So, there’s still a little shelf life left on the iPhone topic with the recent launch of the 3G, even though I’m pretty late to the party here! Let’s hope the hype machine keeps pumping at least until I’ve published this post.

But jokes aside, the iPhone really does have some great offerings for musicians that you should know about, and I think it’s a platform with huge potential for musicians, especially on the move. We’ve all experienced the frustration of coming up with a great melody and having no way to get it down, and subsequently forgetting it. Or lost a guitar tuner or forgotten the correct fingering for a chord.

Since there was a forum thread about this recently, I figure it’s a topic of interest, so I’ll share what I’ve learned and found over the past week! Read More …

Getting your music out can be tough. Before the Internet you could give some good looking groupies a few bucks to give out your demo on the sidewalk, but those times are long gone. People no longer go outside, and if they do, they don’t lift their eyes from their iPod or take those damn white, terrible sounding headphones out of their ears.

So what’s a musician gotta do to get some attention around here? I’ve scoured the Internet looking for a few good places to plaster your music and your name. Some you might know, some you might not—here we’re going beyond MySpace and trying to make your tunes as ubiquitous as possible. Read More …

Back in June, the fabulous PSDTUTS - Photoshop Tutorials Blog ran a contest to design wallpapers on the theme Audio + Jungle. Now after over 180 entries and a lot of judging, we’re proud to announce and showcase the winners in our AudioJungle Wallpaper Gallery.

Along with the three prize winners you can also see 18 brilliant runners up and grab yourself a great desktop background. The gallery itself is built using a FlashDen Gallery component from DigitalScience and was customized up by Collis.

To all the contestants who entered, well done! The talent level was absolutely brilliant!

If you followed along with us last week, you know how much interval ear training can help you as a musician and how to get started with training itself. If you haven’t read it, head on over to Boot Camp for Your Ear.

This time, we’re going to look at a bunch of applications and websites that will help you with regular ear training sessions. Most of these go beyond intervals, of course. Read More …

As a rocker at heart, I was never much interested in music theory. I picked it up as a matter of requirement throughout my education in bits and dribbles, though it seemed at the end of the day all I could do was read notes off a staff—a musical technology that’s not even really used in my genre.

The problem with the prevailing ideas about music theory and how supposedly useless it is, is that they lump a whole bunch of knowledge under one small label. Some of what we call “music theory” is mind-numbingly boring, some is plain useless for many popular musicians, and some is just hard to get a handle on. But there is a wealth of knowledge there that musicians can use to improve their work.

It wasn’t until about six months ago that I saw the value of interval ear training, something often lumped under that “useless music theory” banner, and started applying myself to it. And all my rocker friends said, “Why bother with all that theoretical stuff when we don’t even use it?”

But ear training isn’t theory. It’s practical. When you take a mere ten minutes out of your day, every day, to master this aspect of the musical field, you’ll find you’re better able to transcribe and dissect riffs that inspire you, and better yet, turn the tunes in your head into tunes you can play without spending hours guessing the notes. Even if you’re a rocker.

If you want to unlock these benefits, then you’re reading the right piece. I’m going to get you off to a head start by providing you with song associations for all the intervals in an octave, and next week I’m going to point you towards some great applications and Web sites that will help you get the training done. Read More …

Even the most hardened veteran benefits from updating skills and experimenting with new ideas. And as someone who learnt most of their profession from online tutorials I can testify to the utility of a good tutorials site! So it’s with a lot of pleasure that I announce our latest member of the TUTS family of sites - AUDIOTUTS!

The site is being managed and edited by the talented Skellie who has a whole array of writers who will be writing on everything from DJ’ing to production. The first tutorial went up a few hours ago by the illustrious Mo Volans and is titled:

Create a Reverse Reverb Effect

So head over, bookmark the site, add it to your feed list and if you’re into stumbling, give it the thumbs up!