Famous Ballroom, and I handled all the audio (with my Revox
> A-77 connected to the mixer).  I had my mothers 9-passenger
> station wagon, and would chauffer musicians back and forth to the
> airport which gave me a chance to meet and talk to folks like
> Horace Silver, Coleman Hawkins, and even John Coltrane.  I didn't
> do anything with Left Bank after April 1968 when Martin Luther
> King was killed where being one of two whites in the club was a
> bit uncomfortable (and I had started racing Formula Cars which
> didn't leave much spare time on weekends).
>
> Bill