CBC 81: Students Speak Out
We’re changing up the podcast format for today’s show and featuring a group of present and former members of the Midwest Young Artists program located on the North Shore of Lake Michigan in metro Chicago. As an educator, I find it very interesting to hear the perspective of younger bassists–what they enjoy about performing, if they’re planning on majoring in music during college, and how they ended up deciding on a particular school for college.Several of these young bassists are my students, and I’ve worked with them all in the Midwest Young Artists program for several years, so it’s a personal pleasure to be a part of their musical education.Learn more about the Midwest Young Artists at their main site or through their podcast (which I host), and you can check out some of the bassists we’re chatting with online through the following links:
- Daniel Chmielinski – www.carsleuth.net
- Dan Bergren – www.wanderingwithpurpose.com
- Ian Hallas – Bottesini Concerto: mvt 1 mvt 2
- Midwest Young Artists podcast
- Midwest Young Artists website
Links:
Donation Opportunity for ISB Members
Buy Road Warrior Without an Expense Acount – the book!
At long last, my book Road Warrior Without an Expense Account is completed and ready for purchase. It’s priced at $14.95 and is available now from Lulu.com (click below to purchase), and will be available through Amazon.com, Borders, and Barnes & Noble in the next 6 weeks or so.
Putting this book together has really been a great experience for me. Originally based on a series of ten blog posts in 2006 and 2007, it has been greatly expanded to cover the history of classical music employment, current and future trends, statistics on graduating student prospects, life as a freelance musician, and advice on the multitude of career paths laid out in front of music students.
Here’s a little video preview of the book. You can also check out the preface through the above link, and of course you can always read the ten-part blog series that was the inspiration for this book to get an idea of what’s inside.
How do you like your Handel?
This is a guest post from early music specialist and Ars Antigua director Jerry Fuller.
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I’m really looking forward to this coming week. I will be performing concerts with Chicago’s Baroque Band that will use period instruments on June 4, 5 and 11. During the same week I will be playing with an orchestra using modern instruments for Chicago Opera Theater’s new production of Handel’s opera “Orlando” on June 3, 6, and 8. It will be interesting to perform back to back concerts using modern instruments for one and period instruments for the other to see what the musical impact is in each situation. I invite you to attend a performance of each and let me know if you prefer the use of modern instruments or period instruments and why.
In the meantime check out the free music downloads available at ArsAntiguaPresents.com. This month we are featuring Elizabethan Delites and in June you will hear music of the Scottish Baroque.
Tim Cobb Double Bass Master Class Summary
I had the opportunity to addend a master class featuring Tim Cobb this past Wednesday (5/28/08), which washosted by Northwestern University’s Peter Lloyd. In addition to serving as principal double bassist with the Metropolitan Opera in New York City, Tim serves as principal double bassist for the Mostly Mozart Festival at Lincoln Center. Prior to his appointment in the Metropolitan Opera in 1986 (where he initially served as associate principal double bass), Tim was a member of the Chicago Symphony, obtaining his position in this orchestra during his senior year at the Curtis Institute while studying with Roger Scott.
Tim is a towering presence as a teacher in metropolitan New York, currently serving as a faculty member at the Manhattan School of Music, SUNY Purchase, Rutgers University, and Mason Gross School of the Arts, and he is the current head of the double bass department at the Juilliard School.
If you’re interested in seeing Tim Cobb in action, check out these two videos featuring Tim teaching lesson segments:
John Grillo, our co-host and regular contributor at doublebassblog.org and contrabassconversations.com, studied with Tim at the Manhattan School of Music for his Masters degree, and dozens of other successful professionals active in the field also spent time as a student of Tim.
Major Pedagogical Points Covered by Mr. Cobb
Though I wish I had the opportunity to attend sessions like this more frequently (work, family, and distance all factor against a person as they get older!), I have done some summaries of classes by other major double bass figures in the past, including a post about Chicago Symphony principal bassist Joe Guastafeste and another post about Boston Symphony principal bassist Ed Barker (this post was one of my very first extended blog posts, so be kind if you happen to click through!).
The Northwestern students performing in this master class did an excellent job, and Tim discussed some of the following topics in this master class (which I unfortunately had to cut out of early due to the 10,000 random freelancer jobs I do on a daily basis):
- Pacing and phrasing – finding good tempos for Bach (Tim prefers slower tempos these days)
- Taking time at the ends of phrases – letting the music breathe before continuing extended phrase structures
- Choosing when to dynamically paint the musical contour (louder when higher, softer when lower)
- Shifting concepts
- Bow speed
- Keeping the thumb down while playing in thumb position
- Proximity of bow to bridge (exploring the area closer to the bridge)
- Using a wide dynamic spectrum
- Developing a wide bow placement palette
More Master Classes at Northwestern to Come
It’s really great to see double bass activities of this caliber occurring at Northwestern University. I’m a graduate of this institution twice over, and (though some people have accused me in the past of being overly critical of Northwestern’s music school in posts like Northwestern’s School of Music is Falling Apart… Literally!), I’m overjoyed to see Peter Lloyd bring this kind of energy and vitality to this institution through ispiring double bass events such as these. Kudos, Peter!
Mac versus PC for bloggers Part 3: podcasting solutions
Check out part 1 and part 2 of this series as well!
A significant chunk of my time these days is spent preparing, recording, editing, distributing, and promoting my podcast Contrabass Conversations, and even though I have always known that I’d have an easier time doing these tasks on a Mac, I’m a creature of habit, and I didn’t relish the thought of relearning all these tasks on a new operating system.
What goes into a podcast
There are a whole lot of small tasks that go into podcast creation and production, and one’s efficiency in handling all these tasks plays a major role in determining whether a podcast will take two hours to put together or twenty hours!
These tasks include:
- recording interviews
- writing scripts/dialogue
- recording host dialogue
- editing audio
- mixing in theme and background music
- encoding the podcast into a distribution format (MP3, MP4, etc.)
- uploading and promoting the material
Much more efficient podcasting on the Mac
After a few weeks spent adjusting to this new operating system and the new applications available to me, I’v discovered that I can massively cut down on the number of small but annoying tasks that always plagued my Windows podcasting workflow. This experience is strikingly similar to what I outlined for my blog workflow transition in part 2 of this series. Even though I’m basically doing the same tasks for blogging and podcasting on my new Mac set-up as I was doing on my old Windows set-up, the more seamless integration of programs and user-friendliness of the major applications has sped up my process considerably, leaving me more time to actually create content rather than futz with settings and file transfers.
Audacity versus Garageband
Figure 1: Audacity (open source software for PC, Mac, or Linux)
For the first 70+ episodes of Contrabass Conversations, I did nearly all of my mixing and editing in Audacity, a great piece of open-source software that is popular among many podcasters. Though I also have a copy of Sony SoundForge for the PC and use it for more complicated single-track editing projects, Audacity is perfectly adequate for mixing together the 5-20 individual tracks that I use for each podcast into a cohesive whole.
My Mac-using friends have long complained about Audacity’s constant crashing, which I always found peculiar-this program almost never crashed for me and was almost always extremely stable. As soon as I installed Audacity on my Mac, however, I understood all the carping about the product. It is extremely buggy and crash-prone on the Mac. It almost always crashes on me on the Mac, even after repairing permissions and doing other troubleshooting. What gives? Who knows…but it’s very irritating.
I’ve used GaregeBand on other people’s computers for quite some time, and I was always impressed with the ease of use and sleekness of the experience. I longed for a Mac and this product as I started my podcast in 2007. GarageBand is, after all, built for podcasting. Why wouldn’t anyone use it for a podcast?
Pros of GarageBand
Figure 2: GarageBand 3 (included with iLife ‘08 for the Mac)
I made the move to GarageBand for my podcasts almost immediately after getting my new Mac, and though I had a couple of bumps in the road (I was very set in my ways after using Audacity for so long), I’ve come to really love it as a podcasting platform. The interface is set up very intuitively, with the most common podcasting tasks easily executed. Even minor features like dragging and dropping various tracks, labeling tracks, and assigning specific graphics to different tracks are a breeze in GarageBand.
Better track details – The track effects and details in GarageBand 3, while not as extensive as programs like Logic or SoundForge, are more than adequate for most podcasters, and the graphical layout makes it very easy to add or alter effects and also makes it clear what is being applied to a particular track.
Good plug-in incorporation – Plug-ins are also easily configured in GarageBand. For example, I regularly edit interviews with SoundSoap to remove background noise and other interference. On the PC, I would have to edit , apply, and save each individual track I was trying to edit before importing it into Audacity–a time-consuming and tedious process. With GarageBand, I was easily able to add SoundSoap as a plug-in. It now appears as an effect option on the menu in GarageBand, allowing me to incorporate it into a GarageBand project without having to edit it externally. Applying the effect is incorporated into the overall mixing and encoding process in GarageBand, streamlining the whole process and actually making me much more likely to use SoundSoap. Very cool.
Adding audio tracks is a snap – Being able to simply drag-and-drop any MP3, WAV, or AIFF audio file into a GarageBand project and have it either create a new track (by dragging it to an open space) or add it to an existing track (by dragging it to an appropriate space on an existing track) is a huge time saver, as is the integrated iTunes and media search functionality.
Easy background music and sound effects – Having all of GarageBand’s loops and jingles easily accessible for any podcast saves a ton of time. Doing this kind of thing in Audacity was extremely tedious. I actually would use my wife’s computer to create tracks in GarageBand (!), and then bring them over to the PC for importing. Talk about inefficient! Having all these great effects (with many more available online or through Apple’s Jam Packs) makes me much more likely to use them, and having the ability to ‘favorite’ ones I use a lot makes finding them a sap.
Cons of GarageBand
Though I really love using GarageBand for my podcasting, there are a few glaring negatives worth pointing out:
More resource-intensive than Audacity – GarageBand is a very cool program, but it’s a very hungry program–hungry for RAM and system resources. Even a new Mac with a fast processor can easily get bogged down in a large project, slowing to a crawl and possibly crashing if other programs are also being used. This is a drag. Audacity isn’t nearly as resource-intensive (though it actually crashes more frequently on the Mac!), and I never had my PC slow to a crawl while in the middle of editing an episode.
Doesn’t handle extremely long episodes well – My podcast often last over an hour, and (though I’ve heard that this has improved from prior versions of GarageBand), I’ve had some pretty disturbing GarageBand “freak-outs” when working on these longer episodes. I’ve actually had the final 1/3 of my episodes become completely silent–nothing I can do will bring back the audio on these files. Even after saving it out as an MP3, I end up with an audio file that is completely silent for the final 20 minutes. How annoying! I never had a problem with this on Audacity on the PC (though I wouldn’t be surprised if it happened on the Mac after my experiences with it).
Poor audio editing features – GarageBand may be many things, but it is definitely not an audio editor. Doing anything besides simple track splitting is a painful exercise in this program, necessitating the use of some other option for tightening up interviews and doing any other sort of editing that involves a lot of small snips.
Final Thoughts
After a month or so spent almost exclusively in the Mac environment, I’m loving it for blogging, podcasting, and every other task I’m doing on a daily basis. GarageBand, ecto, and Comic Life are actually helping me to be more flexible and creative, and programs like Yojimbo and Scrivener are helping me to better organize my digital life and be more effective.
One disturbing facet of Mac ownership: I’m spending all my money on cool applications now! But that’s for another post…
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