The Top Cool Stuff
- the Hyperarts Resource Site — just about everything you need that's not edible, on one handy page. You could make this your startup internet site.
- Sam Evans made this website you're looking at; Darol sez "he's amazing". If you need a website created, revamped or improved technically, he can make it happen.
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Interesting quote:
A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves money from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most money from the public treasury, with the result that democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy followed by a dictatorship. The average of the world's greatest civilizations has been two hundred years. These nations have progressed through the following sequence: from bondage to spiritual faith, from spiritual faith to great courage, from courage to liberty, from liberty to abundance, from abundance to selfishness, from selfishness to complacency, from complacency to apathy, from apathy to dependency, from dependency back to bondage. Attributed to Alexander Tyler, an invented personage
- Compass Records Site.. Darol's current record company.
- Violin makers: I play these fiddles. They sound great. You have heard them. 'Nuff said.Jon Cooper and Bob Kogut. I also have recently acquired an amazing 5 string violin by the late luthierJohn Sullivan, and have been looking into 5 strings built by Barry F. Dudley, who just built an amazing fiddle for Tania Elizabeth (The Dux)
- L.R.Baggs, maker of great pickups, and the most useful direct box on the planet.
- I also like Schertler pickups; they can be easily removed from any instrument.
The new electric violin by Eric Aceto: The NV. A giant leap forward in electric violin tone; equivalent to the advent of Barcus-Berry or Zeta. A product of over 12 years of patient R&D, this is the most acoustic-sounding electric ever built. I know that's a strong statement; I stand by it. Just check it out!- Acoustic Image amplifiers really work great for electric strings. urbbob.com: Acoustic Image Amplifiers
- D'Addario strings, in all their permutations, are working great on all my instruments. At this moment I am using mostly their Zyex perlon-based strings, but a couple of my fiddles also have Helicores on them.
- Knilling planetary violin pegs are amazing- look good and work so well, you won't need fine tuners. No more peg shrinkage disasters on stage in winter or the desert. Great site too.
- SHAR products still has String Orchestra and a few Quartet arrangements for much of the TISQ's music; check them out at Shar's Website
- Homespun Tapes has a video out of Darol teaching the blues on the violin, and a new one with Darol teaching string rhythms..
- Ever wonder what it would be like to have frets on your fiddle? There's an easy and cheap way to do that now. Check outThe Fiddle Fretter... A fellow up in Nova Scotia has made a thin piece of plastic with small frets which can be stuck right on your fingerboard and removed with no damage. Weird? Yes, but have you TRIED it????
Fiddle- or string-related stuff...
- the Five-string Fiddle website is up and running! This is where you can find out all about this new string phenomenon,which is really starting to roll.
- Brittany Haas' website is where you can get her amazing old-time fiddle recording. She plays the other fiddle parts in The Republic Of Strings... one of the most talented musicians I've ever met.
- The IAJE Strings email discussion list. A great resource for your questions about jazz string education.
- International Association of Jazz Educators : The very cool info organization about jazz.
- The amazingTurtle Island String Quartet: the string quartet that split the Jazz Atom. still messing up minds all over the world. They have a new lineup, and an incredible new CD release on Telarc. Buy it here
- Mark O'Connor Fiddle Camp: A very good place to be.
- Mike Marshall: Perhaps the greatest mandolin player ever, and one of the most interesting guitarists. Plays great fiddle. And Mandocello. And he'll wrassle an accordion to the ground.
- Vassar's page: What to say about Vassar Clements that hasn't been said? The nicest guy to ever change the entire course of fiddling His memorial site.
- Darol produced Natalie MacMaster's recent recording project, Blueprint, featuring Bela Fleck, Mike Marshall, Edgar Meyer, Sam Bush, Alison Brown, Phillip Aaberg, Victor Wooten, Bryan Sutton, Jerry Douglas, and other Nashville pals. On Rounder & Warner Canada.
- Matt Glaser: The coolest & most articulate modern jazz fiddler now playing, under-recorded and overworked at Berklee School Of Music. He now has 2 profoundly great recordings of his band,The Wayfaring Strangers, on Rounder Records.
- Joe Kennedy: The first bebop violinist (if you don't count Stuff Smith, who pointed Dizzy at it) Woefully underrecorded, he died in 2003 in Richmond, VA. A fiery combo of Eddie South and Stuff Smith, with the hippest harmonic concept bebop ever would need. Find some really old Ahmad Jamal recordings with Joe on them, or pick up Dr. Billy Taylor's great Concord Jazz release, Where've You Been?
- Stuff Smth
- Wilbur Hall
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YouTube clips of fiddling greats:
These sites are beautifully put together, comprehensive clearing houses for info about any modern violinists, or violins, or whatever...
- CD and MP3 music from Scotland - Scotloads Music Website, a great, capacious & inclusive Celtic fiddle website.
- Bowed Electricity All the info you care to have on electric violins and violinists is here...
- Jazz violin: Mark Chung's information and news site featuring info on just about every jazz violinist ever. This is a good work, by an excellent jazz violinist!
Other music stuff
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I'm in love with this little program called SoundStudio. it's so easy to use and you can carve up anything, from downloaded stuff to mp3s to dictation files.. No crossfading, but easy editing and compression, autofades and so on. There's a little auxiliary program you have to load to convert to and from MP3s, but it's good to go after that, and you can manipulate it to any size or bit rate, which makes your MySpace uploads and sample cuts for the web a piece of cake.
- Irene Young, the coolest photographer in this galaxy. 30 years of photos...I still look good in her lens. You would too.
- Philip Aaberg, the undisputed Montanan master of the keys, is one of the greatest musicians of the American West, or East, north, or anywhere else. He's got a beautful new site where you can find out all about him, and purchase his music online. Sweetgrass Music
- Ol' Danny Barnes! Like a west Virginia coal miner whoÕs hijacked the borer, Danny Barnes has sunk a musical shaft straight down through the jumbled strata of modern culture. Those with the ears to see can read the scratchings on the wall of his syncretic subterranean view of pretty much the whole damn thing: Our nutball civilization, through a banjo, darkly.
- Michael Manring's Site: One of the greatest electric bassists ever, I was lucky enough to play with him for a few years. And one of the best websites I've seen yet. What will that guy do next?
- David Grisman's site.
- Martin Taylor, jazz guitarist supreme and accompanist to Stephane Grappelli for years.
- Jane Siberry an amazing dreamer of dreams and singer of songs
- Bela Fleck and his Famous Flecktones!
- David Lindley
Science/Philosophy (Sci-Phi)
- Genetic Sanity:OK, the good guys come riding in, battling the evil empire Monsanto. The most mind-boggling development in modern Genetics is the push for Open-source Genetics codes, free of copyrights, etc. Promugated by Cambia, it's called the Biological Innovation for Open Society. Check it out.
- Earthquake information from the USGS.
- The late lamented Terence McKenna. The most fun you can have with your brain on... amazing ideas. And a handy little time reference clock too.
- AND... An informative, funny, and fascinating meditation on dying.
"The best answer I've gotten yet out of this is from Don Delillo's Underworld, where the nun discovers that when you die you become your website." - Joseph Campbell: With personal rep slightly besmirched, his monumental body of work lives on unscathed. A signpost for musicians like me who look for the underlying family resemblances in all musical & mythical forms. My current favorite (it's really concise): Myths To Live By.
- Gregory Bateson : A scientific maverick, Bateson is nevertheless descended from an illustrious line of biologists, including Darwin, Lamarck, and William Bateson. He asked the most difficult and deepest questions I have yet encountered: What can or must be held sacred in a world based upon scientific realities? Where does Mind end? What does Life mean, actually? No, Actually? Stewart Brand was a huge fan of the late GB and there is probably a lot of stuff dealing with his work on The Well. Three great books: Mind And Nature, Steps To An Ecology Of Mind, and Angels' Fear (co-written with Mary Catherine Bateson, his daughter by Margaret Mead).
Music, Poetry
- Hipsters...Flipsters...& Finger-poppin' Daddies!
Knock me yer Lobes....!
The first and possibly greatest "Performance Artist" ever to groove us & gas us on this Sweet Swingin' Sphere!!! the one & only
Lord Buckley Online - The Other, scary side of hip scatting. The unique inimitable Shooby Taylor.
- Kenneth Rexroth : The most incisive and adventurous poetic mind of the 20th century. Wrote the greatest love poems too. A new collection is just out of his Collected Poems. Wow. Also: The Collected Short Poems of Kenneth Rexroth : City Lights Books, SF.
- Gary Snyder : The inspiration behind the Turtle Island String Quartet name. Known as the founding influence in the Beat poets and American Zen, his prose writings are incredibly interesting and cogent, discussing our place in the natural order of things. City Lights Books, SF.
- Patrick Brayer: a genius of the musical word. Check out his liner notes to "At Home And On The Range", the Duo's live recording. Wrote "So Long, So Wrong" for Alison Krauss.... and many other hits!
Prose
- Willa Rabinovitch: Luminous crafter of short fiction, writing convincingly and with enormous soul about musicians and other people.
- Gene Wolfe :Note: This is a new link! There is now a discussion group and more devoted to Wolfe. If not the finest writer of Speculative Fiction ever, then one of the best, and most original and quirky. I just fisnished reading his new two-part novel, The Wizard Knight. It is a tremendous work of painful wisdom. Difficult but infinitely rewarding. His Magnum Opus, and my favorite fiction ever, is The Book Of The New Sun , a five volume meditation on and of the Christ archetype, peopled with bizarre and unforgettable characters, and set a million years in earth's future, when science and magic have become indistinguishable and humanity has collectively slumped a bit. We share a birthday.
- Kim Stanley Robinson: writer of Red Mars , Green Mars , and Blue Mars , three novels of the terraforming of Mars. Handles many political and scientific issues imaginatively, intelligently, involvingly. Let's go to Mars! Let's get out there! Enough of this remote control crap!
Other Cool Stuff
- For Thomas Pynchon fans: Check out the HyperArts Pynchon Pages, gigantic and overwhelming!
- Tim Ware : a demented genius who builds great websites for artists and whoever else needs one.
- The Infamous Exploding Whale : You probably know this one by now, but it's so cool.
- Squid &c.
- Squid! : Along with their close relatives the cuttlefish, some of the most psychedelic and fascinating animals on the planet. They seem to be about as smart as cats and look -literally- unbelievable. And HERE! And here's an additional squid source, as compiled by the marvellous Jaron Lanier.
- The most amazing cosmic picture of all time.
