4 Considering jazz's reputation as a music that's made best on a stage, it's strange that most jazz venues aren't built with a devoted recording space. And in the jazz capital, New York City, the square footage afforded to recording engineers in clubs is on par with that of a closet. "You know where they record at the Village Vanguard, right?" asks engineer David Ruffo. "In the kitchen. There's no food, but you're in between this and that and-oh my God, what an environment. The kitchen is the dressing room; it's very strange." Ruffo, who's been recording jazz for six years, has recorded at the Vanguard just once, when he captured a Johnny Griffin performance for his former employer, Global Music Network (GMN). Many of the recordings he did for GMN ended up available for listening at gmn.com, and many of these were made at Birdland, in its present location on 44th Street. Ruffo is Birdland's regular soundman and after witnessing some of the first performances in the club's current location-by Diana Krall, Michael Brecker, Maynard Ferguson' big band-decided to turn a portion of the dressing room into his own recording nest. "We had some big names come in there and I was blown away," Ruffo reminisces. "[Later] I'd buy their CD. After seeing them live, the CD didn't always live up to the vibrancy of the live performance. I started thinking about that and then this engineer in Nashville said, 'You're missing an opportunity here. You should build a studio there and start recording these groups.' I didn't even want to go there-I've owned a couple of studios before-but I did it anyway. I started out with a Mackie console and built this little control room. It's all the way in the back, and I have a roll-down deli gate that keeps musicians out. I recorded Michel Petrucciani there and-he's no longer with us-it's just such a pleasure to have recorded these people while they were here. Live recordings, to me, are extremely special." Since setting up the small studio, Ruffo has attempted to record every performance at Birdland. Prior to a show he calls the artist and asks if they'd like to have the show recorded. If he or she says, "Yes," Ruffo pulls out his collection of microphones (mostly Earthworks SR77s, which he thinks, for the money, hold up against expensive mikes very well) and prepares to record. The Mackie mixer has since been replaced with Yamaha's digital O2R96, which is a testament to Ruffo's claim that live recordings are special to him. The O2R96 is a seriously professional-sounding board and one that Ruffo doesn't feel the need to augment with outboard preamps in order to get great results. "I have some Earthworks mike preamps that I use when I run out of preamps on the board, but the Yamaha mike preamps sound real good to me," he explains before expounding further on his no-nonsense digital recording technique: "Basically, I go flat to tape. In digital it doesn't really hurt to do that. In analog I would compress, EQ and hit tape the way I wanted it to sound. When I first started doing digital I was doing it that way also, but always conservatively because it's kind of hard to hear. Even though I have a control room, it's still in the dressing room and you can hear booming coming through the walls and it's not a perfect world. I didn't want to make any extreme judgments. Now that I have the Yamaha board, I can do everything on the monitor side." Ruffo uses the Yamaha console for mixing as well, and chooses to use its compression and equalization features instead of routing the signal to other equipment. His efforts have resulted in an impressive list of recordings, some of which have found their way to CD-including Bobby Sanabria's Afro-Cuban Dream: Live and in Clave!!! (Arabesque) and Marian McPartland's Reprise (Concord)-and some that may remain archival recordings forever-but if the vast amount of CDs we receive at JazzTimes every day is any clue about jazz's future, I wouldn't be surprised if every live set Ruffo ever caught on tape was eventually put on disc. For all the attention he pays to capturing the detailed sound of a live band, Ruffo isn't a purist. "With live recording it's your call as to what you want to do with the recordings. My tendency is to try and make records out of them. Some people are really religious about, 'OK, the piano is on the left side of the room-bingo-the piano is on the left side of the mix.' They'll have it really dry because maybe the room is dry." Ruffo's not that religious. "I don't make it sound all flowery and reverby by any means, but I try to dress it up a bit and make it sound pretty." true 202 2007-06-07T14:05:44-04:00 false 14186 72 200309 true 0 85 2003-09-01T00:00:00-04:00

Considering jazz's reputation as a music that's made best on a stage, it's strange that most jazz venues aren't built with a devoted recording space. And in the jazz capital, New York City, the square footage afforded to recording engineers in clubs is on par with that of a closet. "You know where they record at the Village Vanguard, right?" asks engineer David Ruffo. "In the kitchen. There's no food, but you're in between this and that and-oh my God, what an environment. The kitchen is the dressing room; it's very strange." Ruffo, who's been recording jazz for six years, has recorded at the Vanguard just once, when he captured a Johnny Griffin performance for his former employer, Global Music Network (GMN). Many of the recordings he did for GMN ended up available for listening at gmn.com, and many of these were made at Birdland, in its present location on 44th Street. Ruffo is Birdland's regular soundman and after witnessing some of the first performances in the club's current location-by Diana Krall, Michael Brecker, Maynard Ferguson' big band-decided to turn a portion of the dressing room into his own recording nest. "We had some big names come in there and I was blown away," Ruffo reminisces. "[Later] I'd buy their CD. After seeing them live, the CD didn't always live up to the vibrancy of the live performance. I started thinking about that and then this engineer in Nashville said, 'You're missing an opportunity here. You should build a studio there and start recording these groups.'...

2009-03-02T00:23:30-05:00

4 I saw music's future at the Winter NAMM show in Anaheim, Calif., last January. It is digital-very digital. Certain corridors at that trade show are lined with stacks of Macintosh G4s, and synth makers speak incessantly of sample rates and real-time tone modeling. For analog fetishists at the show, things don't look so good-music's future feels cold and uninviting. Journeying upstairs to the Gibson booth, where Ike Turner is playing stock blues licks on a Les Paul guitar, things feels like home, all is good again. But what's that cable coming out of Ike's guitar? That doesn't look standard. And what's that strange box it's plugged into? Oh crap. Ike's guitar is digital. Gibson's digital guitar came out of research and experimentation on the part of Gibson Labs, a Sunnyvale, Calif.-based division of the world-famous musical instrument company. It fits a regular electric guitar with a new type of pickup and an RJ-45 connection-aka an Ethernet slot-the same kind of input/output found on the back of networked computers. In that way, the digital guitar isn't so much a model unto itself than it is an option like one you'd choose for a car. The Ethernet-output-equipped Les Paul, the only digital guitar Gibson has let the public see (even though the first prototypes were built from ES-335s), still has the tried-and-true 1/4-inch phono jack onboard. And it uses regular guitar strings. It's just a guitar with added features, features that should open doors to sounds we've never heard. Think about how fast you can navigate the Internet via an Ethernet connection, and you'll realize that the RJ-45 jack in the digital guitar is capable of handling much more information than a phono jack ever could. The technology behind the digital is called MaGIC, which stands for Media-accelerated Global Information Carrier, and it can provide 32 channels of 32-bit, bidirectional high-fidelity audio with sample rates up to 192 kHz at speeds that eclipse MIDI by as much as 30,000 times. In other words, this digital guitar can do way more than even Pat Metheny's MIDI-enabled ax. The digital guitar's pickup (Gibson calls it a "hex" pickup) allows you to output and route a signal from each individual string via a breakout box that the Ethernet cable plugs into. Among other I/O ports, the breakout box has a phono output for every string, each of which could be sent to a different amp. Plans for a MaGIC-enabled amp are in the works at Gibson, as well as a direct connection to a computer, which could change the way guitarists develop their styles and approach recording. Think about what could happen if you used modeling technology to change each string's signal into the sound of a unique instrument-turn a guitar into a horn section, from tuba up through pocket trumpet, or perhaps mutate your guitar into a group of synths. Truly ambitious aural tricksters could remodel a string signal's tone after each note, creating a morphing guitar effect. We could be in store for a new kind of dream in sound. Or a nightmare. After reading about all of this I wondered exactly how discrete the separation of the string signals are. Would the signal from the B string bleed with those from the neighboring G and high E strings? "The crosstalk will vary depending on size of the string, and how hard it is plucked," says Gibson Labs' Nathan Yeakel. "Generally, adjacent strings are not audible unless your amp has the gain set very high." Skeptical of how a digital pickup might sound and worried that the digital guitar would have flat, cold tone, but Yeakel eased my concerns: "Traditional pickups only sense string motion in one axis. The pickups on the digital guitar sense motion in the X and Y axis and recombine them before being digitized. The result is a more natural sound that contains more of what you hear when the guitar is unamplified. Another difference is that the traditional pickup has a resonance point-usually between 2kHz and 15kHz-that extenuates the upper harmonics of the strings. This is one of the things that makes different pickups sound different. The pickups on the digital guitar are fairly flat, allowing you to set the resonance point through tone or EQ, and therefore extending the timbral range of the instrument." Who knows, perhaps the hex pickup will even prove superior to the PAF humbucker over time. Gibson created MaGIC for guitar, but quickly realized that the technology could be used for additional applications, from consolidating the mess of wires in a stage setup to transferring huge files like high-density MRI scans from hospital rooms into doctors' offices for scrutiny. How about that? It's 2003 and electric guitars continue to change the world. true 202 2007-06-07T14:05:44-04:00 false 14089 71 200308 true 0 85 2003-07-01T00:00:00-04:00

I saw music's future at the Winter NAMM show in Anaheim, Calif., last January. It is digital-very digital. Certain corridors at that trade show are lined with stacks of Macintosh G4s, and synth makers speak incessantly of sample rates and real-time tone modeling. For analog fetishists at the show, things don't look so good-music's future feels cold and uninviting. Journeying upstairs to the Gibson booth, where Ike Turner is playing stock blues licks on a Les Paul guitar, things feels like home, all is good again. But what's that cable coming out of Ike's guitar? That doesn't look standard. And what's that strange box it's plugged into? Oh crap. Ike's guitar is digital. Gibson's digital guitar came out of research and experimentation on the part of Gibson Labs, a Sunnyvale, Calif.-based division of the world-famous musical instrument company. It fits a regular electric guitar with a new type of pickup and an RJ-45 connection-aka an Ethernet slot-the same kind of input/output found on the back of networked computers. In that way, the digital guitar isn't so much a model unto itself than it is an option like one you'd choose for a car. The Ethernet-output-equipped Les Paul, the only digital guitar Gibson has let the public see (even though the first prototypes were built from ES-335s), still has the tried-and-true 1/4-inch phono jack onboard. And it uses regular guitar strings. It's just a guitar with added features, features that should open doors to sounds we've never heard. Think about how fast you can navigate the Internet...

2009-03-02T00:23:27-05:00

4 Perfect pitch. It's so mysterious. They say you're born with it. An old guitarist friend of mine has it. In high school we'd sit in my basement with our Les Paul knockoffs and work on songs together. I noticed his innate skill when, with his back turned to me, I strummed a complex chord and he named it, exactly, including whatever suspension it was I had fingered. I played another chord and he named it too. We played this guessing game for the better part of an hour. After a while I realized that this God-given ability to recognize notes without the aid of a reference pitch was also the reason he was such a quick study on any song he had to learn by ear. To be fair, he had also logged countless hours of practice on guitar-having perfect pitch doesn't mean you don't have to work toward instrumental proficiency. But an ear that knows which note is which does make playing, especially improvising, easier, no matter how sharp your chops. The name David Lucas Burge may not be familiar to you, but his product might be, especially if you read music rags regularly. You often see his two-page advertisements that tell the story of the boy who wasn't born with perfect pitch but taught himself the skill. For years Burge's ad for the Perfect Pitch Ear Training SuperCourse was an object of my fascination. I'd ogle it with the attention of a puny 14-year-old reading Charles Atlas' spiel in an issue of Fantastic Four. Being a skeptic, I never purchased the Perfect Pitch course. After all, Charles Atlas beefs little guys up by sending them inflatable muscles to stick under their shirtsleeves, so there's no way Perfect Pitch could really work, right? Still, when a box from David Lucas Burge arrived in my office unsolicited, I smiled wide. The famous Perfect Pitch course wasn't in the box, however, and I was originally dismayed to find Burge's Relative Pitch Ear Training SuperCourse inside instead. But that didn't last long. After listening to the first disc of the audio-CD course, I began to see that relative pitch, which is the ability to recognize notes relative to a reference pitch, is a steppingstone toward perfect pitch. As Burge explains early on in the course: "Ear training is really like plowing the field. If you have a field and you want to grow certain crops in it, it doesn't make any difference if you're going to grow tomatoes or corn or soybeans. Same thing. It doesn't matter if you are going to grow rock music, jazz music, classical music, you have to plow that field. Gaining knowledge about music is like removing the rocks from the field. Gaining relative pitch is like plowing the field, and gaining perfect pitch is like fertilizing the field." If that sounds corny to you, please don't apply for membership in my newly instituted Cult of David Lucas Burge-the man makes a sort of religion out of ear training. He has us look at ourselves, preaching, "Relative pitch, like perfect pitch, is an aspect of our own musical awareness. It's not something outside of ourselves." Theorizing and drawing analogies in this way throughout the course, Burge makes plowing that field oddly entertaining, addictive even. Disc one of the Relative Pitch SuperCourse opens with a calm male voice speaking over New Age-y layers of synth and piano, suggesting a lesson in Dianetics or Transcendental Meditation. But the voice belongs to an anonymous announcer, not Burge. Why does the instructor on a prerecorded course in anything need to be introduced at the beginning of every lesson? The answer is that a teacher needs respect in order to succeed, and with his very own Don Pardo, Burge creates an aura of importance around himself. It's a kind of showmanship that firmly places Burge in the master's role from the start, but he somehow also manages to skirt schoolmarm strictness and remains the kind of professor you want to please. He assures that you'll succeed. Simply play by his rules, take his tests seriously and don't cheat. He even urges you to get a good night's sleep after a lesson before continuing with the next. As someone who's attempted to learn languages through tapes and gotten bored, I was surprised to find Burge making me care about intense ear training. I was surprised that I cared just because he cares. He's a true leader. And the course is intensive. Burge gets deep into theory, each lesson builds on the next and there are quizzes and out-of-class assignments to complete. If you move from one disc to the next without fully comprehending, say, a lesson in perfect fifths, you're screwed. The Relative Pitch SuperCourse is 41 CDs long, with a list price of $389. Thankfully Burge's voice is clear and neutral. It doesn't sooth, it doesn't aggravate. After spending that much time with Burge I reckon you'd emerge with a damn-fine ear for music and be more than ready to tackle his Perfect Pitch course, which I'm less skeptical of now. It's the kind of musical education even a nonmusician can benefit from because, as Burge says, this formal training "unlocks" the ears and opens a whole new way to hear the intricacies in music. true 202 2007-06-07T14:05:44-04:00 false 14108 70 200306 true 0 85 2003-06-01T00:00:00-04:00

Perfect pitch. It's so mysterious. They say you're born with it. An old guitarist friend of mine has it. In high school we'd sit in my basement with our Les Paul knockoffs and work on songs together. I noticed his innate skill when, with his back turned to me, I strummed a complex chord and he named it, exactly, including whatever suspension it was I had fingered. I played another chord and he named it too. We played this guessing game for the better part of an hour. After a while I realized that this God-given ability to recognize notes without the aid of a reference pitch was also the reason he was such a quick study on any song he had to learn by ear. To be fair, he had also logged countless hours of practice on guitar-having perfect pitch doesn't mean you don't have to work toward instrumental proficiency. But an ear that knows which note is which does make playing, especially improvising, easier, no matter how sharp your chops. The name David Lucas Burge may not be familiar to you, but his product might be, especially if you read music rags regularly. You often see his two-page advertisements that tell the story of the boy who wasn't born with perfect pitch but taught himself the skill. For years Burge's ad for the Perfect Pitch Ear Training SuperCourse was an object of my fascination. I'd ogle it with the attention of a puny 14-year-old reading Charles Atlas' spiel in an issue of Fantastic Four....

2009-03-02T00:23:27-05:00

4 After its introduction in 1955, the Hammond B3 inspired numerous jazz pianists to plug in, which in turn helped inspired the whole greasy soul-jazz subgenre associated with keyboardists like Jimmy Smith. But despite its popularity, in 1974 Hammond ceased production of the tone-wheel system that gave the B3 its seemingly endless array of sounds, thus discontinuing the organ's production. As was the case with so many other "lost classics" of geardom-for example the Selmer Mark VI tenor saxophone and, more recently, Roland's TR-808 drum machine-demand for the Hammond B3 didn't diminish simply because it disappeared from music stores. And though some were content to play clones, those who wanted the sound and feel of a real Hammond B3 had to enter the used-gear market, where prices soar and product reliability can be spotty-just think about how many of those 400-plus pound vintage B3s were accidentally dropped on their way in and out of clubs. In the mid-'90s, engineers at Suzuki (which bought Hammond in 1989) began a laborious effort to reissue the B3. The company officially reintroduced the organ, now named the New B3, in January of 2003 and hailed it as "the real deal." As a man tired of classic things being remade with inferior quality (that new Dragnet series on ABC, for instance), I was skeptical of the New B3. How could it sound like the vintage model if it uses-gasp-digital tone generation? For answers, I went to Tony Monaco, a veteran of the original B3 organ and a New B3 owner, whose third CD, Intimately Live at the 5:01 (Summit), just hit the stores. JazzTimes: The New B3 weighs half what a vintage B3 does. Where were the pounds shed? It's lighter because it uses digital tone wheels to generate the sound, as opposed to the mechanical moving parts used in the original. They were in this heavy, cast-iron box, which is gone now. Also, the chorus effect generator and preamp of the original have been replaced with digital parts. JazzTimes: Since the tone-generation is done digitally now, how does the New B3's sound compare to the original's? I can't tell the difference between my old B3 and the New B3. Joey DeFrancesco and I just recorded together for my next release, an homage to the great Jimmy McGriff and Richard "Groove" Holmes. We used two New B3s. I have sent the recording to several B3 purists and aficionados, and after they listened to it I told them it was the New B3 and they couldn't believe it. Those who know me well know that I can't lie. I try to live a very clean and honest life. This is not a clone; it's the real thing. JazzTimes: Is there something else that accounts for the replication in sound, because digital still doesn't sound like analog. The original tone wheel just produced a sine wave. Modern digital tone generation does that just as well. What really made the original sound so good was the nine-contact-per-note keyboard. Each tone was triggered at a slightly different time, creating natural key-click. The New B3 does just that. They spent seven years redeveloping the multicontact keyboard system to act like a vintage B3. JazzTimes: Let's say you had to pick between the two: Old or new? I am replacing my vintage B3 with the New B3. I think it is better in many ways. On-the-fly adjustments for treble, bass, levels and types of reverb, overdrive, percussion decays, volumes, 16-inch foldback on lower manual (for deep left-hand bass), MIDI compatibility, etc. In order to do these things with the old B3 you would have a mess! JazzTimes: There's a "MIDI out" port on the New B3. How will MIDI capability impact the art of B3 playing? I'm already thinking how cool it will be to trigger an analog synth or a digital module with the New B3. I can now combine other sounds with organ sounds or just use one of the New B3 keyboards to trigger another synth sound. I don't need to carry another keyboard to have the sound of a Rhodes, Clavinet, lead synth etc. I'm going to experiment with all kinds of new sounds to blend with the classic Hammond sound. Also, the session I did with Joey was recorded on a MIDI sequencer. I'll have the MIDI files available through my Web site [www.b3monaco.com] sometime in May. This marks the first time that a student of jazz organ will be able to learn note-for-note what we played on the recording. We are at the beginning of a brand-new era. true 202 2007-06-07T14:05:44-04:00 false 14128 69 200305 true 0 85 2003-05-01T00:00:00-04:00

After its introduction in 1955, the Hammond B3 inspired numerous jazz pianists to plug in, which in turn helped inspired the whole greasy soul-jazz subgenre associated with keyboardists like Jimmy Smith. But despite its popularity, in 1974 Hammond ceased production of the tone-wheel system that gave the B3 its seemingly endless array of sounds, thus discontinuing the organ's production. As was the case with so many other "lost classics" of geardom-for example the Selmer Mark VI tenor saxophone and, more recently, Roland's TR-808 drum machine-demand for the Hammond B3 didn't diminish simply because it disappeared from music stores. And though some were content to play clones, those who wanted the sound and feel of a real Hammond B3 had to enter the used-gear market, where prices soar and product reliability can be spotty-just think about how many of those 400-plus pound vintage B3s were accidentally dropped on their way in and out of clubs. In the mid-'90s, engineers at Suzuki (which bought Hammond in 1989) began a laborious effort to reissue the B3. The company officially reintroduced the organ, now named the New B3, in January of 2003 and hailed it as "the real deal." As a man tired of classic things being remade with inferior quality (that new Dragnet series on ABC, for instance), I was skeptical of the New B3. How could it sound like the vintage model if it uses-gasp-digital tone generation? For answers, I went to Tony Monaco, a veteran of the original B3 organ and a New B3 owner, whose third...

2009-03-02T00:23:27-05:00