If you‘re a GarageBand or Logic 7.2 user who wouldn‘t mind owning a nice control surface at a bargain price, have I got a deal for you! The Apple Store has the M-Audio iControl on sale for $99.95 (plus tax) with free shipping, and you can apply this $20 rebate for a total price of only $79.95. That’s $100 off retail!

If a Mac-specific control surface isn‘t what you need, you can use the same rebate for two other M-Audio products at the same price. The Keystation 49e is a USB MIDI keyboard controller with 49 Velocity-sensitive keys and pitch-bend and modulation wheels, and the Fast Track USB is a stereo audio interface that‘s compatible with Pro Tools M-Powered.

You‘d better move fast, though, because the rebate expires on March 7. To find these deals, just go to the Apple Store Web site and search for “iControl,” “Keystation 49e,” or “FastTrack” (not “Fast Track”).

Personally, I have never been a fan of KISS, but I thought I should pass this ditty along for the edification of those of you who are. Apparently, there have been rumors flying around the Web that guitarist Ace Frehley has committed suicide. Fear not; through a press released from his publicist, the painted-faced six-stringer was quoted as saying “Rumors of my demise have been greatly exaggerated.”

Although that quote won’t get him style points for originality, it does appear to indicate that he’s still alive. According to the press release, Frehley is working on a brand new “highly anticipated” solo CD and eating wheat germ. (The latter seems to show that he’s planning on sticking around for awhile.)

There was big news Thursday on the intellectual-property front, as Microsoft was ordered by a judge to pay $1.52 billion in a patent-infringement suit brought by Alcatel-Lucent, regarding its use of MP3 technology. Read the Boston Globe’s story for more details.

I bring this up because Apple, like Microsoft, licenses its MP3 technology from the German Fraunhofer Institute, which played a role, along with Lucent’s Bell Labs in the development of MP3. Apparently, the judge didn’t think the Fraunhofer license shielded Microsoft from Alcatel-Lucent’s claims. Will this have any impact on the iTunes Store and all the (legal) MP3 downloading that has become so important to the music industry? What about other software manufacturers who use MP3 technology? The Globe story quotes an industry analyst who predicts that Alcatel-Lucent will use this judgment “like a club” to force fees out of company’s that have MP3 licenses from Franhaufer.

Naturally, Microsoft will appeal this judgment, so it may be a while before we see if any of this has a direct impact on end users. But it bears watching.

I attended a showcase last night at the Cutting Room in NYC for a really awesome new singer named Ryan Shaw. His music is old-style soul and he just belts it out. His material is really catchy, his stage presence is very good, and his voice is awesome–very rangy and powerful.

He was accompanied by a 5-piece band, which only had 3 instrumentalists: a solid drummer; a bass player named “Tiny” who was about 6′5″ and grooved steadily on a 5-string throughout (and then blew away the audience with a virtuosic slapping-and-popping solo); and a guitarist who played lots of little three-and-four-note, high-voiced chords that were a throwback to Stax and Steve Cropper. The other two band members were male background singers who provided harmonies and counterpoint to Shaw’s vocal stylings.

Shaw’s CD will be coming out on Columbia in early April. Definitely watch for this guy, he has the talent to really go places. I’m also glad to see a resurgence in old-style soul music (check out James Hunter who’s another soul revivalist). Shaw will be touring soon with Robert Randolph, so check him out.

I read an interesting story this morning on MSNBC‘s Web site. It was written by a reporter who made the switch from Mac OS X to Windows Vista. You might enjoy reading about his experience. Just don’t skip to the end, though, or you’ll spoil the surprise ending. The URL is http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/16873608/

One of the high points of last weekend‘s NAMM show was a concert by the Tony Levin Band. Tony Levin is one of the most sought-after bassists in the world. He has recorded with such luminaries as Pink Floyd and John Lennon, and he spent many years as a key member of Peter Gabriel‘s band and of King Crimson. The outstanding musicians he‘s played with are literally too numerous to mention. He‘s also well known for his mastery of the Chapman stick, and he‘s one of my musical heroes.

The band played on Friday night at the Clarion Anaheim Resort, a hotel just down the street from the Anaheim Convention Center. Passes were free from beyerdynamic. The Orangewood Ballroom in which the stage was set was almost too small to accommodate the standing-room only crowd that was lucky enough to catch the performance.

Another Peter Gabriel alumnus, Larry Fast, has been part of Levin‘s band since it began in 2000. He held down stage left, playing a Kurzweil 2661. Fast is probably best known as the pioneering recording act Synergy, who had a run of electronic music success in the ‘70s and ‘80s. Once upon a time, he was a regular contributor to EM, and in 1986 he wrote the foreword to my second book, The Rock Synthesizer Manual.

Also on keyboards, stage right, was Tony‘s brother Pete Levin, whose playing credits range from Gil Evans to Korn. Like Fast, he has been part of the Tony Levin Band since its inception. Jesse Gress, a member of Todd Rundgren‘s band for ten years and the Tony Levin Band since 2001, proved his mastery of the Fender Stratocaster. I was especially pleased to see and hear Jerry Marotta on drums. He was a member of Peter‘s Gabriel‘s band beginning with the latter‘s first solo album. Marotta has played with Paul McCartney, the Indigo Girls, Sarah McLachlan, and others too numerous. He‘s another of my musical heroes.

The concert began with an impressive set by Marotta Griesgraber, a duo consisting of Marotta and virtuoso stick player Tom Griesgraber. The music was genuinely amazing, and the audience definitely dug it. It was almost difficult to believe that so much sound came from a duo performing live. With its complex textures and intelligent rock arrangements, Marotta Griesgraber won over many converts.

Then came the main act. The Tony Levin Band took to the stage with a barbershop quartet composed especially for NAMM, followed by “Break It Down,” the opening track from their latest album, Resonator. The band rocked their way through most of that album‘s songs and eventually included Peter Gabriel‘s “On the Air,” King Crimson‘s “Sleepless,” Synergy‘s “Phobos,” and “Back in N.Y.C” from the 1974 Genesis album, The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, all of which members of the band had played on the original recordings.

Todd Rundgren joined them onstage about halfway into the set, whipping the crowd into a frenzy with a few of his hits, and then left the stage. He returned again for the encore, for which he sang a rousing version of the Call‘s 1984 cult hit, “The Walls Came Down.”

The evening‘s music certainly met my expectations, which were very high to begin with. A splendid time was had by everyone present. Unfortunately, the Tony Levin Band was so loud that from my position near the front of the audience, their entire performance was audibly distorted. Nonetheless, the concert was an experience I will remember for a very long time.

I just got back from NAMM, where–along with a lot of new gear (look for a full report soon on emusician.com)–I saw a cool Pro Tools trick for adding color to the parts of the Mix and Edit windows that are normally gray. (Please send me a comment if you’ve already heard of this.) According to Digidesign, this is not an official Pro Tools feature, but rather an “Easter Egg” put in by one of their programmers. However, they think it’s a cool thing, and had this feature turned on in all of the sessions I saw open at the Digi booth.

I tried this in Pro Tools LE v. 7.3, and I know that it works in the latest version of HD as well. I’m not sure about earlier versions. I tried it on a Mac, but I assume it also works in Windows XP versions of Pro Tools, although I haven’t had a chance to try it yet (the keys to press would be slightly different, obviously).

Here’s how you do it: open the Color Palete, hold down the command, option, and control keys, click inside any color, and then drag your mouse upward. You’ll see all the tracks fill in with color corresponding to their original color selections. The higher your drag the mouse, the more instense the colors. If you decide you want to revert to normal, drag downward. Turning the colors on is global, and will affect all of your session files. Turning it off will do the same.

This shows parts of the Mix and Edit windows,side by side, with the colors turned on.

It has been two months since I first complained here that iTunes 7 wouldn‘t let you view or delete podcasts located on your first-, second- or third-generation iPod. Since then, Apple has done nothing to remedy the problem, and I‘ve been unable to find any third-party utilities that would do the trick.

In “Trouble in Paradise, Part 1,” I suggested that the only obvious solutions were to reformat your iPod–which I was unwilling to do–or remove iTunes 7 from your computer and reinstall iTunes 6. Weary of waiting for another solution, I decided this morning that the time had come to revert to iTunes 6. As I soon discovered, though, deleting iTunes 7 was easier said than done.

Because Apple doesn‘t provide a utility for removing iTunes 7 from your Mac, you need to manually:

1) Delete iTunes from /Applications.

2) Delete iTunes.pkg, iTunesX.pkg, and iTunesPhoneDriver.pkg from /Library/Receipts.

3) Delete com.apple.iTunes.plist from /Users/[name]/Library/Preferences.

4) Move your iTunes folder from /Users/[name]/Music to another location.

5) Restart your Mac and empty the Trash.

6) Download iTunes 6.0.5 installer from Apple and run the installation.

If you try to install iTunes 6 without taking the prior steps, when you reach the installer‘s Easy Install step, it will say, “You cannot continue. There is nothing to install.” If you choose Customize, all the installation options will be grayed out, and the only action displayed will be Skip.

After iTunes 6 is installed:

7) Run iTunes and connect your iPod to view its contents. (Don‘t worry that iTunes will indicate there‘s no music on your computer‘s hard disk.)
Delete the podcasts from your iPod‘s Music Library (finally!).

9) Quit iTunes and update iTunes to version 7.

10) Replace your iTunes folder back into /Users/[name]/Music.

If you replace your original iTunes folder before you update to iTunes 7, iTunes 6 will say, “The file ‘iTunes Library‘ cannot be read because it was created by a newer version of iTunes.” If you don‘t replace it after the update, iTunes will lose track of your music library‘s contents, and rebuilding it could take a very long time.

If someone (preferably Apple) comes up with a more elegant solution, I‘ll be grateful. In the meantime, I‘m unlikely to listen to podcasts on my iPod again, knowing how difficult it will be to remove them. That‘s a real same, because I really preferred listening to podcasts on my iPod to listening to them on my Mac.

My main recording drive failed on me this weekend. It was only a couple of months old. Although I am pretty fanatical about backing up, it croaked in between the time I recorded a session on it (on Saturday afternoon), and when my automatic backup was scheduled (1 AM on Sunday morning). As a result, I lost the entire session. Ugh!

This has caused me to rethink my backup strategy, which relied too much on those daily automatic backups. Although I’ll continue to have the software perform automatic backups once a day, I’m also going to run a manual backup at the end of every session. Had I done so Saturday when my session finished, I wouldn’t have lost a day’s work.

This incident also reinforced to me the utter fragility and unpredictable nature of hard drives, in general. The drive that went down had a name-brand mechanism and should have lasted several years, not a couple of months. Needless to say, it’s under warranty and will be replaced by the manufacturer. However, it goes to show that you should never depend on the reliability of your drive, and you should always backup, preferably as soon as you’ve finished recording.

For more on backup strategies, see the article “Better Safe than Sorry,” in the May, 2006 issue of EM.

As I write this, it‘s late Thursday night, and soon it will be Thursday morning. I‘m on a plane over the Pacific Ocean, fast approaching the International Date Line, typing away on my notebook computer and probably keeping the Brazilian turn-signal salesman sitting beside me awake. My 70-hour visit to Japan has been glorious and all too brief, but I look forward to returning home. I‘ll arrive in Charlotte on Thursday afternoon, of course.

Wednesday was the second and final full day that Korg hosted an international group of MI-industry journalists and distributors, many (including yours truly) visiting Japan for the first time. Japanese companies have a reputation for being very private about how they run their businesses, and Korg has demonstrated genuine corporate bravery by breaking the mold and letting so many outsiders have a protracted peak behind the curtain. I had a chance to bond with product reviewers and editors from the U.K., Italy, China, Australia, and several other countries I can‘t remember at the moment (though I‘ve asked Korg to send me a list). The other two U.S. magazine editors were my friends Ernie Rideout from Keyboard and Craig Anderton from EQ, Harmony Central, et al. The entire group stayed at the Century Hyatt Tokyo, a hotel I can easily recommend if you ever find yourself in the Shinjuku district and in need of comfortable lodging.

After breakfast at the hotel, the group gathered for our second bus ride to Korg HQ. Once back in the presentation room surrounded by top-secret gear, we spent the morning asking questions and getting answers about the wealth of new products Korg will publicly unveil on January 18. Until then, however, we are all sworn to secrecy. Like the previous day, Jerry Kovarsky and John McCubbery led the session (after all, it was those two guys who dreamed up and planned this mass invasion). The only two products I can tell you about right now are the MR-1 and MR-100 1-Bit Mobile Recorders, which made their debut at the AES show in October. The MR-1 has just begun production and is expected to be available in the U.S. in February, with the MR-100 following soon thereafter. I suppose I could also tell you that I wanted to own literally every new product I saw.

Korg‘s original plan was to set up interviews with selected employees immediately after the Q&A. I expected that would be my best opportunity to record conversations I could post on emusician.com as podcasts. I was hoping to interview some instrument-design engineers and members of Korg‘s international synth-voicing team about the product-development cycle–for example, exactly what are the stages leading to a new synthesizer‘s introduction? (And lest you think I‘m hinting that one new product is a synth, I planned the questions before I arrived in Tokyo, and I had no idea what I was going to see.) I had all my questions ready, and I also wanted to learn more about 1-bit recording. Unfortunately, the Q&A ran long, and Korg had planned too many activities to fit into a single day. As soon as the Q&A was over, it was time to get back on the bus and begin a guided tour of Tokyo. Mr. Katoh, the founder of Korg and our illustrious host, joined us on the bus for the remainder of the day.

Our first stop was a lunchtime banquet at an American-themed restaurant serving Japanese food and called, oddly enough, Christmas. Afterwards, we journeyed across town to visit an ancient Buddhist temple called Senso-ji. During the trip, our tour guide pointed out various Tokyo landmarks such as the full-size Japanese version of the Eiffel Tower called Tokyo Tower. And even though the area leading up to the Buddhist temple was full of small shops selling tourist trinkets, the temple itself was pretty cool and I enjoyed taking photos. It was raining and beginning to get dark by the time we reached our next destination, a sprawling and brightly lit shopping district called Electric City. It was just how I‘d always pictured downtown Tokyo from what I‘d seen in movies, like something from Bladerunner but all shiny and new. Every kind of consumer electronics, software, music, and movies were being sold. Our tour guide gave the group an hour to go exploring on our own. I ended up in a store selling new and used MIDI gear, but nothing tempted me to take it home.

I hadn‘t even finished digesting my lunch when it was time for dinner, the grandest feast of all. Words could barely describe such a cross-cultural culinary experience; suffice it to say that two master chefs were also the entertainment and the servers, thanks in part to their loud shouting and long paddles on which they could balance food and drinks from seven or eight feet away (if anyone is interested, let me know and I‘ll upload some photos and video clips that captured the moment). I‘ll say one thing about the Japanese: they sure know to throw a party and make their guests feel welcome. Many thanks to Korg for showing us all a very good time and patiently answering all our questions about products past, present, and future.

Oh, and about all those new products I can‘t tell you about? Let’s just say that next month’s NAMM show will be particularly exciting for Korg and its customers. I promise to spill the beans about everything on January 18, so stay tuned and don‘t forget to climb back on The Bus.