My Grand Mother is unwell. Not a big deal except she’s almost 104 years old. This effects you guys because aside from my usual lack of updates I also have no access to the internet. (well rare access as you can see.) For those of you who have been having trouble downloading the videos in my series, The bottom half of the download page has backup downloads that you can use. They should work just fine. If they don’t, please be patient, as soon as I can get to a place where I can get elbow deep, I will fix the problem and make sure you get access.

Sorry for any inconvenience.

Back at the caddy for the Christmas jam. Mark Sena and the band are rockin’ a full house.

Awesome night tonight! Met a great harp player, Kent Woodruff. I wasn’t able to grab a video of his performance but I did get an mp3. That’s him singing and playing harp. This is it followed by a pic of him playing.

Kent Woodruff

Kent Jamming out at the Caddy

More coming. Hashbrown, Holland K. Smith and… well you get the idea.

More coming. Hashbrown, Holland K. Smith and… well you get the idea.

Strokers blues jam, awesome night with great music. Nothing with me tonight so far. I might get video before the night is over.

The dangers of spending your birthday at a blues jam.

Here’s some pictures of my time on stage. Thanks Rick for the shots.

They don’t need your music any more to make money. They can produce it digitally and even do live concerts, If you can call watching a hologram do a pre-programmed animation with digitally produced vocals playing over loud speakers a live concert.

“Her hair is blue, she dresses like Sailor Moon, and she’ll only appear in concerts via a 3D ‘hologram’. Oh, and did I forget to mention that she’s completely fictional? Created by Crypton Future Media, Hatsune Miku is a virtual singing avatar that you can purchase for your PC and program to play any song you create.”

So now they only need music producers and song writers. The rest can be done on the desktop. Check out the performance.

Nothing can replace live performance with real people. Record companies aren’t about performance or creativity. They are about commerce. If they can cut the musicians and singers out of the loop, they will. The record deals they have now have almost done that. Digital performers are next step for them.

This doesn’t mean that you can’t succeed as a musician. It just means that record companies aren’t the way to go. Besides, as I said before Music Should Be Free.

Check out the full article about holographic performers.

This is, however, not a fanboy post. Harmonica Notes isn’t becoming a tech blog. I have set up a mobile interface for the site. I wanted access to the stuff on the site on my phone. Now I do, and you do too. It’s pretty business like but it works.

I’m going to start optimizing some of the posts for the new interface. I think I’m also going to setup a new bit of linking to make it easy to get to stuff you might need on the fly, like crossharp keys, tabs and so on.

I am also organizing a resource that I would like to have that you guys might want too. A list of harp songs, the key they’re in, what harp to use and what position to play. I hope to make something searchable.

Let me know what you think. Give me some input into what songs I need to put up. If you know key and position, that would be cool too. For you mobile users, check out the site on your phones and leave a comment on what you think.

Last night I went to my local open mic night to jam with the locals. They’re a great group of guys and fun to play with. When I got there a few guys were getting up on stage. A rapper, a guy with an amplified acoustic, a bass player, drummer and a guy I guess you could call a backup vocalist.

They laid down a  basic E jam and the guy started freestyling. After a few minutes of warming up my lips and my A harp, I went up, plugged my mic into the board and joined in. It was fun and a bit unusual. After hearing guys like Die Antwoord it makes me wonder if we might start seeing more of that stuff. I might just be out of touch and this stuff is all around.

If it is, post up some links and let me know. I’d like to find out more. It doesn’t seem far removed from the roots of the Blues.