I first heard Gabe Dixon’s music when watching the movie The Proposal with Sandra Bullock. The single Find My Way had good vocals and keyboard and I was immediately attracted to it. After finding out that Gabe Dixon wrote the music, played the keyboard, and sang the vocals I immediately purchased his first album The Gabe Dixon Band and was duly impressed. Gabe is a throwback to a bygone error where musicians had skills and could sing without auto-tune. No wonder Sir Paul McCarty asked Gabe to play keyboard on his Driving Rain album and asked him to tour.
One Spark marks Gabe’s first solo album effort. Though more of a pop album, there is much here to be admired. The solid lyrics and melodic material Gabe is rightly known for are here in abundance. Though Gabe’s keyboard takes a back-seat in this effort, the collaboration with artists such as Alison Kraus and Starsailor’s James Walsh has produced a solid album.
Music fans rejoice, today Google is rolling out a new music search feature that allows you to discover music through an audio preview feature. Type in the name or part of a name from a song and Google will find it and offer you an audio preview.
They have partnered with MySpace, Lala, Pandora, iMeem and Rhapsody to license these musical previews. With Google’s search algorithms combined with their new content partners, searching for music online just got a whole lot easier. They plan to roll out this feature across the U.S. in the next couple of days. Try it out, and let me know what you think.
The Amazon MP3 Music Service has just been released. It is in beta and works quite well. To use it you must agree to the terms of service. You then are allowed to download the client software which is used to retrieve purchased music from Amazon’s servers. Client software is available for both Mac and PC and has been promised for Linux sometime in the future. Linux users can download single items in the interim.
Read the rest of this entry »
This weekend I finally got a chance to take the music notation software LilyPond for a spin. I had heard of the open source project and was anxious to try it out. As a former Finale and Sibelius user I must admit to being a bit skeptical about its capabilities. I was pleasantly surprised to find the documentation and examples on the website helpful in getting started. For my first attempt with the software I kept it simple. Since my eight-year-old son is now taking piano lessons, I decided to compose a simple Minuet in the Baroque style. Read the rest of this entry »
