More Online Musician Tools I Use

(No, I don’t know why I am suddenly posting to the blog but I guess I think it is info worth the sharing/remembering)…

I FORGOT to mention two topics in my post last night: Piano/Keyboards & Ear-Training!
Now, I don’t want to wait for things to download, I don’t want to log in to anything, I just want to use something and be done with it. Now that you know my criteria…

Free Online Keyboards – I’m intentionally not calling these “Pianos” because if you load up a sampled piano sound, it will take much longer to get going and these are just my quick go-to tools. With current HTML5 web technologies, webpages can play a synthesized sound just fine and with vary little load-up time. (Allow me to always recommend using either Google’s Chrome or Mozilla’s FireFox browsers – they self-update so your odds of success are greatly improved.)

Free Online Ear-Training – Look, does anybody outside of school really work on this? I think if you’re feeling like zipping through a few of good old ear training / aural-skills exercises, both of these sites load quickly and offer a pretty good variety of tests:

BONUS – AudioSauna’s Free Online Studio. It doesn’t load quickly but it is a beast of web implementation.

Some Online Musician Tools I Use

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There are a couple of “Music Utility” websites I keep in my bookmarks bar if I need to quickly make use of a web browser as a practice aid.

BPM Tool for quickly semi-manually figuring out the tempo of anything you’re listening to – I use the super simple http://www.tempotap.com/ – Press X to “start/reset” and then press the space bar to tap each beat. It even sort-of works on mobile devices..

Drone Tool – This site plays a single chord as a kind of a drone. It is called “The Chord Sounder™”. Pretty neat / simple idea and tool. Of course, if you want to actually practice “making the changes” this is not the tool for that job.

Online Metronome – Depending on what I feel like listening to, I’ll either use the Metronome Online site or this online metronome from 8notes.com.

Online Tuner – There are a couple of online tuners, but these get the extreme caveats of “Your Mileage May Vary” – I’ve had OK luck with this online tuner from Jamplay as well as this other one. Continue reading →

Allan Reuss – Bye Bye Blues Solo Transcription

So, if you’re into the swing-era guitar playing, Allan Reuss was Benny Goodman’s acoustic rhythm player before Charlie Christian ever joined the Goodman band.

Plenty has been written about Reuss from other sources, so you can read up on him here:

I’ve transcribed Allan Reuss’ solo on the song “Bye Bye Blues” – I really dig this solo for the way it sequences ideas, many of which are built on a two/three-finger fixed chord-position and uses the fourth finger to add on ornaments. Also, the song itself, while not a favorite, does have the really weird C-Major to Ab7-Dominant back to C-Major movement which is pretty unique.

Here’s the file as a two page PDF. Enjoy! – Allan Reuss -Bye Bye Blues Solo