Andrew Belle
Andrew Belle is a new artist on the pop singer/songwriter scene.
His music has been in notable television shows such as: Grey’s Anatomy, 90210, The Real World, Ghost Whisperer, and Keeping Up With The Kardashians. This talented singer-songwriter has only begun his career and he is clearly doing something right! We caught up with Andrew to find out where does he go from here?
Andrew Belle, The Ladder
Residing in both Chicago and Nashville, he is currently a member of the critically acclaimed national tour Ten Out Of Tenn. Andrew released his debut EP All Those Pretty Lights in 2008, containing songs featured in hit TV shows including “90210” and “The Real World.” His song “I’ll Be Your Breeze” garnered nationwide airplay including Los Angeles tastemaker station KCRW. Andrew recently was named “Best Breakout Artist, Chicago” by MTV. His music and vocal stylings draw comparisons to Coldplay, The Fray, and John Mayer. Fans and critics often refer to his songs as “smart pop”—nuanced melodies and contemplative lyrics coupled with bold, infectious hooks. Look out for his debut full-length album The Ladder, released in February 2010.
“Since I was a child, I’ve always been around music; taught to appreciate the art form but only at a reasonable distance. My parents never let me listen to the radio or any kind of secular music until I was well into High-school. Before that, in Junior high, I recall making mix tapes from local radio stations during the day, and then lying in bed at night listening to all the pop hits of that time through a small, plastic walkman that I had received a few Christmases earlier. Third Eye Blind, the Counting Crows, the Verve Pipe…these were the artists that first welcomed me into the world of meaningful pop-music. The first album that I ever bought for myself was the Counting Crow’s ‘August and Everything After’ when I was a Sophomore in High-school. It had already been out for several years at that point, but I can still remember sneaking it up to my room and listening to it very softly out of the dusty sony boombox in my bedroom; pouring over every melody and marveling over the lyrical genious in Adam Duritz; thinking, ‘maybe I can do this someday?’. Not that I think of myself now as important to music as Adam Duritz or the Counting Crows have been, nor do I even dare to compare myself to such talent, but thinking back on my earliest experiences with music, there is no doubt that those quiet moments spent alone in my bedroom shaped my desires and passions and gave me the hope to make my small mark on this world, one song at a time.”
Listen to Andrew Belle performing “Static Waves” with guest vocals by Katie Herzig.
Visit Andrew’s Website: Andrew Belle
The Young Veins
The Young Veins’ debut album, Take a Vacation!, played with both intellect and ambition – is a band that knows exactly who they are and where they are going. As 23 year old frontman, Ryan Ross, re-imagines 60’s pop, tropicalia, old New York girl groups and fuzzed-out
The Young Veins
Why Young Veins: “At first, when we were throwing around names in the studio, we wanted to call the band the Veins,” recalls vocalist-guitarist Ryan Ross, “but there was already a band called that. So we just called it the Young Veins. We liked the ‘fresh blood’ connotation. But really the name is a Spinal Tap reference. There’s a part where the band is talking about when they were starting out. They were going to call themselves the Originals but that name was taken, so they call themselves the New Originals instead. So we’re sort of just playing off the idea of adding an adjective in front of a band name that already exists.
Tift Merritt – a refreshing songstress and performer
Songstress Tift Merritt is a North Carolina native. Her father taught her guitar chords and Percy Sledge songs. With her longtime band, she has built a unique and critically acclaimed body of work of sonic short stories and poignant performances.
Tift Merritt
In her early twenties, though Tift had gigged by herself, she decided she was not very good at music and better suited for writing short stories. She and her dog Lucy started school at UNC to study creative writing. There, she met Zeke Hutchins, whose band had just taken a haitus and who had decided to become a school teacher. With his encouragement and a big box of LPs from the 70’s that they both liked, they started a band. Zeke set drums up in the kitchen of Tift’s farmhouse on the outskirts of town, and they practiced songs at her red piano. The Carbines played Chapel Hill haunts like the Cave, the Cat’s Cradle, and the front porch of the General Store in Bynum, NC. Tift also made a guest appearance on the Two Dollar Pistols with Tift Merritt EP. In 2000, Tift won Merlefest’s Chris Austin Songwriting contest, and with the help of Ryan Adams, found herself with a manager and a recording contract with Lost Highway records. The band headed to LA to record her first release, Bramble Rose, in 2002, produced by Ethan Johns. The record landed on Time Magazine’s and New Yorker’s top ten lists and was called the best debut of the year in any genre by the Associated Press. Tambourine followed in 2004. Produced by George Drakoulias, featuring Mike Campbell of the Heartbreakers on guitar, Tambourine was a soul-rock throw down, Grammy-nominated for Country Album of the Year, even though it was really not a country album. It was also nominated for three Americana Music Awards. The tour opened for Elvis Costello, recorded Austin City Limits, releasing the performance as a live DVD, and made Home Is Loud, a document of the tour’s homecoming concert in Raleigh, NC. As the tour was winding down, Tift ran away to Paris looking for her mojo and, without intending to, started writing songs that would become Another Country. Another Country was released on Fantasy Records in 2008, again with George Drakoulias and her longtime band at the helm. Buckingham Solo, recorded in England, is an intimate concert behind Another Country, released on Fantasy in April 2009. Also in 2009, Tift had her first art exhibit, Other Countries, bringing the journals and pictures behind Another Country to light. Tift’s latest release, See You On The Moon, produced by Tucker Martine, is her most visceral work to date, and finds her doing what she does best more directly – and better – than she ever has.
Tift also produces The Spark for KRTS Marfa, Texas Public Radio. The Spark explores the real lives and processes of the people behind great works of art. Guests have included writer Nick Hornby, artist Kiki Smith, and singer-songwriter and Merge co-founder Mac McCaughan. Emmylou Harris, when asked about Tift, said, “I first heard Tift Merritt some years ago during a writers’ night at a small club in Nashville. She stood out like a diamond in a coal patch, and everyone there knew she carried a promise of great things to come.”
In 2009, Tift married longtime collaborator Zeke Hutchins. They live in NYC. Tift loves surfing, singing with her longtime bass player Jay Brown, farmers’ markets, independent record stores, anything French, and thunderstorms. If you can’t find her, she has probably rented an apartment with a piano in a town where she doesn’t know anyone and will be back before too long.
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2008 Esky Music Awards – Best Female Voice
Tift Merritt
On Tift Merritt’s new Another Country, we hear a voice singularly suited for both sunny spring afternoons and dark cold nights. Whether she’s whispering in our ears her love or disappointment, you can’t help but want to try a little harder.
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Read more: http://www.esquire.com/features/esky/esky-awards-2008-12#ixzz0w75s543A
This Love – The Band
This Love
This Love is a rock/pop band from Dayton, OH.
The young group is wasting no time getting started. With an acoustic set featured on the home page of Stickam, a full-page article in
This Love
This Love is based simply around living with passion. The hope is that listeners can relate to their music and lyrics, and in doing so find inspiration to live the way they truly want.
Members:
Like a Million Lights – This Love
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Lissie – a pretty, guitar-playing slip-of-a-thing
It would be easy to misconstrue Lissie. Slight and blonde, a pretty, guitar-playing slip-of-a-thing, you might easily take her for a sweet Midwestern girl, a freckled balladeer borne of milk and cookies and cornfields. More fool you. For all the flaxen hair and big blue eyes, this girl is smart and gutsy and tough, with a big old voice to match it: Stevie Nicks taking Neko Case by the scruff of the neck, Laurel Canyon prettiness stewed in campfire and bourbon; there is, after all, a certain vocal quality that only a decade of beer and cigarettes can bring.
Lissie
She was born in Rock Island, Illinois, one of the Quad Cities, on the banks of the Mississippi River. It’s the city that inspired Rock Island Line, and that bore Bix Beiderbecke, it’s the stuff of spring floods and pick-up trucks and bona fide blue collar country music. “I think that people often want to focus on that side of me,” Lissie says, “But it wasn’t like we were all sitting on the porch having a hootenanny writing the album; I grew up listening to gangsta rap just like millions of other American teenagers. There are many sounds and experiences that have influenced and inspired my music.”
Lissie was always the musical one of her family. Inspired a little by her Grandfather, a former international barbershop quartet champion, she would sing along at her Lutheran church but was never a choir girl, then auditioned for the local dinner theatre production and at the age of nine scored the lead in an 80-date production of Annie. “I was always humming,” she says, “making up these little songs and melodies, writing these poems and putting them to music. I know if I’m I feeling bummed out just the vibration of singing is kind of soothing to me.”
She was also the family tearaway; trouble, it seemed, had a knack of following Lissie. From once dyeing her hair with pen ink in 6th grade, cutting class, talking back, eventually getting thrown out of High School for spitting in a teacher’s face. “I felt that people didn’t know what to do with me, and tried to squash my spirit a little, which gave rise to a defiant streak within me early on,” she concedes. “It was that that made me bend my ideas around convention” But all the while she was still humming, still writing songs; she taught herself a handful of guitar chords, wrote about the girls who snubbed her and the boys who broke her and all the scrapes she got herself into, and played them out loud at the local coffee shop where she worked, dreaming of the big city and leaving her small Midwestern town.
Colorado State University was sort of a back-up plan, a brief toe-dip into academia where she took classes in everything from Geology to Speech to Anthropology. She played music, still — honing her songs, headlining the local theatre, writing and recording a track with a local electronic DJ that would somehow find its way onto TV, sound tracking the OC and Veronica Mars and House. She spent a semester in Paris, learned French and photography, kept writing, kept playing, and when she returned to the US, she decided to ditch university altogether, move to Los Angeles and make a go of her music career.
In LA she played bars of course, showcases and residencies, performed in clubs sometimes to an audience of one. In the spring of 2006 she started her own night with musician friends at a bar called Crane’s Hollywood Tavern in her neighbourhood, which she named Beachwood Rockers’ Society, and made ends meet handing out restaurant flyers and selling honey every Sunday at the local farmer’s market. “Raw honey,” she recalls. “I would say “Have you tried the world’s best-tasting honey? It’s not heated, treated, whipped or spun!”
Little by little things seemed to come together; she recorded a five-track EP named Why You Runnin’ with her friend Bill Reynolds of Band of Horses that caught something of a fire in the States last year. She headed to Nashville to record with Jacquire King (who was fresh from working with the Kings of Leon). “There were times when it was hard to figure out the entire picture, of how I wanted it to feel and sound,” she confesses, “but I’m proud of what came out of it and looking forward to the road ahead.”
What came out of it was the bulk of her debut album, Catching A Tiger; 11 songs that range from bluesy-folk to unfettered pop and showcase both her remarkable voice and her songwriting chops.
After leaving LA she spent time in London and Tennessee, and hankered a little for her home in Illinois. Eventually she extricated herself from a long and troublesome romantic entanglement and relocated to Ojai, California, an hour and a half north-east of LA, renting a house she had never seen in a town she had never visited “just because I sat next to someone from there on an airplane who told me it was nice.” She likes it up there.
“It’s fairly slow, everything closes early and you can see all the stars at night. There are mountains outside my front door and it’s really quiet, which means I get a lot of work done and have time to myself which is essential for me to function. I can still drive into LA for some excitement when I want, going out and being around other people is equally important to me. I didn’t want to make plans or have any responsibility to anyone. It’s totally got me through what I needed to get through.”
“All these things,” she says, talking a little about Ojai, and a little about her music, too, “I do them without thinking. So much of my process has been accidental. Its instinct and it’s natural. Even in photo shoots I won’t wear concealer, I don’t want to look like someone who painted my face, because everything I do I want to feel natural, I want it to mean something to me, if it doesn’t feel natural I can’t do it. I can’t act. I’m not good at faking it.” And this is probably the grain of Lissie, something straight-down-the-line, straight-talking, un-phony. “Now I’ve gotten older I really found myself recognising the smalltown Midwesterner in me and embracing it,” she says. “For better or worse it’s not all that tactful or that cool, but there’s no phoniness. It’s pretty direct. And I’m direct, I’m not hiding anything” She takes a swig of beer, pulls out a fresh cigarette. “I don’t really know what or why or who I am,” she says, “but I don’t know how to not be how I am.” Lissie, you might say, nothing heated, treated, whipped or spun.
Band Members:
Lissie – vocals & guitar
Eric Sullivan – guitar
Lewis Keller – bass, kick drum & hi-hat
Management: lissiemgmt@nettwerk.com
UK Booking: nhassler@caa.com
US Booking: mdiamond@paradigmagency.com
How to search for Midi-Files
Need to locate a specific midi file in a hurry? Use one of the three search boxes below and custom search these specific midi databases. Download them for Karaoke, practice examples or to rip apart and analyse.
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Ohm Studio- Redefining online music collaboration
Ohm Force’s mission In 2000, a bunch of music geeks gathered around their computers, only to find themselves guided by a strange and mysterious power — the power of Ohm Force. It revealed to them the essence of audio processing which they used to create the now mythical Ohm plug-ins. But they had a secret goal! This secret and long term task was to venture beyond the plug-in world and explore the other dimension of sound creation: those humanoid artists that play with computers. Thus Ohm Force, by the sweat and steel of its humble, sandwich-peddling warriors, has been laboring to conceive a new type of music workstation — one that will bring real time creative harmony to the world. Yes, you read that right: Ohm Force is announcing the first real collaborative music workstation in the history of music production: the Ohm Studio — a project with which they aspire to redefine the meaning of online music collaboration. Yay. Ohm Force presents the Ohm Studio We’re talking about a fully fledged DAW/sequencer, Ohm Studio: a standalone real time collaborative music making application for Windows and Mac, in addition to a web based collaboration platform and music driven online Community. We’re also talking about real time collaborative MIDI/audio editing, envelopes, a piano roll, audio effects, and virtual instruments: the very same tools we computer based musicians already enjoy, but that you’ll now be able to use with your friends, online. How is this possible? Using an audio core made from scratch, of course, an adaptive audio transfer protocol, a transactional document management engine, some Ohm-style interface innovation, an integrated web Cohmunity, server based projects and much more… Online music collaboration made easier
With Ohm Studio, it will be possible to set up a productive workspace to make music together and with ease. No more big files transfers, no more endless set up incompatibilities. And as with a conventional studio session, communicate with each others thanks to the in-app chat system that makes it simple to share any thought, instruction or comment. When searching for music partners, you will now be able to search for musicians from around the world. Through the Ohm Studio Cohmunity you will discover collaborative projects that appeal to you and find new people with whom to make music, searching by style, mood, skill, city, country and more. You may discover that the drummer or the singer you have always been looking for is only a few clicks away!
Ohm Studio will also be an elegant tool to showcase your own work and skills, in order to be discovered and/or be invited into groups or sessions. Could it be that you have just the right profile those Brazilian guys need for their funky nu-soul project? For those who have a traditional “local” band/project, made up of people from the same town who actually enjoy meeting and playing together, Ohm Studio will be a great way of expanding their workflow, as the creation process will no longer be limited by the 2 hours they’re actually able to share the same physical place. All of those ideas that always seem hit to come the second one gets back from the studio will not be lost anymore. And the work will continue, even if Peter’s garage is not available for the next few weeks.
Fret-King announces the Self-Tuning Super-Matic Guitar
The Fret-King Super-matic self-tuning guitar, is the first ever guitar to feature the Wilkinson ATD HT440 self-tuning hard tail guitar bridge. Built with all the hallmark Fret-King style and attributes, the Super-Matic is a very cool looking beast, cut from matched, two piece centre jointed American Alder, using heritage styling cues to create a subtly nuanced classic double cut body, with cosmetics redolent of the shared history with which we are all so familiar.
The 25 1/5” scale length, 24 fret, Hard Rock Maple neck, with it’s classic ‘Shallow C’ profile, matched to a premium, close grain Indian Rosewood fingerboard with a 10” radius, finished off with an immaculate fret job, using single cut, hand crowned medium jumbo nickel silver frets assures precision, comfort and provides a playing experience which can only be described as luxurious.
The Super-matic features a Hum-single-Hum pickup configuration, with
Fret-King Super-Matic
The combination of carefully voiced and balanced pickups, and the signature Wilkinson ‘Vari-coil’ control, (which allows either of the humbuckers to be progressively wound down to single coil), creates an instrument with an
exceptionally versatile palette of sounds capable of literally any musical style.
Available in either Black or Original Classic Burst, complete with luxury Fret-King carry bag, the ATD loaded Fret-King® Super-matic sets a whole new benchmark and opens up a host of new musical possibilities to expand any player’s performance horizons, and creativity.
The Wilkinson ATD self-tuning bridge, which has been under development by Trev and his team at ‘Auto Tuning Developments’ over many years, is a super low profile, real time electro-mechanical device utilising ultra hi-tech micro gearboxes, designed to retrofit unobtrusively in to a standard Strat vibrato bridge rout, (or similar), with a micro hex pickup, controls small enough not to notice, and an intuitive one touch button controlling all the functions and features of this truly incredible device.
Invisibly incorporating the microprocessor control circuitry, the ATD bridge allows the player, with just one touch of the function button to automatically tune the Super-Matic to standard E-tuning.
Tuning status is confirmed in the hi-visibility display, designed to be viewed whilst playing, and overall tuning is assured with the built in chromatic tuner.
Press the function button again, strum, and let the ATD change the guitars tuning from standard E to open G, or change to DADGAD, then to open D – all in the space of just a few seconds, or recalibrate to five additional ‘user created’ tuning presets in just a few seconds more.
For more information, please visit www.fret-king.com
Martin introduces the 00-15M Acoustic Guitar
Martin introduces the 00-15M Acoustic Guitar
