I have a mild obsession with rhetorical structure, linguistics and flowcharts (if they're funny - I'm not one of those weird regular flowchart people).

Love All This' Hey Jude Flowchart is pretty great, and the fact that it's categorized under "Nerd" blows the lid off of my own categorization system.

I've been on a huge Paul Simon kick lately, both listening and learning - meaning that I'll never truly get the hang of playing - his songs, and I found a great clip of him playing an unfinished "Still Crazy..." with Dick Cavett.

The bridge has always been the most striking part of the tune, and to watch a master songwriter like Simon weigh his options about where to go next is really fascinating.
"Have you ever reached for your C-sharp and gotten your C-natural instead?" is pretty priceless as well.

If nothing else, think about this:  how badass a songwriter do you have to be for Ray Charles to cover you?

Interested in learning the banjo?  Visit the Tony Trischka School of Banjo for FREE video lessons. 

You can even upload videos of your own playing and get some one-on-one pointers from Tony Trischka himself.

A video tutorial service and social network for banjo lovers - all this from a man who passes his time with Steve Martin:

(download)

The first Les Paul song I ever heard was "How High the Moon" on the soundtrack to My Favorite Year.  For years, I assumed Mary Ford's stack of 12 vocal tracks was the Andrews Sisters, and that Les was an entire small combo.  I always loved the song, and I was thrilled (and a little embarrassed) to finally discover after his passing that it was only him and Mary playing around with the multi-track recording methods that he invented.  Who knew?

There's a lot of excellent footage of the then-married couple playing together on variety shows - see one of my favorites below, where Mary really shines:

An amazing, amazing guy - I could listen to that intersection of jazz, rockabilly and country all day, and the modern era of recording might very well not exist without his innovations.

Beloved children's books!  Beloved children's cartoons!  Oh boy!  October is going to be a quite a month.  First, Where the Wild Things Are finally comes out on October 16th:

There's even an excerpt of Dave Eggers' Where the Wild Things Are screenplay / novelization available courtesy of The New Yorker.

On Oct. 27th, we get a tribute to Harry Nilsson's The Point!, one of my all-time favorite records and movies.  Featuring covers from Devotchka, Martha Wainwright, Andrew Bird and more, you can stream the songs here: 
http://amanorecordings.bandcamp.com/album/songs-from-the-point

The record benefits Eggers' 826NYC, a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting literacy and writing skills to kids in NYC and beyond.

Coolest thing I've ever seen? Probably. The Dave Eggers-penned film finally comes out in October, and the trailer debuts this Friday in front of Monsters vs. Aliens.

See more at FilmDrunk

On the eve of so many excellent Philly bands releasing new albums this summer, I've noticed that none of them has a Twitter account. That's a real shame, so here's a how-to (and, more importantly, why-to) guide to using Twitter as a tool for promoting your music.

Twitter is a microblogging service that mimics Facebook's "Status Update" feature: users create 140-character "tweets" and add Followers who are automatically fed these messages via Twitter.com or text messages.

You can also reply to other users (@UserName), send a private Direct Message (D UserName) or start and follow topics (check out #ModernFairy and #LitDish -- both awesome).

At first glance it seems like just another place for personal updates that no one cares about, but if you use it to announce things other than "I am eating a baloney sandwich - ACK!", it's a really powerful (and mobile) real-time marketing device. It attracts tens of thousands of new users each month, and it has grown more than 600% in the last 12 months.
Read "Twitter - the next big source of blog traffic" for more about setting up an account.

Why Musicians Need Twitter:

1. Your fans are already on Twitter
...and so are the journalists and bloggers who review your albums. Trust me, you'll be surprised by how many people you know on here. A simple search using TwitterSearch will also show you all the tweets containing your name - a great place to start adding followers who are already interested your music.

(You should already be receiving automatic updates from Google whenever your name is dropped in news, blogs, videos or other groups - if not, set them up at Google Alerts)

2. Twitter works with your cell phone
Let's say you just finished your sound check and no one has shown up for a gig. Simply send a tweet via text to 40404, and Twitter can notify all your followers that they are missing the best show of your career! Better yet, if they have your profile set up for notifications, it will send an alert to their cell phone.

If you're a touring musician or stuck in the studio, Twitter is a great way to get around spotty Internet access and a lack of time to update your website. Simply text updates from the road and have them fed into your other online profiles.

Services like TwitPic are also great for instantly uploading photos from the road, right from your phone. That burrito you ate with Lyle Lovett? Show everyone in just a few minutes!

3. Twitter integrates with your other social networking services
You can set Twitter to automatically change your Facebook status to your latest tweet, or use a service like TwitterFeed and allow Twitter to automatically tweet your latest blog post, Flickr upload, show calendar update and more.

When I publish this post, Twitter will automatically create a tweet entitled "Twitter for Musicians Pt 1" with a link to this blog (check it out here). At the same time, Twitter will change my Facebook status to the title of that tweet. My Twitter account also imports my latest GoodReads updates, Blip.fm updates and my shared Google Reader items - it saves me tons of time, and it makes sure that my friends who are on Twitter but not Facebook / mailing lists / near a computer can get the same info as everyone else in real time.

-----------------------------------------------
Still not sold? Just take my word for it, set up an account, check out the articles below, and Part II will go into much more detail about integrating Twitter with your other online marketing outlets. And follow me on Twitter when you get there!

• How To Use Twitter for Music Promotion

• Twitter For Musicians and Bands: A How-To Guide

• Musicians’ Guide to Rocking Twitter
  

A follow-up to yesterday's post about Poetry Animations. Both seem to respond to the actual sound waves, with the artist's lips moving in response to any volume shifts -- obviously it's a lot more effective with poetry readings, since Robert Johnson is "singing" all of his guitar stops (the blinking is a nice and very eerie touch, however). Here are some of the best:

From Jim Clark, aka Blues Animations on DailyMotion.com

Finally, democracy for concert seating! SeatKarma.com, where "no two tickets are the same," gives users the ability to view all available seats for a show.

"SeatKarma’s search engine covers 99% of tickets available for purchase online by retrieving live ticket information from a couple of hundred secondary market ticket brokers. The cost comparison is then augmented with venue mapping available for approximately 1600 venues. 1300 of these are “live maps” which place a marker on the section where the seat will be located. The remaining 300 are small venues such as bars where seat mapping doesn’t apply. The company claims it now has more live maps than any other comparison engine on the market." (from TechCrunch.com)

I just bought tickets for the Clapton / Winwood show in Philly and spent 20 minutes in an Internet queue wondering what (if any) seats were still available. Never again!

clipped from network.nationalpost.com The series of 50 books - 25 fiction and 25 non-fiction were redesigned to recall Penguin's first paperbacks, published in the 30s. Then, the softcovers were colour coded - orange books were fiction, blue for non-fiction. The new retro Penguins all carry the same orange cover. "If you're standing looking at those books you know subconsciously or by implication that all of these books are going to be OK," said Peter Blake, the company's Australian sales director who conceived the idea of the series. "Even if you've not heard of Geoffrey Robertson's Crimes Against Humanity you think, 'It's part of the collection, I trust the brand and it's surrounded by all these other classics by authors like Waugh or Fitzgerald so it must be OK.' " To have a look at the entire series, visit Popular Penguins.