MichaelStone’s blog

----Michael Stone----

With the release of my cd "Inspired by a true story" I had some people ask me for some more info on how we put together the project. The Podcast below should

give you a little behind the scenes glance into the music.

Thanks for your interest!

--- Michael Stone ---

Michael-Stone-Cover-for-Web

It's been a while since I've been around, but for good reason I was putting the finishing touches on my 1st studio release in 52 years. Well, OK my ONLY studio release in 52 years. I hope you'll think it was worth the wait.

"Inspired by a true story" is available at Michael Stone Music . com The cd is just $10 US. You can also  sample and download individual cuts through the 7 Digital widget below.

---Michael Stone---

Adobe Audition 3 production software is coming Oct. 29th.

Since Adobe bought Syntrillium, and with it Cool Edit, a few years back, the updates have been coming fairly regularly. With each update, Audition has improved features that bring it into serious competition with the likes of Sonar and Pro Tools.

Adobe Audition 3 is for the "sound designer, musician, recording engineer, mastering engineer, or other audiocentric professional who needs an all-in-one toolset for professional audio production."

Adobe offers another audio product, Soundbooth 3, which has fewer bells and whistles, perhaps for the less demanding producer, and at a less demanding price, but more on that later.

Adobe Audition 3 offers 50 real-time audio effects including echo, flange, reverb and others. It also supports ASIO, VST, DirectX, and ReWire.

They improved the mixing window, quick punch in reality there are far too many features for me to discuss here. I have Audition 2.0 and after taking a look at what they have to offer, I'm seriously considering the Adobe Audition 3-Upgrade. Will this replace Sonar 6 Producer for me, probably not, but there are times I can see projects that I may want to use this software for.

In fact Adobe has a pretty nifty features page that will give you a video demonstration on many of the features available. Take a look and decide if it's for you.

---Michael Stone---
Singer-songwriter
Radio Personality
---Observer---
AudioPros.com

---Michael Stone---

I dis-like doing covers when playing live. The bottom line is that I only want to play my originals.

Reality check here Michael.

If you want people to give your originals a listen, intersperse them with covers, especially in a bar-club scene.

So, off I go to find some covers that I like and can learn quickly for an upcoming club gig. I found several through some quick Google TAB searches and was off to learn them. That's when I realized they were too high for my vocal range. OK, time to sit down and transpose to my range.

Then I thought, hey is there a transposition tool online. Here I go a Googling, and sure enough, here it is; a transpositon tool online. Enter the chords and lyrics, tell it what key you'd like it in and presto, chango, you've got a transposed version of your song. Pretty cool, huh?

It''ll save you some time. Enjoy!

Michael Stone
Singer-songwriter
Radio personality
---Observer---

--- Michael Stone

Amazon MP3 is Amazon's entry into the digital music business.

You can now download digital tunes with Amazon MP3 .

It's service has no DRM (digital rights management) which means the tunes can be copied and is compatible with Zune and Apple's I-Pod.

A quick look at Amazon's stock price this morning found it hovering around $95 a share. Five years ago you could buy Amazon stock for $15 a share.

Amazon MP3 will be a direct competitor to Apple's I-Tunes and is started with a price war, pricing most downloads a dime cheaper than the dominant music service.

Michael Stone
Singer-songwriter
Radio personality
---Observer---

---Michael Stone

As an independent musician and proponent of others chasing the dream, I'm always looking for new ways to promote the artist and the music.

Reverbnation seems to be a site that has a great and innovative team of developers.

I already liked their music players that artists can install on their pages. Their show schedules widget with maps is outstanding, and now they've combined many of their features into one all encompassing widget.

Here's how they describe it:

The widget features a customizable picture, band info, music player loaded with your songs, a video, show schedule (with tour map), "join the mailing list" Fan Collector, and more. You can also cross-promote other artists at the bottom of the widget. These artists are pulled from the list of artists you recommend, and rotated randomly. Great for helping out our artists.This is a great way for artists to spread themselves and their music across the web via blogs, other web pages and their own home page.

I highly recommend it.

Take a look at it below and click around.

All the best!

-Michael Stone-

UPDATE .... Hmmmm...... It seems that the widget has a "loading" problem. I've contacted Reverbnation and will leave this up for a while "as is" to see what they can tell me, I'll let you know what they say.... I swear it's a cool deal. As with all of these things there seem to be bugs....

UPDATE TO THE UPDATE: After getting a note from Robert Hubbard (see comments) of Reverbnation (yes they actually responded. I like these guys) For whatever reason when I copy the code, it was dropping the artist ID. FIXED! Check it out...

ANOTHER UPDATE....Now I've found that my video isn't showing through the widget. In fact, it says that this artists has no video. So I've got another note into the folks at Reverbnation. Additonally, I've just uncovered another bug in how the widget displays in Igoogle. In Firefox it continuously reloads the page and creates a long downward scrolling, while in Explorer it displays partially cut off on the sides..

UPDATE 9/24/2007----9:30 am
EXCELLENT!

Robert dropped a comment, the video problem has been resolved. All in all a great experience with the members of the Reverbnation staff!!.... APPLAUSE!!!

--Michael Stone

A perfect night, despite it's imperfections.

That's how I might describe last night's show. I was the opening act for Karla Bonoff at The Rialto Theater in Loveland, Colorado.

Broken strings, a warm audience and continuance of my musical resurrection, made my performance truly memorable.

No matter how often I perform I get the jitters. Last night was no exception. I went into the performance with some trepidation, because I was nursing a sore throat.

And if ever there was a time I wanted to get it all right on stage, last night was the night. Hometown crowd, first major act I've performed with in ages. It had all the making for a perfect (or nerve wracking) evening.

The sound check was uneventful. In fact, the sound in the intimate confines of The Historic Rialto theater is phenomenal, both on the stage as a performer, and in the audience as a listener.
So when it came time to start the show, it was a self intro. No emcee, so I just walked out introduced myself and started into "TODAY." As with much of what I play it is an athletic song, both on guitar and vocally. I felt it went well and received a very warm reception from the audience, considering most had never heard me and were obviously there for Karla Bonoff.

I then proceeded with more of my set, going into the ballad, "Will you Stay", then over to the piano for "Blue Eyed Friend."

All in all, I was very pleased with the way things were going. Exactly as planned. Al the songs in order, just as we had jotted them down on a napkin while doing lunch at The Village Inn earlier in the day.

With the progression of the program moving nicely I picked up my guitar with some athletic guitar riffs, to fire off a rendition of "I still remember", when Boiinnnng!

Yep, broken guitar string.

Remember I told you how great the sound is in the Rialto. It's especially resonant when a phosphorus-bronze blended G string decides to head south.

So here I am, guitar in hand, broken string, a house full of eager listening patrons of the arts and I'm frozen in time. What kept going through my mind was that I had my backup Ovation Acoustic all bundled ready for the travel to the Rialto, in case of just an eventuality, and forgot it.

Time to punt!

So while I'm going through a million scenarios in my mind, ranging from fleeing, like a musical refugee from the stage, to breaking into an inconsolable Britney Spears style breakdown. I even consider a quick fall to my knees and a power prayer to request divine intervention and a time continuum shift back about 3 minutes to just before the string incident.

It was at the moment as I moved to the piano tat heard what I thought was the voice of God coming through my monitor speakers.

"Dennis will change your string".

What? was I hallucinating, hearing voices?

No, it was Scott the sound man at The Rialto. Dennis his assistant would come up and change my string. Wow, I'm moving up in the world. I now have a roadie!

So off I go to the piano for "Stranger" , which was to be my closer. It's a strong powerful ballad and I thought it would be fitting to end the show here. But remember, I'm in punt mode right now. So "Stranger" on the piano it is, to buy some guitar string changing time.

After the song Dennis brings me the guitar and my tuner with these words, "You might need to do some tuning". A truer set of words has never been said. Apparently during the changing of the string and the subsequent attempts at tuning, Dennis had adjusted other strings unknowingly. It's easy to do, if you don't know the guitar. All those tuning pegs aren't always in the same place.

Punting, part deux.

So while attempting to talk to 400 plus people and keep them entertained, and tune a horribly out of tune guitar by ear, I could hear the building roar of the collapse of that musical resurrection I referred to earlier.

But all went well, the audience was extremely understanding and apparently entertained by my mishap. All in all it made for a nice ice breaker.

I wouldn't take the moment back for anything in the world. So, God, forget that turn back the time continuum prayer please. I'll get back to you at a more important time.

Michael Stone
Singer-songwriter
Radio personality
---Observer---

By Michael Stone

The image of 9/11 that is emblazoned in my mind is not the falling of the twin towers or the pictures of the planes on that brilliant sunny day.

My earliest and most vivid 9/11 memory is words on a computer screen. There was a foreboding sense that this wasn't going to be a normal day on the radio.

My AP wire first revealed that a plane had crashed in one of the towers of the World Trade Center. As with many news stories, the flashes were a little confused. Was it a small plane? Was it a larger plane? At first glance, it seemed like it was yet another tragedy in the daily flood of news that comes into our studio.

As the details trickled in, I started to get a feeling in my gut that this was not a normal aviation disaster, but something more, even though there was no real indication in the initial reports of the enormity of what was really happening - yet.

Then the words came across the AP bulletin with a flash about a 2nd plane. It was at that instant that I knew this was a terrorist attack.

We instantly went into overload, trying to get more information to broadcast. Even though we're an entertainment program on a music station, we knew that we had to get this information out.

We had to try to understand these events just as everyone else was. We needed to process the information and try to make sense of it. The difference was that we were doing it in a very public manner.

We instantly turned into a talk radio station, reporting what we could find out from news wires, websites, TV's tuned to every station we could.

We were fielding hundreds of calls from listeners asking what was going on, telling us what was going on, just trying to understand how something so horrible could happen. And on purpose.

This was no act of God, no earthquake, no, this was a man made calamity of the worst sort.

Evil in it's truest form.

The radio station almost immediately began a simulcast with one of our sister stations. Four people on the air trying to make some sense of an unexplainable situation. Between us there was over 100 years of broadcast experience, but for whatever reason I felt like a rookie that day. Unable to ever quite say what I thought needed to be said.

In the back of my mind I knew there would be thousands of people in those buildings and that right now, so many of them were going through the ultimate hell.

People were dying as I was speaking. That reality was a cruel twist to the profession I have chosen and love. It gave me a sick feeling in my gut.

I felt such a responsibility to do this right. To broadcast with a sense of importance beyond anything that I had ever experienced before.

At one point during those hectic moments, we took a mental break. The on air crew gathered outside the station on what was a gorgeous sunny morning. I couldn't help but think that this is what it looked like and felt like in New York on that morning.

We held hands. We prayed. It was all we could do.

Then we went back to our broadcast and picked up where we left off.

Then came the words that I can't get out of my mind. The AP bulletin was short, but I knew what it meant.

"Tower number one has fallen".

I can still see those words in my mind's eye. A building the size of the World Trade Center had collapsed? That was tantamount to some cataclysmic astronomical event.

As I tried to process that piece of information and continue the broadcast I knew it was going to be a long day and that the world as we knew it, would never been the same again.