That’s why members of the three man band (Tony Karlsson, Bobby Amaro, and Dave Mattera) volunteer at Washington Middle School, along with community centers and other schools in La Habra, California, teaching students to play music.

The band speaks at a school about the importance of music education programs

The issue in La Habra, like many other communities across the country, is a lack of funding for music education classes and supplies. The band teaches for free on their own instruments because, although the school has some acoustic guitars, most don’t have strings. There are virtually no extra picks or accessories for the kids to use.

Now, in addition to teaching, Tony, Bobby, and Dave have taken on the added challenge of raising funds for the gear these kids need to learn their instruments. For example, the band recently played a show at a bowling alley, and much of the money taken in at the door will be used to buy guitar strings. They are also working with a local music store to match their donation.

Drummer Bobby Amaro watches over a "drum-off"

They’re making such a difference that they’ve gotten the attention of the Chamber of Commerce for the city of La Habra and Orange County, plus a few local politicians. They are now working together to get more music education programs started up at other area schools.

This is an incredibly inspiring story, which is why we are excited to team up with Nude as this week’s Pick Education partner. Through midnight on May 20th, for each guitar pick sold in the GearPipe Shop, we will donate one pick to the kids of Washington Middle School and La Habra.

If you’re new to GearPipe, here are a few suggestions:

Singer Tony Karlsson works with a student on his chord changes

I’d be lying if I told you I wasn’t disappointed. We could have done a lot of good with the $2,500 prize, but it was not meant to be. Nevertheless, I think this program’s potential for good is too great to ignore, and I think now is the time in my life to start giving back.

Today is my 35th birthday, which demands reflection. I live a wonderful life. I have a loving partner. Her and I live in a nice house in a great neighborhood in a wonderful city. We have our health, great friends, and two odd, yet loving, dogs.

But I don’t perform many selfless acts, and I think this is my opportunity. Playing music is important to me, and I think it’s helped shape who I am today. I want to focus my life on giving kids the musical opportunities I had when I was growing up.

On that note, I am announcing that we will move forward with Pick Education. Expect an official launch in the next few weeks. We will be featuring the “get one, give one” model with guitar picks and, with luck, a surprise partner.

Stay tuned for more and thank for your support!

– Jeremy

Fuzz Box Girl is recovering, but as one of the many Americans without health insurance, her medical bills are piling up. In a nice twist to this unfortunate story, she’d written on her Facebook page about a band called The Broken Places, whose Christmas album she’s been enjoying during her recovery. The band saw the post, and offered to donate all of their December album sales to help her pay for medical bills. Fuzz Box Girl said it’s “sweetest thing anyone has ever done for me,” and I agree it’s a very generous gesture.

I will be purchasing a copy of the album, called Spirited. If you’re interested, check it out on iTunes.

In a previous post, The Cellist of Sarajevo, I described how one Bosnian man became a symbol of peace and hope in a country devastated by war. He defied the violence, tragedy, and hopelessness surrounding him and transcended his reality with the use of a single instrument, his cello. He also has emphasized a profound, grander concept. Music is powerful.

It can elicit latent emotion, enhance an already present emotion, describe feelings you may not know how to articulate, and draw you out of a current time and space into an alternate reality. Just look closely at any musicians’ faces as they play their instruments. It doesn’t matter what instrument, it is obvious they are passionate about and moved deeply by what they are playing. They are raw, unguarded, and connected with their core. Consequently, we can connect with them on a personal level. This association is so potent and commanding, people spend valuable time and money chasing it for months, or even years, at a time. Watch this short video and examine the musicians as they play, but more importantly, actually feel the emotions this raises. Connect with yourself.

Music also requires and coerces collaboration. I find the best collaborations to be unexpected and unusual because, if executed in a careful manner, these are what can result in the most beautiful, harmonious, creative outcomes. Think of two artists you were surprised to see work together, but ended up producing music that was reminiscent of them both, yet created a novel, unique sound and vision. Personally, one of the best examples of this Alison Krause and Robert Plant’s Grammy-winning collaboration Raising Sand. These artists both have roots in blues and folk, but took alternate routes when it came to their distinct musical sounds. However, this album exemplifies what can emerge from attempting something different, from not taking the obvious route, and working together with someone you never thought you could or would. Listen to this one song off of this inspiring and interesting album.

Ask people what they can’t live without and, besides the obvious, I bet most of them will say music. Although we all have personal tastes and opinions about our choices in music, it is still one of the world’s ultimate unifiers. It has the ability to take individual, completely different units and transform them into a cohesive, beautiful whole. This statement is true for both individual instruments in a band or autonomous members of society.

Like music, building lasting peace requires being raw and unguarded with your emotions and unexpected collaborations. See what happens when you let your guard down and reach out to someone unanticipated, it could fail miserably, but it could be one of the best choices you have ever made.

I can pretty much play chopsticks and the Brady Bunch theme song on keys, but I would still like to add this piece to my home studio.

Enter to win an M-Audio Venom 49-key analog-modeling synth, worth $599, from Sweetwater Sound.

Click Here to Enter

Win this!!!

The Rules:

• Must be 13 years of age or older to enter
• This is a worldwide giveaway
• Entry deadline is April 14, 2011, at 11:59:59 PM, Mountain Time

Here’s a better look a the baseball:

Limited-Edition Fender Baseball

Unlike many Guitar Center coupon codes, this discount can be taken online, in-store, or over the phone. Just follow the link below to print off your coupon.

Here’s another giveaway that I’m catching on the tail end. Go like the Reunion Blues Gig Bags Facebook page, and you could win a free bag (they have a bunch of different instrument bags). Saturday is the last day of this promotion.

Click Here to Enter

There’s a lot of black magic in the audio cable business, and I always cringe when manufactures up-charge for features you’ll never hear. This is one reason I’ve always respected Ted. The guy makes great sounding, tough as nails cables, and found a way to make guitar cables cool, something that had rarely been done previously.

At Winter NAMM 2011, Bullet Cable introduced a new DIY patch cable kit, the SLUG Connector Kit. SLUG is far from the first solder-free patch cable kit on the market, but I think it’s the easiest to use, and the highest quality. Each SLUG connector only measures .470″ wide, smaller than other connectors on the market. Important? If you have a pedalboard, you know every fraction of an inch matters.

Each kit comes with 10 feet of cable, 10 SLUG right angle connectors, and the hex key you’ll need to build the cables. And building one of these cables is so simple! You stick the wire in the connector and tighten the hex grounding screw on the side of the plug (come to think of it, I have more confidence in this set screw than I do a fragile solder joint). That’s all there is to it!

In fact, Ted challenged me to build a cable in under one minute. His time is 48 seconds. Let’s see if I can do it!

So what’s the Pedal Juice all about? Taking a cue from the product’s Apple-inspired look, the Pedal Juice could not be simpler to use. Unbox the Pedal Juice; charge it for a few hours; plug it into your pedals. That’s it!

Depending on the number of pedals in your set-up the Pedal Juice can go up to 50 hours before a recharge is needed. You might be looking at the photo and thinking that you can only power two pedals at once (the third jack is used to charge the Pedal Juice). This is where that perfectly simple design comes in. If you have a large pedal board, position the Pedal Juice in the middle and daisy chain jumper cables to power the individual pedals (Godlylke’s Power-All cables would be perfect).

We now know the Pedal Juice is convenient, but is it better than just using the 9V power adapters that came with your pedals? In many cases, yes.

These days I do more remote recording that playing, where ground loop noise can be a big problem, so I was really excited at the notion of powering my digital recorders with the Pedal Juice. A few times a year I’ll record at conferences where audio lines from many rooms are pulled into a central location. In some of the older convention centers, ground loops can be huge obstacles for recording a clean, quiet signal. In fact, last year I recorded an event where the buzz was so bad, I had to run a dozen recorders on batteries for three days. Even with the Pedal Juice’s $150 price tag, this would have been a steal considering the small fortune I spent on AA batteries!

This brings me to my one small beef with the Pedal Juice. Although it is promoted as a power source for “portable recording devices,” the included cables don’t fit my recorders’ smaller-than-a-pedal’s 9V jacks. A bummer! I record on an Edirol R-09 and Tascam D-07, which are industry standard. However, I’m assuming this problem could be solved by hunting down the right 9V jumper cables.

Sanyo Pedal Juice with Fender Blender Custom & Fender PT100 Tuner

Without the chance to try the Pedal Juice on a recording session, I plugged in a few pedals. It works exactly as expected! The whisper-quiet performance provided a nice change from the sometimes noisy AC in my 80-year-old apartment. I left the pedals on all day and the LED indicator never even turned from green to red, noting 30-60% power left.

In all, I think the Pedal Juice is a great product for any musician to keep in his or her toolbox!

A piano giveaway is like a five leaf clover or an albino deer; a rare sight indeed!

Enter to win a Williams Overture 88-key digital piano. The Overture features an 88-note hammer-action keyboard with selectable touch response; sustain, sustenuto, and soft pedals; 64-note polyphony; 15 main voices and 128 General MIDI voices; 3 keyboard modes; effects; 2-track recording; & a built-metronome. This piano is worth $899.

Click Here to Enter

But, you probably know that I am extremely dependable when it comes to posting gear giveaways on Facebook and Twitter (and more recently, Tumblr). In fact, I started GearGiveaway365 over a year ago and have only missed a few days (he says as he pats himself on the back).

Not only that, but dozens of people have won gear. My guess is that members of the group have scored over $20,000 in musical instruments.

Since I know how to keep with a good thing, I’ve now added an email newsletter to the mix. I’m offering a daily email, which will be delivered each morning and will include a link directly to the giveaway sign-up page. Or, if you’re pretty good about following this already, get the weekly digest, just to make sure you don’t miss anything.

Click here to sign up!

In this GearPipe podcast episode, I speak with Steven Cox, CEO and Founder of TakeLessons, America’s leading source for private music and voice lessons.

We talk about the state of music education, the strict guidelines TakeLessons private instructor applicants are judged on, and even the role Guitar Hero and American Idol have had on music lesson enrollment.

In the end, Steven leaves me with a great deal of hope about the future of music making, telling me that “even if music (education) is cut, what’s really wonderful about music is that this is not going to stop the level of curiosity and the level of interest that people naturally have in music.”

As Christmas rapidly approaches, and gift-buying deadlines loom near, please consider a TakeLessons gift certificate for the young (or old) musicians in your lives. Through December 24th, TakeLessons is offering 30% off all lessons packages.

Want to hear more? Subscribe to GearPipe Podcasts on iTunes!

The legendary rock ‘n’ roll photographer and subject of the new documentary Rock Prophecies shot Led Zeppelin’s first U.S. show at the Whiskey a Go Go in Hollywood. He shot Hendrix AND Stevie Ray Vaughan’s final shows. For over forty years, Knight has been what Rock Prophecies producer Tim Kaiser calls “the Forrest Gump of rock ‘n roll. He just had this knack for being right in the middle of history in the making.”

In this podcast episode Knight tells us that, all things being equal, he prefers when great guitars play a front and center role in these history-making events. “I’m guitar-centric. Everything that I’m really interested in has major great guitar in it, and I wouldn’t photograph bands back in the day that didn’t have good guitar.”

Knight also finds that some legendary guitars have taken center stage in his photographs. “Stevie Ray Vaughan and that beat up old Strat of his. I couldn’t take my eyes off it. The first time I saw Stevie Ray and I saw that guitar, it was like ‘I need to photograph that guitar.’ When I did some studio shoots with Stevie, I asked if I could actually shoot some of the guitars because they almost had their own personality.”

“In a way some of the instruments themselves have become rock stars, like Blackie, Eric Clapton’s guitar, or Eddie Van Halen’s guitar.”

If you’re interested in watching the film (and you should be…it features interviews with and performances by Jeff Beck, ZZ Top, Carlos Santana, Slash, Panic at the Disco, Sick Puppies, Kenny Wayne Shepherd, Rick Nielsen of Cheap Trick, and Steve Vai, among others), you can buy the DVD on Amazon and many other retailers, or watch for free during September and October on your local PBS station.

Want to hear more? Subscribe to GearPipe Podcasts on iTunes!

Check out the official Rock Prophecies trailer:

YouTube Link

Here’s Diego to tell us about how he built this instrument:

Few days ago I started thinking about how I could re-purpose the keyboard of the dismantled piano I keep in the garden, so I thought to build a new instrument by combining it with some other parts I had laying around. I ended up with this mechanical hybrid thing I thought to call “Bassoforte” (bass + pianoforte).

The track I created is a tribute to my Dad who is a big fan of Western comic books and “spaghetti western” films, and because of him I am too.

Vimeo Link

Since that time, Linn has brought us many other cool products, including the AdrenaLinn multi-effects system for guitar, and now he’s out to reinvent another wheel with his LinnStrument (Linn’s rendering is to the right). Imagine a musical iPad app that can sense how hard you’re pressing down (adjusting the volume accordingly), and provides effects like vibrato when you pivot your finger back and forth.

For a more technical explanation of how the LinnStrument works, here’s some info straight from Linn’s website:

This design uses a fingerboard grid consisting of 6 rows of 24 semitones each, similar to a guitar. In acknowledgment of my wife Ingrid’s contribution to the engineering, we like to refer to this note grid as the “InGRID”. It also has two thumb control strips, one on each side of the fingerboard, to be used for sustaining fingered notes after release, strumming, bowing, blowing or restriking, and also has a wind sensor for added expression. (Ignore the 4 long, thin bars on each side; they were to be used as separate palm-actuated sustain bars, but I’ve decided that the two thumb strips work better for this.) This design is intended to be played from either of two positions:

Sounds cool, right? He’s built a killer prototype and shown it to the world through a YouTube video that’s had over 150,000 views. People are into the product. However, the LinnStrument may never see the light of day.

The problem? Amazon purchased the company, TouchCo, that produced the unique pressure-sensitive, multi-touch surface that the LinnStrument relies on and promptly took the material off the market. It’s a pretty safe bet that Amazon is planning to use the material on future versions of their Kindle e-reader (nothing related to musical instruments).

So, what’s a guy to do? Instead of hijacking the last load of TouchCo product to leave the factory, Linn wrote a very cordial email to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos (you can read it on Linn’s website). The email was sent about two months ago, and it looks like there has been to reply yet from Bezos. Linn also says he’s on the hunt for a usable replacement material, but as of yet has not found one.

I’m going to keep an eye on this story and post any updates that come along. You can also sign up for the the Linn Design email list here.

I wouldn’t put money on it, but maybe Bezos has a soft spot in his heart for vintage Madonna and Michael Jackson tracks and will throw Roger Linn a bone!

se

The most obvious example to many of us would be rock bands who make the leap form playing clubs to theaters to arenas. When you’re playing a small room, you can play intricate guitar solos and drum fills that would get lost in the reverberation of an building meant to host hockey games. So, as bands play larger rooms, they tend to play less notes, taking advantage of the sound of the rooms they find themselves playing.

This is the easy example that many of us have probably thought about. Byrne runs through some other great examples that may not be as obvious to us. How does the outdoor environment in Africa influence the rich African rhythms? Why did the music of Bach and Mozart differ so much? It may have had quite a bit to do with the rooms they knew they’d be playing their latest pieces in.

Very interesting. I hope you enjoy it!

YouTube Link

Check out other TED videos on GearPipe

Singer Jamie Cullum is running a very cool contest, where one lucky winner will get a private show in their living room, and when Jamie takes off afterward, he’s going to leave the piano behind for you.

The contest page doesn’t specifically say what type of piano, but he plays Yamaha, and I’ve seen them link to this giveaway on Twitter. The contest rules say the prize value is $3,500, so I’m assuming it’s some sort of Yamaha console piano. A pretty great prize! Note that this contest also involves a scavenger hunt that you can enter in certain cities, but you can skip that and just enter the concert/piano giveaway.

Entry Deadline: March 26, 2010

Get It: Click Here to Enter

For daily links to musical instruments giveaways, make sure you follow me on Twitter or become a fan of my Facebook Page

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The contest page doesn’t specifically say what type of piano, but he plays Yamaha, and I’ve seen them link to this giveaway on Twitter. The contest rules say the prize value is $3,500, so I’m assuming it’s some sort of Yamaha console piano. A pretty great prize!

Note that this contest also involves a scavenger hunt that you can enter in certain cities, but you can skip that and just enter the concert/piano giveaway.

Entry Deadline: March 26, 2010
Get It: Click Here to Enter

For daily links to musical instruments giveaways, make sure you follow me on Twitter or become a fan of my Facebook Page.

When I was in college, the house my band practiced in was broken into and our PA system and our guitarist’s amp was stolen, but the only thing that’s even been taken from me was a splash cymbal. A bummer, but not a huge setback.

On the Fender Front Row blog, the folks from Scottsdale have posted some tips to help you recover your instrument if it’s even stolen. This is pretty simple stuff: write down the serial number, take pictures, file a police report…but sometimes we forget the basics, so this refresher is nice.

Of course, the most important thing is to be extra careful and make sure your gear is safe from sticky fingers to begin with!

Here’s a video from a Bakersfield CA news show reinforcing what Fender is telling us.

via Fender Front Row

If you’re one of those trendy hipsters with a smart phone, you can also access GearPipe on your phone in some cool ways.

First, there is now a free iPhone app in the Apple App Store. It’s not fancy, but it pulls in all of the new GearPipe posts right to your phone, with separate categories for each instrument plus contests and giveaways. Again, it’s totally free, so go to the App Store and download it!

If you’re on an Android equipped phone, a BlackBerry, or if you use an iPhone and would rather access GearPipe through the web browser, I’ve also installed a mobile-specific theme to the site. This detects when you’re coming to the website from a phone and serves up a more streamlined version of GearPipe. This seems to work pretty well, but if you get there and see the regular site, scroll down to the bottom of the page and there should be a switch to toggle between the two versions.

Thanks again for being a GearPipe reader!

Now here’s the catch. Music123 says this deal is good for three days only, but they don’t say which days. Seriously…I looked all over the email they sent me and on their website. If I totally missed it and someone out there knows which days this runs, please leave the dates in the comments. My assumption is that it’s July 3,4, & 5. Who knows?

Coupon Code: Fireworks – Call 1-800-458-4076 24 hours a day.
Expires: July 5, 2009 (maybe!)
Get It: Click Here For More About This Deal

1. Hohner HA-3100 Panther GCF Diatonic Accordion
2. Hohner 3002 Ariette Folk/Cajun Accordion
3. SofiaMari SM-2648 Piano Accordion
4. Musicians Gear SM-3448 34-Key 48-Bass Piano Accordion
5. Musicians Gear SM-3232 32-Key 32-Bass Piano Accordion
6. Hohner Bravo III 72 Accordion
7. SofiaMari SM-3412 Button Accordion
8. Hohner Bravo III 120 Accordion
9. Hohner 3002B Ariette Folk/Cajun Accordion
10. Musicians Gear SM-3112 31-Button 12 Accordion G/C/F

Check out the Best Selling Musical Instruments Archive.
Search for Accordions on eBay.