Bobby Shew’s Exercises and Etudes now available for Trumpet Pro
Recently updated Trumpet Pro and Trumpet Pro Lite to provide a collection of 126 songs from Bobby Shew’s Exercises and Etudes book for use on the iPhone. His book is a classic with many helpful exercises.
If you don’t need the iPhone version, his book of exercises can be purchased from BalquhidderMusic at the following link
Recording with Lunch Money
I just finished a recording session with Jay and Molly Ledford of Lunch Money Music. They do children’s music and invited me to record my trumpet/flugelhorn on their third album. I played with them about a year and a half ago on their second album entitled ”Dizzy “.
During a break they told me that they were featured last year on NPR’s All Things Considered. I was surprised as it was the first time I heard about it. They got overnight attention and it was crazy for a while in the Ledford home.
My hat goes off to Jay and Molly and I’m fortunate to have played a small part in their last album. I wish them the best on their future recordings and hope the third album does even better than Dizzy.
Sprucing up Trumpet Pro for the iPad
In Trumpet Pro HD for the iPad the user can view the notes above while pressing the simulated valves at the bottom of the screen. If you’ve seen the youtube video you can see there is a bit of a disconnect between the music above and the valves below. You can view the music above but must move your eyes from top to bottom over and over if you’re a beginner and don’t know the fingerings for the notes.
I thought about this and decided to add a new option to the latest version of Trumpet Pro HD, French Horn HD and Trombone Pro HD that enable you now to keep your eyes on the music above while also seeing the valve combination for a note as well as the note name. The French Horn version shows the thumb indicator while the new Trombone Pro version will show the possible slide positions such as “14″ or “257″ – depending on the note being played.
Since this is an option it can also be turned off in the configuration settings.
The iPad screen showing the note name, G sharp along with the fingering.
I’m loving the possibilities available with the iPad!
How Google alerts help me stay in touch
You really need to be aware of a neat service from google called Google Alerts. This service monitors search keywords and will send you email when new pages with your keywords appear on the internet. I think this service has been available for a few years but it’s something I’ve only been using for a few months.
I am monitoring the term “contact plus” and I typically get odd matches that have nothing to do with my search term such as:
…YorubaWorld Information Service Clocks 10 – news from another Yoruba contact – plus my response. Thinking about…
As you can see the term “contact plus” appears but it’s not too helpful.
However a few days ago I received an alert in my inbox that actually was relevant. It turned out that a blogger posted a note about a glitch in the Quick Add Contact feature in Contact Plus Professional. They found a work around but never bothered letting me know about the glitch through our normal help desk support system.
The Quick Add Contact feature is really slick as it enables you to quickly add a bunch of new contacts without having to navigate through the main screen. Just the relevant information such as first name, last name, address, email, etc. are presented on screen and makes manual data entry so much easier. It turned out that pressing the TAB key between fields would incorrectly overwrite good data. The blogger found a workaround by pressing the DOWN arrow to navigate from field to field. This glitch has been fixed in the latest version and will be available for download.
Quick Data Entry screen
Not only did I fix the glitch I also added a couple of shortcut keystrokes to make it easier to memorize and recall the contact information. Alt+M to memorize and Alt+R to recall. This is handy when you have a bunch of names to type in all from the same city/state/zipcode. You can pre-enter the city, state and zip and memorize those fields. Then when adding a new contact simply press ALT+R to automatically fill in the memorized city/state/zip.
