Dear musicians, I’m especially excited about this episode because we’ll get to look at music jobs on cruise ships from the perspective of a Cruise Director. I have recorded a conversation with Karen, Cruise Director with several cruise lines, whom I had the chance to work with a couple of years ago. Enjoy the podcast. [...]
Dear musicians, Just because you’re at sea doesn’t mean you have to stop being creative. If you’re planning to record some of your song ideas the minute they pop into your head, you need a flexible recording device with you. Korg just announced their “Sound on sound” multi-track recorder, that’s small enough to fit in [...]
Dear musicians, I’m always on the lookout for gear that either makes it easier or more fun to perform on the road, and I’ve come across a gadget that definitely delivers. TC Electronics has introduced it’s new guitar and bass tuner “PolyTune“. It’s called that because it let’s you strum all of your strings at [...]
Dear Musicians, Just a quick note to let you know that you no longer need to worry about whether our domain end in .com or .ca because both of them work now.
Just a quick note to point out that Carnival Cruises reported that their third quarter earnings are up. Cruise bookings are up and fuel costs are down. Maybe we can start being a bit more optimistic about the economy, although Carnival’s Chief Operating Officer Howard Frank says Carnival is cautious about 2010 because of expectations [...]
Dear musicians, Cover bands have a different role on land as they have on cruise ships. It is thus important to know how you need to modify your package to be suitable for cruise ship gigs. First, one general comment about music on cruise ships as opposed to land. On land, your cover band gets [...]
Dear Musicians, With the apps you can install on your iPhone, you can turn your phone into a flashlight, a metronome, a piano, an ocarina and even a radio. Today I’ll talk about the latter. My favorite radio iPhone app is called “Tuner” by Nullriver. The app is not free and compared to some of [...]
Improvisation is a skill that comes up often as it is required to a certain extent on cruise ships. Some musicians that don’t improvise feel inferior to those that do because they may think that they are less talented. I feel that any musician should work on improvisation, as it will make you a more [...]
Here is a hard swinging rendition of “Bolivia” played by Freddie Hubbard who, unfortunately, left us in December last year. Thanks for all the great music, Freddie. Enjoy
Dear Musicians, When it comes to recording music on the go, spontaneity is one of the key elements to capturing an inspired performance. Whether you are jamming with friends or just playing alone at home, there is always a chance that you will hit upon a musical idea that you will want to preserve so [...]
Dear Musicians, We place a lot of guitar- and piano-vocalists on cruise ships and thus it happens quite often that we come across demos of entertainers that are missing that certain “je ne sais quoi”. Some entertainers choose to use the most basic midi setups to run their sequences and thus can’t manage to create [...]
Dear Musicians, When it comes to recording music on the go, spontaneity is one of the key elements to capturing an inspired performance. Whether you are jamming with friends or just playing alone at home, there is always a chance that you will hit upon a musical idea that you will want to preserve so [...]
