Its still a work in progress, but if you have an iPod, iPhone, iPad, or iSomethingElse, you should be able to subscribe to my videos using iTunes, and put them on your mobile device. This might make practicing at the old piano a bit easier!

I haven’t actually tested this (I don’t have one of these iNfamous iDevices), so give it a try and let me know if it works!

Just click the new link over on the right side… the one that says Videos in iTunes.

After finally wrapping up the videos for Piano Funk Groove #4, I decided to have a little fun and put together an alternate version of the tune along with a video. I even broke out my 1985 Roland AXIS Keytar, and it’s pal the Akai MX-73 (also from 1985). I had a lot of fun shooting this against my homemade greenscreen and editing the video. I used open source software for nearly everything:

• Avisynth: For green screen keying, deinterlacing and colorizing video
• Blender: (Sequence Editor) for actually editing the video timeline and layout out the multi-frame cuts
• Gimp and Inkscape: for straight graphics and title cards
• VIM: My new favorite text file for editing all of those avisynth scripts.

I also took a moment to clean up the page where all of these videos live, and added a nice little popup video viewer to help save some space.

This also means it’s time for me to get back to work on the next tutorials!

Click the thumbnail below for a popup video — I hope you enjoy it!

Talk about organic!

You may or may not know that there is a GrooveWindow Facebook page. It started out as a simple — and fairly infrequent — place where I could drop little quick news updates that weren’t quite worthy of a full blog post. A number of people have joined the page, and we’ve been having some good conversations there.

Then, along came Schmurze, who reminded me of an excellent video on youtube with a killer funk groove — not to mention shredding hammond player:

I posted this to the facebook page, and people really liked it, and starting looking for more videos of great music.

Since then, the page has become a fun place for everyone to post great links to piano players (and otherwise great musicians) that they’ve enjoyed. It’s been a great way to learn about new musicians that we may not have heard of. For example, I had never heard of the insane Hiromi Uehara until James Strong posted one of her videos:

So… come join in the fun! If you’re on Facebook, come on over to the GrooveWindow page, and post some links of musicians you really enjoy!