In the "wish I'd thought of this first and had time to pull it off" category. The "Catcerto," featuing Nora the Cat on keys.

Just say "no" to crack:

Here's a look into our recent past, with a short video news story put together by the student newspaper at Sac State.

BIG NEWS!  Starting today, part-learning tracks (which I'll call "Part Tracks" for simplicity) for my charts will start to become available, as I'm able to create them.  They will be downloadable from a link to a zip file that I'll send you via email upon request from the Order Charts area of the site.  The price, per song pack, is $25, and the first charts to have them available today are:

Fly Me to the Moon
Just for Now

...with additions to follow, I expect, almost daily.  I'll be making the tracks in order of the popularity of the charts on my site, roughly, and my goal is to have tracks available for everything on the site by the time I launch my May charts promotion (adding about 20 new ones to the site at that time). 

Look out for this icon in a chart listing:

If you see that icon, you may request the Part Tracks for that chart when you place your order.

Now, I wouldn't want to negelct my Video-of-the-Day routine...so I'm featuring one of the vBlog entires from the great Imogen Heap, created as she was working on her most recent album, for which she won a Grammy award for engineering!  This is a huge feat, as she built her own home studio for the project and did the engineering and performing entirely on her own.  What a talent!

The New York jazz pianist and composer Henry Hey became known to me years ago because of his "Help Song," as it's now named on YouTube, which was a sort of viral audio clip in which he created a piano accompaniment to a caller losing his mind on the answering machine of a computer customer service line.  It was one of the many awesome things I got hip to by way of Dan Gailey and/or Danny O'Brien, from KU ("to which I got hip??") and it started on some other website that was always hard to locate.  Fortunately, now it's available for all to see, although I'll let you do the YouTube search for it (Help Song), because there are naughties, and, as I said before, I'm trying to keep my new site somewhat family-friendly.

The next time anything like this sprung up was during the 2008 presidential campaign, in the form of "McCain/Palin Song" and "Palin Song," which became moderately viral and are loved by all who view it.  I, then, decided to figure out how to do it myself, and I chose the Bill O'Reilly temper tantrum from the outtakes of "Inside Edition" as the source material for what became my biggest YouTube hit, "Bill O'Reilly's Jazz Operetta."  My suspicion is that Henry, as talented a pianist as he is, used the same methodology as I did to put these together:

I imported the audio track of the video into Digital Performer and let the program use its brilliant pitch detection on his speech.  I then created a MIDI part out of it manually (I've since learned how to do this much more efficiently in Melodyne) and then composed some piano voicings and bass and drum parts to match it, to give the impression that he was singing and being accompanied.  Same deal with my vid...I'll let you search for it...you'll have no problem.  

Henry's version is clearly the winner, by far, as it should be.  Here's "Palin Song"