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About Jon
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I'm a musician and writer, dividing my professional time between these two pursuits. I've published six books in the ubiqutious yellow-and-black Dummies series, as well as other books and magazine and newspaper articles on music, guitar, audio, and technology.
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Category Archives: Featured
“WANTED! Guitarist for up-and-coming band with major label interest.”
There was a time when, if you were advertising for a musician, all you had to do was print the magic phrase “major label interest,” and the world would beat a path to your door—if you were foolish enough to include your home address in the ad. Once the masses arrived, you could qualify the statement with, “Well, there’s no money yet, and we have to travel far distances and play long hours at obscure and under-attended venues, but we have major label interest.” And to a person, the teeming throngs would cry, “Sign me up!”
Life in the Key of Songs
Music is all around us—whether we like it or not. Even when you take the buds out of your ears, you still hear music from the loudspeakers at the mall, in the elevators of office buildings, and at the gas tank when you fill up (usually underscoring a pitch to sell you something else). But as musicians, we can learn from “uninvited music,” even when it’s not to our taste, and we can always keep our critical ear perked for inspiration and ideas. Even being able to identify the musical components of the ordinary, non-musical sounds we hear in everyday life can be revealing.
Downsizing the Grammys
Traditions have a way of providing stability, even when you don’t always agree with them. Whether you support a particular institution, despise it, or are indifferent to it, at least you can learn to work with it if it’s a fixed entity. But when long established routines start to unravel, everyone takes notice and becomes concerned.
This Is Your Brain on Music. Any Questions?
Many brain research studies—including those involved with early-childhood learning, improving mental health, and staving off dementia in later life—identify playing music as a means for keeping the old gray matter in shape. Music requires several specialized brain-related activities, the most basic of which is developing a motor skill. Beyond getting the right and left hands to play together and in rhythm, and using the ear to let you know whether or not you’re not making the right connections, music brings other, higher-level skills to bear. All of these contribute to what amounts to exercise for the brain.
Multi-tasking . . . or Multi-taxing?
Everyone thinks that multi-tasking is a good thing—or at least a necessary skill worth mastering for these modern times. Well, just because we’re forced into multi-tasking for work and home life doesn’t mean it’s healthy. Witness texting while driving: That’s multi-tasking, and that’s clearly an unsafe, bad, illegal thing to do. Many experts argue that simply talking on a cell phone in a car is dangerous, and that the whole “hands-free” loophole doesn’t really address the basic problem—that dividing your concentration ultimately makes you less successful at either activity.
Proper Netiquette Is for Keeps
“Young man, if I catch you doing that, it will go on your permanent record.” Certainly these words were leveled at me (more than once) to try to make me behave by instilling the fear that my mischief-making would have lasting consequences. (I don’t think it worked, most of the time.) We know now that these threats are largely empty, as kids are protected by laws prohibiting disclosure of most youthful transgressions. But even if the law shields kids, real life on the Internet holds perils of indelibility.
It’s All in the . . . Timing
There’s an old joke about a comedian convention where the celebrity comics are scheduled to tell jokes at the event’s big banquet. Everyone in the audience knows all the jokes already because the jokes have been catalogued for the convention. To save time, the speakers decide to just say the joke’s number instead of telling the whole joke. The first speaker is a star, a legend in the business. “Forty-seven!” he calls out to laughter all around. “One-hundred and sixty-two!” The audience explodes with deep belly laughs and leaps to its feet in an ovation.
In the Waiting Game, Technology Always Wins
As Ben Franklin famously opined, “Only three things in life are certain: death, taxes, and a new Apple model announced in the spring.” Okay, he obviously didn’t contribute the last bit (he was more of a Linux guy), but it might as well be added to that short list of life’s inevitabilities. Industry watchers and consumers fearing a seasonal bout of buyer’s remorse dread the early part of every new year, because the rumors start flying about what you would have gotten if you had only waited. Sure, there will always be something new on the horizon, but it doesn’t mean you can’t demonstrate bad timing in your purchasing.
