MusTech.Net!

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Just a quick update about three items I was pretty excited about while attending the Midwest Band clinic this year.   First, my good friend and fellow ME Blogger Travis J. Weller (The “Big Dog”), was in attendance greeting folks at his first year as a composer with FJH Music at the FJH booth in Chicago.   I have to tell you it was pretty cool to see him “working” the crowds.   This year FJH had a banner year for sales and I told him that the “chances were that it may or may not” be directly attributable to his amazing compositions now offered by them…  which is 100% true however you look at it… really!

In all seriousness though, Brian Balmages who is an outstanding composer has done a great job as the chief editor for FJH (and very savvy with regard to technology) and the works that he, Travis, Tim Loest and others at FJH are putting out are of the highest quality.  They should be on every-one’s list to peruse and perform.   Travis’ composition American Visions, is a must have for any library and I encourage you to see for yourselves.

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This is probably the funniest video I’ve ever seen about the “simplicity” of changing over to the new Digital Television Broadcast Air Signal that is coming, by mandate, in February of 2009.

One of my students sent this to me and told me that it reminded them of one of my tech. classes (this year) where I showed them how “easy” it was to connect a laptop to a television or LCD projector… Some of them didn’t agree with me about the “easy part” after I went through how to connect via VGA, or S-Video, or Composite, or Component, or God forbid -RF modulation!!! We still have a way to go with regard to making some of these things “easy”, and LESS cables would be nice! Enjoy the video!

Well, I haven’t been able to keep up with MusTech.Net this semester as much as I would like. I’m hoping my schedule will clear a little so that I can write about some of the many cool things that I’m working on both with faculty and colleagues and my students in the VERY near future.

I wanted to take a few seconds to write about a couple of things that are going on this month.  First, the Music Education Blog Carnival is being hosted by Discover, Learn, Play this month at http://discoverlearnplay.blogspot.com/. Make sure you that you participate this month in the Music Education Blog Carnival as I’m sure it will be a good one!  You can find out more information about the Blog Carnival here: http://mustech.net/muscarn. Also, if you would like to host a music education carnival, please let me know.

As many of you know, I am a huge WordPress fan. I’m thinking about hosting a WordPress Camp this summer in the Pittsburgh area. I know it would be of great benefit to the many educators, students, and business folks in our area.  I just finished a new WordPress site for our Borough Council (Yes guys, this one was Pro bono!). It is unbelievable how easy it is to turn WordPress into a content management system and the ease of the back end (how you write posts and pages) is so simple to use that you can show people how to maintain and change content in less than an hour. There is no easier way to go about putting together a Web site than WordPress.  I’ve quit using all other software to make Web pages now and I only use WordPress now…  This from Frontpage, Dreamweaver, Net Objects, and HTML!!!

You can check out the site here: http://grovecityonline.com

I’m still looking for the brilliant, the bold, the musical, to become the last folks in our quest for 100 Music Education Bloggers. If you are interested please visit or Music Education Blogger page, and contact me here. If you’ve submitted a contact in the last couple weeks, I’ve yet to get to them, I will though -it’s next on my list of mustech.net things to do!  If you’re worried I didn’t get your submission, please re-submit.

If you want to see a totally cool Christmas Flash Animation, I still contend that this one is the best!:
http://mustech.net/2007/11/30/the-coolest-christmas-snowglobe-flash-animation

If you know of any flash Christmas animations better than this (or on par), let me know in the comment section below!

Here’s to a great Thanksgiving to all of you!