Practice Gear :

I thought I would take a little time to talk about some of the practice equipment that I use. At home I was using an old little Stage amp I bought back in high school for $50. It still works, but now with computers and stuff, things have changed a bit. I have found that I needed to have the same set up when I travel and when I’m at home. It was very frustrating to be away from home for a week and not have some material that I wanted to work on. I had two problems. One was bringing material to practice, but not bringing too much, because it is important to travel light. The second was having a way to hear myself when I’m in a hotel room. You can practice without anything, but it’s nice to hear yourself. As far as bringing material goes, I started putting all my materials on the computer. I scanned hand written pages and I now do all my writing and transcribing right into the computer with Finale. It works great all the way around, because I have everything with me all the time. Whether I’m at school giving lessons, at home practicing or on the road, I have everything right there. I just put everything on a memory stick and I can take it to any computer. When I’m on the road, I have always travel with a Macintosh Powerbook G4 anyway. I need it for Internet access, writing and taking care of other business. Never mind the fact that I’m a computer junky. This was a great solution because now I don’t have to lug books around.

Now for the amplification part. A while back I bought a Korg Pandora's Box practicing unit. This thing is awesome! It is super small. A little bigger than a cassette tape. Very light, and it can do a lot. The unit is a digital tuner, drum machine, metronome, sampler and has some very useful multi effects. You can plug in a CD player, tape deck or any other external device and play with it. You listen with head phones and control the balance. The sampler can be used to sample phrases up to 15 seconds and you can slow them down to half speed for help when trying to figure out those fast lines. I even like the old Mutron sound in it. It really sounds good. Most of the sounds I would never use, but the EQ and compression come in handy. You can also use this unit live for the effects and tuner. I use it as my tuner on stage, and this has eliminated one more thing I use to carry. The only thing that would make it better, would be if you could program the drum machine and get some different sounds. I usually just practice with a click, but I’m sure they will add that feature in the next version. Don’t get me wrong, the preset drum grooves are pretty good. Excellent considering what this unit can do. All that for under $200 is a bargain. The newer versions Korg has come out with are even better, but this one still does it for me. I'm sure you could pick up a used one of these on ebay for next to nothing. I don't need to have the "latest and greatest" I just need simple stuff that works real good.

Now for the software part of things. For music notation and writing all my books, I use Finale. It's the best music program out there. It's not easy to use, but you can get it to do anything once you learn it and set up some templets for yourself. For transcribeing I use my itunes to store all my music. I have two, two hundred fifty gigabite hard drives at home. One for my mp3's and one to back them up. I wouldn't want to lose all the music. It's a wise investment to back it all up. I then transfer whatever songs I want, to my powerbook or ipod to take on the road, or work on at home. I do all my work at home on my powerbook G4, so I have the same setup while traveling, and I'm not stuck at my desktop computer. For transcribing music, I use this amazing little program called " The Amazing Slowdowner" This shareware program is a must for anyone wanting to transcribe basslines or solos. You can slow the songs down with this program and maintain the original pitch. It's incredible. It reads your mp3's or CD's. It dosen't matter. The progam is more than well worth the few bucks it will cost you. You can find the program at "www.ronimusic.com"