Canadian Musician Newsletter
January 2012

MusiCounts, with the help of JUNO Award-winning singer-songwriter Joel Plaskett, recently celebrated the $10,000 Band Aid Grant awarded to Sackville High School. The event featured Plaskett talking about the importance of music education and performing for those in attendance. Performances were also given by the Sackville High School Concert Band, Jazz Band, and Vocal Ensemble.

Music Teacher Lara MacKenzie says: “I am very grateful for this generous gift and was happy that Joel Plaskett could help us to celebrate our grant today. I suspect this grant and celebration will have a lasting impact on our school and community.”

In the 2011-2012 school year, MusiCounts awarded $600,000 through 69 grants, in both $5,000 and $10,000 increments, to 85 schools across Canada. In this year alone, over 18,000 Canadian children will have their lives impacted through these grants.

For more information, visit: www.musicounts.ca.

A new, regular section called Gear Heads will premiere in the January/February 2012 issue of Canadian Musician. The section invites CM readers to submit a photo of themselves with their favourite piece of music gear – an instrument, microphone, or even a recording unit – and answer some questions about their relationship with it.

We’ve invited John-Angus MacDonald of The Trews to help us with the inaugural edition, though from here on out, it’ll be readers only. Check out the submission page at: canadianmusician.com/gearheads/.

The International Music Software Trade Association (IMSTA), a nonprofit association which strives to inform music software users about the effects of software piracy on the music software industry, is asking music software users to complete its 2011 “Let’s Talk Piracy” survey.

“We believe that through education, we can change end-user behavior over time and reduce the demand for pirated software,” says the organization in a press release.

The responses will be used by IMSTA for analysis purposes and the results will be available to the music software companies. IMSTA will not be taking part in lawsuits or any other destructive measures in facing software piracy. The name and e-mail address of people who complete the survey will not be shared with or sold to the music software companies or any other companies or individuals.

IMSTA will also pick the best comments and three winners will be sent music software products given away by participating IMSTA member companies.

To learn more, visit www.imsta.org or to complete the survey HERE.

Vintage Guitars has introduced the latest addition to its Vintage ReIssued line, the VXP6BK.

The VXP6BK is outfitted with two gold-plated Wilkinson humbuckers, a 22-fret, set-in hard maple neck and rosewood fingerboard, eastern poplar body, Tune-O-Matic bridge, a three-way selector switch, volume knobs for each humbucker and a master tone control.

For more information, contact John Hornby Skewes & Co. Ltd.: +44 (0) 1132-865-381, FAX +44 (0) 1132-868-515, , www.jhs.co.uk.

Roland has made available its new SPD-SX sampling pad, a multi-pad percussion instrument with 2 GB of onboard sampling memory and three effects engines.

Replacing the SPD-S, the SPD-SX provides a simple and portable way to add sampling to any performance set-up. The 2 GB of built-in memory provides more than three hours of CD-quality sampling in stereo, which can be captured via the stereo mic/line input or imported through USB. The SPD-SX also features multi-pad sampling, ideal for capturing complete songs then assigning individual song sections to specific pads.

User samples and factory-preloaded wave data can be organized and stored in any of the 100 available kits and played from the nine integrated trigger pads, which include six large pads and three edge triggers. Two dual-trigger inputs allow users to expand the SPD-SX with optional external pads and acoustic drum triggers for more options.

For more information, contact Roland Canada Ltd.: 604-270-6626, FAX 604-270-6552, www.roland.ca.