Phew, my mind was expanded when looking at Steve Vai’s guitar collection over at his site. That’s quite a big of a collection, and most of them are custom made. He has even more gear, see the rest over at his site.

I have an Ibanez RG series guitar, owned that one since 1992 I think. I’ve actually been an Ibanez only electrical guitar owner since my first Ibanez back in 1978, purchased a Flying V copy model. It was a fun guitar, but unpractical for studio work, of known reasons.

Anyway, makes me go and check out other Ibanez models this weekend…

Speaking of Steve Vai, he’s one of the few guitar players whose solos I actually like (Eric Clapton being another player). You could get a free DVD from the Carvin site, check out the really funny solo Steve Vai does on that DVD — even my wife who is bored of guitar music was impressed. What makes Vai’s playing interesting is that he is interesting, unique. Something to strive for. There’s no need to be a technocrat player, speed is not everything. Don’t be a copycat, invent your own style, in whatever musical genre. One Daft Punk is enough.

Recently my studio has turned into a hardware centric place with two guitar amps, Line 6 Pod XT, cables, pedals, guitars, bass guitar, lots of stuff around the place.

As part of ramping up the traditional instrument side I’ve been purchasing stuff from online stores and other places. Here are some notes in case you want to save money.

One place that I like is Musicians Advocate.  They don’t have all the brands, but a nice wide selection of instruments, amps, effects, MIDI interfaces, even software. The cheap prices are the ones you need to click for generating an email response. I suspect that those are B-stock units. B-Stock is where something has a flaw, either as part of shipping or being in a store for weeks, resulting in something that can’t be sold as brand-new. But hey, if a little bit paint is gone in a corner, that’s not a big deal, especially as musical instruments in use will become tarnished over time, anyway.

Another interesting link that I check from time to time is Musician’s Friend Stupid Deal of the Day. They have different kinds of things there, a couple of days’ ago they sold bass softcover bags for $9.95 plus shipping. But if you suddenly wants something they announce, it’s a quick way to get something cheaply.

Another place I check is DealNews,  but this is mostly to catch any interesting coupons for online stores. Speaking of coupons, do a net search in case the brand of the product purchased has a special deal for sending in a coupon (usually a PDF file to be filled in) and you get something extra or money cash-back.

I’m also using Google’s Shopping service to quickly get a rough idea what the street price is for various products. Also, using Amazon I have found even lower prices for the same music online sites that sell via Amazon compared with their online prices at their site. One of those mysteries of this universe.

There’s the obvious eBay and CraigsList. I prefer Craigslist as I could locally meet the seller and check out the product before taking it home. eBay purchases are more risky in my opinion, the picture looks nice but it might be broken, or the shipment might cause damage to the product — as shipping electronics is a delicate matter.

Many music stores also have a special swap shop section. Here in the San Francisco Bay area the Guitar Showcase swap shop and Starving Musician are good places, they even have their listings online so you don’t need to visit the places unless you see something you want to purchase. The Guitar Showcase has some kind of deal with Ibanez USA about B-Stock, I’ve seen a lot of really good Ibanez electric and bass guitars for ridiculously low prices over there every week.

Finally, if you purchased something that you are not really using, just re-sell it. No idea wasting studio space for unused gear.

See Ars Technica report from the Digital Music Forum.

Imagine how much money and new ideas the major labels would have made over ten years ago if they understood the power behind Napster. This will to to the classic business blunders of all times.

Maybe by now you have noticed that I’m on a small quest to bring musicianship back to electronic music. That means that there’s an attempt and it takes time to learn an instrument, but then you have far more nuances compared with copy/pasting loops or using fixed MIDI sequences.

For example, the state of art concerning electronic drum kits are far beyond the early days of the Simmons sets. Check out the Roland TD-3S kit, a very reasonable price, you could usually get them for below $1000 or even lower. The videos at the link also shows what could be done, provided you do your homework and learn to play the instrument.

Now, compare using something like this for recordings or live sessions versus using a drum machine or drum loops. There’s something special about humans that play, the nuances will pop out. Yes, I know, many of us try to put them back with shuffle modes and all kinds of tricks, so that’s another way to do it. But then again you could do it in one take — assuming you want to learn to play drums.

Those electronic drum kits are also easy to transport, for example for jam sessions. Not to speak of the clarity of the drum sounds when running them through a PA. And we have not even touched the options to trigger and play all kinds of percussive and non-percussive sounds during a live set. The other bonus is that the audience loves people playing instruments.

I guess someone had time collecting a lot of records, see this article about an eBay sale of a collection of three million records and 300,000 CDs.

Physical record collections are important, in this age of digital material, especially unreleased stuff, it’s easy for a hard disk to fry. I don’t even know if my old archives work any longer, speaking of +12 year collections of stuff on hard disks. I might not even be able to open them up due to  material produced with Opcode Studio Vision. I think some material is still on a DAT tape, and one might wonder if that’s even playable today.

Now, has this person listened to all the tracks? That would take multiple lifetimes…

I was looking around, once again, for any used Roland AX-7 keytars, but the eBay prices are just horrible, too high. To recap, Roland stopped selling these units last year, just when everyone discovered them, from Beyonce’s band to Justin Timberlake and many others.

The Create Digital Music blog had a new entry about this also today.Roland is a great company, and I’ve been a Roland customer since Jupiter-6 days — owned one of the first ever Jupiter-6 keyboards back in 1983 as it had the first MIDI implementation (I still think it was earlier than Prophet-5.) However, they have a reputation of introducing cool things and then just abandon the concept and go on with something new, instead of refining a good product.

If someone knows of an email address where to send feedback to Roland, please let us know. Also if you are involved with any other bigger keyboard company, Yamaha et rest, let them know that there’s a nice market to be taken over in case Roland is not re-introducing new keytar models.

As for me, it would be fun going to jam sessions as a bass player, but using a keytar instead of a bass. I could also figure out tons of other similar ideas using a portable keyboard controller for various projects….

It is really important that we have good controllers in this new age of electronics. We don’t want to sit behind a pile of equipment, thanks. I don’t want to climb inside a pyramid, either :-).

Hey, that’s good news. Even better, Alex Patterson is going back to the U.F. Orb sound roots.

Here’s the link to the Resident Advisor article, it also has a youtube video which is quite funny.

I always felt Alex Patterson is the closest to a ‘Frank Zappa of the electronic music world.’ Frank Zappa actually also worked a little bit with electronic music, check out Jazz from Hell.

Now, all we need are more innovative electronic music producers, those who dare to do something different.

I recorded the Classics Series, Frank Zappa Apostrophe/Over-nite Sensation program to my DVR as it was shown via the VH1 Classics cable channel a couple of nights ago.

Wow! I used to listen to Frank Zappa quite a lot during my high school days, but I suspect I didn’t really appreciate Apostrophe as much as now when I’m older.

If there was an artist that was so opposite of the classical ‘rock&rock’ archetype artist, this is it. Frank Zappa was really a composer that made use of rock music as his medium.

Watching and listening to programs such as this one makes me go back to the studio and really make use of arrangements, triads, non-standard tonality changes, scales. I miss all that stuff after a longer stint doing techno productions….

PS: If you ever have the stamina to watch this movie from beginning to end, Frank Zappa’s Baby Snakes movie is very, very interesting. Not to speak of the concert scenes, too..

Another thing to get the creativity up is to experiment with other musicians. You could join various jams, craigslist is a good source of finding what’s going on. Or then ask around, or find out what’s going on.

The nice thing with playing other musicians is that you really never know the outcome. Which is for me very liberating — after living years and years inside a production studio and controlling every aspect of the production.

Sometimes the whole of it all sounds very inspiring, compared with you controlling every aspect.

As a DJ, it is not so hard to hook together two systems with MIDI synchronization. In the case of Ableton Live, read the manuals that has the info. You only need MIDI in/out ports on your audio card/box. Then one could play tracks and the other annotates them, and you could switch roles. Or even more fancy, do a totally free-form jam with dance tracks.

It is the unexpected result that is the interesting aspect when working with other musicians. It’s fun to fine-tune a performance, as well. But for me, the interesting thing is when multiple musicians get together and have a good way of communicating and creating music on the spot.