A Beginner's Ukulele Resource Kit

The 2nd New Los Angeles Folk Festival

…a fun filled day of music and entertainment at Zorthian Ranch, a surreal hideaway at the foot of the San Gabriel Mountains, just 15 miles from downtown Los Angeles.

…45 acres of junkyard treasures …live music by almost thirty bands performed on natural stages… Spend the day roaming the grounds with llamas and turkeys, visit art installations embedded in Zorthian’s junk & old car sculpture garden, splash in the pool overlooking miles of trees, then picnic beside a giant blue head before hitting up a square dance in the horse ring. 

All this and a 50 foot waterslide and a complimentary coconut water? A fine pre-Burning Man warm-up.

An interesting line up — watch the band videos and make a fun day of it.

(via The New Los Angeles Folk Festival)

(Free) Power Tab Editor Software by Brad Larsen

If you’ve ever stumbled upon a song file with the “.ptb” extension, well, you’ve found a Power Tab (Music) file that you can open and edit thanks to this free (Windows-only) editor:

Power Tab Editor is a tablature authoring tool… to create sheet music, more commonly known to musicians as tablature. The program provides the most commonly used symbols in tablature, including chord names, chord diagrams, rhythm slashes, bends, slides, hammer-ons/pull-offs, harmonics and palm muting.

This program even plays (in full MIDI glory) the song with metronome! 

Sadly, it appears that development on this particular program ended in 2006 with the Music Publishers’ Association announcement that they intended to go after folks distributing sheet music. According to the Wikipedia entry, however, the source code is available on Google Code.

I’ll not editorialize about supporting artists, fair compensation for creative works, overreaching corporate partners squelching fair use or the artists’ intent, nor will I rant about 90 year copyright protection just to save Mickey-flippin’-Mouse from Public Domain. Nope, I’m not one to rant… no editorializing here.

Free Blank Ukulele Staff & Tablature Music Manuscript Paper

Part of the reason I’ve resumed work on the tablature conversion “software” (JavaScript is software? sure. why not?) is so I could learn to play a song’s melody— you know, music that sounds like “music” as opposed to just the chords (I cannot sing) — with people asking, “ummmm, what are you suppose to be playing now?”

However, in order to do this I needed blank manuscript paper, paper with the musical staff (just treble clef, of course) plus the tablature “bars”. Naturally, I made my own… because I’d never heard of this Google thing.

(via UkeGeeks)

Made some great progress over the past couple of evenings on my ukulele chord tool, “Scriptasaurus” (yeah, worst name ever — suggest another?). I use it to pretty-up my entire uke music library — mostly I want all my music to look the same. 

Tablature, however, has been the gaping hole in the tool’s features. 

Not for much longer!

I’ve tackled this and it’s close to being integrated into the main tool. 

I’ll write some longer posts describing this later, but if you want a test drive or just a quick sneak peek, go to UkeGeeks.com/tabs.htm.

The sample shown above is a “before and after” for “The Rainbow Connection” intro. On top is the “before” — the text only tabs, and below that is the “after” — how the tool automatically formats it. Neah, huh?