Music

I love music, who doesn't ?
I prefer music that says something worth keeping in heart, and this is possible for any combination of armony, melody, lyrics and rhythm.

Playing

In 2005 I finally bought a piano, after dreaming about it since I had to stop taking lessons cause I didn't have one (ages ago). It's an electric one, a GEM with 88 weighted keys and dynamics. Had tought about a real one, would have been fun to tune it, but would have also been a pain to do it when forced to... No complains: has a good quality sound, and costed less then 1k EUR, which is fine. Also, it has a MIDI interface; not that I really plan to use it, but if it ever hits me, I can :)

So, I'm now trying to get serious about playing with it and music in general. With the help of LilyPond I'm working on transcriptions of music I like for me and my friends to study and play.

Online resources

• Bob Keller's Jazz Page
  This guy teaches computer science at the Harvey Mudd college. As of 2008 one of his courses happens to be Jazz Improvisation and the Jazz Page seems to be there for that reason.
  I love his website, neat and simple in layout, yet very informative. Should put a link to it in the people's page :)
• JazzStandards.com/
  Contains lots of information about standard jazz tunes, including analisys, cd recomandations, book references.
• Jazz88 on WBGO network
  This is a radio station from Newark (NJ). Newark Public Radio is a cultural affiliate of National Public Radio. It's a listener-supported radio that I used to listen when in USA. 24 hours a day Jazz. No advertising! I missed this one when I came back to Italy, but finally they have an online stream so I started tuning on it again (thanks!).
• Learn Jazz Piano
  A citadel of jazz pianists, by Scott Ranney. This is a BBS-like service, with many interesting resources for learning. It has some targetted advertising, but it's targetted, so not very disturbing.
• Lead sheets
  A big collection of jazz, classical and brasilian music sheets in PDF format. The link above is a directory listing, I find it far more usable then tipical web sites. If the link brokes or you prefer to browse a colorful page follow this link.
• Mutopia Project
  Mutopia is similar in spirit to Project Gutenberg, but consists of free sheet music. All music is available as Postscript (.ps) and PDF (.pdf) files, for both A4 and Letter paper sizes, as well as GNU Lilypond's own file format (.ly). Audio previews of the music are available as MIDI (.mid) files; these are computer generated but give a rough idea of what the music sounds like.
• chordie.com
  Guitar tabs, guitar chords and lyrics (lots of stuff, often broken but can be useful anyway).
• LilyPond - music notation for everyone
  LilyPond reminds me about how good Free Software can be ! It produces high quality music sheets from source code (which means comments, revision control, all keyboard based input). Can also easily transpose pieces and supports metadata and all of that.