Tuesday, July 12, 2011

Summer Acoustic Music Week, SAMW, and iPad Chord Book

I have been so busy lately working on a ton of projects. One that is just about done is an iPad version of my Essential Chords book. I have basically rewritten then entire book because I discovered something about my book and iPads. Ebooks seem to work best when each page is the same direction. If you have seen our Essential Chords book you will see some pages are vertical and some pages horizontal, well that is cool and it works nice but not on an ereader. You end up having to turn and turn the ereader as you chase the page around the reader getting it to read correctly. So what I have done is reconfigure every page back to a vertical format.

The second thing I have done is to add in tons of new charts especially banjo chords. I have tried to set up each instrument with the basic chords and their 1, 4, 5 chords for each key so you can figure out the basic structure. So the Key of A has the 1 chord, the A, the 4 chord the D and the 5th chord the E and also the 7th version of that chord, so E7. I have now gone through all of the 4 instruments and done this for each key. Including the banjo for both 5 and 4 strings. It took way longer than I thought, but it is just about done. I had promised to make a left hand Essential Chord book but I needed to fix this first, and it took a while. Now I can convert this book over to a left hand version.

Ok number 2, SAMW, what is this? SAMW (WUMB - Summer Acoustic Music Week) is just the best adult music camp, this will be my 10th or 11th time, I can't quite remember. It is run by the Boston folk radio station WUMB and is held up in New Hampshire, in July, and again in August. About 100 students, 20 faculty, classes, workshops, performances. Songwriting, playing, sound, performance, great swimming and dancing. It is a great time. Next week I am off for a vacation of playing music.


Anyways when I get back I will be figuring out how to release the new iPad version, it came out pretty cool and get to work on the left hand version and a bunch more ideas.